Over the past three months the Tea Party has broadened the scope of its protest, in particular with regard to immigration, an issue that it had previously taken care to avoid. Before the passage in April of SB1070 by the Arizona state legislature, which makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally and requires police officers to check the immigration status of suspicious persons, the Tea Party had focused its attention largely on taxation. Two decades ago George Will, the Beltway’s idea of a “conservative” columnist, loftily dismissed tax complaints by asserting that Americans, in comparison with the citizens of European countries, in fact are undertaxed. That was priggish of him, but taxes, though onerous and unfair, are really not the most pressing evil the American citizenry needs to resist. Since SB1070, the Tea Party has loudly defended Arizona’s action, while simultaneously attacking and deriding the state’s eminently attackable and derisive critics, who have so far succeeded only in exposing themselves as ideologues marching under the slogan ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION NOW, ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION FOREVER. More directly, the Tea Party has played an active role in a number of political primaries, and in one of them it enjoyed a glorious victory by bearing home the scalp of Republican Sen. Robert Bennett of Utah, an instructive example of a Republican-pseudo, from a party delegates’ vote. (Bennett, reflecting the long-standing position of the Mormon church, always eager to import converts from abroad, is a strong partisan of immigration “reform.”) In general, the Tea Party’s success in the primaries had been mixed before Rand Paul won the Republican primary in Kentucky, but no one denies that the Tea Party has been effective in pushing the Republican Party distinctly rightward. It is a relatively small, loosely organized, mobile, and very active force that has shown itself capable of pulling off harassing raids, a modern political version of Gen. Bedford Forrest’s Critter Company. Unfortunately, what is needed in the long run is the equivalent of the Army of the Confederacy, commanded by a latter-day General Lee. (Many historians, of course, consider Forrest to have been the greatest military genius of the War Between the States, while Lee and his army were ultimately defeated, though only after a protracted and nationally devastating war.)

The Tea Party, whatever its influence at present and no matter what its future may be, probably has less importance as a political agent than as a sign of the times, and perhaps even a bellwether. Something in America has changed since the election and inauguration of President Barack Obama, and the Tea Party is a symptom of that change. The first and most obvious cause is the fact of the United States having elected her first mulatto president since the founding of the Republic more than two centuries ago. The issue is less the President’s blackness than the alien quality his color, fairly or unfairly, gives him. One need not be “racist” to respond to newspaper photographs and film footage of Obama, standing behind a podium bearing the presidential seal, with feelings of simple incredulity. (Even George W. Bush, immediately after the election, confessed he had never expected he would live to see a black man in the White House.) For such incredulity, Obama is hardly to blame. He is, however, entirely blamable for his inability, or perhaps his refusal, to foresee the likelihood—indeed, the inevitability—of such a reaction on the part of the white majority population, and therefore for his failure to make account for it. No doubt, that failure is thanks in large part to his own self-bamboozlement, and to the self-delusion of his entourage, allowing the Obama campaign to fall for its own sentimental propaganda about the coming of a new postracial America. As journalistic commentators have been pointing out ever since, no such color-blind animal in fact exists, yet the President and all his men have continued to act as if the species had already been verified, awarded a taxonomic name, and set down in the pertinent scientific literature.

Obama, feigning humility or coyness or both, has always been quick to dismiss the election of a half-black man to the presidency as no big thing, yet it is, indeed, a very big thing. Certainly, it is too large to have been succeeded, in the space of a few short weeks and months, by a $787 billion stimulus, the bailout of several huge financial institutions, the federal acquisition of a major automobile manufacturer, and, later, the passage of a federal healthcare bill whose unintelligibility is equaled only by its obvious unaffordability. The result of such unabashedly socialist policies is Obama’s plummeting popularity (33 percent), the galvanizing of a Republican Party thought to have been as dead as William Jennings Bryan’s Chautauqua, and the Tea Party.

Liberalism as a political movement (it never was a political philosophy, for the very good reason that it fails to approach the level of philosophy at all) never made sense in spite of the fact that the majority of Americans since the War Between the States have been liberals, whether they knew it or not. It took what James Kalb calls advanced liberalism, coming in the last quarter of the 20th century, to bring the American public to a sort of political Great Awakening, in which they find themselves, somewhat groggily, shaking themselves and rubbing their eyes. Or rather, one half of the American public, the other having converted—as it seems, irredeemably—to the advanced-liberal ideology, which is really the old liberalism stretched and distorted and pummeled from its youthful naive falsity into senile surrealism. The arrival of advanced liberalism has divided the United States between the New and the Old America, a division that is unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future but is becoming, rather, more fixed and rigid. Liberalism in the era of Obama represents for the Old American culture what Islam does for the culture of Old Europe. “[B]e­tween us and you there is a great gulf fixed . . . ” Liberals blame an unenlightened reactionary mass for the divide, but in truth the fault is theirs, and all theirs. Advanced liberalism demands that people think, believe, and act in ways that it is simply unnatural for human beings to think, believe, and act, and it is unlikely that it will win over a greater proportion of Americans to those ways than it has managed thus far to do. The battle lines have been drawn. America is fated to remain a house divided against herself for many generations, and afterward to share the inevitable fate of all divided houses, which are by nature ungovernable, and hence unlivable.

A century and a half ago the United States wasted the greatest opportunity in American history to divide peacefully into two geographic sections, each left to go its own way. Our ancestors had their chance, and they threw it aside. (Had they not, the fastidious Yankees of our own time would enjoy the inestimable satisfaction of requiring the Neanderthal Confederates to obtain visas before traveling north.) For four terrible years, the United States suffered the War Between the States. That was terrible enough, but that was all it was—a conflict between two discrete opposing unions. Today, she faces the prospect of real civil war, a war among citizens that cannot be settled by the physical separation of the adherents of the two sides, who, to a greater or a lesser degree, are integrated one with the other across an entire continent. The day may yet come when America will rue the chance she long ago refused, to separate what Orestes Brownson called the personal or barbaric democracy of the South from the humanitarian democracy of the North. (He preferred the first kind.) The problem then was a simple one, and so was the solution. Today, it has become an impossible problem, for which there is no imaginable solution. Modern Americans do indeed exhibit a tendency to settle in communities according to their own kind—not just racially and ethnically compatible communities but politically agreeable ones as well. (One thinks of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Salt Lake City.) But these demographic self-rearrangements are insufficient to the scope of the difficulty, save on a statewide basis, in which case the resulting blocs of states would be unlikely to enjoy a convenient geographic contiguity. Whatever the solution—if there is a solution—turns out to be, it is clearly impossible that the United States should continue as she is going, trapped in a state of radical instability and wracked by the most profound public dissensions and animosities that inevitably acquire a personal dimension.

The Tea Party, as I have said, is not an agent of political change. It is an expression of a widespread popular demand for a kind of political and social reformation that has yet even to begin to be formulated in a conscious and deliberate way and coupled to a political vehicle devised more or less expressly for itself: a collection of loosely affiliated raiding parties, not an organized army fighting for a determined collective goal. Thus, the need seems to be for the eventual identification of some such goal, and the creation of a political movement capable of achieving it. Unfortunately, the times are probably not ripe for these developments. John Lukacs’s maxim that change within democratic polities always comes slowly may be soon tested. The United States, indeed, has changed radically, and with radical speed, in the past 60 years, and no one can say where she is going (except to likely disaster) and how fast she is going there. For this reason, the Tea Party’s essentially reactive, ad hoc, short-term strategy may be just what is wanted, for now. Perhaps, following this strategy that is in fact no strategy at all, it may help to create a political climate in this country from which some big political thing may arise. The Tea Party, and whatever friends and allies it may succeed in scrounging up for itself, are unlikely to create a true political party and less likely still ever to control the government, while the prospect of their establishing a ruling elite, as Sam Francis hoped his Middle American Radicals might do someday, is a near social and political impossibility. The New Class rules because it is necessary to the New America it has created, and, so long as the New America survives, the New Class has nothing finally to fear from the Tea Party and its sympathizers. This raises the great question whether the New America is actually sustainable, socially, economically, and politically speaking; or whether, as Edward Abbey put it 30 years ago, our only hope might not be catastrophe.

