The Conservative Search for Order
by Thomas Fleming

The triumph of the ancien régime.

VIEWS

The Education of George Bush
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.
Not by George Bush.

Consumption Taxes, Property Rights
by Scott P. Richert
Notes toward the restoration of property.

NEWS

It’s Springtime for Hitler in Europe
by Leon T. Hadar
Is Europe anti-Israeli and antisemitic?

See, I Told You So
by Cliff Kincaid
About Limbaugh.

REVIEWS

Letting the Catholic Out of the Baggins
by Joseph Pearce

Bradley J. Birzer: J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth
Richard Purtill: J.R.R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality and Religion
Fr. Ian Boyd and Stratford Caldecott, eds.: A Hidden Presence: 
The Catholic Imagination of J.R.R. Tolkien

plus

William R. Hawkins on Dan Briody’s The Iron Triangle: Inside the Secret World of the Carlyle Group

Jeffrey Meyers on Donovan Webster’s The Burma Road

Paul Gottfried on Andrei Navrozov’s Italian Carousel: Scenes of Internal Exile

Clark Stooksbury on James Bovard’s Terrorism & Tyranny

Tobias Lanz on Amintore Fanfani’s Catholicism, Protestantism, and Capitalism

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Alabama: Lessons From Montgomery
by Michael Hill

Letter From St. Petersburg: Monumental in Everything
by Curtis Cate

Letter From East Tennessee: In Praise of Accents
by John J. Duncan, Jr.

Letter From London: Another Untaught Generation
by Michael McMahon

VITAL SIGNS

INTELLIGENCE: Information Sharing
by Margie Burns

EDUCATION: Terms of Empowerment
by B.K. Eakman

AMERICAN EMPIRE: The American Myth of World War I
by Joseph E. Fallon

THE NEW REPUBLIC: Attack of the Trotsky-cons!
by Justin Raimondo

COLUMNS

THE WESTERN FRONT
by Paul Gottfried

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

EUROPEAN DIARY
by Andrei Navrozov

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
In the Cut, Shattered Glass
by George McCartney

THE BEST REVENGE
by John Carney

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
To Peder Anders Sulerud
and
Words for John Murphy, Perhaps
by Timothy Murphy

Black Swans
by Peter Hunt           

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustration by H. Ward Sterett.

Conservatives in the 19th century, to one degree or another, were opposed to some or most of the liberal aspirations and completely rejected red revolution.  Unlike the liberals, however, conservatives were never able to agree on a broad set of fundamental principles.  By the end of World War II, liberal was coming to mean, albeit only in the United States, what socialist and social democrat had meant, and conservative was now used to designate either those who blindly accepted the social order as it was or those who believed in the liberal ideology of the 19th century.

Liberalism is, however, an essentially corrosive ideology that undermined the social order.  Once its original task was finished (before World War I), people with liberal instincts quite naturally moved on to the next phase of the revolution.  In the 1950’s, unreflective conservatives just as naturally devoted themselves to defending the only social order they knew, the bourgeois liberal order established in the late 19th century, just as conservatives of the 1980’s and 90’s defended the society created by the socialist New Deal.

Speaking in the broadest terms, a major difference between liberals and conservatives of every type is that the former are working to destroy the inherited order and the latter would like to preserve or even restore some form of traditional society.  It is in this sense that die-hard Leninists in the 1990’s, unwilling to surrender the world of their childhood, were called conservative.  American conservatives complain about the unfairness, but it is not more unfair than their own misapplication of the term to their version of liberalism.

Every conservative, then, is an advocate of some social, cultural, religious, or moral order, either the one that currently exists or one whose memory has been preserved in tradition.  Conservative defenders of the social order come in two varieties.  The first have a principled notion of what a good society must be like, whether that notion is embodied in the bourgeois order of Middle America in the 1950’s; in the ancien régime that existed before the revolutions of 1787, 1917, and 1932; or in medieval Christendom.  The second are unprincipled (in a political sense) and interested only in preserving their own personal interests or those of their class.  While principled conservatives will always have to collaborate with their unprincipled brethren, who are far more numerous, they must always be on their guard because interests change, and conservative Republicans who once defended high tariffs and restricted immigration had little difficulty in changing sides once it was in their interest to do so, and, if they do not betray the cause, their children will.

