Shelf Life: Confirm Thy Soul

IN her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (Collins, 192 pp., $19.95), veteran conservative author and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan diagnoses the malady of America’s political culture in the post-9/11 era. The illness began, she writes, with partisan “teamism”-and subsequently “degenerated” into outright “gangism.”

She summarizes the tone of the decade’s politics as follows: “From the Left: Bush lied, people died. The chimp started the war to pay off his corporate cronies. From the lunatic fringe of the Left: 9/11 was an inside job.” And from the Right: “You don’t support the war? Then you are not a patriot. . . . You criticize Bush? Now, while we’re at war?” The Left “indulg[ed] in grim, and mindless, triumphalism,” showing “a smirk of pleasure” whenever bad news was reported from Iraq. The White House, for its part, resorted to “the last refuge of the adolescent: defiance. Their attitude was: ‘Oh yeah? We’re Lincoln, you’re McClellan. We care about the troops and you don’t.'” Both sides, reports Noonan, have been called “thuggish”; and in both cases, she says, the charge “was not unfair”: “I was starting to feel that Washington was a city run by two rival gangs that had a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fought.”

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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IN her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (Collins, 192 pp., $19.95), veteran conservative author and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan diagnoses the malady of America’s political culture in the post-9/11 era. The illness began, she writes, with partisan “teamism”-and subsequently “degenerated” into outright “gangism.”

She summarizes the tone of the decade’s politics as follows: “From the Left: Bush lied, people died. The chimp started the war to pay off his corporate cronies. From the lunatic fringe of the Left: 9/11 was an inside job.” And from the Right: “You don’t support the war? Then you are not a patriot. . . . You criticize Bush? Now, while we’re at war?” The Left “indulg[ed] in grim, and mindless, triumphalism,” showing “a smirk of pleasure” whenever bad news was reported from Iraq. The White House, for its part, resorted to “the last refuge of the adolescent: defiance. Their attitude was: ‘Oh yeah? We’re Lincoln, you’re McClellan. We care about the troops and you don’t.'” Both sides, reports Noonan, have been called “thuggish”; and in both cases, she says, the charge “was not unfair”: “I was starting to feel that Washington was a city run by two rival gangs that had a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fought.”