#David packer free

Politics for them was nothing less than the titanic struggle between good and evil, God and man. Many of them were former Marxists, such as Whittaker Chambers and James Burnham, who carried their apocalyptic baggage with them when they moved from left to right.

Buckley Jr., who introduced the first issue of National Review, in 1955, with the famous command to “ Stand athwart history, yelling Stop. ”Īdjacent to the traditionalists were the anti-Communists. The traditionalists’ elitism put them at odds with the main currents of American life-the one passage of American history that most appealed to them was the quasi-feudal Old South-but their writings inspired the next generation of conservatives, including William F. Their hero was Edmund Burke, the avatar of conservative restraint, and their enemy was John Dewey, the philosopher of American democracy. They were appalled by the complacent vulgarity of the semi-educated masses. The traditionalists were sin-fearing Protestants, orthodox Catholics, southern agrarians, would-be aristocrats, alienated individualists-dissidents in postwar America. One was traditionalist, a reaction against the utopian plans and moral chaos of modern secular civilization. Nash observed, it uneasily wove together several strands of thought. The conservative movement began to dominate the Republican Party in the 1970s, and then much of the country after 1980 with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. It’s personal freedom, without other people-the negative liberty of “Don’t tread on me.” The freedom it champions is very different from Alexis de Tocqueville’s art of self-government.

#David packer free

Free America draws on libertarian ideas, which it installs in the high-powered engine of consumer capitalism. None can be understood apart from the others, because all four emerge from the same whole.Ĭall the first narrative “Free America.” In the past half century it’s been the most politically powerful of the four. They overlap, morph into one another, attract and repel one another. Over the past four decades, the four narratives have taken turns exercising influence. They reflect schisms on both sides of the divide that has made us two countries, extending and deepening the lines of fracture. They have roots in history, but they are shaped by new ways of thinking and living. In their place, four rival narratives have emerged, four accounts of America’s moral identity. The 1970s ended postwar, bipartisan, middle-class America, and with it the two relatively stable narratives of getting ahead and the fair shake. We have to understand this exchange in order to grasp how we got to where we are. By the turn of the millennium, the Democrats were becoming the home of affluent professionals, while the Republicans were starting to sound like populist insurgents. Since then, the two parties have just about traded places. They were more restrained than we are, more repressed-though restraint and repression were coming undone by 1968. Americans then were more uniform than we are in what they ate (tuna noodle casserole) and what they watched ( Bullitt). Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats played important roles in their respective parties.

The two parties reflected a society that was less free than today, less tolerant, and far less diverse, with fewer choices, but with more economic equality, more shared prosperity, and more political cooperation. This arrangement held until the late ’60s-still within living memory. But, unlike today, the two parties were arguing over the same recognizable country. Republicans emphasized individual enterprise, and Democrats emphasized social solidarity, eventually including Black people and abandoning the party’s commitment to Jim Crow. The Republicans spoke for those who wanted to get ahead, and the Democrats spoke for those who wanted a fair shake. Through much of the 20th century, the two political parties had clear identities and told distinct stories. Tracing the evolution of these narratives can tell you something about a nation’s possibilities for change. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts-they need stories that convey a moral identity. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality-when facts become fungible, we’re lost. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. There is never just one-they compete and constantly change. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be.