It is certainly conceivable that a new spirit of resistance could rise in America, spread itself around the country, and achieve in time a more populist, or popular, alternative to the increasingly despised and despaired of system with which Americans are saddled and bridled today. But while it may be possible to recover, or recreate, something of the Old American political system, the Old American civilization is gone for good. We cannot look for a restoration of that, and to look, or hope, for such a thing is to court unreality, cynicism, and despair, as the Tea Party so often does by its demand that Old Americans should be given their country back. No political movement, not even the resurrection of the Founding Fathers, could possibly accomplish such a miracle. Christ raised Lazarus and Himself from the dead. He never raised ancient Israel, the Israel of judges and kings, or the Israel of His own time, Israel under the Roman Empire, and He never will—at least not before the end of time itself.

Even so, the past couple of years are beginning to loom as significant ones in recent American history. Something, I cannot help feeling (feeling, not thinking), has happened, and is happening, in America. In these two years, America’s rulers have learned, for the first time since Alexander Hamilton expressed his theoretical fear of the Great Beast, the People, to fear the mob—the New American Mob. That is a healthy thing for all Americans, the ruled and their rulers alike: the first in their freedoms and possessions; the second in their souls.

This article first appeared in the July 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

We are not here in this world to find elegant solutions, pregnant with initiative, or to serve the ways and modes of profitable progress. No, we are here to provide for all those who are weaker and hungrier, more battered and crippled than ourselves. That is our only certain good and great purpose on earth . . .

It is not clear, absent the lack of immediate context, whether by “we” the socialist politician meant humanity born onto this earth or, more exclusively, his saintly comrades in Labour. Since his exhortation was part of a political stump speech, the presumption is in favor of the latter, and yet it is more than possible that the speaker really had in mind the former. Certainly, in an age in which politics has become religion, and religion, to a substantial degree, politics, the second understanding would not have struck Foot’s audience as being in any way exceptional, or exceptionable.

Aristotle observed that, although all men claim the status of Man, only the man who devotes himself to the pursuit of knowledge actually deserves it. Under the Christian dispensation, one might rather argue that the man who is most fully Man is he who loves most fully, and dedicates his life to acting upon that love. I was moved to consider this possibility after the earthquakes in Haiti last winter, when it seemed almost that the world had ceased for a time to turn; that the human race had foresworn the pursuit of mammon, the lust for power, and the quest for knowledge in order to devote itself to the relief of the pathetic, poverty-stricken victims of brute nature. Of course the world had not stopped, and the illusion that it had was the result of just another experiment in virtual reality, a creation of the mass media. But should it have stopped? For a Christian especially, the question is not so ridiculous, so absurdly sentimental and impractical, as it might at first appear to be.

Political liberalism arrived at a theoretical affirmation of the proposition long ago. Christian theology, far more alarmingly, is halfway there, at least. And it is easy to see why. Jesus Christ, True Man and True God, and His disciples devoted their earthly lives to charity, and so did the saints who followed them. A religion that professes an ideal of co-suffering might quite logically affirm that no one is morally justified in enjoying the goods of this earth so long as anyone lacks them, and that material enjoyment is licit only as the earned reward for the eradication of poverty and misery from the face of the earth. Socialism, which Claude Polin argues is the expression of a distinctly Western impulse produced in minds prepared by Christianity to receive it, certainly affirms it, and so does liberalism, which is only socialism-and-soda in a Waterford glass. James Burnham said that liberals, including liberal groups, nations, and civilizations, are “morally disarmed before those whom the liberal regards as less well off than himself.” But there is obviously, as Burnham pointed out, a paradox here, since to feel morally disarmed is to feel guilty, and liberals do not believe—at least they didn’t, before liberalism was superseded by advanced liberalism and multiculturalism—in collective or inherited guilt, just as they deny the fact of inherited intelligence or cultural superiority. But Christians, brought up on stories pertaining to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Babylonian captivity, and the Lord’s teaching that the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the sons, are believers in the guilt of groups. Belief makes them susceptible to liberal assumptions of collective guilt, and to the conviction regarding a collective responsibility for the world that liberals teach. Unlike liberals, however, Christians tend toward a literal, rather than a theoretical (I mean smug and self-congratulatory), view of that responsibility.

For the past year I have subscribed to L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of Vatican City, in its weekly edition. There is much that is good in the paper, and a regular reading of it has certainly improved my Italian. Yet Pope Benedict’s insistence on looking above the billion-odd heads of the faithful to address the wider world for whose welfare he has been given no direct responsibility, and his constant calls for lo sviluppo umano integrale (the whole development of man), are irritating, tiresome, and, so far as I can tell, without grounding in scripture. They may, however, find basis and justification in the most recent Catechism of the Catholic Church, prepared during the papacy of Pope John Paul II. The section entitled “The Social Doctrine of the Church” contains a paragraph explaining that these teachings developed in the 19th century as a result of the Gospel’s encounter with the new industrial society that revolutionized relations between man and man, man and the state, and man and nature. The section “Justice and Solidarity Among Nations” might similarly have explained that the Church’s teachings on international relations developed as a result of the Gospel’s encounter with the institutions and mechanisms of liberal internationalism, which they accept and appear to take for granted. Thus, Paragraph 2439 states that “Rich nations have a grave moral responsibility toward those which are unable to ensure the means of their development by themselves or have been prevented from doing so by tragic historical events.” According to Paragraph 2440, “It is also necessary to reform international economic and financial institutions so that they will better promote equitable relationships with less advanced countries” (italics in the original). The Catechism does not acknowledge the enormous obstacles inherent in reconstructing Third World societies, including the recurrence of “tragic historical events” endemic to the history of those countries, nor does it suggest the grounds on which its faith in the economic and financial institutions of global liberalism rests.

The liberal conscience is tormented, the liberal mind undone, by two stark realities. The first is that the global village is really a vast global slum; the second is that the modern communications system that created the “village” informs us on a 24-hour basis of unpleasant situations and conditions in remote places that we are incapable of changing, and that we should be better off never having heard about in the first place. (Knowledge is not always power.) The difficult—helping Haiti out in an emergency—is hard enough. Indeed, it is harder than the impossible—eradicating world misery—which is the task to which socialism, liberalism, and modern Christianity are calling us. (“Where there is no solution,” Burnham said, “there is no problem.”) Christ’s poor were the widows, the orphans, the lame, the blind in a tiny occupied country in the Middle East, barely more than a collection of villages. They were what we might call the personal poor, a different case entirely from the vast, unknown, almost abstracted masses of the world poor, toward whom charity is a bureaucratic response rather than a biblical action, like giving alms.

But all of this is almost incidental to my broader point.

Michael Foot asserted in his speech that providing for the weak, the hungry, the battered, and the crippled is “our only certain good and great purpose on earth.” One can—almost—hear the voice of Christ speaking those words, but He did not speak them, and they are not true, either in the political or in the theological context. Instead they express an extremely narrow view of politics—an apolitical view, in fact—and an equally narrow understanding of Christian theology, or any other theology I know of.

The world does not, it could not, it must not revolve around the claims, or even the needs, of the poor and the oppressed of the earth. Charity, even bureaucratic charity, is both a human obligation and a divine injunction, but man has many other things to be about in his Father’s house, some of them having value and validity equal to those on the agenda of the British Labour Party. It is important for intelligent people, those in positions of power especially, to understand this, if only for the reason that the better part of the world is coming more and more to resemble Haiti, which it will very likely approximate in the future. If the civilized world should ever become convinced that its moral duty lies in deliberately merging itself with either the barbaric Third World or the semidepraved world of the lower classes of the West, that would be the end of civilization, and civilization is a moral duty of mankind, as the ancients understood. Aristotle said that the aim, business, and justification of government is the attainment of human excellence, and he was right, as always. Civilization, said Evelyn Waugh, “has no force of its own beyond what it is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all.”

The world is really doing quite enough for Haiti, Somalia, Kenya, Afghanistan, and other similarly benighted places. As for the British Labour Party, it has already done a great deal too much for the British poor, today among the most drunken and loutish in Western Europe, the youthful poor especially. “Michael Foot was a genuine British radical,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown said in tribute to the deceased. “He possessed a powerful sense of community, a pride in our progressive past and faith in our country’s potential for a radical future.” Now that really gives Britons something to look forward to.

