Books: Douthat and Salam on Republicans
February 24th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 233 pp.
by Matthew Raley
I have followed the incisive writing of these men in National Review for several years, and have regretted taking so long to get to their book. Their version of recent political history, their analysis of the working class and the new stratification of American society, and their road map to Republican success are compelling.
But my interest in their book is focused less on their political acumen than on their revealing picture of evangelicals.
Religious, socially conservative voters have been a base of the Republican party for several decades. These voters come from all classes, but they are disproportionately working class and southern. They have pushed the party to adopt pro-family, pro-life, and anti-gay marriage positions, and to side with them against the sexual mores of Hollywood.
When Douthat and Salam show these voters’ problems as part of the larger working class in America, a disturbing portrait emerges.
The authors assert (p 133), “The most important thing to understand about today’s stratification — economic, social, and cultural — is that it starts at home, where working-class Americans are far less likely than their better-educated peers to enjoy the benefits of stable families.”
Come again?
Better-educated Americans are liberals. They’re the ones who don’t have stable families, who don’t even believe stable families are important. So what’s this about the working class not enjoying stable families?
Douthat and Salam explain (p 133), “The divorce rate exploded across all classes in the late 1960s, but among the college educated it leveled off quickly and then began to drop.” Here are the numbers (pp 133-134):
In the period from 1970 to ’74, 24 percent of all first marriages among Americans with college degrees ended in divorce within ten years; two decades later, that figure had fallen to just 17 percent. During the same period, by contrast, the divorced-within-ten-years rate crept up among Americans without a college degree, from 34 to 36 percent. As late as 1980, the divorce rate for women without a four-year college degree was just three percentage points higher than the divorce rate for women with a four-year degree; by 2000, this “divorce divide” stood at nine percentage points.
Or take illegitimacy (p 134):
In the early 1960s, the rate of out-of-wedlock births was 5 percent among the best-educated third of the population and just 7 percent among the least-educated third. Over the next forty years, the illegitimacy rate would triple for the least-educated third, while barely budging among the best-educated segment of the population.
For Douthat and Salam, the social conservatism of so-called Red states is directly related to the working class’s economic interests.
They quote Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect (p 140): “People in states like Massachusetts, for example, which has very high per capita incomes and the lowest divorce rate in the country, are relatively unconcerned about gay marriage, while those in Southern states with much higher poverty, divorce, and single-parenthood rates feel the family to be threatened because family life is, in fact, much less stable in their communities.”
The authors’ point that social conservatism is not, as many liberals argue, a distraction from the real problems of the working class, is needed.
But the disconnect between the voting passions of evangelicals and the way their families live has bothered me since the late nineties, when it became increasingly obvious that the loud, beefy Rush fans were just as, if not more, immoral than their NPR nemeses, and that Red-state church attendance was not having much impact on this hypocrisy.
I read Douthat and Salam’s policy recommendations with enthusiasm. I hope a talented politician is studying this book.
But when I finished it, my thoughts went back to evangelicals. Their sexual morality is more an aspiration than a fact, which puts them in a poor position to lecture the rest of the country about righteousness. The out-of-wedlock pregnancy in the Palin family is all too typical of evangelical households right now, and protests that we believe a gospel of grace are not going to gain us sympathy.
Evangelicals need to recall that the kindness of God should lead us to repentance.
At the Christian Writers Guild Conference
February 19th, 2009 § 1 Comment
I arrived here in Colorado Springs yesterday for the conference at the Broadmoor, brought by a smooth flight and greeted by serene weather.
One of the things I like about coming here is the profusion of accents from around the nation and the globe. Behind me at breakfast, a New Zealand baritone talked over business with a guy from the American suburbs. To my left, a grand Latina lady taught her little granddaughter some Spanish. A girl pouring coffee was from the English midlands, a bellman named Moses had Jamaican music in his voice, and the maid who just knocked on my door came straight from Vienna.
But the craziest moment was yesterday. I get on the shuttle from the airport to the hotel, and all around me are middle-aged women shouting at each other in the brutal tones of Manhattan friendship. They’re the real deal — gestures, laughter, the works. And what are they doing at the Broadmoor?
They’re attending a Tupperware convention.
