Jun 13 2008
Noonan’s Brave New World
Here’s what Peggy Noonan wrote today in the Wall Street Journal in an Op-ed piece, Brave New World?:
But 2008 will also prove in part to be a decisive political contest between the Old America and the New America. Between the thing we were, and the thing we have been becoming for 40 years or so. (I’m not referring here to age. Some young Americans have Old America heads and souls; some old people are all for the New.)
Mr. McCain is the Old America, of course; Mr. Obama the New.
* * *
Roughly, broadly:
In the Old America, love of country was natural. You breathed it in. You either loved it or knew you should.
In the New America, love of country is a decision. It’s one you make after weighing the pros and cons. What you breathe in is skepticism and a heightened appreciation of the global view.
Old America: Tradition is a guide in human affairs. New America: Tradition is a challenge, a barrier, or a lovely antique.
The Old America had big families. You married and had children. Life happened to you. You didn’t decide, it decided. Now it’s all on you. Old America, when life didn’t work out: “Luck of the draw!” New America when life doesn’t work: “I made bad choices!” Old America: “I had faith, and trust.” New America: “You had limited autonomy!”
Old America: “We’ve been here three generations.” New America: “You’re still here?”
Old America: We have to have a government, but that doesn’t mean I have to love it. New America: We have to have a government and I am desperate to love it. Old America: Politics is a duty. New America: Politics is life.
The Old America: Religion is good. The New America: Religion is problematic. The Old: Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. The New: I’ll sue.
While I think her description is accurate to some degree of the Old and the New America, I think she’s presented an inaccurate dichotomy. Indeed, we are looking down at a fork in the road, but it is not simply a matter of change in modalities.
You don’t simply change from the Old America to the New America. You have to actively reject the Old America, send it crashing down for the New America to exist. Perhaps “crashing down” is too dramatic a phrase. Gradual legislation and young indoctrination is more accurate. And it’s been a progressive slide for more than 40 years.
I am an immigrant to America, and I most definitely fall on the side of the “Old America”.
“Old America.”
The term suggests that the ideals that created and molded America are somehow antiquated in a modern technological environment. These ideals, however, DO NOT CHANGE in the so-called “New America” she present here. The “New America” exists, such as it were, only as an anti-”Old America”. That is, the “New America’s” beliefs and values are adversarial to the values of the “Old America”.
Should they succeed in toppling the America that created all the wealth and freedom and prosperity of this entire country, the “New America” will not be America at all; certainly not the one I fell in love with. Instead, it will be a sub-sovereign entity, answerable to the world at large, perhaps the U.N. or Europe, and not to its own people.
She wrote that the “New America” prizes “sacrifice”? What she described is not sacrifice; it is cold, calculated ambition and greed, for you can’t manipulate events for your own personal gain and aspiration and call it “sacrifice”. I think it is an accurate description of the “New America” values, and it’s even accurate that they would even call naked greed personal sacrifice.
Such is the effrontery of this brave new world that they would call grasping after power noble.