American Culture in Peril

Charles W. Dunn

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780813140650
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Thirty years ago, Ronald Reagan rode a wave of patriotism to the White House by calling for a return to what he considered to be traditional American values--personal liberty, free markets, and limited government. After the cultural struggles and generational clashes of the 1960s and 70s, it appeared that many Americans were eager to abide by Reagan's set of core American principles. Yet, despite Reagan's continuing popularity, modern America remains widely perceived as a nation weakened by its divisions. While debates over cultural values have been common throughout the country's history, they seem particularly vitriolic today. Some argue that these differences have resulted in a perpetually gridlocked government caught between left and right, red states and blue. Since the American Founding, commonly shared cultural values have been considered to be the glue that would bind the nation's citizens together. However, how do we identify, define and interpret the foundations of American culture in a profoundly divided, pluralistic country?

In American Culture in Peril, Charles W. Dunn assembles top scholars and public intellectuals to examine Reagan's impact on American culture in the twenty-first century. The contributors assess topics vital to our conversations about American culture and society, including changing views of the family, the impact of popular culture, and the evolving relationship between religion, communities, and the state. Others investigate modern liberalism and the possibilities of reclaiming a renewed conservatism today. American Culture in Peril illuminates Reagan's powerful legacy and investigates whether his traditional view of American culture can successfully compete in postmodern America.

Contributors

Hadley Arkes

Paul A. Cantor

Allan Carlson

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Charles R. Kesler

Wilfred M. McClay

Ken Myers

PART 1

RONALD REAGAN AND
MODERN CULTURE

RONALD REAGAN AND
MODERN LIBERALISM

Charles R. Kesler

“The central conservative truth,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan once wrote, “is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth,” he added, “is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself.”¹ Although there is wisdom in Moynihan’s dictum, it suffers two defects. In the first place, it leaves unclear what culture is and where politics comes from—or to put it differently, it fails to put culture and politics in the context of nature, including human nature. Second, the statement is politically mischievous insofar as it implies that politics is the liberal vocation, and culture (whatever that means) the conservative one.

I suppose a liberal truth could be used for conservative purposes, and a conservative truth for liberal purposes, but Moynihan’s sly association of liberalism with deliberate, salutary change—and conservatism with cultural determinism—is hardly evenhanded. Could a conservative use politics to “change a culture and save it from itself,” or would that very endeavor militate against his being, or remaining for very long, a conservative? The dichotomy comes close to implying that liberalism’s very purpose is to reform culture for the better, and conservatism’s either to dismiss such efforts as futile or wait around for the chance to guard the new traditions faithfully. G.K. Chesterton drew the same implication, though from a different point of view, when he observed that the business of progressives is to go on making mistakes, and the business of conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected!²

Moynihan’s apothegm tends to turn the right either into apolitical fatalists who think culture is destiny, end of discussion, or into grudging custodians of liberal innovations, into Burkeans of a very dull sort whom only liberals could love. This, as it happens, is not far from Sam Tanenhaus’s point in his recent book The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus, who edits the Sunday New York Times Book Review, criticizes contemporary conservatism as what he calls “revanchism” because it attempts a “counterrevolution” against liberalism, rather than sensibly accommodating itself to the enduring changes in American society since the New Deal. These changes, such as the growth of Big Government and the sexual revolution, were probably inevitable and at any rate are now unrepealable, he maintains; a political movement that doesn’t recognize this is unrealistic and therefore unconservative. By seeking to impose various forms of political, economic, and moral “orthodoxy” instead of adjusting to history’s dispensations, today’s conservatives “seem the heirs of the French rather than of the American Revolution.” They are Jacobin, not Burkean, in their political orientation, ignoring or rejecting the advice of sober conservatives like Whittaker Chambers (the subject of an excellent biography by Tanenhaus) to make peace with the elements of modern life that cannot be undone.³ As William F. Buckley Jr.’s official biographer, Tanenhaus will have to square this account of conservatism with Buckley’s own radical or anti–New Deal inclinations. If right-wingers are forbidden to stand athwart history yelling Stop, after all, what is left of the animating spirit of Buckleyite, that is, mainstream, American conservatism? Doubtless, that spirit must be disciplined by intelligence, and by a prudent regard to the difference between theory and practice, which means an acceptance of the truth that not everything can be improved that should be improved. Buckley was well aware of that. But from the imperfections of political life one should not conclude that the appeal to “orthodoxy,” to permanent or ahistorical political principles, is itself heretical. Here is Edmund Burke himself on the point:

