America’s Cultural Crackup
Flying home from London, where the subject of formal debate on the 70th anniversary of World War II had been whether Winston Churchill was a liability or asset to the Free World, one arrives in the middle of a far more acrimonious national debate right here in the United States.
At issue: Should Barack Obama be allowed to address tens of millions of American children, inside their classrooms, during school hours?
Conservative talk-show hosts saw a White House scheme to turn public schools into indoctrination centers where the socialist ideology of Obama would be spoon-fed to captive audiences of children forced to listen to Big Brother — and then do assignments on his sermon.
The liberal commentariat raged about right-wing paranoia.
Yet Byron York of The Washington Examiner dug back to 1991 to discover that, when George H.W. Bush went to Alice Deal Junior High to speak to America’s school kids, the left lost it.
“The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” railed The Washington Post. Education Secretary Lamar Alexander was called before a House committee. The National Education Association denounced Bush. And Congress ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate.
Obama’s actual speech proved about as controversial as a Nancy Reagan appeal to eighth-graders to “Just say no!” to drugs.
Yet, the episode reveals the poisoned character of our politics.
We saw it earlier on display in August, when the crowds that came out for town hall meetings to oppose Obama’s health care plans were called “thugs,” “fascists,” “racists” and “evil-mongers” by national Democrats.
We see it as Rep. Joe Wilson shouts, “You lie!” at the president during his address to a joint session of Congress.
We seem not only to disagree with each other more than ever, but to have come almost to detest one another. Politically, culturally, racially, we seem ever ready to go for each others’ throats.
One half of America sees abortion as the annual slaughter of a million unborn. The other half regards the right-to-life movement as tyrannical and sexist.
Proponents of gay marriage see its adversaries as homophobic bigots. Opponents see its champions as seeking to elevate unnatural and immoral relationships to the sacred state of traditional marriage.
The question invites itself. In what sense are we one nation and one people anymore? For what is a nation if not a people of a common ancestry, faith, culture and language, who worship the same God, revere the same heroes, cherish the same history, celebrate the same holidays, and share the same music, poetry, art and literature?
Yet, today, Mexican-Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a skirmish in a French-Mexican war about which most Americans know nothing, which took place the same year as two of the bloodiest battles of our own Civil War: Antietam and Fredericksburg.
Christmas and Easter, the great holidays of Christendom, once united Americans in joy. Now we fight over whether they should even be mentioned, let alone celebrated, in our public schools.
Where we used to have classical, pop, country & Western, and jazz music, now we have varieties tailored to specific generations, races and ethnic groups. Even our music seems designed to subdivide us.
One part of America loves her history, another reviles it as racist, imperialist and genocidal. Old heroes like Columbus, Stonewall Jackson, and Robert E. Lee are replaced by Dr. King and Cesar Chavez.
But the old holidays, heroes and icons endure, as the new have yet to put down roots in a recalcitrant Middle America.
We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.
Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.
Now it is death panels, global warming, “birthers,” and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?
The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.
“E pluribus unum” — out of many, one — was the national motto the men of ’76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?
Is America, too, breaking up?
Patrick Buchanan is the author of the new book Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War,’ now available in paperback.
COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS.COM
“Is America, too, breaking up?”
Really Pat, at the Nation’s core, it broke up long ago. While one could argue the seeds of our “cacophony” were always latent, the move to secularization began in the early 19th century. The ever-present divide has simply grown more visible with time. We have long ceased to be a Nation. We are all expatriates. Can I buy you a beer?
Buchanan has been making the same tiresome rant since his speech at the Republican convention in 1992. If this is a crack-up, it must be the slowest crack-up on record.
No.
I understand Pat pays the bills at this place, but this post is so mindbogglingly stupid that you wonder what the other writers here must think.
Can we count some of the idiocy:
There was a point in this nation’s history where Irish Catholics like Mr. Buchanan were not welcome in polite society and their St. Patrick’s Day celebration was somewhat akin the Cinco de Mayo.
Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are not American heroes.
And the music–I’m sure it would surprise many to learn that jazz was always one of those mainstream styles and that the rock n roll of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry were so welcome in the homes of middle class America.
Why is Buchanan taken seriously by anyone? Why?
KXB wrote:
“If this is a crack-up, it must be the slowest crack-up on record.”
With all due respect KXB I think you need to look more at that record, or even just the thickness of some of the books containing same.
(Starting, say, with the six volumes it took Gibbon to relate what happened to Rome. I know the cliche doesn’t mention it, but it didn’t decline and fall in a year either.)
