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Capitol Ideas
Fifty Years in America
Our longtime Capitol Ideas columnist looks back.
THE CUBAN MISSLE CRISIS erupted soon after I arrived in America. I was teaching at an excellent school in Virginia, Woodberry Forest, which still flourishes today. The forcible integration of Ole Miss took place at about the same time. But like most young people, I took little notice of politics, whether in Washington, Cuba, or Mississippi.
I now realize that the missile threat was serious, more so than we knew at the time. By comparison, today’s scares, most of them masquerading as science, should be seen as campaigns to increase funding for various government agencies. Man-made global warming is only the best-known example.
By 1965, I had moved to New Orleans, which had been my original reason for coming to America. I was politically awake to the extent that, driving south on vacations in my used car through Georgia and Alabama, I hoped no one would mistake me for some sort of “freedom rider.” Civil rights were the last thing on my mind.
My interest was in traditional New Orleans jazz, as exemplified by musicians like Bunk Johnson and George Lewis. My biography of Lewis was published by the University of California, and I made some recordings of the era’s surviving musicians, since reissued on CD. But sadly my interest in this art form coincided with its abrupt decline. There are still good reasons to visit New Orleans, but local jazz isn’t one of them. My politically incorrect thought: All the best black music in this country, and there was a lot of it, was created in the era of segregation.
When I later saw what happened to American popular music—tumbling from ragtime to the idiocies of rap in less than a century—I have been dogged by a sense of decline. Classical music, ditto: Bach to Bartok. Where’s the improvement? It’s all downhill. Perhaps that helps explain why I don’t believe in evolution. Things don’t evolve; they peak quickly and inconspicuously, then they fall apart. When I left England in 1962, it was already declining and had been doing so for decades. I have the same concern about America today—who doesn’t after the recent election? It’s hard to say how these things should be measured, but government’s share of national production gives a rough estimate. National decline seems to be the equivalent of organic aging.
After a few years in New Orleans, I started working for an “alternative” newspaper. I had found my métier. You go to an event, write down what people say, and with any luck you can earn a living. I became an American citizen at the same time and learned to drop the condescension that so many Brits adopt toward the United States. I also noticed the automatic anti-Americanism of the liberals. Watergate! Everyone was saying what a crisis it was. If so, why were they so gleeful? Ditto America’s defeat in Vietnam. They quietly relished that, too.
Liberals adopt a perpetual fault-finding mode about their own country. For a while I kept quiet about this, lest I sound like a right-winger. Maybe, I now think, a quota of liberals should be exiled for two years to see how they like it somewhere else. Come to think of it, Peace Corps volunteers agree. Driven by idealism, with very little sense of how their own country works, they go abroad to instruct others. Some, in their naivete, undoubtedly do learn something. In 2011, an investigation by 20/20 found that over 1,000 young American women had been sexually assaulted while serving as Peace Corps volunteers abroad.
Like welfare, foreign aid hurts those who receive it, and I’m always glad to read that a country has rid itself of the Agency for International Development. Howard Phillips, appointed by President Nixon to head the Office of Economic Opportunity, promptly attempted to shut it down, and Howie and I have been friends ever since.
Nixon, incidentally, is the only president I met, and I did so three times. It was while he was trying to rehabilitate himself after his resignation. On one occasion I asked him what he remembered about the Hiss-Chambers case. “Not much,” he said. Once he had known a lot, and he emerges as a hero in Whittaker Chambers’ book Witness (1952). But Nixon could credibly plead major distractions in the interim!
