Wall Street Journal - February 4, 1999 Commentary
PANGLOSSES OF THE RIGHT ARE WRONG
By Gertrude Himmelfarb, a professor emeritus of history at the City University of New York. Her book "The Two Cultures" will be published by Knopf later this year.
A spate of recent articles urge conservatives to "lighten up," to be cheerful. Things aren't as bad as they've been made out to be. In fact, they're pretty good. The economy is booming. Crime and welfare are down. People are quietly going about their lives in spite of the sordid mess in the White House--indeed, in deliberate disregard of that mess. And the most pressing national problem is how to spend our first budget surplus in decades.
What is even more cheering in all this good news, we are told, is that it represents a triumph for conservatism itself. The state of the economy and budget are surely a vindication of good old entrepreneurial capitalism. The decline in crime and welfare is a direct result of the application of conservative principles, often over the vociferous objections of liberals. And the great majority of the people who are giving the president such high approval ratings--higher and higher as the evidence of wrongdoing mounts--are doing what conservatives have long been preaching. They're attending to their families and work, their communities and churches, their private lives and economic well-being. They are, in fact, being good members of the "civil society" that conservatives have always valued so highly.
Yet we may also find it prudent to restrain our enthusiasm and self-congratulation. This is not to say that there is any merit to liberal caviling that the crime rate has declined "but" the incarceration rate has increased--as if one contradicts or vitiates the other; or that even after the spectacular fall in the welfare rolls, there still seems to be a residue of "hard-core" welfare cases--as if society has not always been called upon to cope with such cases.
The people are contented, but the culture is a mess.
But other bits of good news are in fact more ambiguous. If the rate of divorce has fallen, the rate of cohabitation has almost doubled in the past decade alone, and couples living together without benefit of marriage can separate (and do so more frequently) without benefit of divorce. If the rate of out-of-wedlock births (relative to the number of unmarried women of child-bearing age) has decreased, the ratio of such births (relative to all births) has only leveled off, and at a very high level. One-third of all children, two-thirds of black children and three-fourths of the children of teenagers are born out of wedlock. If there are fewer abortions, it is partly because unmarried motherhood has become more respectable. (And the number of single-parent households continues to increase.) If older girls are less sexually active, younger ones (below the age of 15) are more so. If fewer children are dropping out of school, it is because more failing children are automatically promoted.
And so on. For almost every favorable statistic, an ornery conservative can cite an unfavorable one. He can even go beyond the statistics to point to the sorry state of the culture: the loss of parental authority and of discipline in the schools, the violence and vulgarity of television, the obscenity and sadism of rap music, the exhibitionism and narcissism of talk-shows, the pornography and sexual perversions on the Internet, the binge-drinking and "hooking up" on college campuses. Two memorable phrases capture the cultural mood: Daniel Patrick Moynihan's "defining deviancy down," which normalizes and legitimizes what was once abnormal and illegitimate; and Roger Shattuck's "morality of the cool," which makes sin and evil seem "cool" and thus acceptable.
What is a cheerful conservative to make of all this? And what is he to make of all those people who, the polls assure us, are more outraged by the Congress that is impeaching the president than by the actions of the president that called forth that impeachment? These people may well be the same ones whose commendable concern for themselves we conservatives praise, yet they seem to have lost sight of larger issues affecting the moral character of the nation as a whole and, ultimately, of their own families and communities. Perhaps a conservatism overly focused on economics may share some responsibility for this failing.
Cheerful conservatism, we may be discovering, is a fine philosophy for a period of stability and tranquillity. But it may be inappropriate (to borrow the delicate pejorative that epitomizes the "defining down" tendency of our culture) in a period of social and moral disarray. There is a time for cheerfulness and a time, as Bill Bennett reminds us, for outrage. And it is disconcerting for a conservative, even a would-be cheerful one, to find so little outrage when it is so amply deserved. It is even more distressing to find the moral language denoting outrage debased and disparaged. Thus to make moral judgments is to be "judgmental" and "moralistic," to engage in moral discourse is to "preach" and "moralize," to pronounce upon moral affairs is to wage a "moral crusade" or, worse, a "religious crusade."
Conservatives used to think that "the people" are "sound," that only occasionally are they (or more often their children) led astray by the "elites" in the media and academia. That confidence has now eroded. The polls tell us what we already knew: that most people, for the most part, have adapted to the dominant culture, accepting what now seems inevitable ("everybody does it") and thus becoming incapacitated for outrage.
The good news is that there is a minority that resists the dominant culture, that abides (in principle at least, if not always in practice) by traditional values, and that is unembarrassed by the language of morality. This minority constitutes, in effect, a dissident culture. And this dissident culture is not confined, as some might think, to evangelicals or the "religious right," as they are derisively called, but includes those of little or no religious faith who are appalled by a dominant culture that is always "pushing the envelope," seeking more and more ways to shock the sensibility of people as they become more and more inured to such shocks.
It is only a minority, I repeat--perhaps no more than a third of the people. But it may be enough to cheer up even a dour conservative.