Cheers,
I agree with much of what Mr. Buchanan says, although I think it’s at least worth mentioning that most of the “third-world immigrants” whose entry into his Christian nation he decries are his fellow Catholics.
Is their Catholicism inferior? If so, why?
A great column by Buchanan. Too bad so many of the commenters at this website are leftist pinheads.
I’m not normally one of Pat’s cheerleaders, but I see nothing mean spirited, nor one sided in anything he wrote. He said nothing demaeaning about 3rd work countries. He stated a fact that we have more cultures in the fray than ever. Can anyone disagree with that? You can, but but the statistics don’t contidict this.
I’m not saying Pat’s John Lennon, (Peace to All) but his point is,no one seems to be able to AGREE TO DISAGREE as a Nation today. Nearly EVERYONE is opinionated to the point of near violence.
Whatever happened to civility? Manners? Love Thy Neighbor?
A Nation Divided Cannot Stand?
Freedom of Press, Religion, and Speech?
Let us pick ourselves from the dust of infighting, and unite, as a Nation, of the most diverse people on Earth, exactly what our Founders intended.
Otherwise, let us go the way of others, failure due to intolerance and anarchy.
Can anyone honestly say we aren’t more polarized than ever since the Civl War as a Nation? And it’s not North and South. It’s much more fragmented.
Just think about all before we through more hatred at our Brothers and Sisters of this Nation.
MD
Well, I for one hope the United States as we know it collapses. We have an unsustainable welfare, warfare, and bureaucratic state that needs to end. Secession is the only answer to federal tyranny. It’s quite impossible to actually dissolve every arm of the federal government, when those employees, and families of those employees vote. Secession is an instant nullification of everything the federal government. No more DOD,FDA,EEOC,DOA,DOS,IRS,Fed,Drug War,Medicare,Medicaid,VA,FTC,etc. It will all dissipate and we can actually restructure our smaller republics.
I’m a born-again agnostic, but even I recognize the importance of America regaining the Christian principles on which it was founded. (You’ll notice I did not include the commonly-used, politically-correct prefix.)
Let us pick ourselves from the dust of infighting, and unite, as a Nation, of the most diverse people on Earth, exactly what our Founders intended.
A questionable assertion about the intention of the Founders — the 13 colonies were culturally diverse, but not as diverse as contemporary America.
Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee are not American heroes.
“Yes, they are.”
Tom, It’s like that proverbial clockwork. Each new Buchanan article triggers a spurt of vitriol, much of it from unfamiliar quarters. I doubt this is a coincidence.
“Too bad so many of the commenters at this website are leftist pinheads.”
Yeah – this place ranks right up their with DailyKos and Huffingtonpost in its encouragement of an ever-expanding government and unlimited overseas adventures. In Bizzaro-world. Then again, Buchanan is a family-values man with no children, calls himself pro-military without every having serves, and decries DC, and yet grew up and settled there his whole life. And he cites Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, two men who took up arms against the United States, as American heroes. You cannot make this stuff up.
1. If you don’t like what Buchanan writes, well, hey, there’s nobody putting a gun to your head and forcing you to come here!
2. Buchanan IS pro-military, which is why he opposed putting their asses into harm’s way in Desert Storm and the self-parody entitled, “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Quite different, he, from chickenhawks like Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol and Richard Perle.
3. Not only have I been commenting on posts and articles here FOR MONTHS, I’ve also been dogging McCarthy these past several weeks for a TAC blog of my own!
Thom Meehan wrote:
“Tom, It’s like that proverbial clockwork. Each new Buchanan article triggers a spurt of vitriol, much of it from unfamiliar quarters.”
Yes, and what’s funny here that those denouncing this article with the most vitriol don’t seem to understand that by using same they are lending credence to its very thesis.
On the other hand those doing so from either the Left or Right aren’t “pinheads” and there’s no reason to call them such. By their very denial of that thesis it’s obvious they do feel that the country still has a strong, unified core which is heartening.
For my part I can’t decide whether the country is cracking up due to cultural-type matters and has indeed lost its fundamental moorings, or if this is just the natural (and certainly not total) perception of someone who’s just lived half a century now and and what I’m seeing isn’t any fundamental un-mooring but merely inevitable, unexpected change. After all the foolish lure of perceiving Armageddon around every corner is always there.
On the other hand societies and cultures have indeed collapsed so I don’t know how anyone can really answer the question if that’s what we are seeing or if it’s just my failure to have anticipated the changes that our country’s fundamentals were always pointing towards. Maybe the better question then is the one alluded to by Mr. Orlowski above simply asking whether what we have now with all its changes is still worth saving.
