The American victory was important to the French army, whose memories of glory went back to the first half of Louis XIV’s disastrous reign, but, under the nationalist governments of the Revolution and the Empire, French arms dominated Europe.  French soldiers fought and died bravely in World War I, and, although the nation was too worn out to sustain a second war against Germany, French volunteers in British forces and the soldiers of the Free French, led by the greatest statesman of the 20th century, made a good showing.  My late friend Marcel Boisot, an heroic pilot who flew his plane out of Vichy France and crash-landed in Spain, flew many missions for the RAF and was highly decorated by both the British and French governments.

This is the nation of cowards currently being reviled by internationalist leftists who insist on describing themselves as patriotic conservative Americans.  Most are none of the above.  (How many have ever shot skeet, attended a church picnic, or joined the Boy Scouts?)  The ironies do not end with the neoconservatives.  Few anti-imperialist or “isolationist” conservatives know how to respond to the call for renewed patriotism.  Libertarians can rightly say that they oppose all wars among nations, because they do not believe in nations, not even their own.  But what can Pat Buchanan’s friends, who for years have been banging the nationalist drum, say in response to the neojingoists?

Few nationalist conservatives, in fact, support the projected war against Iraq, but they ought to be happy with the upsurge of patriotic rhetoric.  We know they are not, but why?  Surely not because they like Saddam Hussein.  The nationalists would say that the war against Saddam is an unjust war, is not in the national interest, and is being undertaken out of a combination of bad motives: greed for Iraqi oil and a desire to protect Israel.

To a true nationalist, however, bad motives should be a small obstacle.  “My country, right or wrong” is a nationalist cliché.  If the success of the nation is the highest good, then how can it be right to promote divisions within the nation and to undermine the expansion of the nation’s power?  At a time like this, nationalists would be expected to be found playing on the national team, not coaching from the bleachers.  It is difficult for men who have spent their careers despising the ACLU suddenly to deplore the erosion of civil liberties and states’ rights over the past year and a half, much less the eruption of vulgar patriotism—the cult of the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and the incessant droning of “God Bless America.”

The words nationalism and patriotism are often confused, and, even when political theorists draw a contrast, the result is often a distinction without a difference or a bizarre twist of meaning that defies everyday usage.  The modern concept of nationalism (just like the concept of internationalism) took shape during the French Revolution, which implemented Rousseau’s theory of the general will and continued the process of centralization inaugurated by the monarchy.

According to 19th-century nationalists, the will of the nation—where nation is defined as an historic community of blood and tongue—had to find expression in a common and unified state.  Hence, the Italian nationalist Mazzini, whose political lineage went back to the Revolution (by way of Buonarotti, the disciple of Babeuf), spoke always of the twin principles of unity and nationality.  Italy presented a special case of a people that had not been unified since the fall of the Western Roman Empire and had been divided up into competing principalities, some of which were controlled by foreign dynasties (e.g., the Bourbons of Naples) and foreign powers, particularly Austria.  To liberate and unify Italians in a centralized state was the nationalists’ goal, one that naturally overrode all the local patriotisms of Sicilians, Venetians, Latins, and Tuscans—to say nothing of Catholics loyal to the pope, whose estates were rudely stripped away by the French-speaking rulers of Piedmont.  That process of unification culminated in the 1860’s, when the more developed North conquered and subjugated the agrarian South.  The parallel with the American Risorgimento did not escape the notice of Pope Pius IX, who regarded Jefferson Davis as a fellow victim of nationalist aggression.

Most 19th-century liberals were sympathetic to patriotic and nationalist movements of liberation and unification, and even archindividualist John Stuart Mill embraced the notion that every distinct nation should have its own state.  However, other liberals condemned the nationalist state as spiritually and culturally mortifying.  Jacob Burckhardt pointed out that a divided Germany had produced Haydn and Goethe, but the unified nationalist German state was eager only for power, not for civilization, “hence the hopelessness of any attempt at decentralization, of any voluntary restriction of power in favor of local and civilized life.”

In England, Lord Acton condemned nationalism as the principle most inimical to human liberty, and he viewed a federal system, such as that of Switzerland or the Holy Roman Empire, as the best solution to ethnic conflict.  States built on the national idea were, he argued, too confining to inspire the generous, cosmopolitan civilization that had been characteristic of European man.

If the nationalist standpoint narrows the human outlook, it also implies a willingness to divide the human race into the categories of us and them, and to define them as an enemy to be eliminated or subjugated.  This attitude, as George Orwell pointed out, stems from “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled ‘good’ or ‘bad.’”  By identifying ourselves with a nation, he said, we place the state “beyond good and evil, . . . recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”

Propaganda and ethnic bigotry are the hall-marks of developed nationalism.  While soldiers in the two world wars were sometimes willing to look upon one another as human beings, their governments, which enlisted distinguished writers in their propaganda campaigns, were not.  The Germans, who were portrayed as savage monsters by the Allies, ridiculed the effeminacy of Britain and France and portrayed Jews and Slavs as subhuman.  The United States, in denigrating the Japanese, resorted to the most sordid racial stereotyping.  Such propagandistic stereotyping on the part of the U.S. government goes back, at least, to the Civil War, when government and newspapers alike depicted Southerners as cruel and inhuman slave drivers.  The propaganda was then used to justify the criminal actions of the Union.

For the most part, however, nationalists do not actually identify themselves with the real and historic country of their birth but with a fictional version.  Robespierre’s France was the imaginary product of his scheming but uneducated mind, and the Jacobins reinvented French history as the struggle between the subjugated Celts and Frankish invaders who made up the aristocracy.  Although the real Germany was divided between Catholics and Protestants, the Nazis’ ideal German nation had to be unified, and Hitler was more ready to persecute his family’s own Catholic Church, because it divided Germans and made some of them loyal to an international entity.

Rabid nationalism, so far from being a sign of strength, is actually an indication of a weak sense of nationhood.  Lincoln’s United States, Masaryk’s Czechoslovakia, Pavelic’s Croatia, and Mussolini’s Italy were divided countries in which people were more loyal to their region, their church, or their ethnicity—to anything but the nation.

Modern Zionism, a nationalist movement par excellence, flourishes in an Israeli state divided between Jew and non-Jew and, more importantly, between Middle Eastern and European Jews, between ultrazionists and socialists, liberal secularists and the Orthodox who would restore Solomon in all his glory.  Their only unity is in national solidarity against the Palestinians and other Muslims, whom extremist rabbis dismiss as Amalekites, a nation to be eliminated.  Their hysterical propaganda, repeated by uneducated evangelicals in the United States, is perfectly understandable as a form of nationalist self-reassurance.  To describe Zionism, as the Palestinians do, as a form of Nazism is to miss the point entirely: Arabic and 
Israeli nationalisms were forged in the same European laboratory of revolution.  Arafat and Sharon are as alike as Eteocles and Polynices were—twins who fought even in the womb.

The nations adored by nationalists do not actually exist but are something to be realized in the future.  The real Israel 
of downtown Tel Aviv is a far cry from 
the Zionist dream.  Mussolini, it is said, dreamed of changing the Italian climate to harden the character of his people, and, after the war, Italian fascist Giulio Evola openly voiced his contempt for the Mediterranean character of Italians who were happy to abandon the virility of fascism and return to their mandolins and “O Sole Mio.”  Evola thought he wanted to restore the virtues of ancient Rome, little realizing that Romans in the age of Cicero were far closer to the Italians than to the severe characters portrayed by Livy.

From this perspective, Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan are not really nationalists at all: They are patriots, a word that misuse in the mouths of politicians and propagandists has rendered unpalatable and, perhaps, obsolete.  In general usage, patriotism signifies a person’s willingness to take risks and make sacrifices for the sake of his country and his fellow citizens.  Although his devotion may spring from an instinctive “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life,” the patriot is not merely loyal to a spot of ground; he is willing to defend it with his life.  Patriotism, although it begins in instinct, can also, as Lord Acton advocated, transcend the blood-and-soil passions of primitive man and become an ethical force based on respect for law and the Constitution.

In arguing for a purely ethical patriotism, Lord Acton failed to understand that the stages of human social development can never be transcended; they can only be incorporated into more complex communities.  The family was not eliminated by being incorporated into a tribe, and a tribal or provincial identity can only be destroyed at grave peril to the moral health of the people.

Jacobin nationalists established the model.  In attempting to build an abstract and artificially unified French nation, they made war on all other, deeper loyalties: They attacked the Church; waged a war of genocide against Catholics in the Vendée; and did their best to obliterate the distinctive ways of life (e.g., in Provence and Brittany) that were responsible for the vitality of French culture.  The predictable result in France, Britain, and the United States (to name only three examples) is a mass culture in which the only “national identity” is found in commercial entertainment and state propaganda.

