America has never been in such desperate straits. America has never faced such immense external threats while suffering from so many wrongheaded legislators and enemies within. A strong case can be made for both of those statements, but it isn’t as if no one was prescient enough to see where we were headed when America was much stronger and more confident than it is now. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, a novelist wrote a series of books depicting our nation in severe crisis that with a few changes could have been written yesterday. Allen Drury, almost completely forgotten today, saw all this coming from miles off.
In 1959, Drury wrote a novel of political intrigue in Washington, "Advise and Consent," that became a bestseller and was made into a hit movie in 1962. Emboldened by success, Drury wrote a sequel, and then a sequel to the sequel, and so on until there were six books in all, each one showing more forthrightly and compellingly than the last the dangers of leftism, the subversiveness of the establishment media, and the end result of the growing political divisions in American society.
By the early 1970s, when the final novel in the series, "The Promise of Joy," was published, that same establishment media was thoroughly sick of Drury and his insolent questioning of their fabled (and even then, quite fictional) objectivity. Time magazine’s April 1975 review of the final book was scathing: “Allen Drury promises this will be the last of his "Advise and Consent" novels. That is a mercy. The author's comicbook view of humanity and reflex cold-war xenophobia, as well as the clothespins he calls characters and hangs out on his reactionary line, have long ceased to be amusing targets. Drury, in fact, somewhat resembles those Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender in 1945 and spent 30 years with scorpions and coconuts.”
By 1975, you see, the best and the brightest were sure that the Cold War was just right-wing fantasy, and that the Soviet Union was ready to lock arms with us and march together into the glorious future. It wasn’t until a half-century later that the left, casting about for a weapon to use against Donald Trump, discovered that the post-Soviet Russians were a very grave threat indeed, far more dangerous than the most rock-ribbed Cold Warrior (like Drury) had ever described them as being. But when the actual Soviets were threatening the entire world, the Western Left was busy telling us we were all paranoid.
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In the 1960s and early 1970s, just like today, subversives, saboteurs, indoctrinated leftist youth and other America-haters inside the country made it harder for the nation to deal with the external threats the nation faced. Such people are key players in the "Advise and Consent" series. In the most gripping and harrowing novel of the series, "Come Nineveh, Come Tyre," the fifth of the six books, the left’s favorite son is overwhelmingly elected president, and immediately, in his inaugural address, begins to implement his program of appeasement and surrender in the face of the Soviet threat. Edward Montoya Jason, known to everyone as “Ted,” is a patrician, the scion of a rich and famous political family—that’s right, it’s a thinly veiled Ted Kennedy, and Jason’s presidency goes about as well as the real Ted Kennedy’s might have, or as well as Old Joe Biden’s is going now.
Swept into power in the Jason landslide is a large number of bright young senators and congressmen who are the products of leftist indoctrination. Drury describes them this way:
They were absolutely innocent, absolutely earnest, absolutely righteous and absolutely terrifying. They knew, because they had never been allowed to know anything else, that they were the children of a rotten country that had to be changed no matter what the change might do to liberty or to human beings. They were without objectivity, compassion, the power to analyze or any points of historical or moral reference because objectivity had been destroyed, compassion had been withheld, the power to analyze had been turned upside down, and history and the concept of moral reference had been deliberately and scornfully dismissed.
"Come Nineveh, Come Tyre" was published in 1973, and yet Drury could have been talking about today’s miseducated, indoctrinated and thuggish Antifa militants. Or, since he was discussing legislators, about the likes of Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Mogadishu), Rashida Tlaib (D-Ramallah), Cori Bush (D-Race Hate), and Jamaal Bowman (D-Fire Alarm). America is now plagued with “absolutely innocent, absolutely earnest, absolutely righteous and absolutely terrifying,” and they’re in charge virtually everywhere it matters.
The seeds of what we’re experiencing now were planted a long, long time ago, when few Americans fully realized what was happening. Allen Drury did. What makes great literature great is that it is enduringly relevant, and continues to illuminate and enlighten far beyond the context of its own setting and the time and place in which it was written. Time magazine will still be outraged to hear it, but Drury’s "Advise and Consent " series does just that.
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