These tectonic shifts on the right seem to take place about every half-generation as the old guard retires and is replaced by leaders (both intellectual and political) in their 30’s.  One important shift taking place in the opening years of this millennium is on social and moral questions.  Most conservatives, even in the Reagan years, paid at least lip service to what were then called “family values”—the premarital chastity of women, marital fidelity, the traditional family, the obligations of parents to children (including unborn children), the importance of religion (especially Christianity) in forming the moral character of children.  In terms of causes (which conservatives generally define in negative terms), they were opposed to fornication, adultery, no-fault divorce, homosexual rights, abortion, and the Supreme Court’s illegal banning of school prayer.

The junior conservatives for the new millennium were, in their early years, mostly quiet on these issues, but, one by one, they are coming out of their closets and advocating (sometimes cautiously) all of the above.  As early as the late 1980’s, the “third generation” was boasting of what swingers and “party animals” they were, and, more recently, the young ones have become confident enough to adopt the Clintons’ view of abortions—women killing their own babies is a regrettable situation, perhaps, but cannot be helped.

The current litmus test for leftists is support for homosexual marriage, and the conservatives at National Review and The Weekly Standard have passed with flying colors.

David Brooks, in many ways the most sensible of the neoconservatives, cannot escape their Marxist trap.  In the New York Times in November, he argued that, since marriage is good for many people (heterosexuals), it must be good for everyone, including homosexuals.  This is like saying that, because two or three glasses of wine a day is good for many people, it is good for everyone, including infants and alcoholics.  He uses words like “sacred” and “covenant” without having the slightest idea of what they mean, and he gives the impression that the marriage crisis can be solved if homosexuals can marry, which is equivalent to the neoconservative argument that there is no problem with the low American birthrate that looser immigration rules cannot solve.

Accepting the Marxist premise that man is not bound by his biological nature but makes himself, he insists that we are not animals whose lives are bounded by our flesh and by our gender.  We’re moral creatures with souls, endowed with the ability to make covenants, such as Ruth made to Naomi: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.  Your people will be my people and your God my God.  Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried.”

Brooks apparently wants to suggest that Ruth and Naomi were not merely daughter-in-law and mother-in-law but a scriptural model for an ideal marriage.  More frightening is the Marxist vision of human nature that has escaped the limitations of nature and history.

Brooks’ arguments are echoing across the empty canyons of the neoconservative brains at National Review, where David Frum has embraced homosexual unions with predictable alacrity.  These people represent a kind of conservative, but the kind that still makes pilgrimages to the Kremlin to adore the embalmed stiff who destroyed Russia.

Principled Christian conservatives, as naive and unreflective as the unprincipled, are bewildered by this tergiversation at National Review, a publication founded by a putative Catholic.  This is not surprising, however.  NR’s ideology—Frank Meyer’s so-called fusionism—was based on a fundamental denial of principle, a shotgun wedding between liberal individualists and Christian traditionalists.  The liberal groom had his fingers crossed during the ceremony and started cheating on his conservative spouse on their wedding night.  By 1980, the conservative social and cultural agenda served only as window-dressing for a shop whose real wares were the unlimited privileges of multinational businesses.  Conservatives who go back to that time should be forgiven for being instinctively loyal to the ideology they accepted in their youth, but there is no excuse for anyone under 60 who persists in thinking that this marriage between big money and old traditions can be saved.