Cathedrals and Their Messages
January 15th, 2009 § 1 Comment
"A Sea of Steps," Wells Cathedral, 1903, by Frederick H. Evans, Museum of Modern Art
My son Dylan and I are reading through David Macaulay’s fantastic series of books about buildings. We’ve read about the construction of castles, pyramids, and cities, and right now we’re reading Cathedral.
The timing is interesting, given that our church is in the middle of fund-raising for a new facility. The morality of such construction projects is increasingly questioned by those who cite the poverty of the developing world, and the massive needs around us here at home. I find myself reading Macaulay’s book and looking at his drawings through the lens of my own struggles with our project.
Why do some buildings strike me as self-indulgent and offensive, while others impress me with a message?
In the case of the medieval cathedrals, I can’t help reacting to the abuses that financed them, like the display of relics and the sale of indulgences. I also react to the throne-and-altar alliances that the cathedrals incarnated: the church sanctified the kings of this world and their wars. History rightly pours scorn on these aspects of cathedrals, and highlights the fact that on Sundays most of them are now empty.
As I’ve watched contemporary building programs both at a distance and up close, I notice that a project’s legacy is often soured by manipulative funding campaigns, or by designs that are patently self-serving. Such buildings become symbols of corruption rather than places for fostering godliness.
I recall a visit to the Crystal Cathedral in southern California years ago. Parts of the campus were beautiful. But the famous building itself was bizarre. Wherever I went around the exterior, I saw myself in a massive mirror. When I went inside, I found that all the seats faced straight ahead, not toward the pulpit, so that it was far more pleasing to watch the massive TV screens than to look at the actual preacher.
In fact, I was in a space built for cameras, for viewership rather than worship. In such places, I don’t begrudge the cost so much as the message.
Consider some ways in which the medieval cathedrals transcended their often vainglorious origins:
1. The cathedrals were direct expressions of the faith of common people.
Bishops didn’t build cathedrals; craftsmen did. Whole lifetimes would be spent cutting stones, carving ornaments, blowing glass, climbing scaffolding. The craftsmen remain anonymous, individual contributors to a vast conception meant to evoke the created order. That kind of devotion is worth something. It is not to be sneered at. The level of skill these laborers had is stunning even in the pages of a book for children.
2. The cathedrals united generations.
The people who dug the foundations were dead long before the cathedral was consecrated. In these projects there was a sense of continuity, of one generation receiving a charge from another, carrying on the work, and passing the charge on to their children.
This aspect of cathedral-building in a community’s life is no longer seen as valuable or even desirable, a fact that speaks of a deeper corruption in us than mere materialism. In a word, it indicates decadence.
3. The cathedrals have a present-day impact on a person’s soul.
They say something. They speak to even the most unlearned child. When you walk around the outside of a cathedral, it doesn’t flash back your own image, but a vision of another world. When you go inside, it doesn’t say, “Look at the jumbo-tron.” It says, “Look up!”
The aspersions cast on buildings can also be cast on all the arts. If it is a selfish luxury to make buildings with a message, then it is also selfish to make songs, paintings, photographs, poems, and novels. All of the arts require time, devotion, and money. But we miss the balm of God-given creativity when we lower all of life to the utilitarian bottom-line.
Our building in Orland will not rise above commercial-grade design and construction, which saddens me. But I also know that our design is flexible. We can humanize it by the arts we can afford, and we will. Above all, we will have worship space that encourages participation, not viewership. We’ll have large spaces for many purposes, but also very small spaces set aside for one-on-one counseling and prayer.
The cathedrals were only possible because a strong culture knew what it wanted to say and how to say it. While our building will never be an artistic marvel, it will be a clear message.
Books: Obama and Richard Reeves’ Kennedy
January 13th, 2009 § Leave a Comment
President Kennedy: Profile of Power, by Richard Reeves, Simon & Schuster, 1993.
by Matthew Raley
Recently, anticipating an Obama administration, I reread Richard Reeves’ narrative of John Kennedy’s presidency, and was engrossed.
Barack Obama’s ascent provided the excuse I’d been wanting to return to this book because Kennedy is the nearest analogy to the man who will be the 44th president. Just for starters, Kennedy was a barrier-breaker, as the first Catholic to occupy the White House, and he was young.