I myself am most impressed that Michael Foot should have written a number of books, among them The Politics of Paradise: A Vindication of Byron. I am not a great admirer of Byron or his poetry, and I have never read Foot’s study of him. But I admire the author for so much as wishing to create so elegant, impractical, and decadent a thing as a book the British working man will never read.

This article first appeared in the May 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

In the context even of their age, the aristocratic liberals were liberal without being democratic, and certainly not revolutionary. They wanted constitutional government, limited suffrage, decentralization, and active local governments. And they advocated a political education for the electorate that was basically aristocratic in outline. Mill argued that the chief role of government should be to act as an educative agency; Burckhardt devoted his career to the attempt to preserve the old, humane, liberal-aristocratic ideal. Yet there was neither popular acceptance of such an ideal among the peoples of Europe nor the human material through which to realize it. Tocqueville and his sort were not historical pessimists, but they viewed the possible displacement of the new democracies by despotism as a perennial threat. Especially, they felt that time was not on their side. They were right. Compared with popular and influential liberals between 1830 and 1870 they were considerably less optimistic, had a more restrictive view of the state, and worried more about class antagonisms, and they could not overcome their innate distaste for the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie. Tocqueville’s books were read and respected by educated and highly influential people, on the Continent and in England, yet their practical influence, in Professor Kahan’s estimation, was minimal. “Aristocratic liberalism,” he concludes, “was condemned to the sidelines because it refused to link its particular elitism to any of the elite or the aspiring elite groups that might have given it power, refused to make it the bearer of its values.” Reading these words, I was instantly reminded of Samuel Francis’s criticism of what he called the “beautiful losers” of the Old American Right in the post-World War II era, who lost their bid for political influence and power “because there existed in American society and political culture no significant set of interests to which its ideas could attach themselves.”

Sam Francis has been dead these five years, almost to the day as I write, and so it is possible that his newspaper columns, essays, and books—perhaps even his name—are unknown to the latest generation of American conservatives, including those who have followed the rise of the Tea Party movement over the past year and witnessed the unprecedented descent of the late Edward Kennedy’s seat in the U.S. Senate to a hitherto unknown Republican state senator named Scott Brown. Readers of Francis, whether friend or enemy, will be familiar with his powerful exegesis of the political thought of James Burnham, his careful studies of what he called “the Soviet strategy of terror,” and his unflagging resistance, throughout his too-short career, to mass immigration to the United States and Europe. Yet Francis’s name is associated most distinctly with his advocacy of a “revolution from the middle” led by what he and sociologist Donald Warren (also deceased) called “Middle American Radicals,” or MARs—plus a wise and elegant volume, Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism, first published in 1993. In Beautiful Losers Francis makes an extensive and considered case for the inadequacy and ineffectiveness of the Old Right and for the need of a Middle American political strategy based on the recognition that the old republican establishment the Old Right attempted to defend has collapsed, leaving the vast American middle classes below it to confront the managerial and bureaucratic class that deposed the Old Establishment in the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s.

Briefly sketched, Francis’s argument runs as follows. Liberalism is the ideology of a class invested with multiple self-seeking interests, not a coherent political philosophy. Even so, the problem the United States confronts today is the dominance of the managerial establishment itself, not of the liberal clichés and facile slogans it promotes. The managerial elite, usually called by neoconservatives the “New Class,” having displaced and partly destroyed the Old Establishment (WASP in religion, regionally oriented, entrepreneurial by nature, and traditionally minded), oppresses the scorned American middle and lower-middle classes, while favoring the interests of elites above them and catering to the demands of the underclass below. Unlike the Old Right, which lacked the requisite social base, the energized New Right, with the Middle American Radicals for its demographic foundation and the Sunbelt states as its regional redoubt, is now positioned to oppose, and finally to overthrow, the decadent managerial class that stifles, overregulates, pillages, and despises it in the name of equality, minority rights, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, post­modern culture, and post-Christian morality. The New Right is nationalist rather than anticommunist, favors the restoration of intermediary institutions between the federal state and the American people, and looks to a strong, populist presidency as the means to cut through the existing oligarchies that would oppose any such restoration. The New Right, though it detests the New Class establishment, is suspicious also of the Old Establishment that preceded it: Indeed, it is suspicious of all establishments. The New Right, then, is not conservative, not even in terms of backward-leap-frog conservatism. It therefore, Francis argues, has need of “a new ideology, formula, or political theory that can win the loyalties and represent the interests of its social base and rationalize its quest for social and political power.”

It is unlikely that anyone familiar with Sam Francis’s writings has not had occasion over the past year—and most especially in January, when Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley, attorney general of Massachusetts, in the special Senate race—to wonder whether the Tea Party movement in particular, and the altered state of public opinion that got Brown elected generally, might not represent an early stage in the fulfillment of Francis’s grand political design.

Massachusetts could scarcely be located farther from the Sunbelt, where Francis expected his MARs revolution to take shape. All the better, one might say: The events in Massachusetts this winter suggest that the New Right has advanced further, under cover, than anyone, the politicians and the media included, had expected. But if that is indeed the case, how then did Barack Obama manage to carry Massachusetts by 26 percentage points in 2008? The notion that MARs sprang up in their legions out of the Bay State’s stony soil over a period of 14 months in sufficient numbers to equal 52 percent of those who turned out to vote is hardly a convincing one. A more coherent explanation is that the Massachusetts voters are themselves incoherent, reflecting the political incoherence of the wider American political system at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. Nearly 50 years ago, the English philosopher Kenneth Minogue wrote that, from the moment when the germ of liberalism enters and infects a society, that society is, sooner or later, doomed. He was right, and a half-century later Professor Minogue’s liberalism has evolved into what James Kalb, in The Tyranny of Liberalism, calls advanced liberalism. How could the citizens of a country with no racial, ethnic, or cultural identity, no agreed-upon history, no generally accepted system of morality and a confusion between the sexes, no sense of national values beyond abstracted, ahistorical principles, no consensus regarding either the limits of the law or the nature of law itself, no notion of regional or national obligation, no knowledge of or feeling for the past and only a shallow ideological view of the future—how could such a people possibly think and act, politically, in anything like a coherent manner? Americans are currently suffering from an epidemic of mass mental confusion produced by a supposedly rational political theory that is at best only a pseudophilosophy.

This is no more than to say that the 52 percent of voters in the special election in Massachusetts were not all Tea Party voters, which no one, of course, has claimed. Tea Party has expanded in its first year to the proportions of a national movement, of which its Massachusetts, even its New England, component is doubtless a small percentage. At this writing, the National Tea Party Convention has just met in Nashville, where, as with all gatherings of “conservatives,” real or bogus (CINOs, one might say), the various eccentric factions appeared to experience difficulties in reconciling their many differences. Still, the general Tea Party platform demanding smaller government, lower taxes, a recognition of states’ rights under the Tenth Amendment, and enhanced national security are consistent enough with Francis’s insistence that “The strategic objective of the New Right must be the localization, privatization, and decentralization of the managerial apparatus of power.” So next we may ask what, if anything, might make Tea Party a more politically potent and significant phenomenon than previous populist movements proved to be, including the Populist Party of William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace’s third-party presidential bid, and Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork campaign and Ross Perot’s Reform Party in the 1990’s. Populism has a relatively long history in the United States, but that history has been one of co-optation, disappointment, and disaster.

No one, not even in our era of ideological anti-elitism, has ever denied the plain fact that the U.S. government was the creation of a tiny elite—the elitist elite, indeed, in American history. Sam Francis viewed his MARs as a subelite, which, he predicted, would in time become the dominant elite, replacing the degenerate ruling one. He claimed, I think, too much for them. Certainly the Tea Party movement, whose current heroine, Sarah Palin, and her family are really only trailer trash from the trashiest state in the Union, has nothing elitist about it, drawn as it so observably is from the wide ranks of the middle-middle and lower-middle classes. There is an ambiguity in Francis’s theory that, so far as I know, he never attempted to resolve, and that is how the MARs, even granting them status as a subelite, could possibly establish themselves as the country’s ruling political and—still more difficult to achieve—social elite. That is to say, Francis never explains, except in the most general terms, how the MARs masses might be inspired and organized to accomplish so great a victory. Would they, for instance, require political organizers, such as the Bolsheviks provided to the Russian people? If so, who would these people be? Samuel Todd Francis, Ph.D. (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and a direct descendant of the family of Mary Todd Lincoln, and his colleagues? But MARs have no affinity or liking for scholars of British history and scions of the upper classes: That is precisely one of those characteristics that identifies them as MARs in the first place. Or, would they jump-start and organize themselves—as, one might argue, the Tea Party people are doing today? But, if they are to become the nation’s dominant elite, MARs must start thinking like an elite, a feat comparable to that of a newly elected British Labour M.P. from the Transportation Union who somehow succeeded in assuming the class consciousness of the duke of Gloucester. The fact is, a true elite never establishes itself by force or at the electoral booth: It is developed historically and trained up over a substantial period of time to exercise its privileges and assume its proper responsibilities. Sarah Palin, a blue-collar girl reared in Wasilla, is not prepared to govern anything more civilized than the state of Alaska.

