In Retrospect: Making the World Safe for Hypocrisy

I like particular dead European writers for the raking light they are able to shed on the painted canvas of American illusions. (My metaphor will have meaning if the reader thinks of the grand allegory of George Washington's apotheosis in the Capitol dome or of an old Ringling Brothers circus poster.) Yet I've also had the privilege to meet and know living Europeans, ones born before World War II, who grew up in highly traditional societies and who possess firsthand experience of totalitarianism—intellectuals but not nihilists, inoculated against leftism by painful encounters with ideological regimes. They are not necessarily anti-American but they are critical of American naïveté, provincial narrowness, cultural shallowness, and self-absorption. They have a story to tell to the world's newest imperial power, a story that begins with America ruining Europe in the settlements to two great wars that were supposed to save it. Their story may also include a vision of a non-democratic order that is nonetheless free and just, based on truth as embodied in inherited culture rather than on skepticism and the self-cancelling of private interests pitted against each other and the unwinnable competition of fundamental beliefs where all opinions are assumed to be in the right.

Englishmen cannot provide such help; the British, who ran much of the world without ever gaining an understanding of Europe were engaged in the same work of European salvation-ruination, from the same liberal premises. Nor can leftist émigrés in the American universities be of any use; they are, in fact, the cultivated guardians of America's liberal cocoon. Driven out by Nazism, they brought the entire intellectual world of nihilism here, lock-stock-and-barrel. I say that these wiser Europeans of my preference were born before World War II, because later generations are as confused about themselves and the world as anyone else imprisoned in modern mentalities—and it can't simply be blamed on the infusion of American mass culture (the soap operas, MacDonald's, and Disneyland Paris). The fact remains that Europe did not recover spiritually from World War II. Soviet occupation devastated Eastern Europe even more, and Western Europe was a psychic hostage. (A movement towards spiritual restoration, however feeble, emerged among the Eastern European dissidents.) Two other specific factors in European decadence spring to mind: the post-war return of the leftist émigré professors to re-colonize the European universities, and the half-surrender or three-quarters surrender to modernity by the Catholic Church signified in the sacred phrase "Vatican Two." But the review below is not about Europe's problems.

In 1984 when I reviewed John Lukacs' silly book Outgrowing Democracy (republished in 2004 as A New Republic), it gave me a chance to discuss my views on American misunderstandings of social class, or at least to hint at them. America doesn't understand that it has no class system, that it only has tax brackets. Insofar as there is any stable essence to the middle class identity, or a "spirit of the middle class," America is completely a middle-class country—except that you can't have a middle class without an upper and a lower, just as you can't have a ham sandwich without two slices of bread.

And here is the point. The rulership of a ruling class is absolute, and the middle class was once excluded from rulership. The destitution of a class of poor people, who are in a sense not a class at all, but "classless," is absolute. The middle class has being only in relation to these two absolutes as a tertium quid, neither one thing nor the other, neither fish nor fowl. It comes into existence when people on the bottom want something better; the only model for anything better is the best. If you are in the middle but cannot go higher, you can either accept the upper class as your unattainable model and reverence it, or you can resent it and hope for a revolution that will abolish it. Just so, the French revolution in its original phase was a bourgeois revolution.

America does not have a class system because in this country classes are not legally defined and are not hereditary; any family can move from rags to riches to rags in three generations. There is a good deal more to class than money: ways of life, manners, historical identity or myth. But in America anything can be bought. Ah, but I must correct myself on one point: America does have a legally protected underclass, a hereditary criminal-welfare class, which contains members of all races. Were it not for its various legal protections (anti-discrimination law and welfare entitlements), one would have said that this grouping of the socially discarded or socially invisible was not a class at all, but "classless." In any event, America has no aristocracy, only financial and meritocratic and technocratic élites, and a few old families with more or less stable identities and traditions and who exert the power of snobbery—like some molten cheese atop an open-face sandwich, in which the rest of us are the ham. (Charles Murray's thesis that something like an American class system may only now be emerging merits discussion.)

One counts on older Europeans to be able to explain to Americans how a class system works. Alas, John Lukacs is too confused by his alienation—or his system of alienation—to do so. One of his problems is that he is a bourgeois triumphalist, albeit in a somewhat different way from the disciples of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz. He believes that the bourgeoisie represents the pinnacle of civilization and the human spirit: it is as much triumph as we will ever get. He points out justly that all the great anti-bourgeois writers of the Romantic age were sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie; with less justice and wisdom he declares that the remaining aristocratic families of the world are only doing what's best for them when they give up their pretensions and permit themselves to sink into the new class as into a warm bath.

Lukacs is a retired professor of history who is less a historical scholar than a litterateur offering opinions about history. He is a charming fellow who presents himself as a great cosmopolitan because that kind of figure represents his human ideal. And indeed, as a half-Jewish Hungarian sent away to a Catholic boys' school in England he is the perfect Middle-European international mystery man. The most valuable part of his work may be the direct personal witness recorded in his memoirs. He observed firsthand the things that Americans cannot learn from the ideologized versions of European history which are the American cultural standard. For example, he understands the differences between Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism; he read about those movements in newspapers of the time in a neighbor country succumbing to its own ideological strife. He faced racist anti-semitism as a baptized half-Jew, and thus knows something about the decadence of the European Right. He knows something about living in a country run by German totalitarians and their stooges one minute, and by Russian totalitarians and their stooges the next minute. He experienced life as a forced laborer and fugitive. The validity of his witness cannot be denied; he knows what he saw.

What he thinks and feels is another matter. The idealisms and paranoias that color his thinking and feeling muddle his analysis, and he is badly served by his own glibness and by his reaching for analytical concepts. I had the privilege of conversing with him over a weekend three decades ago, but it is very difficult to become the friend of someone in whom you arouse paranoia. He is afraid of conservatism and conservatives. And as I got to know him better from his writing, I found the experience without the wisdom.

Lukacs could be compared somewhat to his fellow Hungarian Catholic intellectual, the late Thomas Molnar. Both suffered under Nazi rule; while Lukacs worked as a conscript laborer for the Nazis, Molnar was imprisoned in Dachau. They were traumatized men. And both were exiles, but of a special kind. Whatever patriotism they felt, Hungary was only a province to them; idealistically they believed in some cultural center to the west where they might be more at home away from home. Lukacs was an Anglophile and Molnar a Francophile. Both found America to be a serviceable home away from home, but were never at ease with the modern way of life that makes America an ideal to the middle classes and middle-class aspirants of the whole world, with its mass entertainment culture, its consumer culture, and its culture of business and finance. Both subscribed to the Catholic distributist critique of capitalism. Both were glad to receive attention and subsidy from American intellectual conservative organizations, and both were highly critical of their patrons, privately if not publicly.

As for their differences, Molnar sympathized with the decadent European Right which Lukacs had learned to fear for its varying degrees of tolerance, sympathy, cynical support or outright complicity with Hitler. When Molnar idealized France, it was the France of an anti-democratic movement condemned by the Church, the Action Française, whose anti-semitic conspiracy theories evidently failed to repel him utterly; when Lukacs idealized England, it was for nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism, the love of fair play, and the spirit of a gentleman as one might find it displayed in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (although this is a movie Lukacs' hero Churchill hated). Both abominated the laissez-faire capitalist conservative order of the U.S., although Lukacs had already grown deep roots and enjoyed the comforts of suburban life, while it is Molnar who returned to Hungary after the fall of the Iron Curtain on a cultural mission, as if he were Solzhenitsyn returning to post-Soviet Russia, for which one must give him some credit.