The instinctive loyalty to family and tribe has no name in English or in most European languages.  Edmund Burke, however, intuited the concept when he referred to the “little platoons” that command our loyalties.  Serbian does have such a word: rodoljublje, love of kith and kin, love of the stock (rod).  The love of kith and kin is based not on race but on language, culture, and tradition; and, while the process of loyalty begins with the family, it culminates in the commonwealth, which fulfills (without superseding) lesser loyalties.  Rodoljublje does not even require a nation-state.  It is possible to be loyal to your own people even when separated—as Serbians, Montenegrins, and the Serbs of Bosnia and Krajina were in the 19th century (or as Greeks were until the Roman conquest).  Separate ethnic groups may also be unified in a crown, as the Scots and English were under James VI and I and as the various peoples were under the Holy Roman Empire.

The difficulty comes when a multiethnic monarchy or empire begins to force assimilation, as happened in the waning years of Austria-Hungary, which had degenerated from the more inclusive ideal of the Holy Roman Empire into a dual monarchy.  Austria-Hungary’s dual nationalism made it difficult, if not impossible, for Slovaks, Croats, and Serbs to preserve their identities.  Hungarian nationalists such as Lajos Kossuth portrayed themselves as enlightened patriots interested in the good of humanity, but Kossuth and his allies worked tirelessly to suppress the Slovaks and the Croats who wanted to defend their own identities.  This is precisely the effect that all the misguided proposals for a national language or a national cultural would have.  Such well-intentioned people as Ron Unz (the scourge of bilingual education in California) think they can douse the multinational fire that is burning up our schools and cultures by pouring on nationalist gasoline.  There is no contradiction, as Alain de Benoist explains elsewhere in this issue, in an individualist libertarian advocating nationalist measures: The two go hand in hand.

Faced with the erosion of our national sovereignty through unlimited immigration, economic globalism, and political internationalism, some conservatives have taken their stand on the nation-state not only as a last redoubt to be defended (which it is) but as a supernatural entity tied together by “the mystic chords of memory” and presided over by “the better angels of our nature.”  This sort of nationalism, whether proclaimed by Mazzini or Lincoln, is as blasphemous as the prayer of the Unitarian socialist that American children are forced to recite in school.  To pledge allegiance to a flag is idolatry; to proclaim the Union indivisible not only insults the men who founded this federal republic but justifies the continued centralization of power that is the bane of all modern states.

Real Americans are bound by traditions and habits that connect us both to the great struggles in our national history and to the local places where our kin are buried and our children are christened.  If we are not Georgians or Kansans, we cannot be Americans except by the polite fiction that allows us to pretend (as we ought to pretend) that naturalized immigrants are as American as native sons.  This generic U.S. identity is as bloodless and bogus as the New Soviet Man.  Armed with this fictional identity, nationalists would have to form a party, take over the government, reconstruct the nation by imposing a propaganda curriculum on the schools and by destroying the last few tatters of provincial diversity—and it would be morning again in America, again.

Even if such a nationalist scenario were a paradise and not a nightmare, it is absurd to pretend that it might ever be played out.  To the extent that we Americans still possess an authentic identity, we are finding it in our churches, in our families, and, occasionally, in our ethnic traditions.  I am dismayed by the prospect of large parts of the United States turning Mexican, but I am terrified by the reality that we are creating: a nationalist-socialist state that will eliminate both the Mexican and the Anglo-American identities.

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Mississippi senator’s defenestration would have been a largely insignificant event had it not revealed some of the underlying realities of American politics and especially the realities of what currently passes for American conservatism.  Mr. Lott had few defenders, and even those who did defend him hastened to do so not on the merits of what he said about Mr. Thurmond’s segregationist presidential campaign of 1948 but rather on the assumption that he did not really mean what he seemed to have said.  That defense was probably accurate; you do not become Senate majority leader these days by saying what you really believe, and, if Mr. Lott really did disclose the fruits of his meditations on race, segregation, and the course of American history since 1948, it was likely the first and only time in his entire career that he spoke the unvarnished truth about much of anything.

What was significant about the Lott affair was not what he really meant or believes, nor what he and his supporters chose to say, but what his foes said—and not the obvious and predictable ones on the political left.  Of course, Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton chose to strut and rant about Mr. Lott’s remarks, and, of course, a good many Democrats eager to make what political gains they could from it did so as well.  But the foes who really did Trent Lott in and made it impossible for the Republicans to defend him or for President Bush to keep him were the neoconservatives.  Had they not immediately denounced Mr. Lott and demanded his resignation, he might well have come through the crisis successfully.

The neoconservative onslaught was immediate and total.  Almost to a man, their spokesmen damned Mr. Lott’s remarks: “disgraceful” (David Frum); “indefensible” (Jonah Goldberg); “ludicrous” (William Kristol); “appalling” (Charles Krauthammer); “shameful” (a public statement issued by four Republican appointees to the Civil Rights Commission, led by neoconservative race guru Abigail Thernstrom); etc.  Neoconservative ex-football-star Jack Kemp panted that, “until [Mr. Lott] totally repudiates segregation and every aspect of its evil manifestation,” the Republicans would continue to suffer damage from his remarks.  According to the Washington Post, the quarterback demanded that Mr. Lott “go before a civil rights group and make a major speech about race and racial reconciliation in the New South to help clear the air.”

The hostility of the neocon press gang was essential to the collapse of whatever political support Mr. Lott could have garnered for himself.  Had there existed a corps of conservative columnists and commentators willing either to defend what he said or to dismiss his remarks as irrelevant and harmless, the majority leader might have been able to retain his position.  Facing the nearly unanimous opposition of those who now constitute the permissible “right,” however, he had no ground to stand on and no defenders to whom he could point.  He could not say to President Bush or his fellow senators, “Stand up for me: My strong support in the media shows we can keep public opinion on our side,” because he had no support in the media even from the right (save Pat Buchanan and Robert Novak), and, without such support, he could hardly expect to win or even to keep any allies.  Foolishly, having lost the right and whetted the salivary glands of the left, he tried to placate the black left by his ill-advised and disastrous interview on Black Entertainment Television, an act that only hastened his demise.

Mr. Lott’s collapse was unfortunate because, for all his personal weaknesses and evasions, he was a reasonably reliable conservative vote in Congress, as his record shows.  We could expect nothing radical from Mr. Lott as majority leader, but we could also expect him to do little harm—far less harm, for example, than Newt Gingrich did when, in the 1980’s, he led House Republican support for such measures as the Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday, extension of the Voting Rights Act, and sanctions on South Africa, all of which Mr. Lott opposed.

The difference in the voting records of Mr. Lott and Mr. Gingrich, a neoconservative hero, should tell us why the neocons were so eager to purge the Mississippian from the Senate leadership, and, if it does not, their motives soon became clear in their own columns.  As Charles Krauthammer wrote, “Neocons have been the most passionate about the Lott affair and the most disturbed by its meaning.”

Why?  Because many neoconservatives are former liberals.  They supported civil rights when it meant equality between the races, and they turned against the civil rights establishment when it began insisting that some races should be more equal than others.  Neoconservatives were particularly appalled by Lott’s endorsement of [the original civil-rights movement’s] antithesis, Thurmond segregationism.  Not to denounce it—on grounds not of politics but of principle—would be to lose all moral standing on matters of race.

By itself, this is a fair statement of what neocons really want—much fairer than what most of them have said on the subject before, when they have tried to pretend that they were just regular old conservatives after all.  The regular old conservatives, of course, as National Review and similar conservative organs of the 1950’s and 60’s consistently made clear, never defended either the “civil-rights movement as originally defined” or its political goals, which, quite aside from racial issues, involved a direct and transparent attack on constitutional principles as well as a concerted subversion of Southern social institutions.

Nevertheless, Mr. Krauthammer’s honest statement of neoconservative goals and the whole Lott episode generally served to set off yet another volley from his fellow neocons in another effort to redefine the American right along lines acceptable to, and congruent with, the left and to denounce and expel the paleoconservatives.  That was the burden of columns appearing almost simultaneously with that of Mr. Krauthammer by such neocon sages as David Frum and Jonah Goldberg, who once again ranted and raved about the “racism of the past” to which the noble neoconservatives “feel no allegiance” (Goldberg) and the “inescapable racialism and the obsessive anti-semitism that one finds among the paleos” (Frum; the “racialist” and “antisemite” that he refers to are Steve Sailer and Charlie Reese, respectively, though you may be certain that Mr. Frum could find others if he cared to).

The neocons exploited the Lott episode to help discredit and expel paleoconservatives even further from the political mainstream.  That much would be fine with paleos, who, for the most part, have long since abandoned any desire to share the same movement with the neoconservatives.  Less and less does one hear among paleos the call for “taking back” the organs and institutions of the conservative movement; more and more paleos grasp that they and their rivals on the right are two different breeds that share about as much in common as German shepherds and Persian cats, and those paleos see the need to define themselves as an entirely separate movement, with their own organs and institutions.  What the neocons were doing, however, went further than yet one more “purge” of the paleos.