But there are more significant parallels. JFK had no executive experience, and was the last sitting U.S. senator to win the presidency. He also represented generational change, and a break with ideological passions in favor of a sophisticated pragmatism. Indeed, JFK was the last president to have the sheen of academic and writerly intellectual seriousness.
Does the Kennedy administration, I wonder, suggest anything to watch as Obama takes over?
First, a few outstanding features of Reeves’ book, Obama aside.
Reeves is the master of the taut, high-impact vignette. Kennedy was pondering what to do about renewed Soviet atmospheric nuclear testing. Should the U.S. resume atmospheric testing too? He asked his science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, how radioactive fallout gets to the earth (p 227).
“The clouds are washed out by rain,” answered Wiesner.
Kennedy looked out through the French doors into the garden. It was a rainy day and he asked: “You mean it’s in the rain out there?”
“Yes,” Wiesner said. He stood, awkwardly, waiting. Kennedy did not speak for a long time.
Reeves also conveys the private impact on national leaders of events like the Cuban missile crisis. His understated portrayal gains power from the right details at the right moments. Mike Mansfield, the Senate Majority Leader, left the White House after learning that millions could be dead within hours in a nuclear exchange (p 393). The senator
called his wife, asking her to meet him at National Airport. Mansfield wanted to go home to Montana, and he told his wife there was something he wanted to tell her involving Kennedy. When the Mansfields landed at Billings later that day, there were soldiers patrolling the runways and the terminal — as there were at other airports all across the country.
The Kennedy assassination (which I hope never becomes a parallel between the 35th and 44th presidents) gains drama and tension as Reeves’ narrative rolls on. The dates at the beginning of each chapter prompt the reader to ask, “What if JFK knew he only had this much time?”
And there are chilling moments close to the end.
On November 2, 1963, JFK sat down to a meeting to manage the coup against Ngo Dinh Diem, the South Vietnamese president. An aide walked into the meeting with a cable reporting that Diem had been killed in the coup (p 649). “[The aide] handed it to the President, who looked at it, stood up, and rushed from the room without a word, looking pale and shaken.”
In Fort Worth on November 22nd, surveying the setting of a political rally he would attend before flying to Dallas, Kennedy said to an aide (p 661), “Look at that platform. With all these buildings around it, the Secret Service couldn’t stop someone who really wanted to get you.”
My reading raised one issue that I will be watching closely in the Obama administration.
JFK’s view of military power and foreign policy was primarily political. How would the United States be perceived around the world, and how would JFK be perceived at home?
During the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy refused to send American air support to save the ex-patriot invasion force. He wanted to preserve plausible deniability of American involvement.
Reeves writes (p 157) that Kennedy, meeting Nikita Khruschev in Vienna in 1961, wanted to “talk to him politician-to-politician about the dangers of military miscalculation in a nuclear world. The political systems that produced the two leaders were different, but they were in the same business and Kennedy had no doubt they would understand each other.”
But Kennedy was unprepared for the ideological strength of the Soviet leader. When asked by James Reston how the summit had gone, Kennedy replied (p 172), “Worst thing in my life. He savaged me.”
The pattern Reeves shows in Kennedy’s decision-making is one of trying to preserve his room for maneuver and his deniability until the last possible moment. This was his downfall in the Bay of Pigs, it persisted during the Cuban missile crisis, and remain characteristic during the coup against Diem in the last month of Kennedy’s life.
Of the impending coup, JFK cabled Henry Cabot Lodge, the ambassador to South Vietnam, “We are particularly concerned about hazard that an unsuccessful coup, however carefully we avoid direct entanglement, will be laid at our door by public opinion almost everywhere.”
Barack Obama is not an ideological, but a political creature. He balances, he soothes, he preserves options.
This is good in the sense that Obama will probably not turn out to be the radical leftist some fear. But in foreign policy, where uses of military power have to be concerned less with appearances than with targets and results, and where power needs to be used without a guilty conscience, Obama’s penchant for equivocation could be his undoing.
After the Bay of Pigs humiliation, Dwight Eisenhower visited Kennedy at Camp David, and gave him the dressing-down of his life (pp 102-103). “How could you possibly have kept from the world any knowledge that the United States had been involved?” Ike said. “I believe there is only one thing to do when you go into this kind of thing, it must be a success.”
But we don’t have the equivalent of a former president Eisenhower anymore.