RECENTLY I FINISHED READING WITNESS—way too long at 800 pages—and then his Cold Friday, posthumously published. Chambers is a man after my own heart—even more of a pessimist than I am. A skilled writer, he had many bylines in Time and Life before testifying against Alger Hiss in 1948. Both Hiss and Chambers had been in the Communist underground in the 1930s. Hiss, convicted of perjury, spent the rest of his life denying what he had once lived for: the Communist cause. By the time he died, in 1996, he had lived long enough to see the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What of Communism today? As a party program with satellite countries, millions of “apparatchiks,” and a queen bee in the Kremlin, it is dead. But American-style liberalism is its remnant and it lives on in its dishonest way. Chambers was surprised by the widespread support for Hiss among intellectuals and within the U.S. press corps, even though few of them were ever members of the Communist Party. He saw that the winds of fashionable opinion were against him. Progressive dreams had far more appeal than free-market realities, as they still do today.
What do modern leftism (American liberalism) and communism have in common? Both are godless and egalitarian, but liberalism has “evolved.”
Communists wanted to kill off capitalism, for example, but liberals know it must be preserved—in a highly taxed and regulated form. It must be permitted to create sufficient wealth to redistribute to favored groups—single mothers, minorities, college professors—if the system is to keep Democrats in office. Liberals want market outcomes to be “predictable.” Appeals to envy and blame heaped on the rich can also be used as a bludgeon, as Obama has shown.
The liberals do follow the Communists in aspiring to crush “organized religion”—Christianity in particular. A book that influenced me was The Socialist Phenomenon (1979), by Igor Shafarevich, a Russian mathematician and a friend of Solzhenitsyn’s. Socialism began as a Christian heresy, he points out, and it has three primary goals: the destruction of private property, the family, and religion. If achieved, this would ensure that everyone will be dependent on the state or the ruling power.
The liberal-left, who in some ways constitute our intelligentsia, are never reliably in power in a democracy. It frustrates them that they must submit to majority rule. Hence the importance they attach to the Supreme Court, a tribunal where five votes can enforce the things they most care about. Unrestricted access to abortion is probably their top issue today, and has been for some time.
About the Author
Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).
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Pecos Pete| 12.12.12 @ 8:02AM
Mr. Bethell: Excellent!
ArmyAviator| 12.12.12 @ 8:32AM
Democracy will NEVER be installed in the Arab nations. It's simply impossible! Islam is it's own political system. Democracy implies certain inalienable rights. There are no inalienable rights in Islam. One has no right to criticize Islam. To do so, is to seek ones own death sentence, which will be dutifully carried out by a father, brother, or even a sister if needed, in order to maintain the "honor' of the prophet. Yesterday's Liberals are today's Liberal Socialists. Liberalism has morphed into Liberal Socialism and thus the seeds of destruction for our nation have been sown and are now sprouting with vigor. The USA will survive, but as a fragmented, weak and fractured nation, incapable of thwarting any future Tojo's and Hitler's. We will be a nation of followers, not leaders. The Free Enterprise nations will lead the world in the 21st Century and the USA will be left behind, in a cloud of dust and Liberal Socialist confusion.
C. Vernon Crisler | 12.12.12 @ 9:54AM
A unitarian faith like Islam always has a problem with diversity. Islam provides unity for people who often feel isolated and alone, but it requires a level of conformity that has no place for differences. It is the opposite of moral anarchism, but it substitutes external unity in place of inward freedom.
The Big E| 12.12.12 @ 9:09AM
China may not be our enemy, but they may soon be our landlord.
I think there is one other area of the world which will dominate the news over the next 50 years along with the rise of China and the fate of Israel - the Mexican drug war. It will inevitably spread across our borders, along our interstates, and into our cities as the ever more powerful drug cartels extend their reach northward and battle for distribution routes inside the US. The battles on the streets of Juarez today will be fought in Los Angeles tomorrow, St. Louis the day after that, and eventually in Baltimore, Boston, Philadephia, and other major US cities.
