Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Free

Syria, Sudan, and Serbia. But how do the Buchanans, Bennetts, and O’Reillys account for perfectly pleasant little countries like Sweden? Or the Netherlands? Or Canada? (By the way, someone needs to alert Pat Buchanan that Canada is not in Europe. On page 200 of The Death of the West , he writes, “Europe has begun to resemble the United States. Between 1960 and 2000, out-of-wedlock births soared in Canada from 4 percent to 31 percent, in the U.K. from 5 percent to 38 percent, in France from . . .”)
    The carping goes on year after year, book deal after book deal, with the Republican National Convention serving as a sort of quadrennial national checkup, during which we’re invariably told that we’re headed downhill fast. Watching the Republican National Convention is like going to the doctor every four years and being told your body is riddled with some horrible, disfiguring, fast-spreading, terminal cancer. We’ve been getting that same diagnosis from the same doctors every four years for—what? Twenty years? Longer? Am I the only one who sits through our national chemotherapy sessions with former drug czars and radio talk-show hosts and is not convinced we’re so ill that we require such an annoying and toxic course of treatment?
    Can’t we get a second opinion?
    Sometimes we do, but it’s not all that helpful either. Americans are sinning, wimpy liberals meekly respond, but we’re not sinning quite so much as Bill Bennett would lead us to believe. Americans may cheat on their spouses and smoke a lot of pot, but we don’t cheat or smoke pot at the rate one might expect. If only a few more Americans would have Just Said No, liberals and conservatives agree, we could reverse our moral collapse and avoid the ignominious prospect of being a slightly less glorious nation than Canada, the sick man of Europe.
    For anyone interested in genuine political arguments, the second opinion offered by liberals is deeply frustrating: it buys into the same values espoused by the people who gave us that faulty first opinion—namely, that “sin” is always bad. Terrified of being the pro-pot party or the pro-adultery party or the pro-sodomy party, the Democrats opt for virtue-lite politics and send junior varsity scolds like Sen. Joe Lieberman out to lecture Hollywood. Where is the politician who will look Bennett in the eye on television and say, “Some of the nicest, most virtuous, morally uncollapsed people I know smoke pot and commit adultery (with their spouses’ permission)—it’s how they pursue happiness, and so long as they’re not hurting anyone else, why should they be made to feel guilty? Or any less virtuous than you, Bill Bennett?”
    Bennett, like every moral scold who has ever compiled a big book on virtue, goes on and on about the deep sense of happiness and fulfillment he has derived from marriage and traditional family life. There’s something deeply problematic about praising Bill Bennett—an activity that eats up an awful lot of Bill Bennett’s time—for pursuing those things that make Bill Bennett happy (heterosexuality, sobriety, monogamy) while condemning someone else for pursuing the things that make him happy (say, homosexuality, pot, and the occasional three-way). Refraining from having sex with men and with women who aren’t his wife makes Bill Bennett happy . And I’m all for Bill Bennett being just as happy a Bill Bennett as Bill Bennett can possibly be. But everyone should have the same right to happiness. Should the law coerce all of us into pursuing Bill Bennett’s brand of happiness? Bill Bennett thinks so, and so do Bork and Buchanan. These men, so far as we know, derive happiness from things that have been labeled virtues, and hence they are praised for their pursuit of happiness. For others, the things that make us happy have been labeled sinful, and we’re condemned for our pursuit of