An alienated man is ultimately at home nowhere in the world, and often not even in his own skin. If he is a political speculator, or what I will call a political hypercritic, then he may find peace in himself as long as he can find fault outside himself. An alienated man uses flimsy conceptual (rather than real) distinctions in order to rationalize his conflicting sentiments, and in Lukacs' case one can cite his self-identification as a reactionary, which he uses to save himself from being categorized as a conservative. Everyone can agree on the problematic nature of the term conservative; it's a simple concept only for liberals who use it as the name of a demon, a "devil term." Lukacs wants to distinguish himself as a non-leftist who loves a "bourgeois republic" with an élite class but no hereditary aristocracy, with economic prosperity but a less complex financial system, and with a democratic constitutional system where an intellectual élite discreetly manages the opinions of the people and their governors. He believes that this preference for an ideal world marks him as superior to the American intellectual conservative who trusts free markets and technological innovation and is insufficiently alarmed by the erosion of taste and meaningful discourse. Innovation is the opposite of conservation. And so, as someone who really wishes that things could be the way they used to be (at least some selected things, like hotel lobbies), who rebels at modern taste, Lukacs is a reactionary. And insofar as American conservatives are hungry for the conquest of the future, and jealously protective of their country's interests and security, they are men of bestial instincts, greedy power-worshippers, and potential Nazis.

Another flimsy conceptual arrangement important for his politico-social idealism and his critique of modern America is one between "public opinion" and "popular will." "Public opinion" is evidently a body of correct opinion generated not by but for the public, by what liberals call "public intellectuals." "Popular will" is a pool of sentiment not yet groomed and bridled by the public intellectuals, gushing from the hearts of the unwashed masses. A system whereby public men discriminate righteous from unrighteous policies and bring demagogues to heel requires a criterion for judgment that can only arise from cultural tradition and from a sense of duty in the public men as well as a respectful docility bred into the masses who are supposed to accept the discipline imposed on them. What a noble, classical ideal, with a kind of clergy of the mind (which Coleridge called "the clerisy") so closely bound to a citizen congregation so deeply schooled in the civic religion. I could not see from Outgrowing Democracy that Lukacs had any sense of where the cultural traditions and sense of civic duty needed for this system would arise and how it would be sustained. The fact that he is able to conceive such an ideal, he thinks, entitles him to launch a Frankfurt School-style conceptual analysis of the degradations of Reagan Republicanism, the demagogues promoting it and the electorate uncritically buying the goods.

His concept of a social class he calls bourgeois is appealing but problematic because of his idealization of it. The term middle class only signifies neither upper nor lower. The bourgeois are residents of a bourg (German Burg), and their capacity for urbanity and cultivation as city dwellers—whether as shopkeepers or bureaucrats—begins to lend positive content to the concept middle class. The haute bourgeoisie (to which Proust and his narrator/character "Marcel" belonged) is an upper rung of the bourgeoisie, one that begins to resemble a hereditary class because it has attained a way of life that can be protected by seemingly inexhaustible wealth and that can be perpetuated across generations with a self-conscious and self-willed family identity. The middle-class discipline of delayed gratification, solvency, thrift and commercial reputation-building then turns to a discipline of social self-maintenance, image-control, avoidance of publicity that could arouse envy, and cultivation of an ethos of civic responsibility which may involve public patronage of the arts rather than just a private indulgence in connoisseurship and acquisitiveness.

There are bourgeois echelons or rungs of the social ladder well below the haute bourgeoisie, for which the haute bourgeoisie represents a model and an ideal, just as the aristocracy serves as the model for the haute bourgeoisie. The independence of these less exalted orders is less secure; they may pass down ways of life to their children along with a successful shop or a small factory, and live in a good city flat with servants, and they may have what today we call "discretionary income." (Lukacs says his Jewish grandfather could have afforded a car with a chauffeur but didn't.) The part of the story that Lukacs does not tell is the part about social imitation and aspiration—how the the bourgeois vision of a life above the tillers of the soil comes to be conceived.

A big-city or imperial-capital bourgeoisie is Lukacs' idealized alternative to the "puritanical" middle-class and its narrow canon of "respectability" and cultural narrowness as found in Mark Twain's "Hadleyburg" or Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg" or any other caricature of Protestant, midwestern-American, small-town provincialism as depicted by middle-class literary refugees from that small-town world. For Lukacs, America is that small-town world, and conservatism is its ideology. I hasten to point out, however, that just as Lukacs has no notion of what would foster or sustain a democracy managed by virtuous intellectuals, so he has no notion of what fosters or sustains the haut bourgeois's self-willed identity. Insofar as he despises American conservatism (both the intellectual and political kinds) he holds in contempt the forces that keep the middle class in America afloat. (And for Lukacs the ultimate condemnation is to say that somebody "likes Reagan.")

In Europe, the image energizing haut bourgeois aspirations was the image of aristocracy: of a hereditary noble class whose power and security in the pre-revolutionary age were absolute, a class that continued to maintain its image after the rise of democracy by selective involvement (e.g., military service) and by withdrawal into a private society like a court in exile, one that excluded the haute bourgeoisie except for financial marriages, a last-resort solution to bankruptcy resisted for as many generations as possible until "everybody was doing it." This was the social opening for the Americans, for whom the English landed-gentry model of the citizen-planter founding fathers was of fading relevance, and for whom the London citizen-merchant model as replicated in Puritan Boston held no glamor. When the Vanderbilts and Astors had risen in America as far as they could go, Europe was the only field left for the play of their ambitions. So, during the four-decade period which Lukacs defines as America's golden age of embourgeoisment, between the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the Depression, the gilt-edged, cosmopolitan social status of the American haute bourgeoisie was certified by the fact that as many as a thousand American women in the nineteenth century had already married titled nobles. In this way they had at last become aristocrats, heirs of castles and chivalric family legends.

Perhaps it was a frivolous aspiration, exposing the middle class's social and psychic insecurity; yet it may be the frivolous side of something that also has a serious side. Insofar as the new haute bourgeoisie wanted to become an aristocracy, it sometimes wanted to take up the responsibility of governing, and not necessarily just to gain power to protect its wealth. Only a Marxist would refuse to give the bourgeois credit for anything higher. Usually, however, the intense self-involvement and privacy of this class militated against seeking political office; it was as demeaning for the polished grandson of millionaires to compete in the bear-pit of electioneering and machine politics as it would be for a full-blooded prince.

My case against Lukacs, then, is this: he wants the bourgeoisie to be the social pinnacle of an ideal republic, as though it ever were or could be a self-subsistent thing. I say that it is the presence of aristocracy, as the unattainable model, which brings out the best in the bourgeois. Aristocracy is still the upper without which there can be no middle, the absolute which gives meaning to the relative. To put it bluntly, you cannot have aristocracy without knights and chivalry, or chivalry without crusades, or titles without a royal court. How would the bourgeois ever imagine anything better without it? Otherwise there would only be Calvin's Geneva, unsmiling men in black suits, convening in councils to punish adulterers and pass death sentences against witches.