The problem, from the beginning of the postwar conservative movement, was the incompatibility of conservative instincts not merely with liberal individualism but with liberalism’s failure to understand the nature of man (to say nothing of the nature of woman).  Liberals (including the radical liberals known as libertarians) can be quite good on specific political and economic policies, but they always founder on the rock of human nature.  Man is not, by nature, an isolated individual.  The human race depends on the dimorphism (that is, the differences in physical, intellectual, and emotional aptitudes) of the sexes that unite in marriage to produce the next generation of the human race.  In some species, the size and appearance of the two sexes vary greatly; for humans, the difference is only about ten percent, but that ten percent explains why women cannot play in the NFL, serve effectively in combat, compose great music, or, by and large, become great mathematicians or statesmen.  For the same reasons, men are not good at rearing children or caring for the sick.

Nature has assigned different tasks to males and females.  From a natural perspective, the greatest task is the bearing and rearing of children, in which men play a subordinate role.  The essential (albeit not the only) role of marriage is to provide a stable setting in which children can be born, nurtured, and educated.  Any stable society will discourage divorce and make it difficult, if not impossible, for women to work outside the home.
The feminists are quite correct in saying that women have always worked.  Quite apart from carrying their duties as wives and mothers, women have tended the garden, made useful objects to sell, and run family businesses.  It was only in modern times, however, that women were encouraged to sell their labor in the marketplace and to abandon their children to the care of strangers who watch them not out of love but for a living.  From the natural point of view, daycare is child neglect, and abortion is not only murder but the frustration of the natural end of human sexuality.  Same-sex “marriage” is a contradiction in terms, and homosexuals who adopt children (apart from cases of absolute necessity) are moral predators, no matter how honorable their intentions are.

Christians learn this lesson both from their traditions and from the scriptural reminder that “male and female created He them,” but secular conservatives have always known that (in the words of David Hume) “man born of woman is compelled to maintain society.”  Both Russell Kirk and Robert Nisbet understood the limitation imposed on human ingenuity by our naturally defined sex roles, which rule out support for women in combat, no-fault divorce, or any of the other items on the leftist social agenda.  Kirk was a convert to Catholicism; Nisbet, a skeptic who had tried (and failed) to become a Christian.  Both, however, understood that, quite apart from the truth of Revelation, Christianity played a vital role, not merely as an agent of social stability but as the principal means by which men and women reach out to find a meaning beyond the necessities of ordinary life.
In Darwinian terms, religion has, as E.O. Wilson once put it, adaptive significance.  Man is, as we learned in logic, a rational animal; and he is, as Aristotle taught us, a political animal; but he is also a religious animal who, if deprived of his religion, lapses quickly into the despair of self-gratification.  All legitimate conservatives, therefore, support the social establishment of religion, whether they believe in it or not, just as George Washington, when President, refused to condemn a bill in the Virginia legislature authorizing payment of Christian clergymen’s salaries.  The Father of Our Country was far from being a Trinitarian Christian, but he knew the value of religion in undergirding a free and stable society.

Even Marxism was a religion of sorts, an unsatisfactory theory that offered an explanation of history and a social life organized around the cell.  But, in comparison with Greek paganism, which offered a cycle of festivals and rituals, Marxism was a complete failure.  It inspired no good music and little serious literature; it sucked the joy out of life and reduced human beings to automata and human society to a brutish nightmare; and yet it would be far better to be a real Marxist-Leninist than one of those sad children of disenchanted communist parents.  These red-diaper babies, who have pasted on unconvincing blue-and-white stickers in the hope of passing for Americans, want nothing better in life than to marry a blonde and to land a soft job in Washington.

Neoconservative is a highly misleading term.  The useful and relevant analogy is neo-Nazi.  What is a neo-Nazi if not a Nazi who disguises his real motives and identity with a different style of political rhetoric?  In purely objective terms, the proper term for neoconservatives is neoleftist—that is, someone who advocates a leftist agenda within a superficially conservative framework.  Today, they are in a power struggle with their brothers and cousins on the left, but both sides know who the real enemy is, and, my friends, it is us.  Even if we never raised a voice in protest against their lies and treason to the American nation, they would still be going after the last remnants of Christian America.  As I heard one Southern Baptist tell an audience, the light can stand the darkness, because the light knows it will win, but darkness cannot endure a single particle of light, which, if let in, will obliterate the dark.