One thing I think is interesting and heartening is that we now seem to have a President with about the most Leftist instincts imaginable within the U.S. system today. And yet whatever else you want to call him I don’t think, analytically speaking (nor even polemically really) you could come even near to saying that he’s a revolutionary or a subversive. Instead he’s talking to kids telling them to work hard and that they can succeed, he’s propping up big businesses instead of delighting in seeing them disintegrate (even way too much so in my opinion), and he conspicuously seems to be rejecting absolutely none of society’s fundamental structure or tenets and indeed can appear to be a big believer in same. (Nuts, the guy even seems to have such respect for the U.S. *military* of all institutions that he thinks we can indeed “win” in Afghanistan, not to mention his belief that we should.)
And, beyond that, if the alternative is to hearken back to the kind of the past believed in by Mssr.s Bush and Cheney and McCain, with the U.S. President going around willy-nilly invading other countries like Teddy Roosevelt did to get the Panama Canal, you can count me out. The oldest trick in political leader’s books is to build acclaim on the bodies of the men they sent to needlessly die, and conservatives especially should be wary of such power.
So I dunno, but I sure don’t like the vitriol and think it’s fundamentally immature and even dangerous. Whichever side of the divide one is on at most we are all only a molecule more influential than being pure spectators to the incredibly small slice that we now occupy of history’s long long workings. And intelligent people ought to have the maturity to recognize that, and recognize too that history has made fools if not monsters of almost everyone who felt that they were the sole possessors of truth or wisdom.
Cheers,
As something of a leftist pinhead myself, I must say I’d probably prefer to be stranded on a desert island with a Pat Buchanan than with a typical HuffPost Commenter (although I do have a genuine fondness for, and take guilty pleasure in HuffPost, in a similar way I do with Black and White B-Movies). Then again, the typical HP commenter being a Vegan/herbivore, it might not count as cannibalism if…
And in fairness, the conservation of Energy suggests that a Universe that will spawn Birthers or Freepers has to counterbalance somehow.
He’s making a fair point about all the “you, are worse than Hitler” attitude (nobody even says “sir,” now, not even haughtily) – and it almost seemed that the column was a little more reticent than usual: the Right says this, the Left says that. I do hope he doesn’t become too even-handed just for the sake of it.
And, although I do genuinely appreciate points about preservation of a strong cultural foundation (e.g. a national, unifying, multi-ethnic culture rather than multicultural free-for-all) and the national prerogative to control borders, the last time I went to buy a Christmas card at a major supermarket the only religious – i.e. genuinely Christmas – one I could lay my hands on was _en_espagnol_. It’s a little difficult as descendant of ethnic and religious outsiders, to defend a foundationally protestant enlightenment political culture when it insists on either circling the wagons in LaRoucheville, Redneckistan, or pimping itself as Bread-&-Circus-R-us.
I appreciate a lot of the establishment Right only say they like diversity because it runs meat plants and scrubs toilets at bargain basement prices, and offers a moral whitewash for foreign adventurism, and some reading this may gag at even the whiff of accidental alliance with such people.
And it may really get people’s goat to say this, but I have a friend who is a Vietnam Vet who remembers growing up being told the absurdity of ever thinking that a Catholic would be President; in the same era an older relative of mine who applied for a State Department job was told by an actually fairly decent older man in the department, to not waste his time – as a Catholic from an Irish background he was never going to get anywhere. I’m not band-wagoning: just pointing out that the “Christian European” platform is a fairly recent – and inclusive – idea of Republican-leaning idea-men. Even “white” was once a fairly exclusive cultural club that the Irish only gate-crashed by bouncing people off City Hall walls in late nineteenth century America.
I’m not saying immigrants should be mollycoddled and told they can bring their home-country’s entire institutional structure with them (how is Spanish a less oppressively imperialist language than English for example?)
But without an ever-expanding geographical frontier for newcomers and settlers to grab their slice of the Earth, you have to find the frontier somewhere else to maintain the “people of prosperity” without third-world wealth skews. We’ve maxed out on Real-Estate values and Credit Expansion (and outsourcing our costs by war or foreign labour). If you don’t want to insource cheap foreign labour to maintain the Buy’n'Large lifestyle, why is that lifestyle used as the values pin-up poster for the Right – including many of those protesting against the Red Menace of non-usurious healthcare? And if you can’t stop the influx, why is unionisation of them for a decent wage-floor verboten, for example?
Sorry to ramble on, and to horrendously mix metaphors, but it just seems like all of us are being constantly suckered into “values” streetfights with each other, choreographed by one guy behind a curtain and another with no clothes on.
I’m amused that Lee and Jackson were cited as heroes in a column about disunity in America. Usually they’re cited as heroes in the context of the right to *leave* America.