Lukacs admires his idealized bourgeoisie for its discretion, privacy and "interiority"—his suggestive word for a mood of domestic closure. True, the bourgeoisie is very self-protective and self-involved. It has no court to define its essence, so the family becomes the court. Insofar as image and continuance are threatened by the bad behavior of one's progeny, there is only the family to discipline them, not a royal court. In pre-revolutionary times the bourgeoisie learned to be discreet about its wealth as a shield generally against envy and particularly against taxation. In the post-revolutionary period, it feared expropriation by ideologically manipulated mobs, just as the aristocracy did. And it's not good for people to know too much about their bankers; one's name should never appear in the newspapers except for a christening, a wedding, or a funeral. But doesn't this privacy and private interest forbid civic involvement and responsibility in government? "Interiority" suggests withdrawal and disengagement, and whether it really is part of a proper bourgeois ideal or not, it appeals to Lukacs's taste.

"Interiority" or self-concentration or self-absorption is also the consequence of not being able to rise higher, especially evident in the Jewish bourgeoisie, for which, because of actual legal disability or merely prejudice, any rise higher was absolutely blocked. It is said that the Rothschilds only married cousins in order not to disperse their wealth, but the case might be that there were usually no other Jews socially important enough to marry, and they could not or would not marry Gentiles. This "interiority," verging on the incestuous, like the silent echo between the mirrored parlor walls of an afflicted conscience, like the mood of Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, seems to inspire in Lukacs a snobbish fascination. I do not know what Lukacs' cult of "hypocrisy" really means, although it bears relation to his pessimism about human nature and his cult of original sin as the final explanation for the twentieth century's evils. I suspect, though, that he savors the bourgeois' scruples of conscience. As the scion of merchants advances in self-indulgence, he dispenses himself from inherited "puritan" codes but must still keep up an appearance of propriety. The worldly, patronizing voice of the old European quip comes to mind about how Americans believe in lifelong marriage with hardly any mistresses. (When I met Lukacs, he twitted me for puritan impulses.) But as a reactionary he apparently prefers hypocrisy to the open poly-perversity of the sexual revolution.

Lukacs' preference for the bourgeoisie is clearly a preference against the aristocracy, much like the bourgeois triumphalism of the neoconservatives (whom Lukacs despises.) This is the reverse side of snobbery, in which one takes the side of the haute bourgeoisie against their betters in a hypocritical embrace of democracy, over which they still expect to preside as a social élite. It brings to mind Dr Johnson's old saying, " your levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves..." Lukacs' general snobbery also appears in his inelegantly expressed distaste for arrivistes in diplomatic circles (Kissinger) and his preference for Boston brahmins and descendants of Hudson Valley patroons. (I suspect that he likes Southern planters.) And, like Kennan and Huntington, he does not relish a future in which America is flooded with non-Anglo immigrant citizens. Lukacs knows that, among people he despises, the intellectuals—the academic rabble who suffer from a fundamentally "false relation to life" in his pseudo-Frankfurt analysis, and who are also his fellow critics of small-town America—are the sons and daughters of the middle class but have become its alienated academic refugees; after all, everyone in America is middle-class, and the grandchildren of the immigrants tend to become teachers and professors. But he does not see these refugees from their own class as a manifestaton of insecurity and self-loathing within the class itself, lurking behind its discreet charm. He cannot see that they are acting out the bourgeoisie's internal contradictions.

Irving Kristol was very good at explaining how the middle class raises itself from the lower orders through discipline, how its virtues are fundamental to the growth and prosperity of modern societies. He understood how academics and artistic types come to express their contempt for the society from which they originate. He was a political and social theorist. Lukacs expresses admiration for José Ortega y Gassett, the early 20th-century Spanish philosopher with 19th-century liberal views, a pro-republican anti-statist who believed in a natural élite that would sustain democracy and who castigated the emerging "mass man" of his time who experienced freedom as an unwanted burden. But Lukacs is not a theorist and cannot apply Ortega to the middle-class problem. All he has to offer is his taste, his aesthetic preference for a lost world of taste.

It would be too demeaning simply to call Lukacs a snob and a victim of trauma. When he talks about his own life in his memoirs (Confessions of an Original Sinner and Last Rites), he records impressions and experiences that are instructive; he shows what it is like to be a man of ambiguous status who has emerged from a highly stratified society and is thrown into a largely formless society where social identity is "the art of the possible." His insecurities sharpen his perception. Alas, as one who has been patronized many times, he also knows how to patronize, and his endless patronizing of American conservatives wears on one's patience. If he were younger, he would probably be a perpetual guest on MSNBC. Perhaps it's evidence of the magnanimity of intellectual conservatives that they tried to include him—and with Russell Kirk, a friend was a friend. A Kirkian would sympathize with Lukacs' "reactionary" mood. But where does his peculiar blend of idealism and cynicism lead? If you cannot trust conservatives, and instead are relying on creeping socialism and democratic muddle to keep them and their laissez-faire and internationalist policies at bay, then you would seem to have an affection for mediocrity.

I recall an indignant young man, a Kirk protégé, who rose to Lukacs' defense—not by analyzing anything I had written, but by questioning my competence to write any review and the competence of the magazine in assigning reviews. He considered Lukacs one of his patrons in a complicated career path he had designed for himself that would someday turn him into a new William F. Buckley. This project failed, if only because there could only be one Buckley, if only because the historic opening into national consciousness for a media-cultivated persona like Buckley's was already passing away in his own lifetime, which is to say that he somewhat outlived his own importance. The young man was ambitious, and ambition is often irritating because of its cynicism, which says, "most of the high offices go to mediocrities, so why shouldn't I be one of them?" Ambition is so bourgeois.

I imagine that the neoconservatives, the principal school of bourgeois triumphalists, were angry with Lukacs for not loving the bourgeoisie in precisely their way; but they already despised him for his views on the Soviet Union as a harmless, post-ideological teddy bear leaking its stuffing, unjustly antagonized by western nationalists. Other conservative reviewers of his book, some of them neocons, were unable to make heads or tails of my theoretization of classes, and one surly fellow even asked, "What the hell was that about?" Another neoconservative political aspirant with an interest in this review had been Lukacs' unwitting patron: the drugstore magnate who set up a foundation to sponsor scholarly right-wing authors, but lost control, so that all the grants ended up going to liberals. The magnate could have been disappointed that I didn't slam Lukacs harder.

A critique of Lukacs' critique of Reagan's Soviet policy would simply be an analysis of George Kennan's. I leave that to others. Lukacs' critique of America has not mattered to very many readers and in future will matter to none. I am only glad that Outgrowing Democracy gave me an opportunity to ruminate on the perpetual middle-class identity crisis.

TJJ's Review Essay on OUTGROWING DEMOCRACY by John Lukacs

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, MAY 1984, Vol. 17, No. 5, pp. 15-18. Copyright 1984 by the Alternative Educational Foundation.

JOHN LUKACS
OUTGROWS CONSERVATISM
When Dr. Lukacs appears to be right about something, it may only be a coincidence.

