A Century of ‘Progress’ Comes Full Circle
Speaking of “progressive” Mobius Loops that ultimately go nowhere, near the end of David Frum’s How We Got Here: The 70s The Decade That Brought You Modern Life — For Better Or Worse, a book written back in 2000, long before he went off into RINO-land, Frum wrote:
The sprawling, garrulous, fractious, unequal, polyglot republic of the early twenty-first century looks a very great deal like the republic of the beginning of the twentieth. Then as now, the United States was haunted by cares and doubts. Old certainties had collapsed and the new certainties—socialism, eugenics, imperialism, war—threatened traditional values and ideals. City streets jabbered in foreign tongues, racial tensions pervaded the country, the sudden agglomeration of wealth raised the ominous question of how democratic government could survive the arrogance of the rich and the envy of the poor. Family life seemed to be disintegrating, as the rise of great cities encouraged unhappy men to desert their families and the weakening of religion chipped away at traditional sexual norms.
The social stability of the 1950s was not inherited from some distant past. It was the self-conscious achievement of a society that had overcome its disorder, doubt, and disunity. And when that stability was lost, the disorder, the doubt, and the disunity returned.
Perhaps Frum was merely a decade or two off. Back in 1987, in The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom wrote that after the war, America slowly morphed into the disorder, doubt, and disunity of Weimar Germany of the mid-1920s:
This popularization of German philosophy in the United States is of peculiar interest to me because I have watched it occur during my own intellectual lifetime, and I feel a little like someone who knew Napoleon when he was six. I have seen value relativism and its concomitants grow greater in the land than anyone imagined. Who in 1920 would have believed that Max Weber’s technical sociological terminology would someday be the everyday language of the United States, the land of the Philistines, itself in the meantime become the most powerful nation in the world? The self-understanding of hippies, yippies, yuppies, panthers, prelates and presidents has unconsciously been formed by German thought of a half-century earlier; Herbert Marcuse’s accent has been turned into a Middle Western twang; the echt Deutsch label has been replaced by a Made in America label; and the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family.
A century of “progressivism” coming full circle and returning to its roots a century ago was also a topic that Jonah Goldberg explored in the emailed version of his G-File last week:
Obviously, there’s more to be said about Obama’s Kansas speech. An excellent place to start is NR’s editorial. You might also want to see my column today. But here are a few more points in rapid fire:
1. Nationalism = socialism. I’ve been saying for years that the presumption that nationalism and socialism are opposites — an idea ingrained in many Marxist minds — is nonsense. Nationalism, in terms of public policy if not necessarily culture, is socialism. When we nationalize health care, we socialize medicine. Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism” was a call for a “new socialism” — a point his advisers, Charles van Hise, Richard Ely et al., would have happily conceded.
2. President Obama has been shockingly nationalistic. Sputnik moments, “Beat China!” “We owe it to the troops to support green energy,” “Kneel Before Zod!” And now he disinters Teddy Roosevelt’s “new nationalism.” In actual policy terms, he’s been vastly more nationalistic than George W. Bush was. The difference is that liberals hate cultural nationalism. They hate it so much they even see overt displays of patriotism as scarily nationalistic. But they love programmatic nationalism — Everyone shut up and build things liberal like! The danger is when you get cultural nationalists joining forces with socialists. In fact, that’s called national-socialism. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
3. Where the hell are the “new ideas”? Perhaps because I wrote a book arguing that liberalism remains loyal to the progressive philosophy first laid out over a century ago, or maybe because my next book is in no small part about how they try to hide this fact, I’m particularly vexed by the fact that conservatives are supposedly in thrall to “old ideas” but liberals are all about new ones. In his Kansas speech, Obama kept insisting that conservatives are beholden to the failed ideas of the past. Er, okay. And that’s why you dusted off a 101-year-old speech by a failed third-party candidate? Got it. Obama talks as if raising taxes on rich people so they can pay their “fair share” is a new idea when “let’s take more from that guy to pay for stuff I want” was an old idea when proto-humans were drawing stick figures on cave walls with saber-tooth-tiger scat. And yet somehow Republican politicians never turn the tables on this incandescently stupid argument. It vexes me. I am exceedingly vexed.
