What's Wrong With America

Walter Russell Mead is a classical liberal and a Democrat.  Other than voting for Obama, he is a paragon of lucid thinking. He wonders if Americas decline can be traced to the decline and debasement of our elites.

We Americans have a disdain for royalty. Like most of my fellow countrymen, I paid scant attention to the recent royal wedding in Britain (I can’t even give you the names of who got married).  But reading Mead’s article, I realized one practical purpose for royalty:  To be a shining example of moral virtue and self-sacrificing patriotism, thus inspiring the rest of us to similar heights.  America’s elites, whether we like it or not, have historically served a similar purpose here.

Of late, American elites, like British royalty, have fallen into debased decline, and it puts our society in peril.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. 

It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. 

Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed. (Mead)

While conceding that religion is no guarantee of moral virtue, he nonetheless fingers a lack of moral virtue as a contributor to our troubles

What a surprise!  We raised a generation of bright kids without a foundation in religion, and they’ve grown up and gone to Wall Street.  We never told them that the virtuous life was both necessary and hard, that character was something that had to be built step by step from youth, that moral weakness was both contemptible and natural: and we are shocked, shocked! when, placed in proximity to large sums of loose cash, they grab all they can. (Mead)

Today's Wall Street makes the robber barons look like Mother Teresa.  Add in Arnold's groping infidelities, an IMF Chief raping a hotel maid, serial crimes and outrages by the Kennedy family…  It’s rape, pillage and plunder at the hands of the world's "elites."

Many problems troubling America today are rooted in the poor performance of our elite educational institutions, the moral and social collapse of our ‘best’ families and the culture of narcissism and entitlement that has transformed the American elite into a flabby minded, strategically inept and morally confused parody of itself.  (Mead)

Worse, it has trickled down to the Hollywood pseudo-elite that so much of our society lamentably now looks to for guidance.  Is it any wonder a libertine anti-intellectualism has seized much of middle America?  The Establishment is perpetually disappointed in us.  It’s bad enough being preached at by your “betters,” but ordinary Americans can no longer abide the perpetual lectures from the morally and intellectually flabby.

The elites have historically taken the slings and arrows of the hoi polloi with magnanimity, earning a grudging if hidden respect from us in return when they did something right.  No longer.  The waters are poisoned, we are jaded.

Lecture me?  Screw you!  I'd rather go hunting with Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin.

Walter Russell Mead – Establishment Blues
Maureen Dowd - Powerful and Primitive
Globe and Mail – French Morals, American Justice