This article originally appeared in the January 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Precisely because of the exposure of the hidden neocon agenda in the establishment press, their hired guns had to return fire, and, in the September issue of Commentary (which remains their premier outlet), neocon gunslinger Joshua Muravchik pumped out some rather predictable rounds.

The burden of Mr. Muravchik’s fire, of course, was that all the critics who denounced and exposed neoconservatives as responsible for the Iraq war are really antisemites.  “Of course,” because that is what neoconservatives always say about anyone, right or left, who criticizes them, Israel, or American foreign policy for being too pro-Israel—Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, Gore Vidal, the Nation, Chronicles, etc., etc., etc.  Mr. Muravchik, however, concentrated his own fire on the left—and rightly so, since the left, now and for long the dominant force within the establishment media, is in a stronger position to harm the neocons and thwart their agenda than any part of the right, old or older.  Mr. Muravchik is thus able to discover antisemitism lurking in the reflections of such apostles of progress as Elizabeth Drew writing in the New York Review of Books, Michael Lind in the New Statesman, William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune, and many others, and not merely individual writers but such institutions as the New York Times itself, Le Nouvel Observateur, the “British Broadcasting Company” (sic), the London Times, the National Journal, the Boston Globe, and (by no means least) Lyndon LaRouche, “the crackpot political agitator,” as Mr. Muravchik not inaccurately identifies him and with whom he does not hesitate (not so accurately) to lump the others he names.  One has to wonder, reviewing this encyclopedic compendium of supposed Jew-baiters, how any Jews could remain at liberty at all in the countries where the thoughts of such pundits are received seriously.

Commenting on the emphasis several of these critics placed on the supposed connections between the neoconservatives and such figures as Leon Trotsky and Leo Strauss, Mr. Muravchik finally spies “the real reason” that lurks beneath any and every criticism of the neocons:

There is, however, one thing that Strauss and Trotsky did have in common, and that one thing may get us closer to the real reason their names have been so readily invoked.  Both were Jews.  The neoconservatives, it turns out, are also in large proportion Jewish—and this, to their detractors, constitutes evidence of the ulterior motives that lurk behind the policies they espouse.

Leave aside the question of why it is permissible to search out the “ulterior motives” that supposedly drive the critics of the neocons but not at all permissible to suggest that neocons themselves may have motives of an ethnic and political character.  Mr. Muravchik himself notes that “Many neoconservatives are in fact Jews” and offers a somewhat labored explanation of why this should be so in terms of “a powerful attraction to politics and particularly to the play of political ideas” on the part of Jews.  Be that as it may, it is perfectly consistent with explanations of neoconservatism in terms of the supposed influence on it by Trotsky or Strauss, both of whom also exhibited the same “powerful attraction to politics” and political ideas.  Of course, it is not at all self-evident that mere mention of the Jewishness of the neocons implies the presence of antisemitism, and the far more obvious reason their Jewishness is so often brought up is that it helps explain why they are so zealous in their advocacy of war against Iraq and other Arab states hostile to Israel.  This is no more anti-Jewish than pointing to William Buckley’s Catholicism as an explanation for his opposition to abortion is anti-Catholic.

Nevertheless, whatever fantasies of antisemitism haunt Mr. Muravchik’s mind, he is on stronger ground in challenging a good many of the erroneous statements about neoconservatives that their liberal mainstream critics have uttered, including those concerning their supposed connections with Trotsky and Strauss.  As I have noted in my own columns in Chronicles and elsewhere, Strauss is “hardly ‘the main intellectual influence’ on the neocons,” as William Pfaff had claimed, and few neocons apart from Irving Kristol have been Trotskyites at all.  Mr. Murav-chik is thus able to score a point in his apologia by correctly insisting that not a few of the liberal critics of the neocons do not really know what they are talking about with regard to where the neocons come from intellectually and politically.  That should hardly surprise us.  Liberal critics of the right in general have not known what they were talking about for decades.

