If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…
What, I ask you, is the matter with everybody? The Democrats
claim we are in the worst financial crisis since the Great
Depression. This is ridiculous, but what is even more ridiculous
is that otherwise educated people seem to be letting it pass.
We are the freest, most dynamic economy on earth. We have a
problem because we allowed leftist demagogues to stick up bankers
and force them to let shiftless rabble become homeowners,
simultaneously (and not coincidentally) adopting a gimme-gimme
ethos that by definition was insatiable, anti-civic and selfish.
To the extent we allowed our own moral fiber to turn brittle, we
can say the fault is certainly not in our stars — after all, in
the rest of the world, the vast majority of honest hard-working
people consider themselves lucky if they have indoor plumbing and
would like nothing better than to trade their problems for ours
— but in ourselves.
Not only liberals but conservatives too are at fault for
neglecting the fundamentals. Conservatives grew complacent and
fat, thought the battle of ideas was over. It is never over, any
more than the fight for freedom. However, differences between
conservatives and liberals are huge. Conservatives are sickened
by the related threats to our free market system and our national
security. Liberals by all evidence are sick of America as we have
known it, and fat as they may be, they are on a roll, seem to
have the wind in their sails and a clear game plan.
So conservatives stand by and let the nonsense being spewed about
the causes of our present difficulties pass. We form the best
engineers, the best managers, the best research physicists, the
most life-saving organ-repairing health-sustaining doctors and
the proof is they all come here, not only those yearning to be
free (who still come) but those yearning to be doctors,
physicists, engineers. And we have a problem? That is what
liberals say, and in this campaign season the conservatives seem
unable to deliver the response. You get all manners of clever
responses (on this page for example, or the Wall Street
Journal’s legendary editorial page), but they apparently get
no further. The Obama machine marches on. It is not impossible
that self-described communists and America-haters will be in the
highest circles of government in a few months.
How could this be?
We took things for granted. There was too much money. All kinds
of reasons. Anyhow, it comes down to this: in 2008 we have the
same problem Irving Kristol identified 20, 30 years ago — we
don’t have a leadership class that reads Joseph Schumpeter, or
for that matter that reads anything. They don’t defend
themselves. They don’t fight back. They don’t fight.
They let everything pass.
John McCain is a fighter. That is why he is the best chance of a
party that fought, but not enough, to defend its record. How many
Washington-based wise guys ran for the tall grass as soon as the
going got tough in Iraq? How many ran for their mothers’ aprons
as soon as we ran ourselves, by our own inability to resist and
fight back against creeping demagogic socialism, into a credit
crunch? My gosh, credit crunch, savage war of peace — can’t we
explain these things … and fight back? What happened to all those
millions spent since the “conservative resurgence” to “fight the
war of ideas”?
Although John McCain is a fighter, he is a nice man. I know: I’ve
heard about his temper and his grudges. So what? I have a temper
and I’ve known myself to hold grudges and I’ve even grudged
myself for them. Don’t hold grudges, my teacher Saul
Bellow used to say to me, watching me steam, they’ll get in
the way. In the way of what? I asked with exasperation.
What you’re good at. What you should do.
It seems to me that until he won the primaries and began coasting
to the formal nomination, John McCain understood he had to do
what he should do. Then instead of steaming up and converting
that energy into leadership, he ran out of steam.
More exactly, he ran into Republican political operatives and
clever as these men and women are, they seem reluctant to let
McCain be himself and take the battle to the enemy.
EVEN AS HE SAID the American elites — the producers of wealth —
must learn to defend themselves, Irving Kristol wryly noted, and
this was not especially original, that they would simultaneously
sell their enemies the rope with which said enemies would hang
them (this actually comes from Lenin, and was used as the title
in a quite good essay in Commentary by Carl Gershman,
who a few years later went to Washington and went to sleep, a
symptom of the problem we are staring at). The enemies in
question might be their own offspring. Viz. Bill Ayers,
the son of one of the richest men in Chicago, and indeed
viz. most of the Weather Whatsis and the other '60s
radicals, though they were not all in the same league, moneywise,
as the Ayers family. For that matter, Obama himself is a child of
American privilege, which is why it is so easy for him to rail
against the machinery (free markets and free men) and the talent
and the know-how that make privilege possible.
It is not just us — Dostoevsky saw it all very clearly, as
Harold Rosenberg (for example) made you see in his seminars on
the great Russian master. But we take this farther faster because
we are the first modern country.
And the one on which the modern project — freedom — depends. If
we fail, there goes the last, best hope on earth.
John McCain seems to be letting all this pass. He seems, when you
think about it, to be giving Obama a pass. He is giving Pelosi
and Frank and the rest of the screeching, screaming pack of
self-hating privileged incendiary rope-makers and rope-sellers
pass. They have a clear target: they have opponents who hob and
nob with anti-American, anti-Semitic, Israel-despising phonies,
people who want to United States to be an ordinary decadent
social-welfare country where the world’s rabble come and shop for
the latest fashions.
He should be unleashing his running mate, and the two of them
should be running like the cavalry at the end of the race in
Stagecoach (which takes place in Arizona.) He can remind
voters who was in that stagecoach. That stagecoach contained,
remember, a cavalryman’s beautiful (and pregnant) wife, a gallant
gentleman still keeping faith with the Lost Cause, a drunk doctor
— who knows his stuff — an embezzler, a whore with a big heart,
drivers doing their job, a decent ordinary businessman (same
business as Rick Wasmund) and… and the Ringo Kid.
That stagecoach was America.
Okay, okay, it didn’t contain all the diverse members of the
American community. As far I recall, it did not have a Polish
Catholic among its passengers.
I never heard a complaint about this from a Polish Catholic.
ANYWAY, the Republicans, McCain in the lead, are finally leading
the cavalry charge. They are warning of socialism. They are
warning of over-regulation, excessively progressive taxation,
constraints on choice, encroaching bureaucracies in education and
everything else, the suffocating growth of government, and they
are, too, reminding voters that, yo, there’s still a war on and
we have to win it.
Do you really want someone in the White House when we are at war
who talks to Bill Ayers and David Axelrod and Bernardine Dohrn?
Do you think Israel will be safe with a president whose personal
pastor said Louis Farrakhan is one of the great men of our times?
Do you want America to be a nation like any other — or should we
still have room for the Ringo Kid and traveling salesmen with
samples of whiskey?
Kipling, I used to point out to my students, was a great friend
and admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, like McCain a
duty-honor-country soldier and lover of the great West. One can’t
know, but it’s a fair bet whom Kipling would support in this
race.
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken / Twisted by
knaves to make a trap for fools, that’s a good line, when
you think of how they claim to be the party of the middle class
when in fact they are the limousine liberals, as used to be said,
pandering to the rabble at both ends of the social scale. But now
look at me, I sound like I have grudges. Bellow would be laughing
at me. And Kipling —
If you can make one heap of all your winnings / And risk it
on one turn of pitch-and-toss, — okay then, let’s give it
our best shot and let’s win and should we lose, well — And
lose, and start again at your beginnings / And never breath a
word about your loss; — we’ll already be on the road back.