By T. John Jamieson

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

In 1958 a gang in Harlem called themselves
"Conservatives."—Outgrowing Democracy, p. 336.

MR. LUKACS: But you said just a moment
ago that I'm exceedingly quaint.
MR. BUCKLEY: No, I'm saying that
sometimes you strike me as saying things
because it's quaint to say those things, or
else you are attaching to them a meaning
that is not readily communicated.
—"Firing Line," January 18, 1982.

The wanting appreciation of tradition
among American conservatives was evident
not only among some of their politicians
but also among their star intellectuals. Bill
Buckley was an unquestioning admirer of
Secret Agents, of computerism and nuclear
technology; Tom Wolfe of fast-flying and
fast-living pilots; the two twentieth-century
heroes of Hugh Kenner were Ezra Pound
and Buckminster Fuller. Jeffrey Hart, the
chief editor of National Review, wrote in
1982 that American conservatism
amounted to American modernism: that
the progress of technology, the breaking
away of modern literature and modern art
from all traditional forms, and the new
loosening of the family and sexual mores
were matters that American conservatives
should welcome, indeed, that they should
espouse.
—Outgrowing Democracy, p. 339.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

You may now add John Lukacs to the ranks of George Will, Peter Viereck, and all those who challenge the right of a certain President, a certain political party, and a certain journal of opinion to call themselves "conservative." The January 1984 issue of Harper's carried an essay by Lukacs, "The American Conservatives," ("where they came from and where they are going"), in which he quibbles over whether the word "conservative" is ancient or English or relevant to American traditions, failing to reflect on the fact that in 1980 there was nothing in America for a conservative to conserve, just as in 1815 there had been nothing in France for the original conservateurs to conserve either. He laboriously searches, in this essay, for contradictions and paradoxes in the nature of the pre-1945 American isolationism that after 1945 became anti-Communist internationalism, and comes up with many interesting accusations—and denunciations:

Their view of the world and their consequent
advocacies of foreign policies were
lamentable, since their view of the Soviet
Union as the focus of a gigantic atheistic
conspiracy and the source of every possible
evil in the world was as unrealistic,
unhistorical, ideological, and illusory as the
pro-Soviet illusions of the former liberals
and progressives had been.

In the course of carefully arranging his paradoxes, Lukacs reasons by analogy, comparing the apparent contradiction between domestic and foreign policy in American conservatism to a similarly apparent contradiction in that of late Russian Czarism; at one point he concludes that the Stalin regime represented the triumph of "neo-Slavophilism." Now Dr. Lukacs is the most charming of men, but the sheer love of perversity evident in this statement rates a public flogging. . . . As for his animadversions on doctrines held by Professor Jeffrey Hart, they derive in part from a reading of Dr. Hart's 1981 piece, "An Intelligent Woman's Guide to Modern American Conservatism," which recommended Rousseau, Hegel, and Nietzsche as authorities for a new American rightist ideology. Such a concept is not representative but anomalous in American conservatism.

The article concludes with the judgment that, while American liberals want to exterminate humanity before birth (via abortion), American conservatives are content to wait until afterwards (via atomic fusion). The article is but a small section of Lukacs's new book, Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century. Alas, it is not a history at all, but a rather subjective analysis (if not a mere collection of superior attitudes) of what Lukacs perceives as cultural decadence. And it reveals a certain alienated cast of mind in the often crabbed and cranky prose that would be better suited to a tract on Distributism.

For those not acquainted with the aberrant historic forms of rightist politics, Distributism was the anti-capitalist position of Hilaire Belloc, who advocated restoring the medieval guild system and gave tedious harangues on the evils of advertising and "usury." Though he nods to Dorothy Day's Distributist-like "Catholic Worker" movement, Lukacs is no Distributist himself, since, among other things, he is the champion of the bourgeoisie's glorious materialism. He has traveled in conservative circles for many years as a "cultural conservative," that is, as a traditionalist who deplores the modern breakdown in morals and manners and blames it upon the modern commercial republic. A Roman Catholic, he embraces the dogma of original sin, though with slight equivocation: Despite his utter contempt for Madison Avenue, he commits one of the prevarications of "packaging" when he calls for the recovery of the sense of original sin as "a rethinking of human nature and its relation to the universe." Yet Lukacs seems reluctant to accept the marketplace as the ineluctable consequence of the ineradicable human condition. He reacts to what Daniel Bell called the "cultural contradictions of capitalism," the corrosive effects of the pursuit of gain and of technological innovation upon the social fabric, with fear and disgust; and he fails to moderate this reaction while exalting his dear bourgeoisie, the class which has come into existence more or less because of capitalism. All he can say on this matter is, "One could be a bourgeois without being a capitalist, which was true of many people in the professions." This is indeed a schizophrenic procedure.

Speaking of schizophrenia, I hasten to add that the book is dedicated to George Kennan, the former ambassador to the USSR and original exponent of the Cold War's "containment doctrine" who now claims that the USSR is too preoccupied with internal problems to threaten the security of the free world, and preaches the gospel of unilateral nuclear disarmament—all the while maintaining that he has not contradicted his original position. The flip-side of Kennanism plays a very tiresome song, a theme of negative, neurotic omphaloskepsis, "America the Wretched"— the anthem of a nation too corrupt and too confused to make itself justly an influence in world politics. Especially because Lukacs seems to subscribe to the rest of Kennanism, one might conclude that the tone of bitter disillusionment in Outgrowing Democracy's description of America in the eighties signifies an intent to further the Kennan agenda—to get America out of world politics as an unworthy contender.

The thing that disgusts Lukacs the most about America is the "cult of publicity" which perpetuates a kind of verbal "inflation"—the truth-destroying magic of "public relations," the legerdemain of words and images used to alter the nature of reality in the public mind. This bitterness over popular credulity, collective amnesia, the shortening of the attention span, and the general deterioration of "consciousness" could be moderated if Dr. Lukacs would contemplate the "climate of opinion" in England in 1700. The very phrase itself, "climate of opinion," had been invented by Joseph Glanville in 1661; thus, Truth, if not already abolished, had been the object of latitudinarian indifference for 39 years. A study of Swift's Tale of a Tub, Pope's Dunciad, and Charles MacKay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds will show that the mountebanks of high and low style have always been with us, peddling universal panaceas for bodily ailments, tottering dynasties, and debile economies both public and domestic, and inciting waves of popular enthusiasm in politics or religion either by their windy oratory or by the already vastly inflated medium of print; numberless bubbles of illusion were inflated and popped in the eighteenth century, from the South Seas Bubble to the bubbles of undeserved literary reputation. In such an historical awareness lies the cure for Dr. Lukacs's alienation.

Dr. Lukacs seems bitterest about the present American Constitution which he calls "an elective monarchy"—a phrase full of associations for students of Joseph de Maistre and of Polish history. He charges that the institution has dwindled from a "popularity contest" to a "publicity contest"—and the meteoric rise of a complete phony named Gary Hartpence certainly proves his point. This only goes to show that Dr. Lukacs's title is a misnomer. America has not outgrown democracy, it is just growing into it. It is Dr. Lukacs who has outgrown conservatism.