Yet despite being incidentally correct about some matters of fact, Mr. Murav-chik’s apologia for neoconservatism is less concerned with presenting a serious discussion of neoconservative ideas and recent objections to them than with lobbing vilifications at those who express such objections and reaching for any stick to beat them.  Not only are the critics crypto-antisemites; they do not even know their Strauss and Trotsky.  By the time the attentive reader has reached Mr. Muravchik’s own blundering misunderstanding of Trotsky’s doctrine of “permanent revolution,” he has figured out where the rest of the article is going.

The neocons, you see, had nothing to do with starting the war in Iraq.  The presence of such Jewish neoconservatives in key policymaking positions within the Bush administration as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, and others is irrelevant, as is the presence of non-Jewish neocons in the State Department and Vice President Cheney’s staff.  Most of these people have nothing to do with the Middle East and most, contrary to what various critics have alleged, had nothing to do with producing a now notorious paper advocating war against Iraq for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—in 1996, five years before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States!

Mr. Muravchik’s response to the last allegation is worth pondering for a moment.  Most of the “Americans whose names appeared on the paper had long sought Saddam’s ouster,” he assures us, and, anyway, they did not write the paper.

It was the work of a rapporteur summarizing the deliberations of a conference, and was clearly identified as such.  The names affixed to it [Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser (a former assistant to neocon John Bolton at the State Department and now an aide to Vice President Cheney), among others] were listed as attendees and not as endorsers, much less authors.

Of course, if the “Americans” were attendees and participants in the conference, and the report of the conference that endorsed getting rid of Saddam Hussein summarized the “deliberations of the conference,” and the “Americans” had “long sought Saddam’s ouster” anyway, why is it inaccurate to infer that the conference report shows that the “Americans” advising the Israeli head of state that Saddam should be ousted believed long before September 11 that Saddam should be ousted?  All Mr. Muravchik’s tendentious efforts at clarification, rectification, and justification are irrelevant.  The fact remains that a group of mainly Jewish Americans who are neoconservatives of one kind or another and are also well known as strong supporters of Israel and of the Netanyahu-Sharon Likud party in particular have been pressing for the destruction of Saddam Hussein as being in the interest of Israel since at least 1996.  Moreover, all of them were in the Bush administration at the time its war on Iraq was being developed.  Why were any “Americans” advising the prime minister of a foreign state at all, and why are any of them high-ranking and influential policymaking officials of the U.S. government?

Mr. Muravchik’s apologia for the cabal is thus riddled with inaccurate representations and a line of argument that is neither convincing nor relevant.  Nevertheless, he does conclude with a fair enough point: “If any single episode exposes the fatuousness of the charge that neoconservative policies amount to Jewish special pleading, it was the 1990s war in Bosnia.”  That is so because most neocons then supported U.S. intervention in Bosnia out of “a distinctive neoconservative sensibility” about American power and its uses in the world.  Despite a certain opacity in his description of it, that sensibility

may consist in a greater readiness to engage American power and resources where nothing but humanitarian concerns are at issue.  In larger part, however, it is concerned with national security, sharing with traditional conservatism the belief that military strength is irreplaceable and that pacifism is folly.  Where it parts company with traditional conservatism is in the more contingent approach it takes to guarding that security.

It is Mr. Muravchik’s conclusion, then, that it is this “sensibility,” not any covert preoccupation with the interests of Israel, that explains why the neocon cabal was so intent on a U.S. war against Iraq, and, in a general sense, Mr. Muravchik is probably correct.

