A preliminary example of what not to wish for our country on its semiquincentennial One of the consequences of the American crisis has been a country-wide obsession with the definition of America, as if there will ever be only one. Political philosophy is now a national sport. The madness of our political circumstances has returned us to the inflammatory realm of first principles. This is not an unsalutary development in a polity that bases its governments on the opinions of its citizens, and therefore may be undone from within by bad thinking. Yet still we bless the founders who concluded that the establishment of a republic upon good thinking — upon good thinking in the mass! — was a splendid idea. Is there a more idealistic notion? It breaks new ground in reckless idealism. Or are we fools to commit our fate to the thoughtfulness of millions of people? The founders lived in the age of media innocence, of course, when facts and ideas were communicated by simpler instruments whose corrosive impact upon what they were communicating was not yet an insuperable obstacle to meaningful social discussion. The distortions that we confront make the distortions that they confronted look like typos. In our present-day wrestling with the American definition, it is a life’s work just to clear the field of the rubbish. Opinions have become our opioids, our cheapest indulgences. The spread of the conspiratorial mentality is only the most extreme instance of our mental looseness, in which plausibility no longer has to answer to reality. No philosophical principle, no matter how foundational it once was, can any longer be taken for granted — which is a formula for a terrible confusion, but also a consequence of the glibness that liberals themselves visited upon our national liberalism. (In our social and political arrangements, and in our founding charters, we are a liberal country, and we have only ourselves to blame if we are surprised to discover that it includes also illiberal tendencies.) Anyway, principles must regularly be revisited if they are not to become high-minded alibis. What do we stand for? How do we stand for it? The freedom to be wrong is one of our glories, but the freedom to be stupid, well, there is nothing particularly glorious about that. Whereas all the holders of opinions are equal, all their opinions are not. They all await critical evaluation and none are exempt from the ordeal. Yet we are now marking 250 years of national contentiousness and our long patrimony of democratic experience appears to have made us no better at the art of reflective and respectful contention. There are pages and pages of Mencken that seem abundantly vindicated by what presently passes for democratic deliberation. We are still democratic amateurs. The best one can do in such a degraded democratic environment, if one is a writer, is to remain fiendishly wakeful, to give up some sleep, and to challenge nonsense, especially pernicious nonsense, with the speed of a first responder. The new technology is certainly conducive to such an alacrity of response, except that it is itself a stain upon the reputation of alacrity: its speed can thwart a genuine debate as efficiently as it can launch one. Its avowals may be indelible but they are not lasting. A first response cannot be a last response, if your objective is to persuade and then to rebuild, to move beyond destruction to construction, and the second and third and fourth and fifth responses, the programs of restoration and reconstruction, will have to be more patient, more steadfast, more discursive. Firefighters, bless them, are experts only on emergencies, and we aspire to lives, and to a social order, that do not consist only, or chiefly, in emergencies. Have you noticed that all news is now breaking news, and that all events have been promoted to the status of emergencies? Intellectuals are also first responders, and they can begin their contribution to the recovery of our equilibrium by pleading that not all the ideas with which one disagrees are emergencies. Absolute truth and foul treason are not the only paths before us. Hysteria validates nothing and denotes only a razing of reason, which is anyway a sinister instrument of the elite. A fanatic is a person who is completely certain of himself because he is completely uncertain of himself. Our politics has been crippled by the prestige of fanaticism, by the desperation of Americans who cannot quite escape the ugly rumor that they are worthless. Why do so many Americans think so little of themselves? A man who denies his own worth, and the rational capabilities of his own mind, cannot aim high. And composure must be counted among the democratic virtues, because panic is inconsistent with wise self-determination. Yet sometimes one is rightly ruffled and calm really is out of the question. Sometimes one comes upon a traduction of an idea or a tradition that one deeply cherishes — not that umbrage is ever a proof of truth or falsehood — and one feels a bit firefighter-like oneself, and down the pole you go in order to prevent a sinister notion from proliferating. There we were not too long ago, for instance, the tillerman-intellectuals, calmly reading Notes on the State of Virginia upstairs at the firehouse, when the alarm sounded. An influential writer had proposed that the United States is, and should be, a Christian country! We are ready. The meaning of American is under attack. We suit up and slide down and hit the siren. 
Here is what the chatty and phony reasonableness of Ross Douthat loosed upon the land on the day in question, in the New York Times, on the subject, urgent for him, of “whether what you might call a Christian center can be restored in American life.” By “center,” he explains, “I mean a set of religious beliefs and institutions that are embraced and respected in the broad middle of the country, cultivate a widely
The Patriots’ Ball
