Another Country - Another tour de force by Joe Sobran

Note: The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.


In Washington the two parties have been fighting bitterly over the confirmation of President Bush’s judicial nominees. The Republicans may resort to “the nuclear option” to prevent Democratic filibustering and other obstructive tactics. The Democrats call Bush’s nominees “radical.”

I hardly know which side is more risible. Both parties blow their noses on the U.S. Constitution, so it hardly makes any difference which controls the judiciary. The Democrats are somewhat worse, which doesn’t mean the Republicans are good. To call the Republicans “radical” is to pay them a compliment they have done nothing to deserve.

The Democrats, whether they admit it or not, want judges who will declare homosexuality and same-sex marriage constitutional rights. But the Republicans favor unconstitutional Federal entitlements, expanded executive powers (Homeland Security, the USA PATRIOT Act, et cetera), and of course undeclared war. George W. Bush makes Bill Clinton look like Thomas Jefferson.

Iconoclast. Gadfly. Patriot. Catholic. One has to admire Mr. Sobran's brass.

What happened to the country we used to love and the world used to admire? For many years it was a country of implicit understandings about freedom and the good life. The government seemed to accept its limits and respect our desire to be left alone.

But as new forms of tyranny exploded abroad, our own politicians got ideas too. The concentration of power, economic dirigisme, high taxes, a mania for equality, and world empire became accepted as enlightened principles. Gradually, America became a profoundly different country. We hardly noticed it happening.

I am reminded of this, from Marilyn Barnewall. I think dozens, if not hundreds of books need to be written on this subject. What happened to cause the greatest generation, the generation of my dad and Joe Sobran's father, to fail to pass on its way of life to its heirs? (At least imperfectly so.) Barnewall provides a piece to the puzzle.

Much of the blame for this, I’m afraid, lies with the American Catholic Church, which, since the Second Vatican Council in the Sixties, has ceased to exert the gravitational force it did when I was a child, even as government has joined the mammoth entertainment industry in marginalizing all religion.

A damning indictment of the Americanized Catholic Church. I agree wholeheartedly. But do not believe for a minute this only means the priests and bishops and nuns of the United States. Ultimately, we, the laity are responsible.

Would my father’s generation have fought for this country in World War II if they could have foreseen the America of 2005? Despite the current celebration of “the good war,” I seriously doubt it. They thought they were fighting for a way of life that has now vanished, destroyed by politics and cultural decay. Maybe it was already doomed, and the war only hastened its destruction. (emphasis mine)

This last could be true. WWI could have begun the slide. It did, after all, destroy Europe as we knew it. (See Thomas Fleming here, and his books The Illusion of Victory and The New Dealers' War.)

Tens of millions died in “the good war,” probably including a Gershwin or an Edison, to say nothing of the misery of countless ordinary people. There is nothing about it to celebrate, unless you’re a politician who profits by the new order that arose in its ruins and survives today. Politicians love to commemorate wars, the men who died in them, and above all the politicians who started them.

When you look back on a famous victory in any war of the past, don’t be too sure the right side won.

Ouch. But Sobran is spot on. This is not treason, or defeatism, or even anti-americanism (although that may be closest to the truth if you define "americanism" as a particular ideology - the practicle embodiment of modernism. How about americanism as modernism immanentized ?)


What the heck am I typing about? The following, a description of "Americanism", is from Testem Benevolentiae, an Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII of January 22, 1899:

"If by that name ('Americanism') be designated the characteristic qualities which reflect honour on the people of America, just as other nations have what is special to them; or, if it implies the condition of your commonwealths, or the laws and customs prevailing in them, there is no reason why we should deem that it ought to be discarded. But if it is to be used not only to signify, but even to commend the above doctrines, there can be no doubt that our venerable brethren, the bishops of America, would be the first to repudiate and condemn it, as being especially unjust to them and to the entire nation as well. For it raises the suspicion that there are some among you who conceive and desire a Church in America different from that which is in the rest of the world." (emphasis mine)


The perspective of The Catholic Church is by necessity profoundly different from that of any transitory political system or nation.

Yes, transitory. Persia fell. Rome fell. The Thousand Year Reich lasted merely a dozen. Some day, the USA will be no more. The Church remains and shall always remain until everything ends.

Regardless of the triumphs and achievements of our nation, she is merely of this world. We are transcendent, she is not. We can ascend to salvation or be damned to hell for all eternity. Our country cannot do either.

In a word, God must come first.