Some progressive commentators now say that conservatives
hate America. Never mind why. The people saying such things
could just ask conservatives they know whether that assertion is
true. Sadly, many do not ask, they just assert. They do not
realize that by tossing accusations of hate about so freely, they
cast themselves as Vizzini in a bad (but not inconceivable)
remake of The Princess Bride. They have a
different favorite word than Vizzini did, but they are equally
fond of misusing it.
Those Vizzinis, they can fuss; I think they like to scream
at us.
This is what I mean: To the more vocal Obama supporters,
any lack of enthusiasm for policies pushed by our president
signifies ignorance or stubborn malice.
Have you read news stories or blog posts with the sinking
feeling that the foreign policy of this administration unsettles
allies and
amuses antagonists? You must have forgotten that our
Secretary of State now considers her “reset” button a tool of
statecraft.
When a doctor
writes that the Baucus bill (“America’s Healthy Future Act of
2009”) and its most prominent siblings in the House of
Representatives stink, do you pay attention? By progressive
standards, you and the doctor are stooges for health insurance
companies.
Do you believe in American exceptionalism of any kind, or
think Ronald Reagan was right to describe America as “a shining
city on a hill”? Touchy critics assume you have a gap-toothed
smile and a well-thumbed bible.
Other offenses could be added to that list, but going on
about how special our country is really seems to upset
progressives, not least because people who most embrace that view
tend not to be swayed by appeals to the so-called “world
community.” As
Neal Gabler explained recently in the Boston
Globe, America has a lot to be proud of, but so
does every other country, “and America has no more right to
assume it is the greatest nation in the world than does France,
Switzerland, China, or Russia.”
Mexicans come to the United States, Gabler concedes, but
Turks go to Germany and Arabs go to France. Moreover, “our home
ownership rate trails that of the citizens of Canada, Belgium,
Spain, Norway, and even Portugal.”
I don’t remember Neil Armstrong planting a French flag on
the moon, Portugal tipping the scales on multiple fronts in a
world war, or China sending humanitarian aid around the globe
whenever disaster strikes, but Gabler enjoys putting Bozo shoes
on received wisdom. Last year, he
claimed that the modern conservative movement owed more to
Joe McCarthy than to Barry Goldwater. In true Vizzini fashion, it
could be said of Gabler that probably he means no harm, though
he’s really very short on charm.
These days, Gabler and his liberal cohort sneer at
patriotism because they think we’re better than that, or because
it seems to be different in degree but not in kind from primitive
tribalism. In other words, either we’re enlightened enough to
have outgrown emotional attachments to the local sod, or Tarzan
with table manners is still the lord of the jungle. That false
choice makes no room for quiet patriotism; it assumes that anyone
who thinks his country is best has the same grip on reality that
Alice did when she charged down a rabbit hole into
Wonderland.
Progressive critics deny American exceptionalism on
principle, and also because they have not absorbed the lessons of
classic nonfiction books like Homer Hickam’s Rocket
Boys, Laura Hillenbrand’s
Seabiscuit, and Catherine Drinker Bowen’s
Miracle at Philadelphia. Hickam and
Hillenbrand tell “underdog makes good” stories that depend on a
social mobility unknown to other countries. Bowen writes about
the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the groundbreaking work
that delegates did there. But the rocket story, the horse story,
and the founding story do not matter to people who damn this
country with faint praise after having accused conservatives of
doing that or worse.
When a frontal attack on American exceptionalism won’t do,
progressives sometimes try to redefine exceptionalism (and every
other civic good) as a fruit of “diversity.” That effort usually
downplays the need for compromise or exalts early steps in
consensus-building at the expense of later steps, but people to
whom the diversity pitch is made seldom question it. I wish they
would spend more time at Disneyland, which still has a few things
to teach people who think that multiculturalism scares
conservatives.
Disneyland has sometimes been criticized for implying that
if you sanitize American life, you get the happiest place on
earth, but it welcomes people of all shapes, creeds, colors,
ethnicities, and sexual orientations. Some of what you see is
hokey, but more often than not, the innocence there shames the
cynicism of the company’s own film division and remains a bow to
what Lincoln once called the “better angels of our nature.”
Almost 55 years after its founding, and together with “Disney’s
California Adventure,” the magic kingdom remains a
better-than-average snapshot of American culture (singular, not
plural). One small but representative example: A plaza modeled on
those in Mexico lies a stone’s throw from a store where you can
buy imitation coonskin caps that pay homage to the Scots-Irish
frontiersmen who carved Texas out of Mexico, yet descendents of
people on both sides of that fight mingle peaceably. Walt Disney
and his “imagineers” were saying “yes we can” long before a
junior senator from Illinois appropriated that phrase to run for
president.
If you book passage on the same “Jungle Cruise” that I did,
your Asian-American helmsman will talk about how “zebras at
Disneyland always sleep lying sideways at the feet of lions,” and
steer his boat toward the dock in silence after announcing “one
final joke for all you psychics out there.” I also met a tattooed
biker who spent most of his time trading commemorative pins with
cast members. Two miles down the road, a black man working the
snack counter at an IMAX theater where the early-days version of
Star Trek was in re-release told me he had
been a Disney cast member for a year. He quit because the
“cult-like devotion to Brother Walt” among some cast members was
not for him, but he still recognized the power of the Disney
brand.
That kind of organic diversity is far preferable to the
kind of artificial diversity that progressives too often impose
on the rest of us, via quotas of one kind or another.
Happily, you don’t have to go to Disneyland to find
diversity as it should be. Between planes on the way home, I
stopped to buy a mocha from Dazbog, a Russian coffee franchise
with a store in the Denver airport. In the seats outside the
coffee shop, a man playing bluegrass-style mandolin jammed with a
friend who was cradling not a guitar or a banjo but a ukulele in
his hands. Imagine that, I thought: Lexington, Honolulu, and
Leningrad are dancing with each other on the steps of the Front
Range.
One friend claims that America is becoming more tolerant,
sophisticated, and international. He may be right about that,
although we differ sharply on whether it is honorable to fight a
rear-guard action in defense of Judeo-Christian values (I say
yes, while he is more inclined to think of Judeo-Christian values
as problematic). Beyond that, he does not seem to know that
conservatives usually have more babies than progressives do, and
so he thinks that demographic trends scare people like me. Wrong.
Is this a great country that Barack Obama is trying to bankrupt,
or what?
