PEGGY NOONAN'S APOCALYPSE EVENTUALLY

Today, Peggy Noonan is boasting of her ability to read the future:

It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year's day, 1994....

"At home certain trends -- crime, cultural tension, some cultural Balkanization --will, we fear, continue; some will worsen. In my darker moments I have a bad hunch. The fraying of the bonds that keep us together, the strangeness and anomie of our popular culture, the increase in walled communities ... the rising radicalism of the politically correct ... the increased demand of all levels of government for the money of the people, the spotty success with which we are communicating to the young America's reason for being and founding beliefs, the growth of cities where English is becoming the second language ... these things may well come together at some point in our lifetimes and produce something painful indeed. I can imagine, for instance, in the year 2020 or so, a movement in some states to break away from the union. Which would bring about, of course, a drama of Lincolnian darkness....You will know that things have reached a bad pass when Newsweek and Time, if they still exist 15 years from now, do cover stories on a surprising, and disturbing trend: aging baby boomers leaving America, taking what savings they have to live the rest of their lives in places like Africa and Ireland."

Well, Peg's crystal ball is a tad cloudier than she realizes. Yes, there's secession talk in the air, and Time and Newsweek are in trouble (but that's because of the robustness of the Internet, which doesn't exactly jibe with her last-days hand-wringing), and no Americans are actually leaving the country for economic reasons, certainly not to go to Ireland and Africa (which are broke) -- yes, Drudge reported on a few hundred expatriate richies who want to dodge U.S. taxes on their worldwide income, but that's not the same thing, though Peggy goes on to suggest that it is.

More from Peg (writing in 2010, not quoting herself):

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought -- wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances -- that their children would have better lives than they did. That was what kept people pulling their boots on in the morning after the first weary pause: My kids will have it better....

Parents now fear something has stopped....

Yeah, Peg, I hear you. Check out this Pew poll:

The idea that each generation of children will grow up to be better off than the one that preceded it has always been a part of the American dream. But barely a third of adults expect things to work out that way for today's children, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

About half of adults (50%) say that today's children will grow up to be worse off than people are now. A third (34%) say they'll be better off and most of the rest say they aren't sure....

Oh, wait -- that was from May 2006, at the heart of what Noonan's right-wing friends liked to call the "Bush boom." (Pew also points out that there was a similar pessimism in 1994 -- yes, around the time of Noonan's old column -- and also in 2002. Optimists ruled, however, in 1999, during the reign of that commie satyr Clinton.)

Now, let's review Noonan's list of reasons for this sense of despair:

The fraying of the bonds that keep us together, the strangeness and anomie of our popular culture, the increase in walled communities ... the rising radicalism of the politically correct ... the increased demand of all levels of government for the money of the people, the spotty success with which we are communicating to the young America's reason for being and founding beliefs, the growth of cities where English is becoming the second language ...

Notice what's missing from that list? The fact that ordinary people never get ahead economically, even in good times, or at least they haven't for the past two generations -- except, to some extent, during the Clinton years.

Oh, and Peg has another culprit:

But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don't act as if they do. I think their detachment from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past. I started noticing in the 1980s, the growing gulf between the country's thought leaders, as they're called -- the political and media class, the universities— -- and those living what for lack of a better word we'll call normal lives on the ground in America. The two groups were agitated by different things, concerned about different things, had different focuses, different world views.

But I've never seen the gap wider than it is now. I think it is a chasm.

No, she isn't referring to leaders who insist, say, that tax breaks for big companies with offshore operations should trump medical aid to 9/11 first responders. She's not referring to Wall Street fat cats and the administrations that coddle them. She's not referring to global media barons who cynically sow hatred and division in America in order to elect more tax-cutters for themselves and their fellow plutocrats. She's talking about the likes of this:

To take just one example from the past 10 days, the federal government continues its standoff with the state of Arizona over how to handle illegal immigration. The point of view of our thought leaders is, in general, that borders that are essentially open are good, or not so bad....

Ah, but see, there's a simple solution:

An irony here is that if we stopped the illegal flow and removed the sense of emergency it generates, comprehensive reform would, in time, follow.

Oh, is that all we have to do? Just stop illegal immigrants from coming in? (Smacks forehead.) Gosh, why didn't we think of that? That's so simple! We're such silly elitists not to have hit on this E-Z-2-implement cure-all!

Let's read that at further length:

An irony here is that if we stopped the illegal flow and removed the sense of emergency it generates, comprehensive reform would, in time, follow. Because we're not going to send the estimated 10 million to 15 million illegals already here back. We're not going to put sobbing children on a million buses. That would not be in our nature. (Do our leaders even know what's in our nature?) As years passed, those here would be absorbed, and everyone in the country would come to see the benefit of integrating them fully into the tax system. So it's ironic that our leaders don't do what in the end would get them what they say they want, which is comprehensive reform.

This is a joke, right, Peg? No, wait -- you're serious. You actually believe that "we're not going to send the estimated 10 million to 15 million illegals already here back." You actually believe that "We're not going to put sobbing children on a million buses." Go to a tea party rally and ask about that. "That would not be in our nature"? We had slavery in this country. We had Jim Crow. We had lynchings. We employed children in sweatshops. We interned the Japanese in World War II. What the hell do you mean, "not in our nature"?

And what do you mean, "As years passed, those here would be absorbed, and everyone in the country would come to see the benefit of integrating them fully into the tax system"? The hell they would -- not all of them, at any rate. And you know why? Because elitists -- your side's elitists -- would never stop believing there's a political advantage in keeping people angry at immigrants. Identify a dark-skinned demon and blame its existence on Democrats -- that's a classic. And if these brown-skinned people ever are, somehow, accepted across the political spectrum, it'll be because your elitists have found some other scapegoat for all our problems.

You were right, though, in 1994 to worry about "the fraying of the bonds that keep us together." Fraying those bonds was the stock in trade of that year's political superstar, your very own Newt Gingrich. He's still around, of course, still fraying away. This year, though, he's got a lot more help.

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(By the way, I'm ignoring the fact that Noonan's preminitions of doom seem to come only in years when Democrats control the White House as well as both houses of Congress, and midterms are coming up.)