ArmyAviator| 12.12.12 @ 5:40PM
When the US defaults on it's multi-TRILLION dollar debt to China, there will be Hell to pay. China is not going to bend over and take it! They will want something from our collapsed and fractured nation. An Obama or Obama-type could easily decide to pay off China with LAND GRANTS. The US Government owns VAST TRACTS of land. The majority of Alaska along with it's minerals and OIL could easily be ceded to China. States might not be able to secede from the Union, but I'd bet it's as legal as anything else Obama does, to CEDE land to a foreign power. China will soon have the power to project her will over the mass of the earth, the way we once did. With aircraft carriers and marines. China may not be our enemy, but may well soon be our nextdoor "neighbor." Close up and personal, so to speak.
CJW| 12.12.12 @ 10:54AM
Excellent article. You state the goals of socialism were the destruction of the family, private property, and religion. Those are the goals of the leftylibs that have taken over the national leadership of the Dem party.
cicero| 12.12.12 @ 1:50PM
A walk through modern history. The big difference I have seen (having graduated from undergrad in '66, and law school in '69), is that the students of then, while liberal as young became conservative upon reaching political and economic maturity. The young since have had their education so polluted that they have remained politically immature. Rather than progress from liberalism to coonservatism, they have failed to even enter the fray. They have gone from a desire to lead to a desire to be entertained.
They have surrendered their birthrights to the charlatans of the grasping class.
The blame can be spread far and wide. Organized religion relaxed its moral standards in the name of tolerance. Education - don't even get me started - I don't have enough spacee or time to go into it. Parenting had been pushed aside for following the least line of resistance, and serial marriages. Although I see a real change for the better with this generation. While they seem to be having fewer children, they are parenting those they have better. And finally, our government has gone from attempting to lead the citizens of this country to the top of the mountain, to plunderers of the wealth of the country for their own agrandizement.
Marc Jeric| 12.12.12 @ 5:06PM
It is a personal tragedy for this former refugee from a communist hell to see the ongoing communization of this country under Mullah Obama, our marxist Muslim President from Kenya. Except it is worse since this ongoing onslaught on freedom, capitalism, and free markets is waged by racist communists.
Claudius| 12.12.12 @ 10:52PM
Kudos to Mr. Bethell; he tells it like it is. He's one of my favorite authors at TAS; I always turn to his article first when my issue arrives. Clear, succinct, and no BS.
He's tracing the tendencies of our liberal class: something compels them to rebel at boring status quo institutions. Liberal causes are chic. Big oil, big pharma, big business, marriage, and parenthood are boring. Being destructive toward boring, unchic institutions shows how chic you are, and shows that you care.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Communism was chic, America was boring, hence Alger Hiss thought it would be cool to work for the Communist cause. Of course, he could never admit this; that wouldn't be chic (on several levels).
Time has shown that Capitalism works, even though it might be suspect to liberals. Even the Chi-Coms now realize this. Bethell is right about Capitalism being seen by liberals as necessary for funding liberal causes. What is really amusing to see is where Obama is drawing the line during the Fiscal Cliff crisis. He expects his spending program to be accomplished without the support of Capital; he's happy to tax it out of existence.
Conservative common sense has trouble breaking through now because the "intelligentsia" (including media) are nearly all liberal now. In quotes, because many members of that class are about as intellectual as Obama's Phone Lady ("Romney? Romney S**ks!!!" - that one).
Marc Jeric| 12.13.12 @ 2:56AM
Mr. Bethell ha a history similar to mine. after my escape froom a communist hell in 1957, and after living and working in France while waiting for my conditional 2-year immigration visa I finally arrived in the USA in 1962. The country survived Johnson, Ford, Carter, that impeached disbarred felon Clinton, and now is trying to survive the 8 years of Mullah Obama, our marxist Muslim President from Kenya. I will bet that the USA will not survive; and I am too old to go anywhere else -perhaps Greece or Zimbabwe?
Brian Richard Allen | 3.17.13 @ 9:18PM
.... All the best black music in this country, and there was a lot of it, was created in the era of segregation ....
Translation: All the best "black music" in America -- and there was/is a lot of it -- was/is created in ... um ... America!
Unless in once-great Britain. By Slow Hand the Peerless! And his imitators.