Indeed, the ruling liberal-managerial elite’s greatest fault is its own inability to think like an elite instead of as members of a dominant meritocracy. The complaint against our present ruling class should be less that it is an ill-founded and decadent elite than that it is an antitraditional and revolutionary one, dedicated to destroying everything that a genuine elite—an aristocracy—is keen to preserve, beginning with the welfare of the people and the future of the nation with which it was entrusted. According to Flannery O’Connor’s murderous Misfit, in raising the dead, Christ “thrown everything off balance.” As The Misfit thought Christ had done, so an anti-establishment establishment has thrown the United States and the rest of the Western world off balance, very likely with fatal consequences. Western political theory is simply unable to accommodate the fact of an elite that is revolutionary and destructive rather than traditional and conservative. The ages-old theory of mixed government is fundamentally incompatible with so hideous and unnatural a thing.

The awful truth is that the present establishment—the managerial state, the New Class, the liberal establishment, call it what you will—exists for the very good reason that it was created by, and reflects, the social and political arrangements underlying modernity, which is to say of the modern scientific and technological world. (The fact says even more about modernity than it does about liberalism.) Elites never create societies; societies, rather, give rise to elites. It is a valid question why our Western elite should be a liberal, rather than a conservative, one. Modern China, for example, is ruled by conservatives—conservative in a certain sense, anyway. And here is where liberalism comes into the story: liberalism, the dominant pseudo­philosophy in the West, beginning in the late Middle Ages. And after it, advanced liberalism, which may well have developed at an earlier stage in history than Mr. Kalb suggests in his wonderful book. Advanced liberalism is the result of the managerial elite’s discovery that, for it, liberalism is (in Sam Francis’s words) “a useful and indeed indispensable formula for rationalizing its existence and power.” Unfortunately, the sort of interests, knowledge, and skills that the liberal establishment possesses and that the Middle American Radicals, as we know them today, lack are necessary to providing the overwhelming mass of the American public with what it wants, or thinks it wants, or has been reeducated into thinking it ought to want. Liberalism, as Kalb suggests, must ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, thus revealing its philosophical and political pretensions for the frauds they are. In that case, the end of the liberal establishment will have been systemic rather than political, as, indeed, were most if not all of history’s great earthquakes—very much including the sweeping social-democratic revolution that the aristocratic liberals foresaw, but were unable to prevent.

This article first appeared in the April 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Now Carmen is a work that nobody—director, conductor, or singer—has a right to get wrong, which means, in part, to meddle with, save for a damn good reason. Putting Micaela (whose music is some of the opera’s most glorious) in the smugglers’ pass with a woolen coat and brown satchel common to women of the lower-middle class in the dreary interwar period is an example of meddlesomeness of the inexcusable sort. Eyre has explained that Carmen is too familiar to audiences, whom he hoped to shock and awe into a fresh appreciation of the opera by evoking the brutal and repressive spirit of the Spanish Civil War. My own immediate reaction to this bit of political correctness was to reflect that, had the Communists won in Spain, an updated Carmen might plausibly be set outside a gulag fence instead of a bullring. The serious objection, however, is that neither Mérimée’s book nor Bizet’s opera touches in the least on the politics, liberal or monarchist, of early 19th-century Spain, which is wholly extraneous to both works.

One might suppose that the fact of Carmen’s familiarity indicates the opera’s huge popularity, which suggests in turn that there never was a need to make it less familiar to operagoers. But even if there had been, moving the historical setting forward by a full century fails to accomplish this feat. Surely the Seville of Mérimée’s time is no more difficult to grasp imaginatively than the Seville of Orwell’s, which would be equally unrecognizable to modern tourists. If familiarity were the criterion, Eyre could have put Carmen in the socialist Spain of the early 21st century, with, in the background of the action, gay couples leaving the town hall in wedding parties and immigrant girls from Morocco washing their aprons outside the cigarette factory alongside the gypsy lasses. Or, if shock were the director’s principal aim, he could have set the opera a hundred years in the future, when Spain has become a Muslim country, cigarettes have been outlawed, and Christians instead of bulls are being killed in the arena. In that case, Eyre’s problem would have been that the composer’s score, which combines elements of Berlioz with intimations of Debussy, can no more convey the sensibility of an imagined futuristic Spain than it can the Europe of Edith Piaf. Bizet’s music, like the opera considered as a whole, is at once historical and timeless. At any rate, degrees of familiarity have exactly nothing to do with artistic appreciation. If they did, Mr. Eyre would have had a case to make for adding syncopation and electric guitars to the score and orchestration, and curators at the Vatican could defend a decision to dress the figures in the Pietà in T-shirts, jeans, and Nike shoes.

Directors and conductors are secondary creators who realize their talents by reacting upon the work of the primary artist. Quite naturally, they wish to create in their own right by presenting an established work according to their interpretation of it. And often they really do improve on earlier treatments of a familiar masterpiece. Wieland Wagner’s impressionist productions of his grandfather’s Ring of the Nibelungen music dramas were inspired, resetting these operas from what could have been scenes from Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt’s country estate into panoramas of light, shadow, color, and geometric form that represent in visual terms the sweeping music of which Owen Wister imagined the vast landscapes of the American West to be the embodiment. Unfortunately, when the secondary creation relies upon the principle of aggiornamento for its effect, interpretation is always at risk of becoming deconstruction.

The temptation in the operatic world to update the classic repertoire is closely associated with the embarrassment many modern patrons feel at their involvement with anything so archaic, so elitist, so passé as opera. I suspect, for instance, that the Metropolitan’s current general manager wishes that Grand Opera could somehow be transformed into Grand Broadway, a hybrid perhaps of Franz Lehár and Busby Berkeley. Even so, artistic aggiornamento is not essentially an expression of cultural insecurity and the tyranny of artistic fashion. Aggiornamento is really an uncontrollable tick acquired from the world of progressive politics, with its vision of endless change carrying all of us forward into an imaginary utopian future.

Consistent viewers of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre over the past 30 years have probably noticed how, in the past decade or so, British producers, directors, and actors appear to have lost the ability to portray in a convincing way the old, aristocratic British society that even now is not yet dead. They fail, I think, because they do not really try; and they do not really try, because their hearts are not in their work. For a new generation, the Old Britain is the Bad Old Britain, even if they never really knew it. The old Masterpiece Theatre—Jeeves and Wooster, the two Lord Peter Wimsey series, Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes—are works of nostalgic affection for a certain literature and a certain social period that are now lost irretrievably. The new people have no such affection for these things. And so they cannot match the wonderful documents their predecessors, not so long ago, created. For them, the world of P.G. Wode­house, faithfully reproduced, is too painful—or perhaps simply too dull or irrelevant—to contemplate.

I say the matter is of a political nature because the modern political agendum has to do with redeeming cultural sensibility from the past and transferring it ahead in time—not to the present but to the future. Politics in the Western world has become a futuristic activity, so that it has got ahead of itself, chronologically speaking. Progressive politics has succeeded in progressing beyond history. This is why modern governments are so far out of step with their publics. Governments are aware of the discrepancy and are encouraged and flattered by it, rather than dismayed. In their minds, they are the enlightened vanguard whose mission and duty is to lead, persuade, and, if necessary, coerce the plebeian mass at their backs. The Obama administration is determined to establish an overwhelmingly unpopular system of government healthcare because it believes that, faced with a fait accompli, the mass of citizens will, in time, acquiesce in it. If the politicians are out of step with their constituencies, then at least they are ahead of them by that much. They are, they assure themselves, legislating for the future. But they are not legislating for the future; they are legislating in the future. The world they inhabit is not the real world of the present, but an imagined future world that is wholly the creation of the politicians themselves, beavering away in the present time.