I never govern myself, no rational man ever did govern himself, by abstractions and universals. I do not put abstract ideas wholly out of any question, because I well know that under that name I should dismiss principles; and that without the guide and light of sound well-understood principles, all reasonings in politics, as in everything else, would be only a confused jumble of particular facts and details, without the means of drawing out any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion. A statesman differs from a professor in a university; the latter has only the general view of society; the former, the statesman, has a number of circumstances to combine with those general ideas, and to take into his consideration. Circumstances are infinite, are infinitely combined; are variable and transient; he, who does not take them into consideration is not erroneous, but stark mad—dat operam ut cum ratione insaniat—he is metaphysically mad. A statesman, never losing sight of principles, is to be guided by circumstances; and judging contrary to the exigencies of the moment he may ruin his Country for ever.⁴

Where do American conservatives look for their principles, for illumination of the proper ends of politics, for instruction amid the infinite circumstances of history? Ronald Reagan, the greatest modern conservative statesman, took his bearings from several sources, but most importantly from the American Revolution. Facing squarely the paradox that America, and thus American conservatism, starts with revolutionary action on behalf of certain self-evident truths, Reagan embraced those principles as coming from “nature and nature’s God,” not simply from culture or history, however much a culture was, and would be, needed to conserve and transmit them. His most significant speeches ring with these principles. For example, in the speech that launched his political career, “A Time for Choosing,” delivered on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in October 1964, Reagan declared, “It’s time we asked ourselves if we still know the freedoms intended for us by the Founding Fathers. James Madison said, ‘We base all our experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.’ This idea that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power except the sovereign people, is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man’s relation to man.” Later in that speech (which came to be called “The Speech”), he warned, “Somehow a perversion has taken place. Our natural inalienable rights are now presumed to be a dispensation of government.” As president he pledged in his First Inaugural Address, “It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.” And in his 1985 State of the Union address, after his smashing reelection victory in 1984, he made explicit what had been implicit in his politics all along, that he hoped to ignite a sort of second American Revolution. “Let history say of us,” Reagan averred, “These were golden years—when the American Revolution was reborn, when freedom gained new life, when America reached for her best.” He meant to change American politics, and by so doing change, or at least begin to alter, American culture. It might sound more conservative to say restore American culture, which is mostly what he had in mind. But to restore an unhealthy culture back to health is, perforce, to change it. The very notion of revolution, not to mention founding, implies that politics can change culture. A second American Revolution implies, like it or not, that politics ought to change not only many prevailing policies and political institutions but the habits of heart and mind that gave birth to them and were in turn shaped by them.

Mostly, however, conservatives don’t like that bold notion, or at least profess not to like it. Conservatives of all stripes like to accuse the Left, after all, of “politicizing” our culture, imposing a tyranny of political correctness on everything from jokes to marriage laws. Libertarians start from the proposition that private life is both prior to and more valuable than public life and that economics and culture, as the characteristic, uncoerced activities of private life and, by extension, civil society, ought to be protected from political encroachment. Even so-called cultural conservatives, often accused by libertarians and liberals of wanting to use politics to impose their values on others, see themselves rather differently, as engaged in a long defensive struggle against secularist politicians who want to impose their values on ordinary Americans’ practices of religious worship and expression, family life, and moral formation—the chief purposes of private life and civil society as the cultural conservatives define them.

Regardless of which wing of conservatism one considers, the typical conservative complaint is that what may loosely be called culture—religion, art, economic creativity and exchange, morals, science—should be ranked more highly than politics, and therefore as a general matter it should be shielded from political supervision. Whether students of Friedrich Hayek or Edmund Burke, most contemporary conservatives regard themselves as out to conserve the culture in the sense of the American people’s evolved liberties, sentiments, habits, and ways of life. Politics will be necessary to this enterprise, but only as a means to a higher end.

