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| Ronald Reagan, RIP | Why America is Different |
On Reagan's Paradise Drive
by Christopher Chantrill
June 13, 2004 at 3:00 am
WHY WOULD THE New York Times Book Review put out a contract on David Brooks and his latest book of “comic sociology,” I wondered, after reading its scathing review of On Paradise Drive: How We Live How (And Always Have) in the Future Tense? After all, isn’t Brooks supposed to be the liberals’ favorite conservative? Isn’t that why he got the tame conservative spot on the Times Op-ed page? Why then would they commission Michael Kinsley, master of the snarky putdown, to review his latest book?
On Paradise Drive seems to be a fairly innocuous sequel to the Brooks’ blockbuster Bobos in Paradise. In Bobos, Brooks proposed that bourgeois and bohemian had patched up their century-long quarrel. The fight was over; we were all bourgeois-bohemian now, Brooks assured us. In his new book we are introduced to the rest of middle-class America, Patio Man and Realtor Mom heading home from the mega-stores loaded with loot, he in his huge Yukon XL and she in her top-of-the-line Dodge Grand Caravan. We learn that Americans are regarded world-wide as Cosmic Blondes “that float through life on a beam of sunshine” even though, of course, your average liberal spends her whole life as a Cosmic Brunette that “writes and reads books, worries, condemns and evaluates, judges, discerns and doubts.” We learn about Ubermoms that program their kids’ lives down to the nanosecond starting from the moment of conception. We find out that the Organization Kid that results is so busy in college that she has no time to date or fall in love, so she claims that “hooking up” makes sense. We learn that almost all glossy enthusiast magazines are devoted to the “contempt of people who haven’t taken the time to master their pathetically small sphere of expertise.” We learn that the secret of business success is to “find your Fry!” A Fry! is “one small thing, or a few things, [you] could do better than anyone else in the world.” It is the obsession that drives every entrepreneur (and every artist as well) to success.
The funny thing about us is that despite our mega houses, our mega SUVs, our mega malls, all we Americans seem to want to do is work. It is as though someone has hung up a sign over the nation that reads “No admission here, except on business.”
What is it that drives us, and why have Americans worked, worked, and worked, ever since the first Puritans arrived and decided that Americans were destined to build a city on a hill, the last best hope of mankind? It is hope, Brooks writes, the motivation of a “Paradise Spell… the feeling that there is some glorious destiny just ahead.”
What’s wrong with that, and why should Michael Kinsley take the trouble to shoot it all down as neither serious sociology nor serious satire? After Reagan Week, the answer is obvious. It is not just David Brooks who likes to invoke John Winthrop and the city on a hill. It is not just Brooks or Lincoln who spoke of America as the last best hope of earth. It is not just Brooks who talks about glorious destiny just ahead.
It was Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan spoke again and again about the United States as a shining city on a hill, and the last, best hope on man on earth. And above all, he insisted again and again that America’s best days lay ahead.
No wonder Michael Kinsley is enraged. If Americans were to keep listening to Ronald Reagan, it would be the end of liberals. For liberals the shining city on the hill is not America, it is liberalism. If it weren’t for liberals, women wouldn’t have the vote. If it weren’t for liberals, working people still wouldn’t be able to organize unions. If it weren’t for liberals, Jim Crow still would rule in the South. If it weren’t for liberals the rivers would still seethe with pollution. If it weren’t for liberals, the coat hanger would still rule the nation’s back alleys. America is not the last best hope of man on earth, no indeed. The last best hope is liberals.
David Brooks begs to differ. In his America, people are working away, driving their SUVs, buying loads of loot in big-box stores, and even liberals living in their trendy inner-ring suburbs end up filling their tasteful homes with tasteful toys. For America is not a land of helpless victims waiting to be rescued by liberals. It is a nation of proud pioneers that know how to govern themselves.
Ronald Reagan doesn’t get so much as a single mention in the index of On Paradise Drive. He ought to file a complaint. He wus robbed.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
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Responsibility
Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050
Living the Virtues
When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Faith and Politics
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable...
[1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Class War
In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Conservatism
Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy