Jewish World Review Nov. 2, 2006 / 11 Mar-Cheshvan 5767

Where is America going?

By James Lileks

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | It's just a midterm election. It's not the end of the world. That comes later, if the wrong side wins.

Or not. Depends. Much of the world's fate is out of the hands of Congress, believe it or not. If Republicans keep the House of Representatives, you won't see newly energized congressmen leading a secret team to destroy Iranian nukes. If the Democrats win, it's doubtful al-Qaida will melt away. (A 25-seat majority? We had expected twice that! All is lost!)

The Democrats could spend two fruitful, productive years trying to impeach the president and cut off funding to the troops. A Republican majority could spent 24 months spending, dithering, blathering and back-slapping. And 2008 will roll around with the same passions, the same divisions and the same big question:

Where are we going, exactly?

Every era asks the same question in the same fretful spirit. Even the golden ages that now seem to brim with rude gusto had their doubts. Postwar America, for example, looks full of chest-thumping brio from the distance of 60 years: We beat Hitler! Let's all buy dishwashers! But the Red Threat loomed abroad, and there was a growing suspicion that Negroes would no longer be content with "porter" held out as the highest job to which they might aspire.

Pick any era, and you'll find doubt and worry about the world we leave to our children — if it's not women demanding the right to vote and smoke, it's perpetual stagflation and global cooling.

Somehow we muddle through. The muddling seems tougher now because of those Deep National Divisions you hear about daily, like Coke vs. Pepsi. Mutual distrust has never been greater. The left believes the right would build Heathen Conversion Processing Centers in every state if it could. The right believes the left wants to declare the Boy Scouts a hate group if they don't offer a merit badge for presiding over a gay marriage.

Boil it all down, though, and you get two different views of the future that differ from the sort of disputation we've had before. One is based in the virtues America held in the past: hard-workin', church-goin', gummint outta my hair. The other is based in the virtues Europe displays today: the warm bath of socialism, the bromides of multiculturalism, the distaste for nationalism, and an icky-icky revulsion toward landing a fist on the jaw of the barbarians.

If the left gains power again, it had best seek its roots in the virtues the right has professed, because the example the left loves fares poorly. The end result of European multiculturalism is the burned bus in a Paris suburb; the end result of European socialism is structural unemployment, the dole, and the belief that an eight-week vacation walking around a Spanish beach in a Speedo is a natural right of man; the end result of European secularism is empty churches, shrinking populations and the sincere belief that the culture of resurgent Islam can be mollified by writing a check and assuming the fetal position.

The end result of European experience with war is a defense apparatus that couldn't fight Operation Paper Bag; the end result of European nationalism is the belief that bureaucrats in Belgium must be vested with the power to regulate cheese. It's quite lovely, except when it has to defend itself or stand for something.

The end result is a population that regards the theoretical possibility of polar bears dropping through thin ice as a greater threat to humanism than an Iranian bomb dropping on Tel Aviv. If the EU decreed that for the sake of Gaia the living Earth, crematoria should be used to decrease the surplus population, they wouldn't have to shove people on the trains; millions of enervated Europeans would clamber aboard as volunteers. Save the bears!

It takes concerted effort over time to reshape a culture, and in this sense we're way behind. One midterm election won't change the world. As Europe has shown us, it takes 40 years to sap a culture of its strength and self-confidence. On the other hand, we have their good example; we could probably cut that down to 20.