Throughout the 400 pages of Outgrowing Democracy, Lukacs's pendulum of paradox swings unvaryingly back and forth between what he would call "historical illustrations" first of one side of a proposition and then the other. But it is often unclear whether they illustrate in an evidential or only in a pictorial way. The 400 pages contain, moreover, many thousands of unsubstantiated, unelaborated, minute generalizations, some of which are intriguing and suggestive, none of which I can safely endorse, because of their unclearness and their possible relation to a world-view I have already described as contradictory; which is to say, in short, that when Dr. Lukacs appears to be right about something, it may only be a coincidence. It would take a book of equal length to confront the issues raised by his generalizations, and to ask him what he meant by half of them, and so in the space available here I can only attempt to conjure his esprit du systeme, however divided against itself that system may be. Outgrowing Democracy, as a critique of cultural decadence, describes America's fall from grace. The state of grace Lukacs characterizes loosely as "bourgeois democracy"; the state of sin, in which we now wallow, he calls "bureaucracy," which is "post-bourgeois" and "post-democratic." This culture, he charges, has not only lost touch with reality, it has dismissed reality as an irrelevant concept.

Post-bourgeois man, the book tells us, is engaged in a mystical enterprise called the "insubstantialization of matter" (though it is also called the "spiritualization of matter" without any intention to dignify the discussion with theological overtones). In the bureaucracy, people work at "jobs" without producing anything. The advertising "industry" creates desires for products that are not needed, to be paid for with money that does not exist. "Public relations" experts manipulate "images" to create roles for persons whom society would otherwise regard as of no consequence. The media generate publicity for "issues," and public opinion polls measure this publicity's effect upon minds that are not entitled to an opinion. "Insubstantialization" may also be described as "inflation," and we are told that "monetary inflation is a consequence of the inflation of society and of the inflation of words."

Though Lukacs considers Ortega y Gasset "the greatest conservative thinker of the twentieth century," he admits that the American homo post-democraticus does not embody Ortega's "mass man"; he is, instead, an invertebrate creature better described by the cliché "organizational man." The organizational man is a materialist, but he lives in such prosperity, a prosperity based so extensively on the projection of illusions, that he has lost touch with reality even in its most basic form, the sensible one at his fingertips. In the 1950s he mistook a house in the suburbs for a home, the building of churches for religion, paper currency for money, "public image" for character, "growth" for progress, economic expansion for triumph over moral evil. In the 1960s his world of appearances came crashing down; but after a period of humiliation, degradation, and moral compromise, he was able by the late 1970s to restore enough of those lost appearances to believe that he had recovered his balance, while it was only a kind of self-willed amnesia that made him oblivious to his losses. He elected a Hollywood actor for President, who involved the nation in a "Star Wars" defense program paid for by an economic policy based on the use of mirrors. The organizational man further revealed his general lack of character by moving to a warmer climate—probably California, the zone of dementia which produced the President. He once availed himself of vicarious virtue by calling himself a liberal and now does so by calling himself a "conservative."

If Lukacs's bewilderment before the complexities of a modern economy seems childlike, then he insists that it is the child who possesses common sense in this matter. Nevertheless, if his description of the collapse of progressivist illusions during the unending hell of the sixties appears somewhat accurate, one can get it elsewhere without the bewilderment and without the bitter alienation—in Allan C. Carlson's essay last year in This World, "Foreign Policy, 'The American Way,' and the Passing of the Post-War Consensus," which juxtaposes in damning fashion the relevant public policy texts instead of making farfetched attempts at le mot juste.

The point of origin for this road of decline was a Utopian moment Lukacs calls the "Bourgeois Interlude," which began with the Columbian Exposition of 1893 and trailed off some time after the Great Depression. It was a time when America was "urban and urbane and bourgeois," a time of "amplitude and richness," when great quantities of art and artisans and intellectuals were imported from Europe, a time of sumptuous apartments high above the city streets which gave "a powerful impression of the kind of urbanity which was beyond most Europeans' dreams of avarice." The façades of Fifth Avenue in 1925 "suggest the interior riches of a bourgeois society"—

I am referring not merely to their
monumental exterior aspect but to the kind
of life in their interiors, in these apartment
houses or in the lobbies of the smart
American hotels, to their decorations and
furnishings, to the clothes of the people
who frequented them, to much of their
talk, and to the American cocktail music,
the brief melodies of which were sustained
by the intricate, melancholy, and
sophisticated harmonic structures of
Gershwin or Kern or Porter . . .

This sounds very much like a party to which I too would like to have been invited; but note the materialism of taste required to relish this scene; note also that the "sophistication" which intrigues the observer is a very vague and evanescent idea appealing to human vanity, that this idea has a market value, and that this market value in turn sustains the party, and that the psychologists of "advertising" did not design the lobby or compose the music and did not need to invent the idea of "sophistication." The scene depicts enjoyment, which relaxes discipline, and makes Marxists, Puritans, and Distributists very indignant about the "cultural contradictions of capitalism." If we prefer to place ourselves inside it rather than inside East Berlin, Cromwell's England, or the Distributist State, then we will have to reconcile ourselves to those cultural contradictions with a more subtle moral analysis than Dr. Lukacs provides.

The moral system which supported and sustained this party, in his view, was an allegedly healthy and long-entrenched hypocrisy:

. . . we may look back with a fair amount
of nostalgia to the hypocrisies of the
previous century. Hypocrisy was, after all,
the tribute that vice did pay to virtue.
Hypocrisy, therefore, could flourish only
in a world and at a time when people knew
how to distinguish between virtue and
vice . . .

The moral casuist is quite aware of this argument; however, when the bourgeois of the American Renaissance lost his grasp of moral and material realities through the very corruptions of pride and materialism, he did not exactly duplicate the depravity of a Borgia, and therein is the problem. If "the hypocrite wears a mask in public, while he pursues his inclinations in private," and the evils of "inflation" and "insubstantialization" led to a point where "the mask became the face"—that is, the "public personality" preempted the "private self"—then there must have been something more corrupting than corrupt in the bourgeois hypocrisy of Lukacs's Utopian moment. It must be that the hypocrisy of the American bourgeois, of Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt (let us keep our Babbitts straight), was not of the knowing kind that Lukacs extols. Because it is not fully conscious, it led directly to the revision of virtue; it led to liberalism and "liberation." If Lukacs thinks so highly of the bourgeoisie, it is because he does not understand it.

Lukacs's 1970 work, The Passing of the Modern Age, contained a chapter with the punning title, "The Bourgeois Interior"; in it he called for a reappraisal of the term "bourgeois," whose meaning has been nearly destroyed by the ideological rhetoric of Marxian existentialists. "Bourgeois," Lukacs said, denotes a subset of the category Middle Class, and represents the achievement of what the striving Middle Class is striving for. Lukacs also reminded us that the bourgeois practiced the minor virtues of self-discipline upon which successful entrepreneurship depends, and that the bourgeois thus became the vital economic force of the modern world. So much is true, but I believe that Lukacs has erred in his strange conclusion that the bourgeoisie represents a social ideal, and in his strange assumption that the bourgeoisie is capable of independent existence. My own study of life and letters inclines me to believe that the bourgeoisie does not represent its own ideal, that it could not exist without a class higher than itself to imitate, and that the minor virtues, though indispensable, are alone not sufficient to conserve a civilization.