By denying any allegiance to the “racism of the past,” however, the neocons were renouncing not just the real “racism of the past,” which most conservatives of every stripe have long done, but the perfectly legitimate conservatism of the past—
the conservatism Senator Lott’s voting record represents.  The neoconservatives were trying to create a conservatism that openly embraces not just the “civil-rights movements as originally defined” but most of what the “civil-rights movement as currently established” demands—the renunciation of the Confederacy and its symbols and icons; the acceptance of Martin Luther King, Jr., his holiday, and his creed of “radical reconstruction”; the extended Voting Rights Act of 1982; acts of international aggression against such nations as South Africa simply because their racial policies differ from those endorsed by the left and the pseudoright; and, finally, the mass immigration, multiculturalism, and antiwhite hatred of today.  Having swallowed virtually every claim of the left that European-American civilization is a “racist” order and that such “racism” is too wicked and irredeemable to be tolerated, the neocons move merrily and logically down the road built by the left to outright rejection of the entire civilization and the people who created it.  What else does their insistence that America is an “idea,” a “proposition,” or a “creed” mean but the abandonment of the historic reality of American culture and tradition in favor of the most abstract and meaningless utopia and the embracing of the antithesis of what remains, even today, a respectable and defensible conservatism?

At least, it respectable and defensible until the neocons invited themselves into the discussion.  Their contribution—
and this is what lent the Lott episode a significance beyond that of the ordinary cut and thrust of day-to-day politics—was to assist the left in delegitimizing the respectable and defensible conservatism that seeks to protect and defend a particular civilization and people.  What neither the Democratic Party, the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton, the Washington Post, nor anyone else in the panoply of the left could accomplish, the neoconservatives were able to complete—because they had already established themselves, with the help of the left, as the legitimate voice of the permissible right.

It is likely that the long-term effect of the Lott episode—even more than the Republicans’ abandonment of the “Southern strategy” (denounced by Bill Kristol in the wake of the Lott affair) or their pretended adoption of the “Hispanic strategy”—will be to push the party even further to the left on race, immigration, and “civil rights.”  As the dominant voice of the right, the neoconservatives have shown that they will not hesitate to destroy a senior conservative Republican leader if he deviates from their ideological preferences and premises on such issues and that there can be no media and, therefore, no significant political support for such a leader.  The neoconservatives now define what is and what is not respectable and defensible conservatism, and their definition does not include the voting record of Mr. Lott—or of Barry Goldwater, Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and most other conservatives.  At the present, there is no significant political force in American politics able to challenge their claim that they are the only legitimate expression of the political right.  Maybe it is time somebody started just such an alternative force.

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

I was musing over the fact that there are so many books that have been written—“Why England Slept,” Pearl Harbor, what happened, why didn’t we know?  Right now on Capitol Hill, the members of the House and the Senate are trying to—are looking, having investigations on September 11th of last year, and trying to connect the dots, as they say, trying to piece together what might have been known, and why didn’t we know it, and why weren’t we able to connect the dots?  What the president is saying very simply to the world is let’s look at the dots today.  Our task is not to connect—connect the dots as to why England slept, or what happened with Pearl Harbor, or what happened on September 11th only.  Our task is to connect the dots before the fact, and—and see if we can’t behave in a way that there won’t be books written about why we slept, or what happened.

To “connect the dots before the fact,” in case you have not been able to figure it out, means passing a priori judgments on the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection without supplying any facts whatsoever.

“Connect the dots” seems to have replaced “pieces of the puzzle” as the paranoid metaphor of choice and bids fair 
to supplant even “smoking gun.”  What makes it so attractive is the tacit assumption that there must be a preset pattern, that the investigator’s only task is to go from point to point in the right sequence to come up with the predetermined picture.

After all, the search for “the smoking gun” may prove to be fruitless, if no crime has been committed.  Putting together a puzzle of hundreds of pieces may require hours, and the picture, often quite complicated, will be incomplete if some of the pieces (as the cliché often suggests) are missing, but in the children’s game of Connect the Dots, there is no room for doubt.  One person (in my day, it was usually another child) imagines an iconic image and outlines it in dots, and it is the child’s duty to connect them up to discover the outline of an elephant or the face of Abraham Lincoln.

This simplicity appeals to children.  Adults are supposed to realize that reality is never so simple, that the divine Puzzle Master has created a richly textured universe that can rarely be explained in one-dimensional terms.  Ike was probably not a commie; the Frankfurt School did not single-handedly destroy Western civilization; Bill Clinton was not planning a coup d’état; poverty cannot usually be explained by either the greed of plutocrats or the laziness of social inferiors.

To think that America’s problems in the Middle East can be explained by any simple connecting of dots is as infantile as the phrase itself, and the popularity of this expression is one more indication—as if we needed it—of the growing infantilism of the American people and their leaders.

The evidence is all around us, especially in the elite classes.  Read or listen to speeches of American statesmen from before World War II, and you will hear forceful, articulate men, not afraid to speak plainly, who studded their speeches with references to the Scriptures and to American history.  Listen to any senator, cabinet member, or president of the past ten years, and you will think you have entered into a school for learning-disabled children.  The two Bushes may be excused on the grounds of hereditary dyslexia, but how do we explain away the rest of them?

The infantilism comes out very strongly in the choice of slang expressions and the use of allusions to pop culture.  Where politicians once quoted Shakespeare, the Bible, Thomas Jefferson, and Mark Twain, they now refer to Disney cartoons, game shows, movies, and sitcoms.  Journalists are even worse.  The only frame of reference for journalists under 40 seems to be pop music, sports, and TV shows.  And if we descend the cultural scale, the situation gets even more desperate: If comic writers had to give up all references to Michael Jackson and Jennifer Lopez, they would go on unemployment.

Just in case you might be tempted to take the American pundit-class seriously, consider: This is the country where actresses who play farm wives in films are invited to testify in Congress on the farm crisis, where a p.r. hack like Lucianne Goldberg (to say nothing of her son) or a fashion-plate like Arianna Huffington can gain a respectful hearing, where political activists and speechwriters (James Carville, Paul Begala, Tony Snow, Cal Thomas) pretend to be “journalists” on talk shows.  (“I’m not a journalist, but I play one on TV.”)

Uneducated people have always been, well, uneducated, but, in the old days, they did have a rich storehouse of proverbs, folktales, and traditional lore.  A proletariat has nothing but consumer culture and Madison Avenue to fall back on.  Unfortunately, that proletariat now includes the American ruling class, which can only express its thoughts in simple sentences, because all of its thoughts are simple, and which reveals, in its reliance upon infantile clichés, an entirely infantile view of the world.

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Bulletin: Hollywood scapegrace, Jack Nicholson, reads Chronicles.

Or so several of our readers reported after seeing Alexander Payne’s adaptation of Louis Begley’s novel, About Schmidt.  Needless to say, these sightings propelled yours truly into action.

En route to perform my reconnaissance at the local multiplex, I calculated the probabilities.  On reflection, what had seemed at first improbable began to seem quite plausible.  Nicholson, after all, has a reputation for refusing to toe anyone’s line, even that of his conventionally leftist Hollywood paymasters.  I recalled the flap he raised a few years ago when he declared he was against abortion, having been spared by his unmarried mother, who chose the inconvenience of bringing him into the world, to our everlasting benefit.  So, why wouldn’t Hollywood’s premiere maverick subscribe to a journal as politically out of step as he is?

Or was it writer/director Alexander Payne who decided to cast our magazine as an objective correlative to his wayward ideology, so evident in his first commercial film, Citizen Ruth?  This penetrating account of the abortion wars took some mild jabs at pro-life activists, but it loosed its thunder on the pro-abortion party, dramatizing its members’ unswerving dedication to killing the unborn.  Payne revealed the pro-choicers to be at once loonily self-righteous and calculatingly ghoulish.  Furthermore, there was the rave notice we gave Payne’s delightfully ruthless satire, Election, two years ago.  How could he not be one of our more devoted readers?

As I pulled into the parking lot, I had quite convinced myself that Chronicles had slipped through filmdom’s leftward phalanx.  Payne was our man in Hollywood, and we were, at last, helping to shape the hearts and minds of the thoughtful few behind the enemy’s line.  It is with some chagrin, then, that I must report my reconnaissance was inconclusive.  Yes, there is a magazine on Nicholson’s desk, and, yes, it looks mightily like one of our issues.  But its fleeting appearance makes it impossible to be certain.

I can report this, however: If it is our magazine, it is on the wrong desk.  Given his character, the eponymous Schmidt could hardly be expected to read anything more demanding than the Omaha World-Herald.

About Schmidt is, at best, a mild satire of a late-middle-age man having his complacency bruised by some unpleasant inevitabilities: age, death, and willful offspring.  While Payne dramatizes this well enough, his film lacks the nervy provocation of Citizen Ruth and the crackling boldness of Election.  Schmidt is all too predictable.  In fact, the only real surprise is how little it has to do with its source.  Melding an unsold screenplay of his own with the novel, Payne has transformed Begley’s Schmidt from a white-shoe New York lawyer to a dispirited actuary in Omaha.  The result is an occasionally funny and sometimes moving actor’s film.  Whatever force there is in this account of a man awakening to his mortality comes from a cast of exceptional performers inhabiting the ordinariness of their unexceptional characters.

