From this Sunday's front page NYTimes Book Review review of book on Pres Obama

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/28/2012 3:34 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> "America is different, or used to be. It was founded on the older idea 
> that human beings have a fixed set of natural rights and that the 
> fixed role of government is simply to secure those rights, otherwise 
> leaving people to take care of themselves. This is not to say that 
> young America was some libertarian Eden. It was bound together by 
> common ideas of the best (Christian) life, the public good, democratic 
> duty and good manners. It was also bound together by Abraham Lincoln — 
> the great hero of Claremont conservatism — who preserved the Union by 
> defending the inflexible moral idealism of the Declaration of 
> Independence. Abe bequeathed to us a nation like none other, not a 
> State like every other."

> Please turn in your papers of 25 to 2500 words on this notion dealt 
> with in the collected works (so far) of Thomas Pynchon by the end of 
> time, please.

I hope Pynchon dealt with it as misguided, just like the reviewer Mark 
Lilla does.

According to the author the reason everything changed--that America 
departed from those good 18th century concepts-- is because the vanguard 
Left "fell in love with Germany.

Lilla says:

Kesler is an accomplished player of two conservative parlor games: 
Cherchez le Kraut and Whac-a-Prof. But he, too, is a professor; and as a 
follower of Leo Strauss, he has also absorbed a lot of German 
assumptions about how Big Ideas get born in the mind of a single thinker 
and march their way through history. So it’s pretty amusing to see how, 
after railing against Hegel’s myth of fated historical progress, he 
proceeds to construct an inverted myth of fated historical decline once 
Wilson bore Hegel’s love-child. Kesler’s history of Progressivism 
doesn’t involve real public figures making real choices about real 
policies under real constraints in real time. It follows the determined 
historical journey of the Progressive Idea in words, from the New 
Freedom platform of Wilson’s first campaign, down through the New Deal 
speeches of Franklin Roosevelt (who spoke German as a child), then to 
Lyndon Johnson’s announcements of the War on Poverty and the Great 
Society. Once that rhetorical lineage is established, he then tries to 
show how the Idea spread out into American culture at large, bringing 
with it existentialist self-absorption, moral relativism and passivity 
in the face of the new administrative state, so that by the midcentury 
we nearly became Europeans (only fatter). That is when “it fell to 
Ronald Reagan to help restore Americans’ confidence in themselves, which 
he did in the name not of liberalism but of ­conservatism.”

Lilla admits "there's a real story here" but thinks Kessler's version is 
very overblown.

Hoping for a B-

P
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