By Wilfred Reilly
Sunday, June 19,
2022
Note: Following the release of “America’s Crisis of Self-Doubt,” National Review’s statement of affirming belief in America’s principles against growing doubts about them, on both left and right, National Review has invited signatories to the statement to elaborate on their own faith in America. You can find other entries here and here.
Today, in 2022, no big-budget American movie studio would make The Patriot. None, probably, would make Alexander — at least with a mostly-straight white leading man. That is an intentionally provocative header, but it seems simply undeniable that the good old U.S. of A., and indeed the West entire, is currently suffering from what my old coach Art Panka would have called “a real damn crisis of confidence.”
Virtually every available data point shows this. According to a well-done recent YouGov poll, well under half of U.S. citizens (48 percent) say that they are very proud to be an American. Tellingly, this figure is much lower for the youngest, and most recently educated, cohort of Americans: only 22 percent of 18-to-24 year-olds call themselves “very” proud or patriotic, while 25 percent of them say they are somewhat proud, and fully 41 percent fall into one of two “not proud” categories. Taking these latter two options together, an actual plurality of young Yanks are not proud to be American citizens.
A great deal of other research comes to the same conclusions. Among all Americans, when asked probably the classic question in this space by Pew Research, 23 percent believe that the United States “stands above all other countries in the world,” 52 percent believe the U.S. is “one of the great countries” along with others, and 23 percent believe that multiple “other countries are better than the US.” These aren’t dispiriting data, although I would frankly prefer to see a bit more American exceptionalism. However, among adults under 30 who lean Democratic — and the huge majority of adults under 30 do — the pattern is notably different. At present, exactly 5 percent of young Democrats believe the U.S. is an exceptional country. Forty percent believe we are one of the world’s better countries, and 55 percent believe that multiple other nations are better places all around than the United States.
Fondness for enemy ideology is also on the rise. Among Millennials and members of the still-younger Generation Z, as has been noted often before this, socialism (described as such) is roughly as popular as capitalism. Among these whippersnappers, 49 percent have a positive view of the first while just 51 percent — a statistically insignificant difference — have a positive view of the second. Notably, the key statistical trend leading us here has not been an increase in the popularity of socialism, but rather a sharp decline in approval for American-style capitalism — which fell 15 percentage points, from a 66 percent approval rating, among the same age cohort just since 2010.
Once again, this pattern among young Americans/Westerners is dramatically different from anything seen among their middle-aged or senior peers. Sixty-one percent of Gen Xers and 68 percent of Baby Boomers and “Traditionalists” are strong capitalists, and only 32 percent of the “BBT” cohort supports socialism to any extent. This recent and youth-focused change in attitudes may — probably does — tie into sharp declines in other traditional beliefs. The percentage of Americans who identify as Christian, Catholic or Protestant, is down 12 percent over the past decade, with this behavioral shift again concentrated among the young. And these losses are not always some other faith’s gain; the fastest-growing Census cohort as re religious identification is “none of the above.”
Enough of the numbers: Why is all of this happening? What explains the remarkable (very) recent surge in American guilt and self-hate? While I dislike the common rightist technique of blaming every imaginable social problem on leftist saboteurs, that probably is the explanation here. Since about the 1970s, the institutions entrusted by our society with the tasks of educating children and young adults, and of managing “discourse” — higher education, secondary education, the media — have come to be dominated to a remarkable extent by the hard ideological left. Per the EconLib archives and the serious report “The Prevalence of Marxism in Academia,” 18 percent of American social-science professors currently identify as Marxists (another 24 percent identify as radicals, and 21 percent as activists).
Down in the high schools — and even earlier on — two of the more popular curricular supplements come from the New York Times’ widely criticized 1619 Project, which argues that almost everything unique about the United States came “out of slavery,” and the Marxist Zinn Education Project. Judging from my own educational experiences and what I have heard about those of the students I now teach, it seems a safe bet that most educated Americans born after 1980 or so have been assigned a whole litany of classic anti-Western texts — from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee to Lies My Teacher Told Me to A People’s History of the United States — as they came of age. Although the sample size here is one, I myself had to read The Communist Manifesto at least eight times during my secondary and collegiate career.
This experience has produced a shared worldview, among many young Americans, which might be summed up basically as: “After 1492 (and/or 1619), white Christian warriors invaded Eden, and committed intentional genocide against peaceful Native Americans. Then, depending almost entirely on the labor of stolen Africans — in a caste system unique in the world — they built a cruelly capitalist system, which ruthlessly exploited the natural world and made the birds stop singing. Heroic leftists were recently able to change some of this, but massive problems like the rampant police murder of black men, and systemic racism measurable through audit studies, remain. Fixing these issues may — nay, probably will — require revamping the whole society.”