But does the bourgeoisie really exist? When Lukacs praises it, he is thinking of the haute bourgeoisie, a class capable of sustaining the illusion of "sophistication"—though perhaps there is no bourgeois so petty that he cannot find a bourgeois pettier than himself. The Middle Class exists in a state of continuous mutation, eternally reinventing itself and denying its origins, standing between the classes of inherited poverty and inherited privilege; in its "bourgeois" phase, it is imitating the aristocracy, asserting itself as a proto- (or anti-) aristocracy, though curiously unable to perpetuate itself. Wherever the managerial and professional classes emerged from, they seem to lead into Bohemia and the intellectual proletariat in the next generation. Perhaps the bourgeoisie has nothing to transmit to the next generation but a tradition of denying origins.

Daniel Bell has spoken of the bourgeois "compartmentalization of life," that is, the bourgeois habit of putting politics, religion, career, social life, and domestic life into separate mental categories, logic-tight compartments. Could it be that the bourgeois is only an imitator of surfaces and never penetrates the surface of life to the essence—that he shifts from the religious mode to the social by simply adopting the gestures and appearances appropriate to each without it ever occurring to him that there is or ought to be a connection between these spheres? In contrast, consider the aristocrat as Shirley Robin Letwin's The Gentleman in Trollope presents him, a "unified self" who possesses integrity because he is psychically integrated; through the unconscious assimilation of traditional ways of thinking, the gentleman is courageous, fair, and honorable without setting out specifically to be those things.

I realize that to mention the word "aristocracy" is an insult to the nation's founding myth, but I appeal for support to all those conservatives who claim to have read Edmund Burke— who seems to have said something about "the spirit of a gentleman." At the same time I note a conspiracy of neoconservatives to blame the New Left on the influence of Henry Adams. As for Dr. Lukacs, a genially snobbish European bourgeois liberal, he seems to take the pride of a leveler in leveling down to himself by showing that aristocracies have had to make many compromises in a changing world. But because the aristocracy defines itself by remembering its history, while the bourgeoisie avoids coming to grips with itself through historical amnesia, the aristocracy has made its compromises consciously, while the bourgeoisie has either unconsciously and semi-passively adapted to change, or, realizing that it has a vested interest in change, has tried to anticipate it. In the end, the tenuous hold on reality for which Lukacs indicts "post-bourgeois" American society would then only be intrinsic to its Middle Class nature.

Actually the European bourgeoisie is the one that Lukacs finds charming; but remember that it had an aristocracy close at hand to imitate. The vast width of the Atlantic Ocean did not prevent this aristocracy from serving as a pattern also for the American patrician class of the "Bourgeois Interlude" that Lukacs also finds charming: Consider that what Tom Wolfe calls our "colonial complex" was then at its height. America could not provide sufficient scope for the ambitions of its patricians; yet because the desire to assimilate succeeded the desire to imitate, Consuelo Vanderbilt was married off to the Duke of Marlborough, and Anna Gould was unhappily though briefly yoked to Count Boni de Castellane. In 1899, William Waldorf Astor, who had served in the State Senate of New York, renounced his American citizenship, saying, "America is good enough for any man who has to make a livelihood, though why travelled people of independent means should remain there more than a week is not readily to be comprehended." In 1917 he became the first Viscount Astor.

Nevertheless Lukacs does believe that it is the hereditary right of certain Easterners with three names and a Roman numeral thereafter to conduct our foreign policy. He resents the rise of ambitious wogs in this field, complaining in particular of the dependence of Republican Presidents upon "the global advice of the globular Kissinger"—an insult as entertaining and instructive as d'Annunzio's to Wilson: the old man whose mouth is full of false promises and false teeth.

Outgrowing Democracy abounds with much of the same rhetorical triviality, adding up to a profound lack of seriousness in the author. He revels in his disdain of the "Hollywood actor" President: But does he attribute to Reagan a corrupt or simply frivolous character because the man was once an actor, or is the politician's cinematic past only a symbol of something? Moreover, Lukacs uses large words for small matters, characterizing the shortening of the modern American's attention span as a decrease in "private integrity," and calling the "cult of publicity" a source of "intellectual corruption." I would reserve the phrase "intellectual corruption" for the activity of the Soviet Union's Western apologists, and no doubt the wishful thinking of Kennanism is somewhat touched by this corruption.

One must complain as well of the pretense of historical fact ("A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century") and also of the pretense of common sense uncomplicated by philosophy. Lukacs shamelessly uses the antiquated charge of "ideologizing" against the conservatives, insisting that politics can proceed without principles, claiming that Johnson and Burke maintained "the commonsense argument against abstract reasoning." But that is not the whole truth. Contrary to a great deal of bad scholarship, it is quite possible, in retrospect, to articulate for those two thinkers the metaphysical principles to which they faithfully adhered, principles that describe a realm of concrete spiritual reality though it can be described only in abstract terms. Lukacs presumes, as a historian, that his possession of hard historical fact renders philosophy irrelevant.

As the theorist of "historical consciousness," Lukacs employs a peculiar historiographic technique which involves contrasting what people thought was happening in a given time and place with what we now know was actually happening. Yet there may be a peculiar temptation to the historian's vanity implicit in this technique—the temptation to confuse the superiority of historical hindsight with moral superiority.

"That vanity is much more complicated than greed is something that Dr. Johnson knew and expressed very well, while Adam Smith did not," Lukacs tells us. Yes, Johnson did insist that vanity is a pervasive force in human behavior; and in trying to account for the historian's lapses we might in milder fashion apply the Great Moralist's words for some great offenders against decency: "Truth will not afford sufficient food for their vanity, so they have betaken themselves to error. Truth, Sir, is a cow which will yield such people no more milk, and so they are gone to milk the bull."

EPILOGUE: Lukacs Twenty Years Later

IN the autumn of 2003, Lukacs prepared a twenty-page post-script for the republication of Outgrowing Democracy under a new title, A New Republic. The presidency of the "dwarf" G. W. Bush gave him the opportunity to proclaim anew his disgust with Republicans, and to delineate a further track of degeneration from Reagan to the dwarf.

Republican governance was still based on projected illusions—with the implication that as time went on it took even less skill to fool the "rubes." Example? In comparison with the consummate professional actor Ronald Reagan, who knew how to give the perfect informal salute to his troops, Bush was performing in a military amateur theatrical. As for the motives behind the Iraq and Afghan wars themselves, Lukacs offers an odd-seeming analysis, its syllogistic expression roughly proceeding as follows: the Republican party is a populist party; whatever it does, it does for a base appeal to popular sentiment; wars make presidents popular; therefore the Republican party went to war. (It seems he doesn't take the Islamist threat any more seriously than he took the Soviet threat.)