Healthcare “reform” is actually healthcare preform, designed to address not the present-day United States but the United States of the future, when the government will have granted citizenship to 20 or 30 million illegal immigrants, repatriated tens of millions more of their nearest relatives, and established a policy of virtually open borders between the United States and much of the rest of the world. “You just have to decide if you want us to be a tomorrow country or a yesterday country,” Bill Clinton declared at a rally in Boston for Martha Coakley, the unsuccessful Democratic candidate to succeed Edward Kennedy in the U.S. Senate. The “today country,” ignored by Clinton, has an unemployment rate of ten percent; a popular majority hostile to amnesty and more immigrants; a balkanized population that is determinedly self-segregated; a bankrupt government; 20 million impoverished resident invaders; and the wreck of the world’s best medical system, destroyed by four decades of government intrusion and mismanagement. But Washington lives in a postdated United States that has already taken its place in an achieved multicultural socialist world in which welfare states can coexist practically with open borders, budgets can be creatively jiggered forever, currency promiscuously printed out of thin air, and doctors created by federal fiat; the Ethiope can lie down with the Somali, the terrorist break bread with the security agent, and the Christian convert his church into a mosque, or else subside into a tolerant secularism whose only doctrines are those of the proposition nation and the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. Enoch Powell spoke with the mature and tutored wisdom of a statesman when he described that historical relic as one who anticipates future evils and acts to prevent them from coming to pass. The progressive politician, by contrast, foreseeing such evils, takes steps to accommodate them, while preparing to welcome their arrival as inevitable—so inevitable, indeed, as to have in some sense already occurred. The difference between the two is the difference between the historicist and the ideologue, the visionary and the fantasist, the sane man who dwells in time and the insane one who lives, to every intent and purpose, outside of it.

The progressive politician’s illusion is both reflection and cause of the congenital dissatisfaction and discontent of mass democratic man, addicted to living on emotional, as well as financial, credit. “We live from hope to hope,” Samuel Johnson said. A mental time machine is not what the good doctor had in mind. Nor Pascal: “We are not, we hope to be.”

This article first appeared in the March 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

All of Rome, ancient and modern, from the former Appian Way with the ruins of its tombs and its aqueducts as far as the magnificent Garden of Pincio built by the French, spreads itself in view.

Lost in reverie, Brulard finds the modern metropolis supplanted in mind by the ancient city and its historical memories.  “This place is unique in the world,” he tells himself.

Not only has Rome, the seat of the greatest empire the world ever saw, been a dead empire for 1,500 years, but she has, for many centuries now, stood as the symbol of and monument to all dead empires, almost for mortality itself.  Yet Rome lives, and her empires live within her, because they are dead, and therefore beyond the hand of time, all revenge and revision, at peace with history.  Stendahl seems not to have grasped the fact on earlier visits to Rome, owing in part to his youthful antipathy to the “dead” religion that also has its seat there; but his historical imagination was too strong to allow him to overlook it forever, and his highly eccentric but enormously fascinating Walks in Rome is a result of his eventual enlightenment.

Modern Rome, so marvelously alive today, is the ancient empire’s reward, as sainthood for the soul in Heaven is reward for a well-lived life in the body.  Everyone who reads and loves history knows that one of its delights is that, in history, we have the whole story, we know how past finite events came out.  More importantly still, perhaps, this story lies beyond the pain of partisanship, of having a horse of one’s own in the race.  That, indeed, is why we can love history.  Only liberals, socialists, atheists, and other unhappy people have an ax to grind in reading history; while, for healthy people, a “dead” city like Rome is a profoundly relaxing and comfortable place which we are at leave to enjoy on its own terms and where, as Michel Crouzet has written, “the tourist must become an artist.”  Rome, like the rest of Italy, is threatened by invasion from the Third World, that is true; but Italy has never had a clear ethnic or racial identity, as England had until recently and France to a lesser degree had also—a fact well known to, and accepted by, the Italian nationalists of the 19th century, Giuseppe Verdi included.

The French empire, a flimsy modern arrangement of almost ludicrously short duration by comparison with her Roman predecessor, nevertheless has far to travel before making her own escape from history.  The shipwreck remains, the flotsam constantly stirred by historical conflicts, passions, hatreds, and prejudices, all very much in the present and all dangerously alive.  Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints, a fictional tour de force about the invasion of France by hordes of refugees arriving on a fleet of rusting hulks from India, owes its power to being at once a futuristic and a realistic story; the novel was published almost four decades ago now.  Today, France has more Muslims than any other country in Europe.  The mass intrusion of immigrants from its former colonies and elsewhere strains the historic French identity, threatens the classic French culture, overburdens the national budget, and incites religious and social conflict throughout France, including rioting in the ethnic banlieue and faubourgs that ring the big French cities, those of the capital especially.

My wife and I had last visited Paris three years ago, en route to and from northeastern France.  We returned three months ago, in the fall of 2009, and put up for a week in a local hotel in the eighth arrondissement, at a close distance from the Gare St. Lazare.  I had not spent so long in town since my first visit in 1972, and recent reports from friends abroad had not been encouraging.  We feared the worst; but we did not find it.

It is possible that what follows is a wholly personal and quite superficial impression.  I am acquainted with one Frenchman, a resident of the Left Bank with whom I agree on absolutely every matter of importance (politics, food, and drink), who would (and probably will) be the first to contradict it.  Anyway, my impression is this: Paris—Paris centre, I mean—seems substantially to have cheated its historical fate as the former center of a fallen empire, no matter the condition of the rest of France, its own suburbs included.  In 1972, the place had appealed to me as shabby, the streets dirty, the citoyens polite but not friendly, the women lacking in the proverbial chic that every Frenchwoman is supposed to possess.  They were not even, I thought, particularly attractive, but vaguely unhealthy and unhappy looking.  In retrospect, I suspect the Paris of 40 years ago had not fully recovered from the war: London, when I lived there in the early 60’s, had the same aspect, only more so.

Revisiting Paris in 2009, I felt a delight and relief that acquired in the course of the week the force of a juggernaut that nearly bowled me over in the street among the café tables and book and sheet-music stands.  Compared with London, New York, even Rome, the Paris of today retains, for me at least, its unparalleled urbanity.  Architecturally speaking, Paris is a 19th-century town, and Parisian urbanity is a species of the urbanity of the haute bourgeoisie of that era.  (On the trip, I read La Dame aux camélias, in French, and found the Paris of Dumas fils to be perfectly recognizable in the present day.)  The wealthy bourgeois insisted upon, and was attentive to, detail, precision, and completeness, not just abundance and superfluity.  This attentiveness is a part of civilization, and it continues to prevail in the daily life of Paris in the 21st century: in the markets, the shops, the hotels, the restaurants, the brasseries, bistros, and bars.  The city throngs with lovely women, well dressed and elegant even in relatively casual attire.  There is the bourgeois taste for spaciousness in Napoleon III’s plan for the capital that has hardly been compromised in a century and a half; the streets, save in a few neighborhoods, are clean; the historic buildings and monuments, carefully preserved and displayed to effect and with taste.  I do not believe that Napoleon, on the whole, would be disappointed by Paris could he return there today.  So far, the headscarves have not won in Paris (we saw surprisingly few), and Paris today remains very much a French city.

The established, though recently challenged, explanation for the collapse of the Roman Empire is that the barbarians from the north and east, having invaded and settled within its boundaries, in time destroyed the empire from within.  In the case of France and Great Britain, the imperial nation formally surrendered her empire, only to discover that the empire refused to surrender her.  The results to both countries are innumerable, but of all these the most dramatic and dreadful is the fate of London Town—the home of Boadicea, the outpost of Caesar, the capital of Elizabeth I, Charles I, the Georges, Queen Victoria, and Edward VII—in the 21st century.

