Newspaper Reader wades through the Neo-Conservative muck!

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Nov 09, 2024

Headline: Peggy Noonan: On Loving America

Sun-headline: ‘We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement,’ says the star of our next Book Club.

By Peggy Noonan

Peggy Noonan: On Loving America | The Free Press (In my email November 9, 2024)

Peggy Noonan has never gotten over the worship of Ronald Reagan! After Nixon, Ford and Carter, Reagan and his the city on a hill phrase, that it derived from a 17th-century Puritan sermon. This was the politics that reflected a white middle and working class grown weary of an etiolated Civil Rights Era politics. Not to forget the bussing of children to achieve racial balance.

Let Reagan speak for himself:

Headline: Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech

…

I believe in states’ rights; I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level. And I believe that we’ve distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the constitution to that federal establishment. And if I do get the job I’m looking for, I’m going to devote myself to trying to reorder those priorities and to restore to the states and local communities those functions which properly belong there.

I’m going to try also to change federal regulations in the tax structure that has made this once-powerful industrial giant in this land and in the world now with a lower rate of productivity than any of the other industrial nations, with a lower rate of savings and investment on the part of our people and put us back where we belong.

…

Ronald Reagan’s 1980 Neshoba County Fair speech. (Following is the speech of Ronald Reagan at the Neshoba County Fair on Sunday, Aug. 3, 1980, as transcribed from a tape recording by Stanley Dearman, the now late editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat.)

The Reader might note that Noonan frames her commentary with Charles de Gaulle, to add a bit of historical verisimilitude, to her adulation for her Reaganite Nostalgia!

The famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s War Memoirs most happily translates as: “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” It struck me when I first read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of America.

What is that idea? That she is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, stating assumptions and creating arrangements whereby life could be made more: just. In the workings of its history, I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance: How did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right, different but complementary gifts? Long ago I asked the historian David McCullough if he ever wondered about this. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: “Providence.” That is where my mind settles, too.

The election of Donald Trump has unleashed a flood of toxic nostalgia, for something that bears no resemblance to that putative ‘city on the hill’, of Reagan circa 1980!

Newspaper Reader