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.
In some ways, present-day liberalism is far more radical than
Communism ever was. Consider, for example, the current pretense
that there are no real differences between the sexes, or that
same-sex marriage is a desirable policy goal. Communists
entertained no such delusions.
But there have also been opposing trends since the Hiss days.
Blue-collar workers, once known as the working class, have shown
they are not revolutionists. They aspire to join the middle class,
not overthrow it. Think “Reagan Democrats.” It’s intellectuals who
are, and always have been, the core of the revolutionary party.
Another change is that market forces, despite the liberals’
regulatory zeal, are far stronger than they were in 1962. The
world’s two most populous countries, China and India, are becoming
market economies, and we should no more fear their growing wealth
than we did Japan’s after World War II. Regulatory agencies,
including the EPA (a Nixon creation!), may hamstring the U.S. If
so, China will move ahead all the faster. Don’t think of China as
“Communist” either. True, that’s what their government calls
itself, but they seem to be pulling off the unprecedented feat of
both staying in power and encouraging capitalism. Taiwan may be the
mainland’s undeclared model. China is not our enemy, and the same
goes for Russia.
In Europe there’s a comparable lesson. Bond markets are now more
powerful than politicians, despite the best efforts of the IMF.
This frustrates the intelligentsia, who want Europe to submit to
their foolish Euro-diktat. It won’t work. Europe is fragmenting,
not uniting. Its countries are subdividing and will continue to do
so. The EU is emerging as one of the great planning disasters
engineered by the postwar ruling class.
Technology meanwhile is ushering in huge changes. I am thinking
of the digital world, the Internet in particular. It is so recent
that predictions about it are hazardous. But its major effect will
be to decentralize power. This is already happening, and the
mainstream media can tell you about it. But they would rather not.
Their semi-monopolistic mainstream is dividing into a thousand
rivulets. Television is finally waning. The stock price of the
Washington Post has fallen by two-thirds, while that of
the New York Times is down to one-sixth of its peak a
decade ago.
Technology they cannot stop, but conservatives they can. “Media
bias” seems to be stronger than ever. When the Dow fell 313 points
immediately after the election, what was not responsible?
Obama’s win. Reuters was particularly bad. The sharp market decline
was attributed to the fiscal cliff, which we have known about for
months. The underlying philosophy is that a faltering economy must
not be attributed to Obama’s policies. It’s a gross anomaly for a
free press to constantly advocate the expansion of government
power. Why do they? Because it suits the pretensions of
journalists, who see themselves as the custodians of righteousness.
Also, their “free press” exemption expands their own power relative
to the dwindling private sector. Notice the word “sector,” by the
way, implying something cordoned off.
Another huge development has been the revival of Islam. What are
we to make of that? Islam today probably threatens us as much as
international Communism once did, but with this big difference: The
intellectuals, who often secretly admired Communism, loathe Islam.
They are afraid—rationally afraid—of those who are willing to die
for what they believe.
Whittaker Chambers identified Communism’s great strength as the
recovery of faith abandoned by many Christians and Jews. But
liberals today have no such faith. Many believe little more than
that we should make women equal to men and make amends to the
planet by ceasing to reproduce. Meanwhile we should feel free to
enjoy ourselves by treating sex as fun without consequences. But
these ignoble causes are not things liberals will die for and the
Islamists probably know this.
Hilaire Belloc wrote in his book The Great Heresies
that “in Faith we have fallen inferior to [Islam].” That is far
truer today than when he wrote it in 1938. He also saw Islam as a
faith that was determined to destroy the Catholic Church. Today,
the progressives aim to placate Islam at every turn. The latest
notion, to install democracy in overwhelmingly Muslim countries,
makes no sense. The Arab Spring is already turning into Islamic
winter.
The restoration of Israel, in what the Islamists regard as their
own land, has turned Islam from a somnolent to a fiercely crusading
faith. Today it is Israel that Islamists really want to destroy,
and many secular leftists both here and in Europe quietly feel the
same way.
My guess is that over the next 50 years, the rise of China and
the fate of a beleaguered Israel will dominate the news—but don’t
ask me how it will turn out.