Why this line of argument is supposed to refute “the charge that neoconservative policies amount to Jewish special pleading” is not entirely clear.  The whole point of neoconservatism, with respect to the “Jewish special pleading” that it serves (and, as I argued in a previous column here, that is by no means the only interest it serves), is that it offers “non-Jewish” reasons (to Jewish as well as non-Jewish Americans) to serve those interests.  Specifically, neoconservatism serves as an ideological vehicle for a rationalization for American globalism, which does not by itself necessarily advance or protect Israel and its aspirations in the Middle East but is nonetheless a necessary precondition for doing so.  That is, a globalist American foreign policy might not serve Israel, but Israel’s interests cannot be served without American globalism, and it is therefore in the interests of Israel (as well as of various other groups) for the United States in the post-Cold War world to remain at least as internationalist and interventionist as it has been since 1941.  What is imperative is to make sure American foreign policy is not captured by “isolationists” or advocates of what Mr. Murav-chik calls “American inaction”—namely, paleoconservatives and their allies, the partisans of an “America First” policy.

What neoconservatives have done is to design an ideology—what Mr. Murav-chik so delicately calls a “sensibility”—that offers ostensible and plausible rationalizations for the perpetual war in which Israel and its agents of influence in the U.S. government and media seek to embroil the United States (and which all too many American conservatives, out of a foolishly misplaced patriotism, are eager to support) without explicitly invoking the needs and interests of Israel itself.  Paleoconservatives have been observing, commenting on, criticizing, and trying to expose the philosophically and morally flawed process by which this ideology was formulated for nearly two decades and, from the time that Pat Buchanan first began to call attention to Israel’s “Amen Corner” in 1990, have routinely been demonized and denounced as antisemites and other bad names for doing so.  It should give us no pleasure to affirm that our warnings, vilified and rejected as they were, have today been vindicated by the Middle East maelstrom into which the neoconservatives’ “sensibility” has finally sunk us.

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

Though considerably more ebullient in my own 50’s, I wonder no longer at Waugh’s state of mind.  It was life in what he called “the Century of the Common Man” that ground him down, mentally and emotionally, as living on in a world half created by, half designed for, a universalized and universalizing proletariat increasingly oppresses my own spirit, and the spirits of close friends.  (Today’s proletariat, armed with cheap contraceptives and a constitutional right to abortion, is no longer fit even for its traditional eponymous activity.)

Every area of American life, whether politics, economics, the arts, journalism, architecture and design, entertainment, sports, cuisine, dress, manners, morals, religion—everything with the obvious exception of the academy—reflects the mass taste and intellect of the American proletariat.  While the American government wages perpetual war for perpetual peace internationally, the American public wars on civilized standards and morality at home.  In the world’s richest nation, good food and drink are the exception rather than the rule, while a well-prepared meal is nearly impossible to come by at an inexpensive price.  In the wealthiest society in the annals of history, the public dresses like slobs, oversized children, poor people, or freaks.  In a country that spends billions annually in the attempt at realizing the old republican ideal of universal literacy, education has been commandeered by sports; while the elements of public discourse have been whipped and blended into an evil paste compounded of proletarian taste and ideology (the opiate of the intellectual class, substantially proletarianized itself).  What is still the mightiest medical machine ever seen is half-directed toward terminating and tinkering with life rather than with saving and prolonging it, and on pacifying the proletariat with the equivalent of soma tablets; the churches dispense doctrinal soma as the replacement for the old fire and brimstone each Sunday.  For generations, the social, intellectual, cultural, and moral aspiration of America has been steadily downward, until aspiration has at last been replaced by the unconscious habit of a people that has struck bottom without ever realizing what they have become.  “God must love the common people,” someone has said, “He made so many of them.”  The common people, however, are not what we are up against in the United States today.  In their stead, a new type of man stands forward under God’s sun: the North American segment of an emerging global community of wealthy proletarians who are the deliberate creation of the social-democratic-therapeutic-corporatist elite that has had a century and more to perfect its designs and develop its product—which doubles, of course, as its market.  This New Man is largely devoid of dignity, self-reliance, true piety, and common sense.  “[Whether] or not I continue to live in it,” Edmund Wilson wrote in 1963, “[the United States] is no longer the place for me.”  Forty years later, there is no place for an Old American like Wilson.

