On America, Hochman Strikes the Nail on the Head
Okay, I know, maybe “perfect” is too strong a word. It’s certainly not a word that one writer uses lightly to describe another writer’s work, even that of a respected colleague on the pages of The American Spectator. But I don’t know of a lesser word that would capture my feelings this morning as I read Nate Hochman’s “All America Lies at the End of the Wilderness Road.” As soon as I finished it, I shared it with my wife, who is notably impatient with most political writing — and she loved it.
It’s a concrete vision of the America that lies “at the end of the wilderness,” something real, something as solid as Lambeau Field.
I’m just a contributor here at TAS, with no say in editorial decisions, but I hope that the editors leave Hochman’s essay on the main page, perhaps as an “Editor’s Pick,” at least throughout the balance of the 4th of July weekend. Regardless, dear readers, if you’ve missed it, and don’t see it in the coming days, look for it in the author archive. (READ MORE: ‘All America Lies at the End of the Wilderness Road’)
Why, then, the lavish — and for me entirely uncharacteristic — praise. It’s simple really, and has less to do with the clean, clear exposition than it does with Hochman’s message. He calls out, bluntly, the tendency to locate “America” as nothing more than a philosophical abstraction, a confection of high-sounding phrases easily uttered and impossible of attainment. We can — and should — thrill to the message of the Declaration of Independence, and to all the other expressions of what we wish of our country. And we can accept, proudly, that in living up to these expressions, always substantially if not always completely, we have served as an inspiration to people across the globe.
As Hochman correctly notes, the Left would simply reduce American patriotism to adherence to their interpretation of this aspirational document, something transactional, something scarcely tethered to the reality of the nation we’ve become over 248 years. In their reading, anyone who buys their interpretation of our foundational documents becomes a good American, or “adjacent” thereto. Such an expansive reading might make, say, Emmanuel Macron a “good American,” or Angela Merkel, or Tony Blair. Once upon a time, in the 1960s, there were Americans quite willing to confer “good American” status on Fidel Castro or Che Guevara and, at their silliest, good old Chairman Mao.
I chuckled when I read Hochman’s acknowledgement that he only came of political age in 2016, at the end of Obama’s presidency. I’m afraid I have a few years on him. I came of political age watching the Nixon-Kennedy debates in 1960, and voted for the first time in 1968. He locates the 1960s as the onset of a “concerted and intentional campaign” to “abstract America out of existence,” and in this, from my direct observation, he is entirely correct. The tendency, to be sure, existed much earlier than this. Woodrow Wilson’s “progressivism” partook of the poison, and so too did many aspects of FDR’s “New Deal.”
But the anti-Vietnam war radicals of the 1960s took this to an entirely new level. Picking up on the narrative of the civil rights movement, the insistence that the U.S. live up to “all men are created equal,” the anti-war movement moved directly from “end the war” to “America fails to live up to its promise” without passing Go or collecting $200. This was the message of Howard Zinn’s appalling A People’s History of the United States and its even more appalling follow-up A Young People’s History of the United States, which, together, have wreaked intellectual havoc on several generations of Americans.
There was a time, during the Reagan years, when one might well have hoped that we’d gotten past this nonsense, that “morning in America” meant a fresh appreciation of all that was good in our nation. But the subversive forces continued their corrosive work, until they found their avatar, as Hochman persuasively contends, with the emergence of Barack Obama. Hochman correctly notes Obama’s “diabolical genius for smuggling radical ideas into seemingly blasé, vaguely patriotic sounding statements,” making America so abstract that it may well not exist at all.” As Hochman concludes, for the “progressives,” “America is good so long as it becomes more and more like the country that they wish it was.”
It’s no accident that the progressives’ America fits so neatly into the grander globalist enterprise, no accident that, as I noted recently, Obama’s America — and Joe Biden’s — has made “leading from behind” the manner of our role on the world stage. It’s no accident that leading Democrats and their allies in corporate America walk so comfortably among the grandees of the World Economic Forum. It’s no accident that, once again during this most recent “Pride” month, American consulates across the world lit up with rainbow colors and website messages of endorsement for the LGBTQ+ enterprise. And, sadly, it’s no accident that one can draw a straight line from the 1960s chants of “Ho-ho-ho Chi Minh” or “Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today” to “from the river to the sea.” (READ MORE from James H. McGee: We Must End the Democrats’ Failed Foreign Policy)
Finally, and inspiringly, Hochman locates the antidote to all this in a much different vision of America, a vision that finds America in the everyday lives of Americans and the country that generations of Americans have built through hard work and protected through hard sacrifice. It’s a concrete vision of the America that lies “at the end of the wilderness,” something real, something as solid as Lambeau Field, as beautiful as our “amber waves of grain,” as admirable as the working men and women who have made — and every day go on making — America what it really is.
By all means, conservatives should fight to reclaim our aspirational documents from the shallow and self-serving interpretation of the progressives. But we should never assume that the fight begins and ends as a matter of competing political philosophies. We have the advantage of being grounded in reality, and we should never lose sight of this, never lose sight of the fact — and it is a hard fact, not an abstract idea — that the glory of America has come through Americans working side by side to build a nation that works for each and every one of us.
And so I return to the accolade with which I greeted Nate Hochman’s essay. How did I arrive at the word “perfect?” Perhaps appropriately, it didn’t come to me as a writerly abstraction, but rather from a very concrete real world memory. My dad was no great handyman, but there were a few small things that he prided himself upon. One of these was the ability to drive a nail. Teaching me how to do this, watching with a grimace as nails kept bending under my haphazard strikes, correcting patiently until finally I could hit the head properly, not once, but repeatedly, driving it clean and true into that recalcitrant 2×4. The grimace became a smile and he said “That’s perfect — you’re hitting it right on the head.”
So Mr. Hochman, from my dad, through me, my compliments to you. You’ve hit that nail right on the head and driven it straight and true.
James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a national security and counter-terrorism professional, working primarily in the nuclear security field. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His recent novel, Letter of Reprisal, tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited.
The post On America, Hochman Strikes the Nail on the Head appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.