My wife and I took the Eurostar from Gare du Nord in Paris, and until I stepped from the train onto the platform at St. Pancras Station I had not set foot in England for 47 years, except to change planes at Heathrow.  We stayed at a small hotel at Inverness Terrace north of the Bayswater Road, a 15-minute walk from Portsea Place, where I lived for a year with my family in the 1960’s.  For the first 12 hours of our stay, we heard hardly a word of English spoken in what I remembered as an upper-middle-class neighborhood inhabited by Englishwomen in tweeds taking their dogs for a run in Hyde Park, and men with rolled umbrellas catching buses and taxis to work in the City, where my own grandfather worked.  Today, the lovely row houses are flophouses for Turkish immigrants, and the neighborhood pubs have been supplanted by Third World restaurants serving poor imitations of exotic fare.  Tony Blair has bought a townhouse on Connaught Square, round the corner from Portsea Row, but that was small compensation for the Arab cafés on the Edgeware Road whose sidewalk tables were mounted with three-foot-tall hookahs (not the feminine sort); the burqas and headscarves; the Oriental markets; and the pathos of the stray red-faced Britisher in his tailored suit and plaid cap, gripping his umbrella and briefcase as he dashed round the Marble Arch with his head down, lost in a sea of dusky faces and looking as if he’d just stepped from Wells’ time machine.

I was devastated.  We had seen nothing remotely to compare with this in Paris.  London has lost its urbanity along with its identity, save in the best neighborhoods—the City, West End, Westminster, Belgravia, Knightsbridge, Mayfair; we attended Mass at Farm Street Church near Berkeley Square, where Evelyn Waugh had been converted and married.  In these last redoubts, the old town lives on.  Here London is still recognizable, despite the madding crowds of Asians (east and west) and of Continental tourists, beneficiaries of the exchange rates, crowding its narrow sidewalks and its monuments.  Outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, we observed a Pakistani photographing his small boy waving the Paki flag in front of a sentry box.  I looked round for a big blue policeman nearby, hoping to see the pair of them arrested.

God save the Queen!  But for how long?  History is not through with the British Empire, yet.

This article first appeared in the February 2010 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Classical republicanism cannot survive a modern social and political anomaly that no political tradition before the postmodern era could possibly have envisioned.  That is the rise of an elite that is revolutionary, not conservative or even establishmentarian.  A republic characterized by a bicameral government in which both the upper house and the executive branch are hostile to the traditional notion of an establishment is antithetical to the work as well as to the vision of the American Founding Fathers—in fact, of every republican theorist and statesman.  The resulting chaos is as great as if Louis XIV, instead of attempting weakly to accommodate the revolutionary spirit that succeeded in toppling the French monarchy, had himself become an enthusiastic convert to Jacobinism.  A society in which the destructionists, the antiestablishmentarians, and the professional political and cultural sappers are not only drawn from, but actually constitute, the elite class is the most extreme case of the world turned upside down.  Unfortunately, the world cannot survive upside down, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee standing on their heads for the rest of their lives.  The situation is as unnatural to human society as a country run by the inhabitants of a mental asylum would be, and as sustainable.

Alexis de Tocqueville thought that a true aristocracy must be based on land ownership.  He was right.  When the material prosperity and the political and social power of an upper class, or “elite,” are based on something other than land, which is an actual portion of the bounded national territory, the establishment eventually ceases to care for, or feel a commitment to, their country, its people, and its future.  The transition from landed to industrial wealth in the 19th and 20th centuries weakened that commitment, without destroying it completely.  It was left to the postmodern globalist economy—based on abstract wealth, on information, and on electronic communications—to erase altogether the attenuated loyalties of the elite class.

Over half a century ago T.S. Eliot, in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, had his say on the insufficiencies of the meritocracy as compared with the virtues of traditional aristocracy.  By definition, meritocrats rise on their merits.  They also fall on them, as they are supplanted and cast down by rising individuals who contest their hold on society’s top niches, in the same manner that a coalition of nomad lions seizes a pride from older or weaker males, or those with less prowess in combat.  While meritocrats are capable of making individual contributions to society, they, their families, and, more importantly, their descendants do not remain long enough at the top to establish a system of dominant values and guiding traditions for future generations to preserve and follow.  Consequently, while talent and ability are always renewing themselves, the permanent things come to be regarded as transient ones, dependent upon social whim and fashion, while the traditions that bind and develop a society over time are denied a chance to develop.

It has been suggested that a particular type of educational institution might be devised that is capable of training a responsible elite class.  That, of course, is what the French have been attempting since Napoleon founded the lycée system.  In fact, something of the sort has existed in the United States since World War II, when James Conan Bryant of Harvard proposed that “democracy” be made synonymous with an equal opportunity for all to enter the meritocracy (which would then be democratically entitled to lord it over the lives of the great mass of commoners).  Robert B. Reich, President Clinton’s secretary of labor, in his book The Work of Nations (1992), paints a portrait, as devastating as it is fawning, of what he calls the “symbolic managers”: the latest incarnation of the exclusively educated New Class whose narcissism, social irresponsibility, and contempt for their social and intellectual inferiors makes Marie Antoinette look like Jane Addams.  Noblesse oblige can be inherited, but never learned.

Bertrand de Jouvenel thought that power could be defeated only by cells created by itself that, in time, would work to destroy power from within and usurp its place.  Such may indeed be the case with power in America.  Yet it is hard to imagine how the constituent members of such a cell, nurtured within the body of the Beast, could have the faintest notion of the principles of republicanism, in fact of the classical tradition itself.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I have been visiting the Eternal City for only about a decade, a ridiculously short period in the life span even of such ephemeral places as Las Vegas and Los Angeles.  Still, history, and with it change, are greatly accelerated in the contemporary world.  And Rome is the city I never hesitate to return to, expecting to find some monumental building or bridge knocked down and replaced by a modern mediocrity, a neighborhood or park bulldozed and replaced by high-rise apartments and asphalt.  And so, every year or two for the past ten years, I’ve gone gliding down through a pastel Renaissance sky toward an early morning landing at Fiumicino, admiring the blue Tyrrhenean Sea smoothly foaming along the narrow beaches beyond the damp, green fields and dark forests of umbrella pine surrounding the terra-cotta farmhouses and villages as they slip beneath the wings of the plane, holding my Italian grammar open in my lap and anticipating the moment when, presenting my passport to Immigration, I catch the terse official’s eye and ask him, “Come sta, Signore?” with what I hope is the confidence of an Italian citizen arriving home.  The return to a much-loved place is always a triumphal event, and so the ride on the autostrada across the hilly green plain and into the city is triumphal, too, never mind the light chatter with the driver regarding the recent weather in Rome and certain unfamiliar or half-forgotten things spied from the taxi before the entry into the city proper: the long climb up and around the north end of the Janiculum where the morning sun slants in beneath the soaring umbrella pines, the first glimpse of the Dome of St. Peter seeming to float untethered in the moistly yellow light that clings softly about the Seven Hills, the descent to the Vatican and the curving Bernini colonnades, and the Victor Emmanuel II bridge over the Tiber from Castel Sant’Angelo to the Campo dei Fiori.  There is no more tragic thing than to return to a home that no longer looks or feels like home, but Rome always seems to me more like home than when I saw her last.  That, of course, is because I have been around for 61 years, and the city of Rome is 2,700 years old.

Of course, it’s absurd to claim that Rome, which consists of historical layers comparable to so many geological strata, has escaped the ravages of time and mortality.  The Eternal City is at once a monument to time’s hurrying wings and a forced impression of it, preserved in marble, stone, brick, plaster, canvas, wood, and paint.  The lesson of Rome is not that worldly things, including man’s finest work, do not alter, decay, but that the result of historical processes need not be the ruin, tawdriness, vulgarity, and ephemerality of the modern world.  Last year my wife and I put up at the Istituto San Tommaso di Villanova, a charming hotel for pilgrims run by an order of French sisters, in Parioli.  Parioli is an upper-middle-class residential neighborhood roughly north of the Villa Borghese.  Far from being a part of the old city, it was developed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries from what was then farmland: pastures, vineyards, orchards, oliveti.  Parioli, in its day, was, as much as Queens, New York, another raw new suburb, erected on the plowed and salted furrows of violated nature.  But Parioli today looks charmingly historic, reminiscent architecturally of comparable neighborhoods of Paris: long rows of buff-faced buildings fronted by French windows opening on iron balconies, surmounted by ateliers and impressively mansarded.  The Istituto, at Viale Romania 7, is a hundred yards from Piazza Ungheria, and another several hundred down Viale Rossini to the Bioparco, or Zoo di Roma, tucked into the Villa Borghese and bounded by Via Ulisse and Via Aldrovandi.