The situation might appear to be old hat in America—old as the New America whose construction commenced immediately after the conclusion of the War Between the States.  Henry Adams—on his return to the United States from London, where he had served as private secretary to his father, Minister Charles Francis Adams, for the duration of the war—was quick to observe that

The new Americans, of whom he was to be one, must, whether they were fit or unfit, create a world of their own, a science, a society, a philosophy, a universe, where they had not yet created a road, or even learned to dig their own iron.  They had no time for thought; they saw, and could see, nothing beyond their day’s work; their attitude to the universe outside them was that of the deep-sea fish.  Above all, they naturally and intensely disliked to be told what to do, and how to do it, by men who took their ideas and their methods from the abstract theories of history, philosophy, or theology.  They knew enough to know that their world was one of energies quite new.

Even as he swam in the heavy cream of American society, Adams experienced a fascinated disappointment of the philosophic sort.

Newport was charming, but it asked for no education and gave none.  What it gave was much gayer and pleasanter, and one enjoyed it amazingly; but friendships in that society were a kind of social partnership, like the classes at [Harvard]; not education but the subjects of education.

Here, as he so often did, Henry Adams has put his finger on something.  What is significant is not the old, old, plaint against “anti-intellectualism in American life.”  It is the fact that education in America since about the middle of the old republican era has increasingly had for its primary subject not education but America.  (Tocqueville seems to have understood this.)  “The mass-man,” Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote, “regards himself as perfect.”  Now, to apprehend the perfect as closely as possible has always been the aim of education and of learning.  It still is.  For the Middle Ages, the perfect was God, upon Whom education in that period was focused.  For the 20th and 21st centuries—the age of mass democracy—the perfect is recognizable in the phenomenon of the mass-man himself, who consequently becomes the subject, aim, and object of his own education.  Himself, therefore, is the only subject he knows.  While it is tempting to view the claptrap of politics, television, radio, journalism, and advertising as an exercise in the shameless flattery of the mass-man by his more sophisticated social and intellectual superiors (who expect in this way to win his trust for the purpose of exploiting both him and his wallet), the temptation needs to be resisted—in the interest of truth-in-advertising, so to speak.  Because, in mass-democratic America, who is flattering whom?  It is more and more difficult to say, in a society dedicated to egalitarianism by self-conscious egalitarians who privately stare down their noses at the teeming mass-men below them without ever suspecting that what they deprecate is only a variant of themselves and that the joke is really on them.  For Henry Adams, at any rate, owing perhaps to his self-confessed 18th-century mind, it was no trouble at all to discern the proletarian embryo taking form in the belly of the American social elite as early as 1868.

Because the subject and object of America has for so long been herself (and never more so than when she believes her commitment to be not to herself but to “ideals” like “freedom,” “equality,” “equal opportunity,” and “democracy”), she has failed for nearly as long to recognize standards whose point of reference lies somewhere above her.  At least, she has failed to recognize them publicly and to insist upon them.  (Perhaps it was on this basis that Mencken judged the otherwise magnificent Teddy Roosevelt to have been “not an aristocrat.”)  The failure is caused in part by the cowardliness of what until World War II really was an upper class, if not an aristocracy (fear of being perceived to be sniffish, superior, and aristocratic); its indifference (“What’s the point of trying to set standards for those others—definitely not PLU—in a democracy?”); and the humble origins of much of the leadership class itself.