Nevertheless, in his disgust, Lukacs also attacks Democrats: liberals are cowards, he says, for not resisting the nationalist populism of the Republicans, out of fear they will seem unpatriotically un-nationalistic. He proceeds to a complete condemnation of both sides, as falsely so-called "conservatives" and falsely so-called "liberals," always nesting the terms in quotation marks. Neither faction lives up to the dictionary definition of its respective self-chosen title. After taking Americans generally to task for hypocritical attitudes towards the "environment"—a ridiculous term for what he prefers to call Nature—he delivers the coda of his symphony:

"So many 'conservatives' and 'liberals' were split-minded, representing a political or ideological schizophrenia. So many 'conservatives' were uninterested in conservation; their professed love of their country went along with their indifference of [sic] preserving the land: they may have been (at least in public) defenders of 'family values,' opponents of abortion, but at the same time proponents of technological 'progress,' including the manufacture and use of American weapons of the most destructive kind. So many 'liberals,' doctrinaire proponents of human dignity, were at the same time proponents of free and easy abortions or even of euthanasia; they believed in the benefits of more and more schooling, including sex 'education,' while at the same time favoring the legalization and the public approval of every kind of sexual practice. 'Conservatives,' believing in 'private enterprise' rather than in privacy; 'liberals' in civil and public 'rights' rather than in personal responsibility; 'conservatives' in 'Americanism' at the expense of knowing much of the world and its history; 'liberals' in internationalism and 'multiculturalism' while understanding little or nothing about other peoples; 'conservatives' favoring every kind of mechanical advance instead of protecting traditions and the world of nature; 'liberals' believing in breaking off from the past instead of recognizing perennial human nature; 'conservatives' loving liberty less than hating liberals; 'liberals' fearing conservatives more than loving conservation—such a confusion will not long endure, not to speak of the condition that, latest by the end of the American second century, the 'conservative' and 'liberal' designations were losing most of their meaning." (p. 422)

The appeal to the dictionary reminds me of summer interns at a liberal political magazine who get their one big chance to write an article and use it to castigate conservatives for not "conserving" a liberal status quo. The attempt at wordplay (conservative-conservation, private-privacy) is not only sophomoric but irritating in a paragraph of unachieved, and indeed misconceived, parallelisms. In fact, the writing everywhere expresses Lukacs' huge aspirations towards cleverness, wit, and polish, and everywhere it crashes. It's unfinished and unedited, as though Lukacs had fallen deeper into self-indulgence or as though his publishers never expected the book to be read and would not invest in editorial services. A reader might half-sympathize with the sentiments the writer is trying to express, but this reader should be suspicious of his own generous attempts to help out the writer by imagining the connections, definitions, and full expression that are lacking. The writer may not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

This kind of bad writing also defaces his 1990 memoir Confessions of an Original Sinner. I bring up that book here because of the substance it lends (a little, at least) to his "conservative" vs. "reactionary" distinction, which originates in his attempt to understand the difference between the men of the right who did or did not align with Hitler. The "reactionaries" are the heroic few: Churchill, who was the last leader standing with any integrity after Chamberlain's appeasement policy failed and the Cliveden set's Nazi sympathies were discredited; Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators; Bernanos, who was a believing Catholic, unlike Maurras and Barrès who mythologized Catholicism for political myth and, so to speak, prepared the French right for Vichy. This list should include Eric Voegelin. They are indeed admirable men. So Lukacs' "reactionaries" were the men of conscience, the odd men out, who did not temporize for the sake of mere anti-communism, and fought the good fight and won or strove and suffered unto death. Lukacs thinks they tended to have some kind of living religious faith. And the conservatives? If Lukacs calls you a conservative today, he means you are just the type that would have supported Hitler. (To him we are all Pat Buchanan.) Lukacs' "reactionaries" are examples of ethical development, while his "conservatives" are cases of ethical atrophy or decline, self-seekers or corner-cutters. And remember, communism was never a genuine threat to anybody, the way Nazism was...

In the new epilogue to Outgrowing Democracy, Lukacs' general contradictoriness still abounds. On the one hand he loves the material comforts of the prosperous bourgeois "surface of life" (a phrase I first heard, expressing the same meaning, as uttered by Robert Nathan); on the other hand he laments the greed that makes la dolce vita possible, the greed that trusts in highly conceptual systems of investment that are beyond the comprehension of anyone but professional mathematicians and thus, as wholly intangible entities, must be taken on faith— the greed that also blinds the supposedly nature-loving Americans to their hypocritical treatment of land and water. His disapproval of American provincialism, ignorance of the world outside America's borders, and the apparent decline of American education are consistent, however, with a general hatred of mass culture and a snobbish disapproval of mass media where the hot image triumphs over the cool word. He is unafraid to be taken for a Luddite and a stick in the mud, and proud of himself for being a man of common sense who believes in gold coins and bank pass-books rather than paper money and mutual funds. He must feel vindicated by the Bush-Obama financial collapse. The Credit Default Swap disaster is proof that something is fundamentally wrong, but what? Is it Wall Street or is it capitalism? A historian should see that the thing that is wrong is the same thing that has been wrong at least as far back as the South Sea Bubble of 1720: financiers are no better than they should be and always need careful regulation. Men are too prone to believe in their symbols and counters.

As for his disapproval of declining American education, why does this collegiate educator offer no serious analysis? A man of culture should care a little more to explain how cultural destruction is a macrocosmic problem, in relation to which schools are the microcosm. He might admit, where liberals can't, that the breakdown of discipline and "work ethic" in schools has everything to do with the breakdown of the family; he might decry the education establishment's absurd attitude that teachers simply need to be paid more, that we must simply erect more costly buildings, and that the Federal Department of Education needs more bureaucratic power and programs to administer—as though these things would make up for the perceived decline of American character which manifests itself in America's children. But there are unrealistic and impossible expectations too: is not the "inflation" of college grades and degrees consistent with the inflation of college systems and college population? How can universities—which have always been élite institutions—magically transform the masses into an élite?

This is precisely the vulnerable point where he would be entitled to puncture American self-illusions and optimism. The assumption that the mass is infinitely educable is the part of the general assumption of infinite and inevitable progress (the heart of liberalism) which he wants to debunk. And yet he shares in it, to the extent that he believes in bourgeois democracy and hence in a society that forces everyone into conformity with a bourgeois mode of life. The "culture" of bourgeois society is a cult of success; the "culture" of the lower orders may be judged a cult of failure, resting on indiscipline and untimely self-indulgence. It's the kind of intolerance or confusion in the face of difference that leads to a "war on poverty" waged by liberal do-gooders or the "war on the poor" with which liberals charge conservatives. (And I am a critic of the welfare state as much as anyone, but this is indeed a war on the poor if one promotes free abortion and contraception as a eugenic solution to the underclass.)

The complexities of these issues may be beyond Lukacs' competence, but he takes responsibility for dealing with them when launching his broad attack on American political and social attitudes. Apparently he is no Charles Murray, who in Coming Apart argues that a newly rising haute bourgeoisie is completely indifferent to the moral collapse of those underneath, and does not care to preach on the value of its basic disciplines to anyone else. However much Murray may be a bourgeois triumphalist by taste and sentiment, he makes a practical argument that the growing class division (if that's what it is) is changing the American political system in undesirable ways.