Foreign travel is always a question of whether to explore somewhere new or revisit some familiar place for the purpose of becoming better acquainted.  An argument in favor of the second choice is the special pleasure of making and maintaining friends abroad.  Most of the friends and acquaintances we have acquired in Rome over the years are priests and Catholic journalists based at the Vatican.  A special one, deceased more than a year ago now, was our dearest Bellamy, an Asiatic lion born at London Zoo and acquired in 2001 by the Zoo di Roma, where he lived out his too-short life (he was only 14 when he died in November 2007 of a highly aggressive malignancy) in the company of his serial mates and their offspring.  I last saw Bellamy ten months before his death, when I visited him and his current lioness, Asha, several times in the course of two weeks.  But I did not learn of his demise until the following May, when I read the sad news on the Bioparco’s website and wrote to the director of the zoo’s Scientific Sector, Massimiliano Di Giovanni, to express my condolences and inquire about the most convenient way to make a donation to the Foundation in memoria di Bellami.  The result was a spate of e-mails between Rome and Laramie, one of which extended Signor Di Giovanni’s generous invitation to present ourselves senza indugio at his office when we next visited the zoo for a personal introduction to Oles and Jad, the new six-year-old Asiatic lion couple who replaced Asha and Bellamy as the zoo’s breeding pair.

The zoo community, as I have learned from working as a guide at Denver Zoo, is a fraternal one.  Even so, Massimiliano Di Giovanni outdid himself as a generous and gracious host.  A tall, lean, bearded fifth-generation Roman, in whom motion and speech are fused as pure energy, he speaks excellent English, allowing me to concentrate on matters pertaining to Panthera leo persica rather than my limited Italian.  Though he was busy with meetings that afternoon, Massimiliano set work aside to hasten us out the back door of the administration building onto zoo grounds, past the lemurs and the Asian elephants, and over to the spacious yard where the lions are housed.

This is a spacious habitat exhibit, modeled perhaps on the Forest of Gir in northeastern India where the last 350-odd Asian lions still extant in the wild live and including semitropical shade cover in which the lions can almost lose themselves at one end, a waterfall at the other, and at the rear a series of rock ledges rising to a cliff where I had last seen Bellamy vanish like a shaggy ghost through a camouflaged guillotine door in search of his dinner.  After his death, there were the expectable comments in the press and on the web about the “povero prigioniero,” soon to be succeeded by other poveri prigionieri in his place.  In fact, anyone who knows anything about the perilous life of lions in the wild, and the adaptability of lions to human company and human surroundings, is likely to entertain different views concerning the morality of keeping lions captive in luxurious conditions.  I was mourning the absence of old friends gone (Asha was transferred following her mate’s death to Cheshire Zoo in England) when a beautiful young lioness emerged unexpectedly from cover and posed for us on the open grass, as if inviting admiration.  Oles, despite the cool November weather, was lying up in the shade of the semitropical forest with his great head resting on his paws.  Asian lions are smaller than their African cousins, shorter coupled with a double fold of skin along their bellies, and the male’s ears stand up ahead of his mane.  Unlike many Africans, they tend to that gentleness, even sweetness, of expression I had so loved in Bellamy.  Massimiliano unlocked the gate and took us round back to the indoor stalls where he introduced us to one of the keepers, a pretty young woman who also spoke good English and kindly showed us a photo Cheshire had sent of Asha and her latest litter.  While we were talking, an elderly tiger in retirement came over to her for what zoo people call a safe rub through the wire.  Afterward, Massimiliano bought us coffees at an outdoor pavilion, and Maureen and I crossed the Villa Borghese on foot and walked on through the Porta Pinciana to Harry’s Bar at the head of Via Veneto where we ordered Bellinis, a cocktail invented in Venice by Ernest Hemingway and concocted of champagne and peach juice.  I did not find the Bellini to be among his greatest artistic creations.

Dining out in a foreign city that is also a familiar one is another great pleasure of international travel.  There are restaurants scattered all over Rome, most of them inexpensive neighborhood places, where we are recognized instantly by the staff, who address me in Italian and seem unaffectedly pleased to see us again.  Usually they assume, from my blue eyes, cherubic 18th-century visage, and tweed suits, that we are an English couple, though Maureen is one-quarter Italian and could easily pass for full if only she would learn to speak the language.  Among our favorites is the maître d’ at Ristorante da Olimpio, off Via del Tritone, who treats us to drinks and desserts and relaxes by our table after the lunch crowd has mostly cleared out.  On this trip, we were shocked, though, to discover that Il Ristorante The Meeting on Viale Rossini, which was frequented by British diplomats and businessmen as well as by my brother-in-law Roger McCaffrey, had been replaced by Taverna Rossini, an excellent fish restaurant under the same ownership.  The maître d’ was said to be the same man we had known, but if so, he was not on premises the evening we dined there.  He had always been very kind to us on previous visits.

For the first time in Italy, I felt comfortable and secure with the Italian language.  In order to prevent my mind from defaulting in a pinch to my first-learned foreign tongue, I had made it a point not to pick up a French book or magazine for months ahead of our visit.  As luck would have it, two sisters from Paris were given a table near ours in the dining salon at the Istituto Tommaso.  They spoke good English, but for courtesy’s sake we shifted back and forth between English and French.  I was deeply humiliated.  The simplest French words would not come to mind—only their Italian counterparts!  I floundered about for several mornings at breakfast before I finally found something like firm ground beneath my feet, but even so I was hardly satisfied with my performance.  It was the Frenchwomen’s first trip to Rome.  They had no Italian.  The waiter was a nice young man from Sri Lanka, whose Italian was simple but clear.  Next time we visit Paris, my wife and I plan to look up these women.  I have already forgotten their names.  But Maureen wrote them into her address book.

On our last day in Rome Massimiliano took us to lunch—primo and secondo with wine—at the zoo’s little restaurant.  While we were eating, the curator stopped by our table for a chat.  Yitzhak Yadid was previously director of the Jerusalem Zoo and speaks flawless English.  It was a lovely fall day, and the Villa Borghese was leafless, expansive, and mellow as an English park.  None of us could have guessed that, a month later, the Tiber would be threatening to flood the city and the keepers at the Bioparco would be feeding the monkeys chocolate bars and cookies to maintain their energy levels in the unprecedented cold.

This article first appeared in the May 2009 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Summer camp as it used to be—lakeside in the mountains, with enforced training in swimming, boating, shooting, equestrianship, tennis, fishing, hiking, wilderness survival, and singing silly songs around the campfire—was as American as Huckleberry Finn and Nick Adams, though both escaped its disciplining formalities by lighting out on their own for the territory ahead.  I was spared them myself, being given the run of a 200-acre Green Mountains farm instead.  Nevertheless, the idea of the summer camp of yore yielding place to an intellectual boot camp for neutered nerds from the suburbs is, to me, as shocking as the spectacle of a lovely agricultural valley turned into a silicon one.  This newest Upward Bound program for what its patrons themselves would call the “overprivileged” is simply another training course for the Long Island Olympics.  Is there no satisfaction in life for the elite (or aspirants to it) beyond cutthroat meritocratic competition for place, preference, and riches?  Are the most intelligent human beings really no more than disembodied minds at work according to cybernetic principles?  Was the motto of the ancients, Mens sanis in corpore sano, a menacing prophecy of Naziism or a formula for developing the good, the balanced citizen?  Has the unbought grace of life become totally eclipsed in our time?  Is American society rotting from the head down, like a fish?  When a civilization no longer can produce wholly formed men and women at the top but only troglodytes, no matter how “intelligent,” it is doomed.

We call it “higher education,” but the thing is scarcely that.  Rather, like the elementary and secondary education that precedes it, it is fake education, developed from positively anti-educational principles.  The purpose of post-secondary education was never to outfit a class of narrow-minded sharklings with all the tricks necessary to seize and devour what they consider their just deserts but to graduate cultivated Christian men and women, bred to social deference and the habit of command: fit to accept their place in an established upper class, in the absence of which civilization devolves into society in the merely anthropological sense.  If there were nothing more to a civilized person than a high IQ, developed technical skills, and a ruthless competitive instinct, civilization would be a cheap commodity indeed, rather than the precious and perishable thing that it is.  That, however, is—whether fortunately or unfortunately—not the case.