@O. O’Connell – you are a self-avowed leftist pinhead. Therefore I must disagree with much of what you might say.
I will therefore read your comments several more times, to see if I can find it.
And each time, I will enjoy your humor and insights.
Hope your contribution continues.
@Adam Rurik – Do you submit to them an article every few days? And each time, do you ask yourself, “Is this interesting, and will it help sell subscriptions?” You seem to have good instincts, wish you well.
Illegal Latino masses entering America are not immigrants; they are invaders. It is time to drop the euphemism of calling these invading hordes “immigrants.” Just as the invading English brought their language to Ireland, the invading Latinos have brought Spanish to America. Why does America cater to the invaders with Spanish signs everywhere, when America never catered to the millions of Germans, Italians and other with signs in their languages? Our national diversity farce is balkanizing America, fostering an autistic ethnic tribalism that makes America look ridiculous throughout the world.
KXB,
You are a typical internet coward, lacking even the modicum of courage it takes to post under your own name. And your serial attacks on Buchanan show that you are not only a coward, but a slanderer as well. Many couples don’t have children because they can’t, not because they won’t. Buchanan was in ROTC until he left for medical reasons. I don’t see how anyone can call living in one’s home town dishonorable, and Washington is Buchanan’s hometown. And the view of the Civil War that most Americans came to hold after Reconstruction was that there were good and honorable men on both sides, and certainly Lee has been widely regarded as a national hero.
Thanks, BR. I’ve actually been waiting for a response from McCarthy, giving clearance, before submitting anything, Do you think that I’m being too timid?
@Adam Rurik – of course you submit samples, BEFORE you ask for anything.
Next, you have to learn the local rules. First remember that The American Conservative is a “hangout” for people who oppose war, and generally consider the rank and file conservative to be “vulgar”. Does this set them up to also be a meeting place for people “posing” as conservatives? Of course it does.
When they first began to openly solicit comments, for their blogs, they preferred submissions from lunatic neocons, and thoughtful anti-war and lib contributors. Contradictions of Kara or Kelly were basically not tolerated. If you disagreed with McCarthy, you had to emotionally “hook him”, before you made your points. You couldn’t intelligently or thoughtfully back any of PJB’s articles. And absolutely, you couldn’t answer any of the defamation or insult, by libs, against conservatives.
Much has improved, here at TAC, but the wonderful laws of capitalism remain. If you are going to be useful, you have to understand the local agenda, then attract an audience for their subscribers, and lastly their sponsors (or at least not denigrate the hidden agendas of their financial contributors).
If you can play by the rules, then you might get an opportunity to influence the American landscape. But isn’t that true of anywhere else you go?
But the reward is worth it. When you hear your words and thoughts echo’d, in some small measure, by PJB, or by Hannity, or Rush, then you know two things. That TAC is a worthy soapbox, and in some small measure, that you are making a difference.
“Autistic ethnic tribalism,” I like that phrase.
Why does America cater to the invaders with Spanish signs everywhere, when America never catered to the millions of Germans, Italians and other with signs in their languages?
I get that you don’t like the new immigrants, but America did in fact “cater to” the older immigrant groups by allowing/encouraging the use of their ethnic tongues. That’s why hundreds of thousands of German-Americans (including my great-great grandparents) were taught German in schools, that’s why there are literally hundreds of non-English newspapers, some of them nearly a hundred and fifty years old, and why a trip even today to Cicero, Illinois, will show you enough Polish-language store signage to make you rethink your thesis.
I don’t think unlimited immigration is wise, either, but I can’t think of anything sillier than to complain about the desires of people who are here legally to maintain a little bit of continuity with the world they used to know.
@Steve Donegal, you said:
“I understand Pat pays the bills at this place, but this post is so mindbogglingly stupid that you wonder what the other writers here must think.”
Actually the vilest vitriol is posted, if it is AGAINST PJB.
Some of the “other writers” have surprisingly tender egos.
Whether multicultural America can survive and whether irrepairable decline has already begun are such “big picture” questions that there’s not much point in fistfights over them now. We won’t know the answers to those questions for some time to come.
We can certainly refer to such topics in debates over immigration, but longing for an old monocultural America is perhaps best avoided, as we cross our fingers and hope for the best from the future.
There is no question that the left, secular humanists, globalists, or however they are identified, are trying to destroy American culture. They want to replace the traditional family, they want to eliminate the Christian influence on government, and work to subject U.S. sovereignty to international law. The education system is one of their major tools. Those who teach todays children own tomorrow’s generation. Those who deny this, are part of that movement either as a leader or follower.