I must add that the great historian of "historical consciousness" ought to be conscious of a cultural information explosion which also stymies contemporary educators. A curriculum has finite capacity. With the ongoing deterioration of cultural consensus, there is no center and no standard from which to determine what is essential to the curriculum. For me the most immediate concrete example of this decentralization leading to decadence would be the death of the concept of 'canon' in the teaching of literature. The mind rebels when considering the problem of teaching history from multiple ideological "points of view" for the respective legally defined and privileged minorities—an expansion and diffusion as well as trivialization. The decentralized and collapsed curriculum of America's schools is an immediate manifestation of a decentralized and collapsed American culture. Lukacs is enough of a snob and stick in the mud to want education the old way, but I don't see him mounting any defense of it against liberal pluralism. Maybe liberal pluralism is his defense against the Jingos.

There is one hypothesis in the new epilogue worth considering. Lukacs summarizes the course of nineteenth-century European mass politics as an intensifying polarization between nationalists on the right and socialists on the left. (The Fascists and Nazis tried to defeat communism by squaring the circle and confecting an ideology of nationalistic socialism.) His hypothesis is that this European polarization has come to America at last in the late twentieth century, with the Republicans as the nationalist party and the Democrats as the socialist party. Because he deplores nationalism and fears it, this development is to him a loss of American essence (and innocence?) and the loss of a future for utopian bourgeois democracy. In a way, I find it a reason for hope, which is not the same as optimism.

As economic advancement is no longer perceived as inevitable for the mass of Americans, and as Americans find themselves objects of utter hatred and targets for total annihilation by third-world religious fanatics, their mood has become less generous towards the world and towards the legally privileged poor of their own country. And in this way America is becoming less the "city on a hill" and more a mere country like other mere countries, concerned about its own survival and immediate interests and creepingly aware of the possibility of genuine failure and its finality. This means that reality is asserting itself against America's millennial illusions.

America's new bitterness is not quite like "Old Europe's," which is a bitterness about being overrun several times in recent centuries by enemies one must still live next door to—a bitterness which resolves, to borrow Unamuno's concept, into the "tragic sense of life." That essentially pagan "sense" which can also be the mood of Christian doubt in a dire phase, may be the attitude of a peasant, a pagan under the skin, who admits that his hereditary feud with neighbors of another blood or faith will never be settled except by his own side's permanent defeat; or it may be the attitude of an agnostic, post-Christian conservative thinker, for whom Western civilization is the same as Western art, and who foresees an impending collapse for Europe resembling the fall of Constantinople, when the Cathedral of the Holy Wisdom was turned to a mosque and all the images defaced or destroyed. It could also be the mood of a more-or-less orthodox American Christian who suddenly realizes that he has taken his country's founding myths for granted all his life, confusing the destiny of the human race with the putative "destiny" of his own country, just as Pelagius confused the destiny of Christianity with that of the Roman Empire. It could be the first step in taking to heart the message of St Augustine. It would mean accepting mortality and finitude: like individuals, nations can die, even America. It would mean accepting that other countries can have an ethical life, even if they are not modeled on America, an ethical life that America has sometimes transgressed against.

I am not recommending the "tragic sense of life" as a permanent philosophy, but rather as a mood through which one must pass before there can be anything more sane and sensible. Beware, however, that America is a Protestant country, and Protestantism cannot bear with anything pagan. Catholicism understands that the pagan is the natural, and that the salvation story is about how God rebuilds the supernatural upon the fallen natural. The loss of faith in liberal Protestantism could be the beginning of wisdom, although it has generally been a hazard: the usual course of of the liberal spirit, when experiencing disillusion with America-as-messiah-nation, is to re-image America as a demonic force. This was the course of the New Left in the 1960's, which could not conceive of America as a mere nation among other mere nations, one sometimes transgressing against the ethical life of other nations, but as an ideological anti-Christ. (Meanwhile, for the patriotic fundamentalist, if America is no longer God's right hand, it must mean the end of the world.)

America is culturally European; it was a European project ever since 1492. So there must be some point where this concept from a European thinker, the "tragic sense," begins to have relevance, even though we have no peasants, no basilicas, no deep bitterness on the scale of "Old Europe." One could say that America's national "mission" was to escape the tragic. And indeed, despite the habitual use of the word "tragic" in news accounts, America has faced no genuinely national tragedy, only particular disappointments with deep but private wreckage. According to its hegemonic official culture, the American Civil War had a happy ending, nothing but pure vindication, even if people did die; inasmuch as the Southern way of life was destroyed, it was only the destruction of a private interest built on injustice. So tragedy remains alike beyond the ken of the Yankees who won the war and of Confederates who only keep alive a cult of resentment against Yankee interference. And so on, with the rest of American history. The suffering of the patriot army at Valley Forge was only a sacrifice to obtain national glory; it was not tragic. The evil that was done to African slaves through slavery or to American Indians through extermination and forced containment does not fit into a "tragic" interpretation of history because the victims were beyond the cultural sphere of the perpetrators and not perceived as human; when at last they were perceived as human, their descendants were given a new place in the myth of progress and a share in its optimism. So if there ever is an American "tragic sense," it will be quite a new thing.

For now there is bitterness about costly wars for international order (the national "mission" internationalized, dedicated to the abolition of tragedy) in which nothing was won; but that bitterness is only about failed enterprises in a country that is not supposed to experience failure. There is no common pain running through all orders of society. There is only fear of being "downsized" as a super-power, and no one sees the cause as resting in our stars or ourselves or any tragic flaw but rather in the ambition and greed of specific bad actors of politics and business. Particular modes of disillusionment are now current. Conservatives, who can no longer believe in the open invitation issued to the world's "wretched refuse" by the gnostic Green Goddess of Enlightenment in New York harbor, will tend to devolve into unthinking nativists, cynically accepting that life is no more than Hobbesian strife or Darwinian competition. Liberals, who believed in a more equitable distribution of an ever expanding economic pie, are settling for the shared socialist misery of a shrinking pie, divided under the authority not only of an ever larger and more powerful bureaucratic state, but of an international environmentalist dictatorship—an alternative to the untidy Hobbesian-Darwinian scramble, a international order in which the sovereign super-state claims a right of transgression against the ethical life of nations, a monopolistic right.

So there is still no tragedy, only gloom, and no wisdom—a downsizing of the American dream, but not yet an awakening from the dream, which could itself be tragic. It could also be risky. This is where I find hope, which is not the same as optimism. My hope rests in the destruction of an ideology of optimism.

The American founding myth is in danger, and while more dangerous ideological myths could replace it, a modern republic would be better off having no myth at all than something "hoked up" by demagogues and presumptuous pundits (such as William Kristol's myth of "national greatness"). Character would be better than myth. The only true ground for character would be belief in the nature and destiny of the human person. And the only ground for that belief is the life of the spirit.

In a post-mythical America, national identity would be based on history: the history of a mythical covenant that was outgrown, perhaps also on a collective act of repentance—for the times when the national "mission" only added to the sum of human misery, especially when worthy allies were betrayed (even when they should never have been allies, because we should not have involved ourselves in their struggles), and especially when we accepted villains as our allies. Repentance cannot salvage the myth, like a declaration of bankruptcy leading to corporate reorganization. Repentance only makes a life after sin possible. As an episode in the life of the spirit it depends on grace.

Flawed and mediocre thinkers often make highly illuminating case study subjects. Nevertheless, at this point I declare the Lukacs file closed.