The Spanish-American War was the direct (though infinitely more successful) forebear of the calamitous Iraqi war now being fought.  Yet, while the war in the Philippines produced atrocities far exceeding those of Abu Ghraib, the Cuban campaign had its gallant aspect, provided in considerable part by Theodore Roosevelt’s volunteer Rough Rider regiment—which, so far as I am able to recall, has no parallel in subsequent American warfare.  The Rough Riders included recruits from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, and clubs such as the Knickerbocker of New York and the Somerset of Boston.  (Hamilton Fish, Jr., the ex-captain of the Columbia crew, was among the first casualties on the slog from Daiquirí over to Kettle Hill.)  It included as well hunters, ex-sheriffs, cowboys, mining prospectors, and mountain men from the Western territories—uncouth frontiersman who had hardly suspicioned the existence of anything like a Fish, a Page, or a Channing.  Roosevelt was initially pleased by the refusal of the bluebloods to lord it over their social inferiors by demanding commissions for themselves, being content instead to serve under whatever roughneck they were assigned to; after the regiment had returned stateside and been mustered out, he was delighted to be able to claim that not a single man had backed out after volunteering for service nor failed to do his entire duty.  As for himself, Roosevelt explains in The Rough Riders,

During the year preceding the  outbreak of the Spanish War, I was assistant secretary of the Navy.  While my party was in opposition, I had preached, with all the fervor and zeal I possessed, our duty to intervene in Cuba and to take this opportunity of driving the Spaniard from the Western World.  Now that my party had come to power, I felt it incumbent on me, by word and deed, to do all I could to secure the carrying out of the policy in which I so heartily believed; and from the beginning I had determined that, if a war came, somehow or other, I was going to the front.

Imagine Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, or Douglas Feith forming a regiment and taking it to the Iraqi front!  Or a modern-day Harvard or Columbia graduate volunteering for service with it.  Really, it is unimaginable.  Probably fewer than ten percent of American males with college degrees have ever handled a firearm.  America in 1898 was still a whole society, raising up whole men.  The difference between then and now is, to some degree, the difference between summer camp and college camp.

I have written sometime within the last year that I had always been a defender of the gentleman’s C until George W. Bush entered the White House.  Since then, I have reflected that, had Bush graduated from Yale with an A-plus average, he would have been no less dangerous as president (and even quite possibly more so) than he has proved himself in fact to be.  TR, in spite of his intellectual brilliance and his greatness as a man, as president was almost as wrongheaded as W., overall.  And it is worth noting, moreover, that there is no reason to believe that Roosevelt’s formidable intellect, encyclopedic learning, and literary ability are relatable to the report cards he received from Harvard.

I am speaking here of a college education, not a postgraduate or professional one.  Obviously, it is the duty, as well as the business, of law, medical, business, mining, agricultural schools, and the like to accept the best applicants, give them the most rigorous training, and graduate competent and responsible professionals.  (Although lawyers, in particular, should be humanists as well; while Americans of a certain age can recall their general internist having played the cello and collected works of art, and the music for their Sunday church service being tastefully selected by a Wall Street banker.)  As for the humanities, postgraduate work in history, literature, languages, and the sciences ought, of course, to be conducted according to the standards of professional scholarship.  But, as to undergraduate education?  To hell with the grade-grubbers! Admissions departments should be firmly directed to discriminate unapologetically and refer them directly to the professional schools.  Where the colleges are concerned—the Ivy League colleges in particular—the inflexible rule should be: Only dilettantes need apply.

Because it is from dilettantism that civilization arises and on which it depends.  Civilization, in the highest sense, is play; and civilized play is play in the highest sense of the word, as art is play.  I do not say that the creation of civilization, and of art, is not the result of rigorous and exacting labor, involving blood, sweat, and skill as well as genius; but that the end of art and civilization is itself not rigorous.  (Aquinas beautifully defined art as “reason in making,” which is exactly opposite in concept and purpose of making for a reason.)  Artists, philosophers, and scholars, before the age of mass education, were a minute minority of the human race.  That they are a much larger minority today goes far to explain the vulgar decrepitude of modern times.  Whether or not everyone in a modern democracy can be famous for 15 minutes, the chances of anyone becoming a great creative artist for a lifetime are infinitesimal, on the order of dying in a plane crash or being struck by lightning.  The overwhelming majority of those people who have an interest in art and learning at all are destined to be patrons of these things, not creators of them.  That is to say, they will spend their lives in contemplation of them.  And, while it is certainly possible to help a student to appreciate a Mozart sonata, a poem by John Donne, or a painting by Velásquez, it is the height of philistinism to grade him on the quality of his appreciation.  Worse, it is the height of fatuity.  Worse yet, it is, in one sense, entirely unrelated and, in another, completely antagonistic to the enjoyment of art.  It is possible to listen to a Bach fugue, comprehending the structure of the piece in its every measure, and yet not be moved by it—which is to say, not to enjoy it.  (The student who can do so nevertheless grades A-plus.)  Conversely, it is possible to be moved by the whole without having attained to a technical comprehension of the sum of its parts.  What sense does it make for the academic instructor to insist that I am not enjoying Bach’s composition for the “correct” reasons?  The fact remains that I feel the piece for something the composer put into it and that, since what Bach put into his fugue is Bach, I cannot go wrong in appreciating his work in any one of its aspects, at any level.  (And why should I pay much heed to Professor Julius J. Julliard’s remonstrances or care that he grades me C or C-minus?)  The broader and fundamental objection to the competitive approach to a liberal-arts education really comes down to this: that the competitively precise assessment of the liberal-arts student is as much beside the point as the scientific evaluation of him as a gentleman would be.  And the purpose of a college education should be—as once it was—to produce gentleman and ladies, not meritocratically distinguishable specialists of whom the world has an enormous surfeit already, together with a dearth of ladies and gentlemen.  The issue, I suppose, can be put as follows: What level of academic accomplishment suffices for the civilized generalist?  The answer is probably in the C to C-plus range.

When I was preparing to apply to colleges in the mid-1960’s, the ideal—fixed beyond the most cogent object or rational argument—was “the well-rounded student.”  (Though I was told of one admissions director at a prestigious New England college making mild fun of the applicant who “was so well-rounded he rolled away into a corner and was forgotten,” it seemed this gentleman pretty much rolled along with his counterparts at other schools where the actual application of admissions criteria was concerned.)  Since I have always detested this shallow positivistic ideal, together with most well-rounded people themselves, I should emphasize that well-roundedness is not what I have in mind.  The notion that the model college acceptant should boast an A-plus or (as perfection is denoted these days) four-point average; have been elected class president and made captain of his high-school football team; served as editor of the school paper and shone as matinée idol of the Glee Club; spent his summers working with Habitat for Humanity or in his hometown ghetto and volunteered as poll-watcher on Election Day; and so on, and so forth is no more than a preposterous caricature of the prevailing liberal bourgeois mind.  So far from directing young people toward reality, such absurdly artificial activities lead them away from it and into the fatuous mental morass of modernism.  Young ladies and gentlemen ought to be introduced at the earliest possible age to the genteel pursuits of literature, the fine arts, history, and the natural sciences.  Beyond that, and rigorous religious training, they need to be taught according to the formula of Jeff Cooper, and, before him,the court of ancient Persia: “to ride, shoot straight, and speak the truth.”  None of these accomplishments is likely to be gained at college camp, for the obvious reason that neither camp nor college values such things.

There is a major and fundamental objection to be made to this alternative ideal, and with no reason to believe that a satisfactory answer to be made to it exists.  The problem, of course, has to do with competition and success in later life.  If grade-grubbing and academic achievement alone are recognized by the professional schools and rewarded by business and professional offers, then educated gentlemen must lose out competitively, not as individuals only but as a class, to the intellectual robber barons of the aspiring meritocracy.  The civilized minority thus faces a choice: whether to become the enemy or to be displaced by him.  The choice, to be certain, is a terrible one.  It is not more terrible, however, than the billions of individual choices, some large, some small, faced by hundreds of millions of Christians—day in and day out, year after year, for the past two millennia—who, by some miracle of God, have not yet been displaced from Western civilization.

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.