It is an honor to respond to Wilfred McClay’s profound reflection on the anniversary of our founding. Having done more than perhaps any living historian to contribute to the civic education of the rising generation of Americans, McClay is ideally positioned to help us learn about our past and reflect upon our future. His essay illuminates the challenges we face, and also helps us see why we should face them with confidence and hope.
But it does more than that, and maybe even more than McClay himself quite grants. His essay suggests that we should resist and reject narratives of American decline, not because we don’t face enormous problems, but because those problems are permanent and durable. We confront the same kinds of dangers prior generations of Americans have—which is both good news and bad.
“Because we Americans enjoyed a national beginning which we have come to regard as foundational, and not a mere temporal launching pad,” McClay writes, “we have the ability in times of trouble to think our way back to our origins, and take from them not only a well-deserved rebuke, but also a strong dose of inspiration and redirection.” This is surely true, but it is true not only because our foundations don’t change but also because our deepest challenges recur.
Americans in every prior generation have noted the ways in which our country has fallen short and put its future at risk, but have also ultimately risen to the demands of their time and preserved and renewed our society’s capacity for greatness. And in every generation, we have tended to understand these ways of falling short as modes of falling away from a prior peak, or a lost era of virtue. In almost every phase of our history, Americans have been impressed with their grandparents’ generation, derisive of their parents’ myopia, persuaded their own time is an age of unprecedented dissolution, and alarmed about their children’s prospects.
Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to study portions of Robert Nisbet’s masterpiece, The Quest for Community, with an impressive group of college students. We lingered in particular over his early chapters, which expressed a profound alarm about the breakdown of core social and cultural institutions in his time. “How extraordinary, when compared with the optimism of half a century ago, is the present ideology of lament,” Nisbet wrote in one characteristic passage. “There is now a sense of disorganization that ranges all the way from the sociologist’s concern with the disintegration of the family and small community to the religious prophet’s intuition that moral decay is enveloping the whole of Western society.” That breakdown, he argued, could not be accounted for by material concerns. It ran to the core of the modern soul. Indeed, he insisted, his time was proof that “material improvement that is unaccompanied by a sense of personal belonging may actually intensify social dislocation and personal frustration.” This was the ethos of the age.
Parsing the problems of our age and making good judgments about them will require not novel principles and insights but precisely familiar and time-tested ones.
My students knew exactly what he meant, and could produce plenty of supporting evidence from their own lives. But when I pressed them to reflect on the fact that Nisbet wrote those words in the present tense in 1953—not only before most of today’s nostalgic social critics were born but at the very peak of what we now imagine was a golden age of American cohesion and cultural solidity—we all found ourselves a little baffled.
In fact, conservatives of various sorts can be found raising such concerns in just about every moment of our history. Alexis de Tocqueville was impressed with elements of American civic life in the 1830s, but he warned of its being undone by the tendency of democracy to leave individuals isolated and unmoored, absorbed in “petty, vulgar pleasures,” and prone to being reduced to “nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.” And although his concern looked to the future, he certainly didn’t think it would take a century, let alone two, to materialize. He could see it beginning to happen in front of him.
In the same decade, a young Abraham Lincoln noted a collapse of public virtue in America and pointed to scenes of mob rule “becoming more and more frequent in this land so lately famed for love of law and order.” George Washington had expressed related concerns in 1792, writing to Thomas Jefferson that a growing tendency toward partisan vitriol in America was beginning to raise the threat that “the fairest prospect of happiness & prosperity that ever was presented to man, will be lost—perhaps for ever!” Like many Americans since, he sensed in the sorry state of the politics of his day clear echoes of the fall of the Roman republic.
Some portion of each American generation has understood itself as living amid decline, in other words. And whatever high point they took themselves to be declining from, you can be sure that at its very peak, someone was alarmed at how far America had fallen.
But we should not misread the implications of this peculiar fact. It does not mean that these critics of the past were wrong. It certainly does not mean that our own worries are misplaced and that all is well in twenty-first-century America. Maybe it just means that decline is the wrong way to think about the sorts of dangers that bedevil our society. Maybe they’re not best understood as growing but as persistent. They are the characteristic dilemmas that undermine the pursuit of virtue in a liberal age, and in some respects in any age. They recur, and they must be addressed and taken seriously, in every generation because of the nature of the human person, and the generational character of all societies. Every generation begins where past ones started, not where they left off, which means that some basic human longings and some basic human failings must always be answered anew. And they can be, albeit not simply or easily.
