PEGGY NOONAN
A Separate Peace
America is in trouble--and our elites are merely resigned.
Thursday, October 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
It is not so hard and can be a pleasure to tell people what you see. It's harder to speak of what you think you see, what you think is going on and can't prove or defend with data or numbers. That can get tricky. It involves hunches. But here goes.
I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. In fact I think it's a subtext to our society. I think that a lot of people are carrying around in their heads, unarticulated and even in some cases unnoticed, a sense that the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks. That in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can't be fixed, or won't be fixed any time soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with "right track" and "wrong track" but missing the number of people who think the answer to "How are things going in America?" is "Off the tracks and hurtling forward, toward an unknown destination."
I'm not talking about "Plamegate." As I write no indictments have come up. I'm not talking about "Miers." I mean . . . the whole ball of wax. Everything. Cloning, nuts with nukes, epidemics; the growing knowledge that there's no such thing as homeland security; the fact that we're leaving our kids with a bill no one can pay. A sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding--the spectacle of a great American newspaper, the New York Times, hurtling off its own tracks, as did CBS. The fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperiled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seem owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity. Great churches that have lost all sense of mission, and all authority. Do you have confidence in the CIA? The FBI? I didn't think so.
But this recounting doesn't quite get me to what I mean. I mean I believe there's a general and amorphous sense that things are broken and tough history is coming.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/...
Noonan kind of recognizes that the Republican elites have no answers anymore and are submitting to Modernity and all it means after all. She is/was the epitome of a True Believer in the conservative, which is to say anti-Modern and neocolonial, Reagan era ideology, the true acolyte; this column is where it strikes her that it's all coming to an end of some kind. She can't quite say in straight language- to herself, or to her readers- that maybe they, the Conservatives/Right, were not the Big People they pretended to be and that the world is in fact complicated and the Old Order is rotting away and the Age of Empire is over. But it's there between the lines.
Of course, being a conservative she can't see the changeover to Modernity in any way other than degradation, decline, chaos, dissolution, and Apocalypse. Which is admittedly a fair description of what is going in the conservative side of the country. Her conceit is that this true for all of it. But as the old dies the young is being born.
As a liberal I think our side is looking better every day now, of course, even if the Democratic Party hasn't sorted things out properly yet. Reports of this sort from The Other Side are probably going to become more common over the course of the next year or two.