First, there’s Nicholson himself, playing against type as Schmidt.  Our Jack has called upon his current portliness to show us how Schmidt has padded himself from contact with others.  At 66, he lurks within the fortress of his corpulence, peering out at the world through his fat-crenellated eyes.  What he sees neither surprises nor delights him.  In an hilarious pre-credit sequence, Nicholson sits at an office desk swept clean of paper, pens, and other business litter.  He studies the wall clock as its minute hand creeps toward five, his face impassively gelid, his eyes lifeless, his motionless body swaddled by an ill-fitting suit that reveals every ripple of his flab.  Nothing is said.  Words are unnecessary.  This joyless time-server is about to be released from his wage slavery.  If you are over 40 and do not laugh ruefully at this scene, you are either independently wealthy or profoundly at peace with your mortal condition or, if you are obscenely lucky, both.  Schmidt is fed up with it all.  Of his wife, he tells us in voice-over that he often awakens at night and wonders how this pushy, foul-smelling old lady got into his house.  The only time he comes alive is when his daughter, Jeanie (Hope Davis), calls.  Answering the phone, he pulls his suit jacket into shape and fleetingly primps at his hair, his expression turning suddenly eager with his futile hope of pleasing the one person he still loves.

When his wife dies shortly after he retires, Schmidt is moved to apply his actuarial skills.  He calculates he has nine years to live.  This concentrates his mind wonderfully—on himself.  He tries to persuade his thirtysomething daughter to give up her ninny of a fiancé and return to his house to take care of him “until I’m settled.”  She, of course, fumes at his suggestion.  (Nobody fumes better than Davis.)  But it is not just selfishness on his part.  He simply cannot understand why she would want to marry Randall, a Denver waterbed salesman played to goofy perfection by Dermot Mulroney.  You can see his point.  This is a young man given to the spiritual balm of group hugging.  After the funeral for Schmidt’s wife, whom he met only once, Randall thoughtfully observes, “They broke the mold when they made her.”  Then, looking heavenward, he bellows, “We’ll miss you, Helen!”

What is best about Payne is his cold-eyed assessment of human nature.  He lets no one off the hook.  When the repressed Schmidt meets Randall’s effusive, aging hippie mother Roberta (the irrepressible Kathy Bates), the contrast is quite funny.  In other hands, Bates would have been instructed to play her character as a touchstone of honesty and healthy nonconformity.  Instead, she comes across as a monster of self-congratulation.  Roberta informs Schmidt that she has always been a very sexual being whose needs have gone unsatisfied by several husbands.  In no time at all, she has inveigled Schmidt into her backyard hot tub where, to his dismay, she disrobes and slips in with him, chortling, “A divorcée and a widower: I’d say that makes a good match.”  (I don’t know about you, but I could have gone to my grave quite contentedly without having seen Bates in her altogether, nor was it ever my wish to gaze on Nicholson’s bare bum.)

As in his other films, Payne applies his satire with a refreshing evenhandedness.  If Schmidt’s self-regarding prudence has frozen his soul, Roberta’s wanton career has transformed her into a gorgon of unsatisfied longings.  The organization man and the would-be earth mother stew in their respective tubs of futility.

The Quiet American also tells us of middle-age futility, but in much darker tones.  This beautifully shot film of love, war, and perfidy in French Indochina follows the scheme of the Graham Greene novel on which it is based, but it simplifies its emotions and politics.  Doing so, director Phillip Noyce has altered Greene’s emphasis.  The film suggests that there was a full moral equivalence between the deeds of the communist Vietminh and the CIA agents active in the region in 
the early 1950’s.  While Greene had little sympathy for American intervention, he did not go this far.  Still, at its best, Noyce’s film does justice to Greene’s sobering portrait of good intentions gone horribly wrong.

Greene used a love triangle to dramatize his views of Indochina.  His narrator, the fiftysomething Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine), has ensconced himself in Saigon, where he is supposed to be covering the French war against the Vietminh.  This he does in a desultory manner while pursuing his twin passions for Phuong (Do Thi Hai Yen), a beautiful 20-year-old Vietnamese girl, and for the opium she administers to him nightly.  Into his cozy arrangement stumbles Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), a Harvard-educated CIA operative pretending to be working for America’s medical-aid mission.  (With his big eyes and easy smile, Fraser perfectly expresses his character’s innate niceness, which, paradoxically, enables him to pursue his ideals ruthlessly.)  Pyle is instantly smitten with Fowler’s pillow girl and, in his earnest way, decides he must make an honest woman of her, an impulse analogous to his determination to liberate the Vietnamese from, well, anything that imperils their right to enjoy democracy, American-style.

At first, Fowler is bemused by the young man’s blundering brashness.  But when Pyle makes a point of discussing his intentions, he cannot help scorning the younger man’s naiveté.  Later, when Pyle unhesitatingly saves Fowler from a Vietminh attack, the older man pointedly sneers at his decency.  Fowler shares Greene’s well-known distrust of innocent goodness.  At the same time, he grudgingly respects it, especially when he compares it to his own weary cynicism.

Greene, of course, meant his love triangle to mirror the struggle between competing styles of colonialism and how they deal with the colonized.  The Europeans, he suggests, have no illusions about what their mission is: They have come among the Asians for their own benefit.  By contrast, the American Pyle has come to save the Vietnamese from both communism and themselves.  He carries around a book entitled Dangers to Democracy and prattles on about building a “third force” that will replace the French and supplant the communist Vietminh.

Promoting democracy, however, entails unintended hazards.  Pyle retains a megalomaniacal Vietnamese general to head his third force.  He supplies him with plastic explosives to combat the communists, and the vicious general promptly uses them in the streets of Saigon, maiming and killing scores of civilians.  Although revolted by this unauthorized carnage, Pyle colludes in the cover story that lays the blame with the communists.  He is determined to put the American plan into effect, regardless of how poorly it fits the Vietnamese.

In the aftermath of the attack, Fowler is approached by a Vietnamese friend who asks for his help.  He wants the correspondent to lure Pyle into a trap so that some Vietminh agents can “talk” to him, promising they will “act as gently as the situation allows.”  When Fowler hesitates to betray the man who saved his life, his Vietnamese friend tries some moral suasion.  “One has to take sides if one is to remain human,” he observes gravely.  This is a strange remark from someone working for the communist Vietminh.  They never had any compunction about using terror, not only on the French but on their fellow Vietnamese, torturing and slaughtering peasants who would not comply with their demands and murdering others for the crime of owning property.  Fowler’s decision settles what kind of man he is.  As for Pyle, Greene was uncannily prescient: His type represents the vanguard of the likes of Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, and others in John F. Kennedy’s retinue.  Greene was right: The ruthless innocence of America’s best and brightest unleashed havoc in Southeast Asia.

While Noyce has followed Greene in implicating the communists in various acts of terror and treachery, he has most of it offscreen.  The attack carried out with American-supplied explosives is, on the other hand, depicted in bloody and prolonged close-ups.  Many will leave the theater thinking the communists constituted a relatively decent indigenous movement forced to use extreme measures to ward off the inexcusably brutal French and Americans.  To those, I would recommend the remedy that I have had occasion to apply: Talk to a few Vietnamese in America.  Twenty-five years after fleeing Uncle Ho’s workers’ paradise, they still shudder at the horrors they witnessed in their homeland after we abandoned them.

My reservations notwithstanding, I strongly urge you to see this film.  While you are at it, read the novel.  Greene’s story serves as a potent vaccination against the contagion of war fever that is spreading in our land.

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The first half of the speech was devoted to domestic issues, as the President sought to relaunch himself as a “compassionate conservative.”  As the main accomplishments of his administration’s first two years, he listed education reform, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and tax relief.  All this amounts to “a good start,” Bush asserted, adding that his first goal for the coming year is to have an economy that grows fast enough to offer full employment.  He deftly ascribed America’s present economic woes mostly to factors beyond his control, such as terrorist attacks, and asserted that further tax reductions are the best way to assure economic growth.

Mr. Bush’s statistical claims may come to haunt him, however.  He first asserted that “92 million Americans” will enjoy tax relief this year, averaging $1,100 per household.  While his commitment to reducing taxes is commendable in principle, this particular example was unfortunate and misleading, since the breaks disproportionately benefit the wealthiest taxpayers.  That Mr. Bush chose to average out the windfall may indicate that he is aware of the unpleasant implications.  In real life, the overwhelming majority of Americans will receive substantially less, while a small minority will get much, much more.  Typical families in the middle of the income spectrum will receive just $256 in tax breaks, and about half of all filers will receive $100 or less.

President Bush’s second example sounded no less questionable.  He claimed that a family of four with an income of $40,000 would see its federal tax burden fall from $1,178 to $45 per year, not mentioning that the same family is likely to pay nearly three times that amount—about $3,100—in other payroll taxes.  And, finally, his justification for eliminating the taxation of dividends (“to help the nearly ten million seniors”) sounded disingenuous.

The President claims that tax breaks are needed to kick-start the economy; Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, however, has expressed doubts.  The $2.23 trillion Bush budget for 2003-04 included no costs for war against Iraq and a subsequent occupation.  The cuts would add $1.1 trillion in deficits over five years to the nation’s $6.4 trillion debt.  The President had promised that tax cuts “would not come at the expense of Medicare and Social Security,” yet he will have to borrow the money from Social Security surpluses only years before every dollar will be needed to fund the baby boomers’ retirements.