In this respect, social critics throughout our country’s life have not been too pessimistic but rather not pessimistic enough. They have imagined that men and women were much better in a prior time, rather than grasping that we have always been as mixed a bag as we are now. John Adams—perhaps our most accomplished pessimist—understood this point. In his post-presidential retirement, in response to a letter that praised him and his contemporaries as a generation of giants and “founding fathers,” Adams wrote:
I ought not to object to your Reverence for your Fathers as you call them, meaning I presume the Government and those concerned in the Direction of public affairs, much less can I be displeased at your numbering me among them. But to tell you a very great secret, as far as I am capable of comparing the Merit of the different Periods, I have no reason to believe that We were better than you are. We had as many poor Creatures and selfish Beings, in proportion among us as you have among you: nor were there then more enlightened Men, or in greater Number in proportion than there are now.
If the story of human folly and viciousness is not a tale of decline but of fallenness, then we actually have even more than we might have imagined to learn from the history of our country. Prior generations met their moments with only the resources we have for meeting ours, and so we ought to take an interest in how they did that, and approach their successes and failures as thoroughly pertinent sources of guidance for ourselves.
If, that is, the need for renewal confronts every generation, then the principles that have made renewal possible in the past are available to us as well. As McClay notes, those principles are permanent. And our political tradition makes them available to us in an unusually forthright and explicit way. That’s why every American generation should have recourse to the ideals of the founding—not because men and women were once greater than they are now, but because these foundations have enabled men and women like ourselves to build and rebuild for two and a half centuries, and could do so now.
Our twenty-first-century quandaries call upon us not to invent a new morality but to do something even harder: to recall and renew the best of our inherited order.
It is therefore a mistake to imagine that our moment is distinct because we have fallen some great distance from the heights of our national achievements. Nothing in the American scene of recent decades has been quite as depressing as the sight of some self-described conservatives insisting that we must now ignore all the lessons of our past and reject all the wisdom of our political tradition because to cling to those is to ignore “what time it is.” Such imbecility may be partially forgivable in the young, but not all of its champions have even that limited excuse.
The very fact of human generations—the reality of natality and mortality—means that it is always the same time. It is always time to form and rear the rising generation toward flourishing. Every society always confronts that challenge, and meeting it is always its most vital work. Our civilization has evolved institutions and practices geared to that work over countless generations, and to abandon them now because we persuade ourselves that they have declined inexorably would amount not to cold-eyed realism but to cowardly escapism. The hard work required of us is the same as that demanded of prior generations. Our challenge is not harder than theirs, but it is not easier either. And it is ours, so that the temptation to shirk it is ours too. And as we’re learning, that temptation isn’t easy to resist.
This is why McClay is exactly right in calling us to the lessons of the American founding. He writes that “the ‘debacle’ of the past three decades can best be understood as the prelude to a profound wake-up call” that would be salutary so long as we realize the “need to turn in a self-conscious way toward the guidance of the past, and show the courage and perseverance to follow that guidance.” This is true, and it has been true in pretty much every generation in America. And that is why McClay is also exactly right to argue that we will need that courage and perseverance in dealing with what must strike us as the most novel and unprecedented of the challenges we confront, including the challenges of new technologies.
We are presented with some unprecedented tools and powers in our time, and they do confront us with some daunting prospects, as well as exciting possibilities. But parsing those and making good judgments about them will require not novel principles and insights but precisely familiar and time-tested ones. The question this new moment poses, as McClay well argues, involves the character of our humanity. It is the question we have always faced, and which our religious, moral, and political traditions have developed to help us answer. Our twenty-first-century quandaries call upon us not to invent a new morality but to do something even harder: to recall and renew the best of our inherited order.
Wilfred McClay’s wise meditation invites us to understand our circumstances not in terms of decline but in the context of permanent human realities and of permanent more-than-human truths. He invites us, in other words, to recover and revitalize the highest wisdom and the deepest roots of the American founding. I can think of no better way to celebrate our country as it enters its 251st year than to accept his invitation, and to reinvest ourselves in what has made our land of hope so promising.