However much good sense is contained in these reservations, conservatives should beware of talking themselves into second-class citizenship, according to which liberals would be free to change culture but conservatives duty-bound to preserve it. This isn’t a fair or wise bargain for many reasons, as I’ve already indicated. It approaches cultural determinism for the Right, cultural license for the Left. And besides, conservatives like Reagan, at least, don’t concede that culture is the ultimate consideration. There are good and bad cultures. Reagan tried to appeal to the best of American culture. Republicans, he said in his acceptance speech at the 1981 GOP national convention, were ready “to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” He ended that speech with a moment of silent prayer and the benediction “God bless America.” But the point of the “new consensus” was that the old one had frayed. Like Reagan, today’s conservatives know that American culture has, in certain respects, deteriorated over the past decades. Almost all conservatives are keen to redress that decline—to instill personal responsibility rather than dependency on government, for example, and to encourage moderation rather than sexual will-to-power in youth—even if they disagree among themselves about what caused the declension and what government can do about it. Indeed, most conservatives respect our cultural traditions not so much because they are traditional but because they are good—that is, in keeping with human nature and happiness.

Culture, then, is a somewhat ambiguous concept. Etymologically, it derives from cultura, a Latin word meaning tilling or cultivating, as in “agriculture,” the tilling of the land. The term points not simply to something that grows (as opposed to being made all at once), but to the action of growing something deliberately, with care, labor, and even reverence. The Romans applied the word, by extension, to education (cultus animi, Cicero called it) as well as to worship of the gods (cultus deorum). So culture is a people’s unplanned way of life, the habits and mores that spring up from certain soils; but also the way of life deliberately planted and cultivated, typically by founders and legislators, among a people. For cultural anthropologists today (Barack Obama’s mother was one, incidentally), every tribe or people has its own culture, by definition valid in its own eyes—hence “cultural relativism,” the notion that every culture is equally valid or worthy. But at the same time, the notion of culture points to cultivation, to the choice of some practices and purposes as higher and worthier than others; and hence to the cultured or cultivated human being as the embodiment of the best practices and purposes—a standard by which to judge among cultures. In this sense, culture embraces both a people’s way of life—something common to them and distinguishing them from other peoples—and the highest points of its way of life, which include but are not limited to what is usually called “high culture.” In the best cases, those high points may be so grand and so noble as to show us something of what human nature is like at its best. One thinks of Bach, Shakespeare, or Abraham Lincoln—figures that transcend their native culture even as they glorify it.

So the disagreement between Reaganite conservatism and liberalism is not exactly over the politicization of culture. Each accuses the other of politicizing the culture, and each is correct, at least in its own terms. The difference consists of two different understandings of the political and the cultural. For conservatives, politics ought to serve ends suggested by human nature, hence, respectful of its strengths and weaknesses—always aware of the tyrannical passions in our fallen nature, as well as the portion of reason and virtue possible to man. “If men were angels,” James Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Since government is “administered by men over men,” both internal and external controls on it are needed, even as they are needed for human beings generally.⁵ This view of human nature does not condemn politics to minimalist or purely negative functions, by the way. To quote Madison again, from just a few pages later in the Federalist:

As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.⁶

Thus conservatives who follow the common sense of America’s Founders are keen for politics to show forth the capacity of mankind for self-government, to display and deepen the virtues involved in republicanism. To be sure, they know that politics must acknowledge and guard against human vices, must often supply “the defect of better motives” by dividing and checking the powers of government, separating church and state, and limiting government to tasks that imperfect human reason can evaluate and approve. But both to heighten our virtues and diminish our vices, conservatives seek to enlist the power of habits in the human soul, including the mental habits that Madison and Burke call “prejudices.” In their own way, these internal controls help to elicit better motives, not merely to supply “the defect of better motives.” For conservatives steeped in the Founding understand that statesmanship cannot be indifferent to character and culture: republican government needs a republican moral culture, not merely checks and balances, to sustain it. It is one of politics’ jobs (though it is not always the government’s job, because politics includes civil society and private efforts, too) to shape, nurture, and defend a culture that encourages good motives or virtues.⁷ Among other things, therefore, conservatives second Madison’s insistence on inculcating a reverence for law, and especially for the Constitution.⁸ Neither governments nor cultures, they advise accordingly, should be changed for light and transient reasons.⁹

For the American Left, on the contrary, the tendency for more than a century has been to reject all notions of a permanent or essential human nature. In place of the old-fashioned view of man as an i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The American Cultural Kaleidoscope
• Part 1. Ronald Reagan and Modern Culture
• Part 2. Cultural Conflict in America
• Part 3. The Possibilities of Cultural Change
• List of Contributors
• Index