The truth of what has happened to America, revisited

This is a particularly grim time for conservatives, and it reminds me of another grim time, the election controversy in November and December 2000, when it seemed as if the Democrats were ready to split the country apart in order to have their way—their way being the Collective Will of the People, which somehow the actual votes of actual people did not reflect. Here is my reply to a reader who wrote to me in that season expressing despair about the future.

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Hannon writes:

That was a powerful letter you wrote to that young man. I thought it was well-balanced and not too grim and just the jolt that a lot of folks need to hear, if only to articulate what they know in their heart but cannot express in words. I would so like to know what effect it may have had on his outlook on things. Several passages stood out for me, especially this:

“Once again, it all boils down to themselves and their personal sense of well-being, not to any commitment to a larger civilization.”

This hedonism can obviously open the door to the acceptance of behavior or trends that fall below (former) thresholds of decency. But can any society expect more than a slim number of its constituents to express altruistic concern for matters beyond the local and personal? This seems to be a general truth, that it has always been a small group of defenders of the faith—or, alternatively, a small number of attackers of the faith—that shape the future of their member groups at pivotal periods. I like to think that, with the relatively inert middle populations, we will not be subsumed by the latter and can rally around the former. But it is clear that business as usual is not socially sustainable.

Would you write the same letter today?

LA replies:

I think he thanked me for the latter, but other than that did not reply again, so I don’t know what effect it had on him.

I think what I express in that letter I’ve been expressing pretty consistently in the years since.

I like your idea that ultimately it’s not about changing everyone; it’s about changing the relatively small elite that run things and set the notion of what is acceptable and unacceptable.

Bill writes from England:

“People haven’t recognized the evil because they are too damned comfortable with their lives and themselves; thus it is only something really awful that can wake them up.”

Here in England, we have just held our local elections and mayoral election for the City of London. The British people have rejected New Labour (Liberalism) en mass, meltdown, end of New Labour project and so on, state the press.

IMO, it is no coincidence that these elections have coincided with stark, dark economic storm clouds that are threatening our very way of life—capitalism. The message is, the good times are over, the dream is over—people are waking up (to reality).

These perceptions consist of the credit crunch, the energy crisis and mass immigration accompanied by a whole raft of seemingly intractable social trends. In short, the veil is slowly being raised from the absurdity of limitless growth, so that even the obtuse can see it. The people of Britain have not consciously arrived at this conversion, in fact I would say it is, at this stage subliminal (cost of food, cost of petrol, raging crime, vulgar lifestyle—you name it). In short the latent good people of Britain are expressing in these elections their revulsion at what their lives under liberalism has become.

I started this letter with your quote from the titled piece, which I again repeat. “People haven’t recognized the evil because they are too damned comfortable with their lives and themselves; thus it is only something really awful that can wake them up.”

Again, IMO, in England, this moment has arrived.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 27, 2008 11:44 PM | Send