The President has a difficult job defending his tax cuts against class-war attacks.  His speech revealed the chinks in his armor in a way obviously not intended by its writers, and a cynic might add that a prehensile plutocracy packages its self-gratification with paeans to “the little guy.”  While the Democrats have their own version of class warfare (with a heavy admixture of race), the GOP doctrine is to make the little guy believe knocking the rich is not merely immoral but self-defeating, since “you, too, can be a millionaire.”  For the vast majority of the American middle class, however, the idea that they will become millionaires is simply an as-yet-ungrasped fantasy in the postbubble dispensation.  It is far more realistic to concern yourself with keeping your job and pension.  A secure sufficiency is not seven-figure wealth, but neither is it the penury of Argentina’s former middle class.

Mr. Bush’s promise that next year’s budget would increase discretionary spending by only four percent (“Federal spending should not rise any faster than the paychecks of American families”) is laudable, but it is unlikely to be fulfilled in view of the clouds of war and the array of spending programs that the President enumerated—notably, his “second goal” of “high quality, affordable health care for all Americans.”  He rejected a “nationalized health-care system that dictates coverage and rations care” yet proceeded to state that “health-care reform must begin with Medicare,” which is “the binding commitment of a caring society.”  Accordingly, he pledged to commit an additional $400 billion over the next decade to reform and strengthen Medicare.  Even a loyal Republican could be excused for wondering how those two objectives fit together, for what is Medicare if not a “nationalized health-care system” par excellence?

The most pleasant surprise in the President’s address was his proposal to provide $1.2 billion for research “so that America can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles.”  The commitment “to make our air significantly cleaner, and our country much less dependent on foreign sources of energy” is good news, especially from a team with so many oilmen on board.  No meaningful disengagement from the quagmire of the Middle East is possible without much reduced dependence on fossil fuels.  Reducing and gradually ending unnecessary and harmful dependence on foreign oil is probably the easiest to achieve of all prerequisites for America’s survival.

Mr. Bush’s fourth goal, “to apply the compassion of America to the deepest problems of America,” smacked of his father’s gooey “thousand points of light,” with equal doses of New Age and born-again rhetoric: “The homeless, the fatherless, the addicted” will be helped through the “wonder-working power in the goodness, and idealism, and faith of the American people.”

From his faith-based initiatives, Mr. Bush abruptly turned to foreign affairs with the Wilsonian assertion that “the qualities of courage and compassion that we strive for in America also determine our conduct abroad.”  He started with Afghanistan, where “we helped liberate an oppressed people . . . and we will continue helping them secure their country, rebuild their society, and educate all their children—boys and girls.”  This was an exact encore of last year’s State of the Union Address, in which he said that, in Afghanistan, the United States had “freed a country from brutal oppression,” while her women, formerly “captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school,” are now free.

The difference is that, a year later, Afghanistan is anything but a showcase of America’s global benevolence in action.  Liberating Afghani girls and women was never among the stated objectives of the military action, and the embarrassing failure to capture or track Bin Laden was covered up by the allegedly splendid results of America’s new role as the harbinger of progress and empowerer of the underprivileged around the world.

Mr. Bush went on to say that “we must remember our calling, as a blessed country, to make this world better.”  This approach to world affairs is disastrous: A 
realistic attachment to the national interest—the art of the diplomatically possible—has the potential to realize moral purposes, while the mantle of morality and alleged American exceptionalism (“blessed” by whom? where? when? how? why?) has led straight to the moral collapse of interventions in the Balkans over the past decade.  This was the weakest part of the speech by far.  Its focus on AIDS in Africa was a touchy-feely, politically correct irrelevance: the problem is indeed lamentable but hardly relevant, let alone vital, to the state of the Union.  All of the rhetoric about AIDS policy, mentoring, and Afghani women was put in the speech as a rhetorical counterpoint to Iraq.  Whether these are good or bad ideas is beside the point.  The administration most likely has no intention to pursue any of them.

Mr. Bush’s subsequent rapid transition from natural plagues, through the “manmade evil of terrorism,” to Iraq was sketchy.  Saddam was introduced with the now customary comparison to Hitler, while the other two members of last year’s Axis of Evil, Iran and North Korea, were treated perfunctorily and effectively dismissed for the moment.  (“Different threats require different strategies.”)  Instead of explaining why Iraq is more pressing than North Korea—in view of the latter’s confirmed nuclear ambitions and emerging arsenal—Mr. Bush reversed the argument by claiming that we “must learn the lessons of the Korean peninsula and not allow an even greater threat to rise up in Iraq.”

The elaboration of that alleged threat—
including a list of old self-degradable biological and chemical materials—was nothing new.  Mr. Bush also graphically referred to Saddam’s brutality and human-rights violations, but we have heard it all before from Mr. Blair.  (If such unpleasant practices call for military intervention, then the President should deal with Saudi Arabia—the worst Islamo-fascist freak show on Earth—first and foremost.)  He also referred to the British claim that Iraq recently tried to acquire uranium from Africa and to unnamed defectors who talked of biological-weapons labs—but such claims are difficult to substantiate.

The President’s direct and unambiguous claim that “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al Qaeda,” had never before been stated so authoritatively.  Had it been provable, it would have given him the smoking gun he needed to get the recalcitrant allies on board.  As it happened, Mr. Bush’s statement set expectations 
too high: The evidence Mr. Powell subsequently offered to the U.N. Security Council on February 5 fell short of conclusive and caused a backlash among America’s reluctant European partners.

The final lines of the speech brought us back to the President’s messianic view of America and her role in the world: The call of history has come to the right country; we exercise power without conquest and sacrifice for the liberty of strangers; we know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation (“The liberty we prize is not America’s gift to the world; it is God’s gift to humanity”).

That was megalomaniacal.  To deal with various threats effectively and on the basis of consensual leadership, the United States should discard the pernicious notion of her “exceptionalism.”  The implication that America is not only wise but virtuous, and that her foreign policy is influenced by values and not by prejudices, is preposterous.  It hinders interest-based alliances and blurs the clarity of 
debate, which, in the case of Iraq, hardly existed outside the gnostic mantras of Washingtonian ideologues.  That the claim of exceptionalism makes literally billions of people all over the world very angry is neither here nor there; it should, however, irritate all real Americans, whose sense of common decency and modesty must be offended by such hubristic ravings.

This year’s State of the Union Address, even more than that of 2002, shows that the President and his national security team have not grasped the main lesson of the tragedy of September 11.  The danger to ordinary Americans will remain with us as long as the United States remains committed to an unrestrained projection of her power everywhere in the world.  Instead of realizing that the threat to America exists because of the policy of global hegemony, Mr. Bush persists in the view that this hegemony is the divinely ordained, morally obligatory, open-ended, and self-justifying global mandate of the United States.  As long as that remains so, the terrorist threat to America will be unlimited and permanent.

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“If a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

American evangelicals, according to former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “are the Israelis’ best friend in the whole world.”  In return, they dubbed him “the Ronald Reagan of Israel.”  That so many are still surprised by those statements indicates that, by and large, those happy to be called evangelicals or even fundamentalists have been largely ignored by most of the dominant American mass culture, though a few outside the fold who have stopped ignoring this “sleeping giant” have reaped tremendous rewards: election victories, foreign-policy directives, and undying political loyalty.

Republicans, driven by such key evangelical leaders as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, have, at least since the Reagan Revolution, made use of the “Christian Right” during election season, parroting such shibboleths as “pro-life” and “pro-family” to the soul-stirring delight of the world-weary faithful; those who are the most interested in being “best friends” with the evangelicals, however, are the Israeli political right, whose political objectives are the unlimited expansion of Israeli territories and the subjugation (if not deportation or even elimination) of the Palestinians.  Neoconservatives in Washington and New York City, together with those evangelicals who have entered the realm of politics (from Robertson to James Dobson to Lindsey Graham) with a view to advancing the Christian Right’s agenda on a national level, demand that every evangelical’s chad be punched “Republican: Straight Ticket” for two reasons: The GOP is pro-life; the GOP is pro-Israel.  (For faithful evangelicals, the argument that Israel, not the United States, is threatened by Saddam’s alleged “weapons of mass destruction” only makes the case for total war against Iraq stronger.)

That Paul Wolfowitz or Bibi Netanyahu may merely be using the evangelicals’ faithful support to advance an agenda incompatible with the American interest or the principles of justice does not occur to faithful believers who love “Zion.”  They are driven by a theology that is as ingenious as it is unbiblical.  When they watch Bibi as he extends the hand of friendship, they look beyond him to the New Jerusalem, the coming Millennium.  When the liberal media mocks their “rigid biblical literalism,” they cling to their Bibles: “All Israel shall be saved”; “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem . . . how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings”; “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved”; “as much as ye have done it unto the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”  Every time they approach the voter’s booth, they know that they have but one choice: Support the candidate who supports God’s chosen people, or face divine judgment (“I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee”).