Michael Oakeshott, explaining why ideology (defined as “the formalized abridgment of the supposed substratum of rational truth contained in the [political] tradition”) and rationalism have come to dominate in modern politics nearly to the exclusion of any other philosophical approach, concluded that “the politics of Rationalism are the politics of the politically inexperienced.”  That is to say, rationalism, ideology, and scientific technique applied to politics have a dangerous attraction for modern, postaristocratic, bourgeois politicians who, not having been bred to politics as a family tradition and responsibility, find the formulated political handbook which a rationalist and ideological view of politics provides them to be indispensable.  To look to these politicians, and the social classes they represent, for standards beyond those of the merely professional sort is plainly futile; as politicians and as Americans, their values are narrow and solipsistic.  Worse, these are abstracted—the product of what Oakeshott calls the habit of reflective thought (as opposed to the habit of affection and behavior), which itself is based on “the self-conscious pursuit of moral ideals” and “the reflective observance of moral rules.”  By this habit, moral life is reduced to a succession of problems, in response to which the realization of the rule employed toward a recognized end is always preferable to concrete behavior.  “Indeed,” Oakeshott notes, “it is not desired, in this form of the moral life, that tradition should carry us all the way; its distinctive value is to be subjecting behaviour to a continuous corrective analysis and criticism.”  In these circumstances, the standard of reference—or, for our purposes, the reference for standards—must always be the ideological or the situational one.  As with education in Newport at the opening of the Gilded Age, politics is not politics but the subject of politics.  (Adams had concluded, “All [in Newport] were doing the same thing, and asking the same question of the future.  None could help.  Society seemed founded on the law that all was for the best New Yorkers in the best of Newports, and that all young people were rich if they could waltz.”)

Allen Tate thought Henry Adams’ tragedy was that he never quite understood what he was looking for.  Of course, he was looking for faith; but faith, for an Adams and especially for an Adams at Henry’s point in the line of descent, was impossible.  The Unitarian Church left him cold; the Catholic Church offered him a means to understand both women and philosophical unity through the Virgin Mary, taken as a symbol; while Christianity after two millennia seemed to him no more than a “stupendous failure.”  No use, therefore, looking to religion for education in the form of transcendental standards (though for years he believed they might be found in Darwinism).  That left only aristocracy—but Adams, again as an Adams, was strongly anti-aristocratic—a prejudice that was confirmed for him by his acquaintance with Lords Palmerston and Russell during his years at the Court of St. James.  As for Democracy, the Union, the System of 1789—the old Constitution seemed to Adams to have broken down completely after the great Northern victory to which he had made a (very small) contribution, while the succession of Grant to the office formerly held by his grandfather and great-grandfather suggested that Darwinian evolution was a theory that might almost have been devised by a monkey rather than by a man.

Possibly the problem was that, though Adams was anything but an unself-conscious man, he was not self-conscious in the ordinary way of his compatriots.  While the idea that the United States is a propositional or (as Irving Kristol has recently claimed) an ideological nation is patently ahistorical, American society is and always has been intensely self-aware.  Yet, to the extent that Henry Adams was self-consciously American, he saw Chaos rather than Progress ahead for his country.  “The child born in 1900,” he wrote,

would, then, be born into a new world which would not be a unity but a multiple.  Adams tried to imagine it, and an education that would fit it.  He found himself in a land where no one had ever penetrated before; where order was an accidental relation obnoxious to nature; artificial compulsion imposed on motion; against which every free energy of the universe revolted; and which, being merely occasional, resolved itself back into anarchy at last.  He could not deny that the law of the new multiverse explained much that had been most obscure, especially the persistently fiendish treatment of man by man; the perpetual effort of society to establish law, and the perpetual revolt of society against the law it had established; the perpetual building up of authority by force, and the perpetual appeal to force to overthrow it; the perpetual symbolism of a higher law, and the perpetual relapse to a lower one; the perpetual victory of the principles of freedom, and their perpetual conversion into principles of power; but the staggering problem was the outlook ahead into the despotism of artificial order which nature abhorred.  The physicists had a phrase for it, unintelligible to the vulgar: “All that we win is a battle—lost in advance—with the irreversible phenomena in the background of nature.”

All that Adams seems to have left out of this picture are the solid bulk and soaring spires of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, standing strong against that same penumbrous background.

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