The Decadent Democrats

I just encountered an unread copy of Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence in my library. Several years ago, Hudson Institute President Herb London recommended I read Barzun, as Herb was a pupil of Barzun’s while an undergraduate at Columbia. However, family and career commitments intervened from taking up his suggestion.

In the opening pages of the book, Barzun calls the age we live “decadent” because it “sees no clear lines of advance...the loss it faces is that of Possibility.” He continues:

The forms of art as life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result. Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

It will be asked, how does the historian know when Decadence sets in? By the open confessions of malaise, by the search in all directions for a new faith or faiths. . . To secular minds, the old ideals look outworn or hopeless and practical aims are made into creeds sustained by violent acts: fighting nuclear power, global warming, and abortion; saving from use the environment with its fauna and flora (“Bring back the wolf!”); promoting organic against processed foods, and proclaiming disaffection from science and technology. The impulse to PRIMITIVISM animates all these negatives.

Such causes serve to concentrate the desire for action in a stalled society; for in every town, county, or nation, it is seen that most of what government sets out to do for the public good is resisted as soon as proposed. Not two, but three or four groups, organized or improptu, are ready with contrary reasons as sensible as those behind the project. The upshot is a floating hostility to things as they are. It inspires the repeated use of the dismissive prefixes anti- and post- (anti-art, post-modernism) and the promise to reinvent this or that institution. The hope is that getting rid of what is will by itself generate the new life.

It occurs to me, sadly, that many in the leadership of the modern Democrat Party embody this new worship of Decadence. Most of the Senators aligned with this party are opposed to the war in Iraq, not necessarily for its merits, but because they are opposed to everything that embodies the Western ethos: development (as evidenced in their sacrosanct belief that the Earth is warming, despite an eminent French scientist saying otherwise, and that humans are the problem rather than the solution), Judeo-Christian ethics and mores (as evidenced by their failure to defend against religious radicals in the Middle East who aim to annihilate modern liberalism), free-markets (by their willingness to tax and regulate American business into recession and push the benefits of Big Labor to the detriment of the American auto industry) and their abandonment of free-will (as seen in the growth of the nanny-state through no-smoking regulations, and the banning of trans-fats).

The Western tradition recognized that wars are transformative events that can help shape the direction of the modern world, a fact evidenced by our own Revolution and Civil War, both World Wars in the early half of the 20th Century, and the resultant post-Bretton Woods world order that created the United Nations, World Bank, IMF, and NATO, among others. As Philip Bobbit writes in the Shield of Achilles:

Many people see war as an illness of states, a pathology that no healthy state need suffer. This way of looking at things more or less disables us from shaping future wars, as we search, fruitlessly, for the wonder serum that will banish war once and for all (or as we plan to fight wars we know – or believe – we can win). Yet we can shape future wars, even if we cannot avoid them. We can take decisions that will determine whether the next epochal war risks a general cataclysm.

Most Democrats see no possibility in President Bush’s Middle East strategy of bringing democracy to that region, because they are drunk on this “wonder serum” that we can banish war forever. A look at any history book, the Bible, or even an encyclopedia for that matter should quickly dispel these anti-Western thinkers of this utopian ideal. No, war will never be banished from this Earth, so long as evil exists, which is another truth that anti-Westerns want to forget. So why not have war on our terms?

This is the thinking of those blamed for the Iraq War: the much maligned neo-conservatives. Despite the protestations of those on the left and the far right, who claim that this war has been bungled, we Americans forget so easily that those 3,000 or more young men and women who have died in Iraq have died to ensure that September 11 never happens again – and so far they have done a damned good job of it.

The War in Iraq is indeed a war on our terms, because it has had the intended or unintended effect (this should be the real point of debate about Bush) of attracting every looney in the greater Middle East to come to Iraq, rather than our shores, to kill the “American infidel,” as they see us. If we weren’t fighting them there, then they would be fighting us. Here. Lest we forget the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the East African U.S. embassy bombings in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000. This should be a stark reminder that terrorism against America and its interests didn't start on 9/11, nor will it end if we pull out of Iraq.

While Bush may not deserve a gold star for his efforts in the War on Terror, at least he’s doing something. And that something is a lot better than anything that the Decadent Democrats have offered.