Christians familiar with the historic interpretations of the biblical prophecies concerning “Israel” (the Church) and the latter days may find it easy to dismiss the biblical claims of evangelical Zionists.  The blame, however, for this eschatological aberration must be laid at the feet of the Main Lines and their clergy and scholars for failing, at a crucial moment in American Church history, to articulate the genuine, historic, Christian doctrine of Christ so beautifully and succinctly rendered in the Nicene Creed: “He shall come again in glory to judge both the quick and the dead, whose kingdom shall have no end”; and, again, “We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.”

The fact that evangelical Christians can countenance a belief that the Judge of the Quick and the Dead could return to the earth for a thousand-year reign only after which “all things will be put under his feet” is more a reflection of a deficient Christology and soteriology than a misguided interpretation of one or two proof-texts.  Christians who understand that Christ’s matchless glory is expressed chiefly in that He “took on the form of a servant” and “humbled himself unto death, even the death of the cross” will never be able to accept the notion that He will one day rule from His Jerusalem headquarters as a mere dictator over a world in which all is not completely subject to Him.  Nor is it fathomable that the Rider of the White Horse, Whose Name is Faithful and True, could appear in the clouds “with all the holy angels” and “ten-thousand of his saints,” without the consummation of all human history occurring immediately.  Yet these positions (and many other theological non sequiturs) are part of the end-times dogma to which the evangelical world is so completely devoted—dispensational premillennialism.

Dispensationalists (all of them are “premillennial”) think themselves conservatives and biblical literalists, but the view they hold is less than 200 years old, and the hermeneutic they employ is, at best, selectively literal.  (As they read the Bible, Israel always means “the Jews,” yet the seven-headed dragon of the Apocalypse has neither scales nor a tail but is made up of the nations of the “revived Roman Empire,” of late identified as the European Union.)  Contrary to the dispensationalists’ “literalism,” the sensus literalis, which Martin Luther championed as the first principle of biblical hermeneutics, demands that the “letter” of Scripture be interpreted within the context of its genre: poetry as poetry, history as history, and apocalyptic literature as apocalyptic literature.  Thus, those who would interpret the last book of the Bible have, as their guide, both the prophetic literature of the Old Testament (chiefly concerning Christ’s First Advent) and its fulfillment in the Gospels and the Epistles of the New Testament.

The success of dispensationalism in America is proof that Jesus was right when He warned that kicking out a demon is dangerous if the Holy Ghost does not take his place: If the house remains vacant, the demon will return and bring seven of his friends with him.  In the case of American evangelicalism, the demon was old-fashioned millenarianism (“postmillennialism”), the notion that God was using America to make the world better and better, thus inaugurating a secular “Kingdom of God” on the earth.  This idea was first advanced in the New World by the Puritans, many of whom believed Boston to be the New Jerusalem.  As the fires of the First and Second Great Awakenings raged in New England, many of the denominational barriers (Congregational, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and Baptist) melted away and Yale’s New Divinity School—emphasizing revival and “heart religion” over any sort of confessional orthodoxy—took center stage.  Despite their aversion to dogma, however, these believers retained the eschatology of the Puritans: The great “revivals,” they reasoned, were proof that the Holy Ghost was at work in America, bringing about the Millennium—the reign of Christianity over all the earth.  Being a Presbyterian was not as important as being an evangelical (though many remained within their formal churches); and, chances are, you were “converted” quite apart from a church, in an open field where Charles Finney and his contemporary (early-19th-century) Christian musicians were holding their traveling meeting.

What, in the absence of parish life and doctrinal catechesis, would be the chief outward expression of this apocalyptic “heart religion”?  As the fires of revival spread from New England to the Upper Midwest in the urban centers built by Yankees, campaigns against alcohol and for female suffrage (too many men were drunks, and teetotaling women hoped to rock the vote) combined with abolitionism to produce a visible evangelical piety.

When Dixie seceded from the “sacred” Union, evangelicals knew what was at stake: The departure of the South would tear apart the Kingdom of God and uninaugurate the Millennium.  While power-hungry Republicans pulled the strings in Washington, evangelicals rallied to the Union cause and beat down the traditionalist Southerners, who were less enamored of the world-vision of the New Age.  Hymn writer Philip Bliss, inspired by General Sherman’s determined admonition to General Corse to “hold the fort” at Allatoona Pass, penned the following evangelical standard, which conflated the Union’s mission with Christ’s parousia: “‘Hold the fort, for I am coming’ / Jesus signals still. / Wave the answer back to Heaven, / ‘By thy grace we will.’”

By 1865, however, it seemed to many that the Millennium had been lost.  The sheer carnage of over half a million dead gave second thoughts to those eager to believe that America was the harbinger of the Kingdom.  As Yankee chaplain Dwight Lyman Moody would confess, many men had simply lost their heart religion on the battlefield.  In addition, the Main Lines (having made themselves easy targets) were being penetrated by an imported Schleirmachian liberalism, which argued that heart religion need not have an historic resurrected Christ at its foundation.  Perplexed, D.L. Moody took up the mantle of Finney, hired Ira Sankey to be his soul-stirring musician, and hit the sawdust trail.  When he did, however, the notion of America-as-God’s-Kingdom was left behind.

American Christianity was soon divided into two camps: the liberals and the fundamentalists.  The liberals retained the idea of American exceptionalism—recast as manifest destiny and the Social Gospel—but jettisoned everything fundamentally Christian.  The evangelicals, conversely, retained the “fundamentals” but jettisoned the millenarianism of their forebears in favor of an eschatological vision that expected things to get worse and worse, not progressively better.  Dispensationalism, first brought ashore by John Nelson Darby (of the Irish dissenting group known as the Plymouth Brethren) during the 1860’s, had enjoyed a small following among Adventists and maverick evangelicals before the Civil War.  When the tide turned, however, dispensationalism became very attractive, and evangelical eschatology was reconstructed to reflect the “growing apostasy” in worldwide Christianity.

Unaware that they had imbibed the same sort of Baconian rationalism and historicism that their liberal opponents had, the dispensationalists were convinced that a commonsense reading of the Bible would reveal that God had divided all of human history into seven dispensations.  In each of these, God would test mankind, man (save for a remnant of true believers) would fail, and a great disaster would follow.  The sixth dispensation (“Law”) had ended with the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as their Messiah, after which Jesus began the dispensation of “Grace” (the seventh), also called the Church Age.  During the Church Age (sprawling across the last two millennia), men would be saved by faith in Jesus Christ, and, at the end of this age, these Christians would be caught up into Heaven in a “secret rapture” and escape the disastrous “Tribulation” to follow.  And, contrary to the Social Gospel of the liberals, no amount of social engineering would change the degenerative course of history: “When they say peace and safety, then cometh sudden destruction.”

The “Great Reversal,” as it came to be known, meant that evangelicals increasingly withdrew from the sinking ship of mainstream American culture.  It was pointless to hope for any lasting cultural renewal at the end of the Church Age.  In fact, the signs of the times pointed to widespread degeneracy: Darwinism, liberal theology in the old universities, the failure of Prohibition, effeminacy (prohibitionist preacher Billy Sunday, the original Promise Keeper, championed “manliness” and decried wire-rimmed glasses), and illegitimacy.  During the early 20th century, evangelicals began to hole up in their own denominations and schools and hold mass meetings to promote “the fundamentals” and dispensationalism.  No one could attend such a spectacle as the International Prophecy Conference and walk away unconvinced that all who take the Bible seriously must agree with dispensationalism.

If not to American culture, where, then, would evangelical believers look to find visible signs that the end draweth nigh?  The answer, first conceived by Darby in the absence of all earthly hope, was Israel and the Jews.  God, having chosen the Jews to be His own—an ethnic group, not the spiritual descendants of Abraham, who could be raised up, if necessary, “out of stones”—would not abandon His people, despite their error.  Thus, the dispensationalists taught that the Age of Law was not really completed during the first century A.D. but merely postponed.  After the Church Age, circumscribed by the “great parentheses” of Providence, the Jews were to return to center stage in the divine drama and accept the Christ Whom they had rejected.  With the Christians raptured and the Holy Ghost no longer restraining the forces of evil (“he who now letteth will let until he be taken out of the way”), a political leader (the Antichrist) would arise who would, over the course of seven years (the Tribulation) first broker a peace with the Jews, then turn on them and pursue them to destroy them, culminating in the Battle of Armageddon.  Then, just as all hope for Israel seems lost, the Jews will “look up, for their redemption draweth nigh,” as Jesus and the raptured believers return to destroy all their enemies.  Here endeth the Tribulation and beginneth the dispensationalists’ Millennium, during which Jesus shall reign over all the earth from Jerusalem and the raptured believers (in glorified, supernatural bodies) will share in His dominion, each according to his reward.  This thousand-year reign will then close with (another) judgment, at which the Devil and all unbelievers will be consigned to Hell.

