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| Ronald Reagan, RIP | Why America is Different |
On Reagan's Paradise Drive
by Christopher Chantrill
June 13, 2004 at 3:00 am
WHY WOULD THE New York Times Book Review put out a contract on David Brooks and his latest book of “comic sociology,” I wondered, after reading its scathing review of On Paradise Drive: How We Live How (And Always Have) in the Future Tense? After all, isn’t Brooks supposed to be the liberals’ favorite conservative? Isn’t that why he got the tame conservative spot on the Times Op-ed page? Why then would they commission Michael Kinsley, master of the snarky putdown, to review his latest book?
On Paradise Drive seems to be a fairly innocuous sequel to the Brooks’ blockbuster Bobos in Paradise. In Bobos, Brooks proposed that bourgeois and bohemian had patched up their century-long quarrel. The fight was over; we were all bourgeois-bohemian now, Brooks assured us. In his new book we are introduced to the rest of middle-class America, Patio Man and Realtor Mom heading home from the mega-stores loaded with loot, he in his huge Yukon XL and she in her top-of-the-line Dodge Grand Caravan. We learn that Americans are regarded world-wide as Cosmic Blondes “that float through life on a beam of sunshine” even though, of course, your average liberal spends her whole life as a Cosmic Brunette that “writes and reads books, worries, condemns and evaluates, judges, discerns and doubts.” We learn about Ubermoms that program their kids’ lives down to the nanosecond starting from the moment of conception. We find out that the Organization Kid that results is so busy in college that she has no time to date or fall in love, so she claims that “hooking up” makes sense. We learn that almost all glossy enthusiast magazines are devoted to the “contempt of people who haven’t taken the time to master their pathetically small sphere of expertise.” We learn that the secret of business success is to “find your Fry!” A Fry! is “one small thing, or a few things, [you] could do better than anyone else in the world.” It is the obsession that drives every entrepreneur (and every artist as well) to success.
The funny thing about us is that despite our mega houses, our mega SUVs, our mega malls, all we Americans seem to want to do is work. It is as though someone has hung up a sign over the nation that reads “No admission here, except on business.”
What is it that drives us, and why have Americans worked, worked, and worked, ever since the first Puritans arrived and decided that Americans were destined to build a city on a hill, the last best hope of mankind? It is hope, Brooks writes, the motivation of a “Paradise Spell… the feeling that there is some glorious destiny just ahead.”
What’s wrong with that, and why should Michael Kinsley take the trouble to shoot it all down as neither serious sociology nor serious satire? After Reagan Week, the answer is obvious. It is not just David Brooks who likes to invoke John Winthrop and the city on a hill. It is not just Brooks or Lincoln who spoke of America as the last best hope of earth. It is not just Brooks who talks about glorious destiny just ahead.
It was Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan spoke again and again about the United States as a shining city on a hill, and the last, best hope on man on earth. And above all, he insisted again and again that America’s best days lay ahead.
No wonder Michael Kinsley is enraged. If Americans were to keep listening to Ronald Reagan, it would be the end of liberals. For liberals the shining city on the hill is not America, it is liberalism. If it weren’t for liberals, women wouldn’t have the vote. If it weren’t for liberals, working people still wouldn’t be able to organize unions. If it weren’t for liberals, Jim Crow still would rule in the South. If it weren’t for liberals the rivers would still seethe with pollution. If it weren’t for liberals, the coat hanger would still rule the nation’s back alleys. America is not the last best hope of man on earth, no indeed. The last best hope is liberals.
David Brooks begs to differ. In his America, people are working away, driving their SUVs, buying loads of loot in big-box stores, and even liberals living in their trendy inner-ring suburbs end up filling their tasteful homes with tasteful toys. For America is not a land of helpless victims waiting to be rescued by liberals. It is a nation of proud pioneers that know how to govern themselves.
Ronald Reagan doesn’t get so much as a single mention in the index of On Paradise Drive. He ought to file a complaint. He wus robbed.
Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.
Buy his Road to the Middle Class.
To comment on this article at American Thinker click here.
To email the author, click here.
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Knowledge
Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its
characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then,
once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Democratic Capitalism
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches... they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Conversion
“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital