The Way Back. F. H. Buckley

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СКАЧАТЬ equality is a tough sell. Walter Berns, a conservative thinker, once quoted the opening words of the Declaration of Independence to me. “All men are created equal.” He asked me: Do you think that’s an empirical proposition?

      When we look at others what we see are differences, between the long and the short and the tall. In the left’s identity politics, it’s differences between races, ethnic groups, genders. On the right, it might be the nasty IQ debate introduced by people such as Charles Murray, which has permitted the members of the New Class to feel superior to the little brains beneath them. Without religious belief, what else is there?

      Among the wiser socialists, that’s led to a new respect for religion as a foundation for their dearest beliefs. Without abandoning his atheism, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas was willing to debate Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) and announce his openness to the egalitarian content of religious traditions. G. A. Cohen, a Canadian-American philosopher, came to the same realization in If You’re an Egalitarian, How Come You’re So Rich? Similarly, in Culture and the Death of God, Terry Eagleton noted that “it was the fate of the Enlightenment to usher in a civilization in which its pragmatism, materialism and utilitarianism tended to discredit some of the very exalted ideas which presided over its birth.” That’s why today’s clever Marxist is as likely to study the Epistle to the Romans as he is to read Das Kapital. But the New Class paid no attention to any of this. It wasn’t that they were believers, or even that they were atheists. Rather, they had simply stopped caring about equality.

       The Republican Workers Party

      The NeverTrumpers were right about one thing. On domestic policies Trump was not a doctrinaire libertarian. Early in the 2016 presidential campaign, a higher-up at the Charles Koch Foundation told me his problem with Trump. The developer from Queens didn’t have an entitlement policy. He didn’t plan to roll back Medicare or curb Social Security. But that’s not what most Americans want either. We have a generous welfare policy, as I noted, and all Trump planned to do was make it work better. He proposed to repeal and replace Obamacare, not just repeal it; and he wanted a system that wouldn’t leave people uninsured.

      In appealing to ordinary voters, and rejecting rigid Republican right-wing doctrines, Trump had rescued what is living from what is dead in conservatism. What is living is a Republican Party that doesn’t think those left behind deserve their fate. Trump is a nationalist, and what many of his opponents missed is the logic of nationalism: that the needs of Americans take priority over the interests of non-Americans, that what is denied non-Americans must be paid for by what is given to Americans. That’s a lesson as old as the distinction between strangers and brothers in Deuteronomy, but it’s one that right-wing ideologues, with their desire for open borders and their willingness to ship jobs offshore, had failed to hear. They had a perfect fidelity to principle, but an indifference to fellow Americans. And that’s what was dead in conservatism.

      Trump’s Republicanism would be a party of “buy American and hire American,” a party for the laid-off coal miner, the auto worker whose job was sent abroad, the child in a terrible school, those who struggle with crime in their inner-city neighborhoods. At the 2017 CPAC Conference he called it the Republican Workers Party. It would be the jobs party. (In time, I hope, it will also be the health-care party.) What it wouldn’t be is the bicycle-lane party, the transgender-bathroom party. He’d leave those issues for the Democrats.

      The new party wouldn’t blame those who are left behind, as NeverTrumpers did. With a vituperation that recalled Marx’s contempt for the lumpenproletariat, the writers at National Review described Trump supporters as Oxy-sniffing moral lepers who whelped their children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog. Before long, the mainstream media took up the theme, and a redneck-porn literature was born, one that invited upper-class readers to indulge in their sense of superiority by slumming with the underclass.

      How very different this was from the older literature of poverty in America, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or Michael Harrington’s The Other America. The earlier writers described the poor with compassion, as fellow Americans. They were the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, honorable people down on their luck. There was no sense of moral superiority in this literature, even with those who might have brought their poverty on themselves. The desperately poor were broken in body and spirit, and while they didn’t belong to anyone or anything they still were our brothers, with whom we shared a common humanity and citizenship. If they lived their lives at a level beneath that necessary for human decency, we were called upon to do something about it. In Harrington’s case, that meant living with them in one of Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker hospices, not an experience any of today’s purveyors of redneck porn will have shared.

      Harrington described how poverty had persisted during the boom years of the 1950s. In our day, too, we’ve seen poverty coexisting with spectacular wealth gains for others. Similarly, we’re seeing unprecedented longevity for some, alongside climbing mortality rates for others. With new drugs and better medical providers, we’re saving people who in the past would have died earlier from things like heart disease and cancer. That’s how it is in every other First World country, and that’s how it is for African-Americans and Hispanics. But life expectancy for white, middle-aged Americans has recently declined. Anne Case and her husband, Nobel laureate Sir Angus Deaton, report that had the rate held at 1998 levels, there would have been 100,000 fewer deaths over the next fifteen years for whites aged 45−54. In much of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta, life expectancy is lower today than in Bangladesh or Nepal.

      How did this happen? The NeverTrumper and the liberal blamed the victims themselves. More generously, Case and Deaton said that the increased deaths are largely a result of despair, social isolation, drug and alcohol poisoning, suicide and chronic liver disease, and that all this in turn could be attributed to higher unemployment and lower wages. In Appalachia, in the heartland, white, working class Americans had lost their jobs and were killing themselves, but at our elite colleges, social-justice warriors were asking them to check their privilege, while Hillary Clinton was calling them deplorable and irredeemable.

      If we want to do something about it, Case and Deaton surely pointed us in the right direction. The best remedy for an opioid crisis is jobs. People don’t lose their jobs because they smoke Oxy; they smoke Oxy because they’ve lost their jobs. By voting for a person who called himself the “jobs president,” Republican voters showed that they understood this. They evidently looked past Trump’s moral lapses, and had little interest in a state-led moral rearmament crusade. With David Hume, they likely thought that “all plans of government, which suppose great reformation in the manners of mankind, are plainly imaginary.”

      The voters defined the policy challenges for the Trump administration: create jobs and restore economic mobility. That in turn will require the reforms in education, immigration policy, the tax system and the regulatory regime that I describe in this book. Nothing much else ascends to the level of policy. Trump intellectuals said they wanted to make America great again, but “stop being a loser” isn’t a policy; “stop doing stupid stuff” isn’t a reform. Through all of Trump’s self-induced crises they defended him, like Jonahs inside the belly of the whale, swept wherever it might take them. But they didn’t tell us what the way back might be, which was the point of my book. They never told us what to do about decline.

      For what, after all, is American greatness? Is it cultural superiority, to match that of France? Is it military might, such as the Soviet Union once had? Is it a foreign policy of liberal imperialism, riding in triumph through Persepolis? Those are the dreams of other people, other candidates, but they weren’t Trump’s dream, or the American Dream, that of a country where one isn’t held back, where all may get ahead, where our children will have things we never had.

      And now? As I write, the papers are full of stories about special prosecutors and Russian sabotage. The Democrats talk impeachment, and Republican NeverTrumpers lick СКАЧАТЬ