Of course, most of this is nonsense. Some North- and Meso-American Native tribes were peaceful gatherers, but others were among the most skilled and brutal warriors in human history. Anthropologists recently uncovered the literal skull storage racks of the great Native cities like Tenochitlan and — no doubt with some reluctance — confirmed almost all of the bloody old historical rumors about the anthropagic Aztecs. The Commanche riders who opposed our own Anglo and black ancestors inside the future U.S. were not notably kinder.
Black slaves certainly contributed to the growth of the U.S. (all of our ancestors did) but by no means “built the whole country.” A recent brutally frank British report on the contributions of slavery to the coffers of Empire placed them at about 3 percent of the total. The American figure would be a multiple of this one, but it also cannot be forgotten that the U.S. fought a historically unprecedented war to free the slaves — a war in which more than 600,000 Americans lost their lives, and one in every four fighting-age men in the Old South was killed or wounded. Since that time, the U.S. GDP has increased roughly 12,000 percent, and our magnificent societal accomplishments — building the trans-continental railroads and inter-state highway system, winning the space race, beating the Nazis — have played far more of a role in moving the U.S. to pole position in the world than did racial or regional wars 150 years ago.
This sort of accurate contra-revisionist screed could go on for some time. Notably, slavery was all but ubiquitous globally when it existed in the U.S., and this global problem included an entire sub-trade (the Barbary Slave Trade) focused on the sale of captive whites to Muslim and black masters. Today’s focus on the flawed past is especially bizarre given the reality of life in the present. By any objective standard, the modern West — so often attacked for racism — is the least racist large society in the history of the world.
Actual racism, defined for example as unwillingness to marry a fellow citizen of a different race, has declined about 90 percent since the middle of the past century. Almost 95 percent of Americans currently approve completely of interracial marriage. Similarly, just 8 percent of all Americans would refuse to vote for a qualified same-party candidate for president because that candidate happened to be black (vs. 9 percent of refuseniks for a Hispanic or Jew, and 19 percent for a Mormon). These basic patterns extend to almost every arena within which constant contemporary racism is alleged. The actual number of unarmed black American men shot annually by on-duty law enforcement officers is ten to 20. Inter-racial crime of what might be called the classic variety — crimes of violence involving both blacks and whites — make up only about 3 percent of serious crime; more than 80 percent of instances are black-on-white. And so on.
This brings us to a key point. The striking dichotomy between the astonishingly prevalent anti-Western (and generally sensational) narrative of today, and reality, means that very, very many people believe horrifying things which simply are not true. Whatever the actual numbers on inter-racial violence may be — and I have just given them — about 75 percent of black Americans say they fear for their lives when around whites or police, something which might make more sense in the other direction . . . but not much then.
No less an authority on civic affairs than LeBron James of the National Basketball Association’s Cavaliers/Heat/Cavaliers/Lakers/etc. once famously declared that he and other African Americans are “hunted” and feel terrified every time they leave their homes. This kind of misunderstanding goes beyond the qualitative and into the quantifiable: The average “very liberal” American believes that between 1,000 and 10,000 completely unarmed black men are murdered by police officers every year. It also goes beyond the topic of race. By summer 2020, the average U.S. citizen — to judge from the probable respondent pool for a KEKS-TC survey — was convinced that 9 percent of the American population had already died of Covid-19.
Understanding that brings us to a second key point. Rightists, parents, and others don’t mock the “MSM,” and oppose the trendy critical theories of today because they are bigots or “fear the truth.” Rather, the opposite. They — we — do so because most of this stuff is nonsense that was confined to the mustier and more clove-cigarette-scented corridors of academia just a decade or two back. The issue with the 1619 Project isn’t that authors like Nikole Hannah-Jones just “spit too many hard facts” for the average witty suburban haus-frau to endure, but instead that the Project contains so many obvious omissions and mistakes that its own fact-checker wrote a major Politico article critical of it.
Similarly, believing that the annual number of unjustified police killings of black men is 10,000 when it is ten is not a minor mistake. It is a staggering error of three orders of magnitude. These are but a few data points that show how, to a rather remarkable degree, the case against the modern West rests upon a foundation of sand. It is based on falsehoods and half-truths and theories most smart normal citizens would dismiss as insane upon a close reading. So, what to do, for those of us that know this?
First, hold hard and wait for support. One of the more encouraging trends of the past three to four years is that, as old war-horse institutions like the ACLU fall to the woke mobs, replacements like the Foundation against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), 1776 Unites (specifically the black business and social-science community’s response to 1619), the Daily Wire on the right, FIRE, and many others are making their way toward the bulwarks — calling out such radical war cries as “All racism is bad (!!!),” “Western civilization is a good thing (!!!),” and even “Males aren’t females!” In the meantime, there is probably worse advice than: renew your subscription to National Review, turn off the TV, and check out the library in your town.
And, always, trust your own damn common sense, and refuse to be gas-lit by liars into hating yourself, your tribe, your country, or your society.
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