As Jonah writes, “It’s Like They Never Want Liberal Fascism to Go Out of Print.” Hopefully future generations of journalists and pundits won’t be listening to “Midnight, the Stars, and You,” trapped in this same wing of the Overlook Hotel a century from now.
That paragraph by Frum is either ignorant or disingenuous. It’s tempting to say “same as the old boss” when attempting to defend a position but robbing that comparison of context is also the “same old.”
The comparisons Frum makes are not useful: saying people were worried about change 100 years ago and also now is not the same thing as saying those worries have equal merit. There is worry about societal damage and there is actual societal damage. Having physical conditions that alter the nature of family is not the same thing as ceasing to believe in family with no physical reason to impel one to do so other than some cultural conceit that marrying a pick up truck will make 2% of the country feel better about themselves.
Racial tensions certainly did not pervade the country as 90% of black folks were still living in the deep south in the same year the 48th state was set, 1912. There is a big difference between making a casual snipe at Americans as xenophobes startled by foreign tongues and having 10 to 20 million illegal foreign grifters robbing the nation of treasure in the form of revenue, jobs, surpressing wages, advocating purely by race and generally making a nuisance of themselves. Ask anyone who actually lives in or near a Latino community in Las Vegas or Phoenix, which few to zero intellectuals do, how nice that is and what they see.
In 1912 the great great grandchildren of the people who built this country didn’t despise its history and themselves as endemic racists and general ne’er do wells by the simple virtue of being white and sure as hell didn’t listen to people from cultures that had had no hand in the building of the U.S. as if their opinions had equal weight purely because many of those countries, shorn of a benelovent light of political correctness, were considered jokes.
Today we let people from a country like Mexico, who can’t keep their own house, come here and dress us down on how to keep ours while referring to us as racist “gringos” without a trace of self-awareness or irony – irony is eternally present in the Third World but not in an intellectual way. That is because the illegal playing the race card is a con and a well known con known throughout Latin America as as good as gold. I honestly doubt more than a few immigrants who cry racist actually believe it; after all, they have eyes; it’s just a word that works, like “open sesame.”
Americans in 1912 were no where near as naive as the average middle class American is today in this regard and what they lacked in experience was made up for by the unchallenged use of common sense, something not available in the public arena today, where you can be attacked for not having a diverse workspace by a black radio station without a diverse workspace.
“Disorder, doubt, and disunity” are again, relative terms, not in a way that brings 100 years together by simplistically assuming nothing ever changes but in a way that distinctively separates that span if one will but look.
“Tarzan of the Apes” was first published in 1912 and was a huge hit. Today it is assumed by huge swaths of people to be simply racist. This is not because we have become wise and now see Tarzan and Burroughs for what they really are but we have become stupid and start guitily at the merest shadow of empire or hint of race. “Tarzan of the Apes” is no more racist now than in 1912 but a hyper, smug and moral awareness of race today has cast a huge net that has caught the dolphins with the tuna.
Ironically Burroughs used to write that civilization was a thin veneer easily cast off in trying circumstances. The upside down madness of poltical correctness that dominates social debate and policy in this country is enabled by that veneer, a veneer based on false cultural conceits and assumptions that would fall like a house of cards if our infrastructure collapsed.
If a disaster hit the U.S. today the first things to go would be vegetarianism, feminism, ideas that we are all equal, gay marriage, troubled and surgically altered transexuals, perfume allergies and a hundred other things. No one would get away with saying they can’t fix a generator cuz the guy in the next valley was a racist – they’d just want the guy who can fix a generator.
Goldberg really has identified and clarified the gross distortion and modus that democrat party national socialists use to pick everyone else’s pockets. Their stock and trade- “It’s your duty to surrender to me, the government, your property in this the one and only legal, monopolized, and sanctified form of theft and highway robbery. I leave you with enough to survive, so that when you’ve built up your resources again, I, the government, will loot you again, in rinse and repeat fashion, for the rest of your life and beyond.“.
Government, by taking from those that have, to “help the poor”, is a phony charity. I can bearly fathom the number of suckers who perpetuate this larceny.