At the time when Darby, Rueben A. Torrey, C.I. Scofield (of the dispensationalist “Scofield Reference Bible”), and W.E. Blackstone were winning mass converts to dispensationalism, there was no nation of Israel.  Hence, Blackstone, a resident of Oak Park, Illinois, and a friend of D.L. Moody, began holding “Christian Zionist” conferences in Chicago during the 1890’s.  His book, Jesus Is Coming, was a bestseller, and, in 1891, Blackstone drafted a petition demanding the creation of an Israeli state in Palestine, which was subsequently signed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; the speaker of the House, the mayors of Chicago, New York, and Boston; and such prominent figures as Cyrus McCormick, John D. Rockefeller, and J.P. Morgan.  Blackstone, in 1918, was hailed “the father of Zionism,” and, in 1956, the Israeli government named a forest after him.

After the Balfour Declaration (1917) and the demise of Ottoman rule in Palestine, the dispensationalists were all the more convinced that they had been right all along.  Even the Nazi murder of so many Jews during the latter part of World War II was, ironically, seen by the dispensationalists as the work of God, preparing the way for the worldwide acceptance of an Israeli state in Palestine.  Fundamentalist preacher Harry Rimmer said that, “by driving the preserved people back into the preserved land, Hitler, who does not believe the Bible . . . is helping to fulfill [it].”

In 1948, all doubt among evangelicals was eliminated, as Israel had, once again, entered her historic territory.  Then, Jesus’ words in Mark 13 rang true in the minds of the evangelical faithful:

Now learn a parable of the fig tree; When her branch is yet tender, and putteth forth leaves, ye know that summer is near: So ye in like manner, when ye shall see these things come to pass, know that it is nigh, even at the doors.  Verily I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.

In the midst of a hostile culture in which Bible-believers were mocked and marginalized, one thing was certain: The fig tree (Israel) had budded; therefore, the rapture was near.  Evangelist Louis Talbot called the establishment of Israel “the greatest event, from a prophetic standpoint, that has taken place within the last one hundred years, perhaps even since 70 A.D. [sic], when Jerusalem was destroyed.”  Since 1948, dispensationalist leaders have praised every subsequent military action of the Israelis, no matter what it was or how it was conducted.  After the Six-Day War of 1967, Christianity Today proclaimed that current events give “a student of the Bible a thrill and a renewed faith in the accuracy and validity of the Bible.”

The single-greatest-selling book of the 1970’s was dispensationalist Hal Lindsey’s end-times novel The Late Great Planet Earth, in which the European Common Market was first fingered as the realm of the coming Antichrist.  (The threat of Russia (Gog) and Moscow (Magog) was also factored in, and “fire and brimstone” was code for nuclear detonation.)  Evangelical filmmakers at Mark IV Pictures began to produce end-times movies for evangelicals about the rapture, the Jews, and the Antichrist, with such titles as A Thief in the Night, A Distant Thunder, and Image of the Beast.  These films were circulated among Christian youth groups and prophecy conferences, urging viewers to turn to Christ or miss the rapture.  (Larry Norman, a pioneer of the genre that came to be known as “contemporary Christian music,” penned the theme song for Thief: “I Wish We’d All Been Ready.”)

Beginning with the Eisenhower Doctrine of 1957, Washington had supported Israel with aid and weapons, in an effort to counter the Soviets’ influence on the Arab states of the Middle East, which, it was argued, could lead to the spread of communism throughout the region and the cutting off of the oil supply from Arab states.  Washington’s support for Israel had its political side as well, since it pleased Jewish voters in America.  And, as more and more evangelicals began to be drawn into the fringes of the dominant American culture during the 50’s and 60’s, politicians took note of another voting constituency: Christian Zionists.  Richard Nixon, under the influence of Henry Kissinger, agreed to support Israel for geopolitical reasons, though it only meant that the Israelis “would be even more impossible to deal with than before.”  At the same time, he concurred, in the presence of dispensationalist evangelist Billy Graham, that, while neither of them particularly liked Jews, support for Israel was essential.  He nodded along while Graham lamented (in the recently disclosed 1972 Oval Office meeting) that “all—I mean, not all the Jews, but a lot of the Jews are great friends of mine, they swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I’m friendly with Israel.  But they don’t know how I really feel about what they are doing to this country.”

A growing number of Republicans began to see the need for a presidential candidate who could translate the evangelicals’ earnest theological commitment to Israel into an electoral victory.  Ronald Reagan had said in 1971 that, “In the 38th chapter of Ezekiel, it says that the land of Israel will come under attack by the armies of the ungodly nations, and it says that Libya will be among them.  Do you understand the significance of that?  Libya has now gone communist, and that’s a sign that the day of Armageddon isn’t far off.”  Bolstered by popular dispensationalist televangelists—Falwell, Robertson, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, all of whom had led pilgrimages to Israel—Reagan was able to bring the evangelicals into the Republican Party for good while securing his victories in 1980 and 1984.  In the process, American evangelicals were able to add the old Puritan commitment to American exceptionalism to their apocalyptic theology.  The United States, upholding her godly heritage, would be the protector of God’s chosen people, while the Soviets and the nations of Europe conspired against them, bringing the world to the brink of the rapture.

Since then, dispensationalist fervor has only increased.  In 1993, popular evangelical author Timothy LaHaye, along with Christian fiction writer Jerry B. Jenkins, published a new rapture novel, Left Behind, which topped the New York Times’ bestseller list.  Since then, there have been nine more novels, with the 11th, Armageddon, scheduled to be released on April 8.  Over 42 million of these books have been sold; two film versions, starring evangelical Hollywood actors, have been made, and a third is currently in production.

Evangelicals are now fully enmeshed in Republican politics, and—no matter how many times the GOP lets them down when it comes to abortion, homosexual rights, or cloning—they will always return to the party that most visibly and vocally supports Israel.  In October 2002, Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition held its Christian Solidarity Rally For Israel in front of the White House, and, in addition to the mayor of Jerusalem, many Republican politicians came to deliver five-minute speeches.  The schedule included numerous senators and congressmen: Dick Armey, J.C. Watts, Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Tom DeLay, James Inhofe, Lindsey Graham, Ernest Istook, Roy Blunt, Bob Goodlatte, Sam Brownback, Orrin Hatch, Robert Aderholt, Dave Weldon, Henry Brown, and Walter Jones.

Not all Republican politicians are cynical manipulators of the evangelicals’ love for Israel.  Lindsey Graham, himself an ardent dispensationalist, declared at the October 2002 rally, “There are people in the world today who want to destroy Israel.  Those people will be my enemy forever.  Those people who want to bring about peace—come join us.”  Graham, along with his dispensational brethren, knows that Israel is part of God’s plan and is, therefore, indestructible, a delusion that is highly dangerous, considering Israel’s geopolitical situation.  Thus, he called on the United States to “send a signal that’s undeniable, unquestionable to all the forces of evil that you will not destroy the state of Israel.  If that is your goal, you will lose.”

Dispensationalist House Majority Leader Tom Delay shares Graham’s belief: “I’ve been to Masada.  I’ve toured Judea and Samaria.  I’ve walked the streets of Jerusalem, and I’ve stood on the Golan Heights. . . . And you know what?  I didn’t see any occupied territory.  What I saw was Israel!”  In other words, since God has given the land of Israel to the Jews, there can be no Palestinian state.  The Palestinians simply do not have any claim to the land on which they have lived for 2,000 years.  And anyone who disagrees will suffer the wrath of God.

Divided loyalties such as these are nothing but a recipe for disaster in the realm of foreign policy.  “Best friends” Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon do not have the American interest at heart: Instead, they (rightly) have their own.  Then again, the Republicans, by and large, do not have the dispensationalists’ best interests at heart, either.  They have their own geopolitical goals, which, thanks to the overwhelming influence of the neoconservatives, happen to coincide on the surface with the evangelicals’.  These sincere Christians will never be awakened from this eschatological nightmare by politics.  They must be led back to the path of orthodoxy by Christians immersed in the traditions of the Church, which teach that the next event on “God’s calendar” is the Judgment, for which we all must be prepared.  On this, the Fathers, Augustine, Thomas, Luther, and Calvin agreed.  But are there enough Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Catholics left who are sufficiently familiar with this rich heritage to explain it, lovingly and patiently, to their brethren?  Or, in Jesus’ words, “When the Son of Man returns, will He find faith on the earth?”

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The power to tax, however, provides the city with a different set of options from those available to the father.  In this current economic slump, the head of a household does not have many ways of increasing its revenue; he may be lucky simply to keep his job.  By necessity, he either has to cut expenses (the prudent, though possibly painful, course) or to borrow to make ends meet, pushing those expenses further into the future to a time when, he hopes, he will have a little more cash in his pocket.  The city, however, can generate more revenue through a simple majority vote and, thus, avoid the issue entirely.  And that, unfortunately, is what Rockford’s aldermen have chosen to do.

On Monday, February 3, the council voted to increase the telephone tax by 500 percent (from one percent to six percent), to tack a five-percent tax onto the city’s water service, and to increase garbage-collection fees by $24 per year.  While the city did delay about $3 million in capital purchases and laid off a total of 29 full- and part-time employees to close its $7.5 million budget gap, the aldermen failed to address the underlying causes of skyrocketing city expenses.  Four of the fourteen aldermen voted against the telephone tax; only two voted against the water and garbage fees.

