Chilton Williamson, Jr.

G.K. Chesterton observed after his return to England from a lecture tour in the United States that America is a nation with the soul of a church. That is hardly surprising, the northernmost of the original thirteen colonies having been established by a fervently religious sect. All religions are exhortative by nature, none more so than the sectarian ones which have a solid history of being noisier in this respect than the established churches, partly, I suppose, because one encourages the burning of witches in louder tones than one solicits a bigger collection plate for the relief of the victims of territorial rebellion in Ethiopia. It is true that the first generation of Puritans in Massachusetts were a more dignified lot than many of their successors.

A few philosophers since ancient Greece have been wise, scarcely any humble. None at all, to my knowledge, has had the hubris — or maybe courage — to tackle the foremost challenge in political philosophy facing Western democracies today: how to achieve a demotic political system with an elite culture resting on top of the popular one, and the subordinate problem of how to prevent bad culture from driving out good, or making it impossible. Not even Tocqueville addressed the problem, which shows what a wise man the aristocratic Frenchman truly was.

Future historians will marvel, if history is not abolished and historians themselves canceled — or worse — before then, how so many Americans at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st came so suddenly and with apparent certainty to believe in such human and scientific impossibilities as homosexual marriage and the multiplication of the two biological sexes into a unlimited number of them; the ability as if by magic to transform a man into a woman and a woman into a man, and for a man to give birth to a baby; the possibility for Homo sapiens to exert direct control over the terrestrial climate, as if the earth were a suite in a luxury hotel; and other manifest absurdities.

The English language as written today is often nearly incomprehensible on first reading, and as spoken almost unintelligible and unpleasant to the point where the civilized listener disengages himself in frustration and disgust from the speaker and his speech. The problem in the first instance is the readiness of people who know better to embrace demotic usage in semi-formal literary venues, such as respectable journalism; the second, the bizarre combination of pretension and illiteracy and its results, the jargon and barbarisms ubiquitous in the 21st century.

Over the past six decades Homo sapiens occidens has grown progressively more informal in matters of clothes, language, speech, manners and social behavior to the point where, having lost any form whatever, it has devolved into Homo slobus, and democracy into slobocracy. This departure from formality has occurred across every class of society and every occupational and social category — politics, corporate business and finance largely excepted — including what remains of high society, private schools and clubs, and the churches. The lockdowns that followed from the pandemic contributed immeasurably to an already precipitous momentum.

For the past seven and a half decades Western politicians have been exhorting voters to ‘believe’ or ‘have faith’ in democracy. They should have been addressing themselves instead. The unpleasant truth is that 20th- and 21st-century politicians on the right have never believed that constitutional democracy based roughly on the American model could ever satisfy the masses by giving them the material loot and freedom they expect, while those on the left have always thought it does not go far enough in granting themselves the power and authority they require.

‘He who is not a republican at 20 compels one to doubt the generosity of his heart; but he who, after 30, persists, compels one to doubt the soundness of his mind.’ Thus spake M. Anselme Polycarpe Batbie, a 19th-century French academic jurist whose sentiments, variously phrased, have also been attributed to John Adams, François Guizot and Georges Clemenceau. A generous heart and the ability to learn from experience are very good things, certainly. An even better one is common sense: a native attribute that age does not diminish. Mencken claimed that he had never changed his mind on any matter of importance. Donald Trump said in regard to John McCain that he preferred war heroes who didn’t get captured. Myself, I like thinkers who were right from the beginning —and stayed that way.

An incident recalled from the days when I still counted out my age in coffee spoons has to do with a political conversation between my parents and two elderly Bostonian spinsters in the days when Republicans, even those of the female persuasion, were not unheard of in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The subject was the second Eisenhower-Stevenson set-to, which from the perspective of the 21st century looks as reserved as a difference of opinion between two members of the New York Yacht Club over a bottle of Evian and cigars. In those days my parents were still-recovering members of the FORWARD WITH ROOSEVELT set, and therefore MADLY FOR ADLAI in the campaigns of 1952 and 1956.