Ald. Frank Beach delivered an impassioned speech, arguing that the city had failed to consider all possible cuts and that the tax increases would only compound the problem by further impoverishing Rockford taxpayers and driving businesses (which have to pay the increased telephone tax on every line) out of Rockford, and, a week earlier, Ald. Pat Curran had pointed out that unionized city employees were not being asked to give up anything—even a portion of their raises—to help balance the budget.  (Rockford taxpayers fund the healthcare of each city employee to the tune of $12,000 per year—a plan that far outstrips those of most private-sector workers.)  Most of the “debate,” however, sounded like the Bush administration’s rhetoric over its Iraq policy, with alderman after alderman declaring that the “easy thing to do” would be to vote against the tax increases and congratulating himself for his “courage” in raising taxes in order to maintain the current level of city services.

There were some interesting moments, however, that the local media failed to notice.  Ald. David Johnson, a Republican, announced that he would be voting for the tax increases because, he argued, he had no choice: The cost of city services cannot be significantly trimmed because the growth in those costs has been driven largely by the expansion of Rockford through annexation.  Over the last ten years, during which Rockford’s population rose by 7.7 percent (or 10,689 residents), the size of the city has increased from approximately 45 square miles to approximately 60, an increase of 33 percent.

The problem, as Alderman Johnson later acknowledged in an interview, is that the cost of fire and police protection,  of snow removal and street repair, and even of water, sewer, and garbage collection, may be driven more by geography than by population growth.  Rockford police today need to cover one third again as many miles as they did in 1990, and firemen need to be prepared to respond to emergencies in areas farther removed from existing stations.  Much of the cost of garbage collection is road time, and the cost of providing and maintaining water and sewer lines depends less on the number of houses connected than on the length of the mains and the sewers.

Because deannexation is not really an option, there is no easy answer to the current budget shortfall, but there is an obvious step that the council could take to keep from making it worse: Quit annexing unincorporated areas of Winnebago County.  Responding to a multitude of studies over the past two decades that show that, in the long run, the costs of annexation usually outweigh the additional tax revenues, cities across the United States have taken a more cautious approach to annexation, often requiring developers (who typically make the annexation requests) to pay for a cost-benefit analysis before they will consider an annexation proposal.

Here in Rockford, however, at the same meeting where the tax hikes were approved, the council voted 14-0 to approve one annexation proposal and 13-1 to approve another.  (Bob Greene, the Democratic alderman from Ward 1, the fastest-growing ward in the city, voted against annexing property that would be added to his ward.)  In light of those votes, it is hard to believe that the council is taking the budget crisis seriously.

With the highest crime rate in the entire state (higher even than Chicago’s!) and property taxes that are still, even after the end of the school-desegregation lawsuit, some of the highest in the country, Rockford needs to get its priorities straight.  Yes, refusing to annex more property will undoubtedly slow down development, but, since the American Farmland Trust consistently ranks Northern Illinois as one of the most endangered farming areas in the country, that may not be such a bad thing.  And with Rockford now occupying about 12 percent of the geographic area of Winnebago County, developing new population centers—and new centers of political power—may benefit the county as a whole.

Just a little over a week after the council meeting, the local Gannett paper reported that Aurora may have surpassed Rockford as the second-largest city in Illinois.  I think we should let the title go.  What Rockford needs now is a healthy contingent of Little Rockfordians.

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

A review of

Americans have lost the habit of constitutional government.  Judges hand down commands derived from their own personal revelation, in the teeth of law and majority rule, and are tamely obeyed by millions.  A President, recently sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States, announces his intention to commit the blood and treasure of the citizens in war against a distant state that has provoked his personal ire or the suspicions of his unelected entourage.

To have lost constitutional government is to have lost self-government.  Self-
government has apparently come to mean no more than counting up punch-card holes to determine which of two interchangeable celebrities will preside over the immense, unreachable, and unlimited machinery on the Potomac that can take our property and even our lives in a fit of pique or even of absent-mindedness.  But note: The Founding Fathers spoke not of throwing the rascals out to make way for another bunch of rascals; they spoke of changing the “form of government.”

Much of the problem results from the inclination of too many Americans to conflate the state apparatus and the people, to fail to distinguish government from society.  Thus, people say “New York City is broke,” though the statement does not apply to the place and the people, in all their multifarious life, but only to the passel of politicians who locally monopolize the powers of taxation and legal deadly force.  Thus, many Americans seem to regard the President—any president—as a benevolent uncle (the way many Russians viewed Uncle Joe), as a fountain of good will and competence who can do no real wrong and make no serious mistake.  After all, we are one big, happy family that plays together.

For the Founding Fathers—or, at least, for the better part of them—the entire point of constitutional government was to provide means for the people to restrain the officeholders.  These officeholders were not coterminous with the existing human society but delegates who needed to be kept from overreaching the authority the people had given them.  Politicians were, unfortunately, a necessary evil.  Like all the rest of us sons and daughters of Adam, they were vessels of vanity, greed, and lust with a perpetual temptation to take advantage of their position.  A constitution set limits to help ensure that rulers enhanced society rather than preyed on it.

John Remington Graham has gone back to the origins of our self-government and has found them in the same place the American statesman of independence found them—in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, with a nod further back to Magna Carta.  The society of England changed the form of its government by casting off the legitimate Stuart monarch and establishing a new royal house with the consent, and on the terms, of the society.  In Graham’s words, “the occasion was revolutionary, and it was also lawful, peaceable, bloodless, orderly, necessary, beneficial, and glorious.”

On the same principle, the 13 North American colonies changed their form of government by an act of constitution-making by the sovereign people: dissolving their allegiance to the British Crown, creating 13 constitutional republics, and later giving their consent to a mutual agreement in the Constitution of the United States.

Another name for this is secession: the withdrawal of consent from the existing form of government.  As Graham puts it:

The right is universal, rooted in natural law and legal tradition—a right of peaceable and lawful revolution. . . . it is a right necessary in extraordinary circumstances for every free and civilized people, whatever their race or culture, wherever their location in the world, whenever they have entered into federal relations with neighboring peoples for mutual advantage.  Without it, federal relations are too dangerous to consider.  With this right, federal relations can be a great blessing to mankind, and can assure peace and friendship among nations.

Graham brings to the question his considerable knowledge of law and history, a great power of synthesis, and—perhaps most importantly—the experience of his participation in the amicus curiae brief for the judicial proceedings in the Canadian high court on the rights of Quebec.  The case of Quebec serves as a model of a society claiming and receiving the right to protect its own peculiar qualities from a central power in control of a potentially hostile majority.  Would that Americans had as much allegiance to their own Constitution and tradition.

Unfortunately, we seem more intent on constructing a police state manned by bully-boy federales who regard criticism of “our President” as treason and who are far more adept at murdering dissident citizens than at protecting us from foreign enemies.  Nevertheless, there are signs, as in Graham’s work, that some of us are beginning to emulate the Founding Fathers and to think about the legitimacy of forms of government.

This article first appeared in the April 2003 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Remember From When Thou Art Fallen
by Thomas Fleming

Lessons from Old Europe.

VIEWS

"You Have To Commit!"
by Roger D. McGrath
The problem of dual citizenship.

A Nation of (Proletarian) Immigrants
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Mexicans, here and there.

Apocalypse Now
by Aaron D. Wolf
American evangelicals, left behind.

Nationalist Über Alles
by Alain de Benoist
A study in definition.

FICTION

Leokadia and Fireflies
A story.
by Anthony Bukoski

REVIEWS

Bada Bing, Bada Bang, Bada Boom
by J.O. Tate

Five books on The Sopranos: Glen O. Gabbard, M.D., Regina Barreca (ed.), Maurcie Yacowar, David Lavery (ed.), and David Simon

plus

Clyde Wilson on John Remington Graham's A Constitutional History of Secession

Jeffrey Meyers on Stephen Burt's Randall Jarrell and His Age

Paul Gottfried on David C. Downing's The Most Reluctant Convert: C.S. Lewis's Journey to Faith

Lawrence Dugan on Dorothy Parker's Complete Poems

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From the Russian Federation: A Place Called Home
by Wayne Allensworth

Letter From London: The Hole in the Heart
by Andrei Navrozov

Letter From Belgrade: Privatization in Serbia
by Srdja Trifkovic

Letter From Abroad: Unseen Places
by Jeffrey Meyers

VITAL SIGNS

POLITICS: Curses Not Loud But Deep
by John Kilgore

MUSIC: Weeds and Habitats
by Tom Sheeley

SOCIETY: The SLA and the Child Experts
by B.K. Eakman

RELIGION: Philokalia
by Fr. Hugh Barbour, O. Praem

COLUMNS

THE WESTERN FRONT
by Paul Gottfried

PRINCIPALITIES AND POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
About Schmidt, The Quiet American
by George McCartney

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
In the San Juans by Catharine Savage Brosman
and 44th Street (circa 1983) by Lawrence Dugan

DICTATIONS

ON THE COVER

Cover and ins illustrations by Stephen Warde Anderson.