[This book review appeared in the July/August 1997 issue of
Conservative Review
, pp. 35-38.]
Why Do Americans Submit to This?
Dr. Susan Huck
McLean, VA: Newcomb Publishers, Inc., 1997
Reviewed by Dwight D. Murphey
The title of this book raises a question that is central to the “culture war.” There isnothing that enemies, foreign and domestic, can do to American society that is nearly sodamaging as our own docility. Were it not for the comfortable acceptance by Americans of the ongoing attack on American culture, that assault would be stopped in its tracks.
To What Are We Submitting?
Just in case anyone, perhaps awakening from a forty-year slumber, wonders what itis that Americans are submitting to, Sue Huck (as she is affectionately known around theoffice of the
Conservative Review
, where she is, along with this reviewer, an associateeditor) sets out her “D list” on the back cover. It refers to “what liberals like to see in therest of us.” Here is a sample from it, although it deserves a close reading in its entirety— one of several reasons for buying the book:Liberals, she says, like to see Americans as:
•
“
Dumb
, as in both ‘dumbed-down’ and mute.
•
“
Docile
, ready to be guided and trained, ready to accept any outrage.
•
“
Deprived
of as much of our income as we will allow to be taken from us…
•
“
Deceived
by the current propaganda line, whatever it may be…
•
“
Denounced
for destroying the earth, oppressing ‘others,’ harboring badthoughts…
•
“
Deracinated
, if white—forbidden a sense of racial identity or pride…
•
“
Displaced
from schools and jobs by federal pressure favoring federally- privileged groups…”This list captures the essential points in American submissiveness. It is by defaultthat we are losing our civilization and our culture.
Why Are Americans So Submissive?
Sue starts with a review of Jared Taylor’s excellent recent book,
Paved With Good Intentions
, and relates a conversation with Taylor in which he broadened the question: “‘Ithink future historians will ask why whites committed suicide.’ The trend, he notes, is nowglobal. Yes, it is—everywhere in Europe, visibly so in South Africa, and even inAustralia.” So it isn’t just Americans. Western civilization itself is under attack, and isallowing itself both to be eaten away by the acids of an alienated intellectual subculture andultimately to be caused, through the medium of a massive influx of non-Western peoples,no longer recognizably to exist.All of us who write on these issues are short on explanations of why so few peoplecare. And, despite her title, Sue Huck doesn’t give much explanation. Her book is acompilation—much better organized than other compilations I’ve seen, and with a short
introductory essay to each cluster—of the many articles and book reviews she has writtenfor
Conservative Review
between 1990 and 1997. It is a splendid, angry, and yetdelightfully told account of the assault upon us. She has positioned herself to “see the faceof evil” by being in personal contact with the countless crazies of the Left. There is probably no better book than hers for someone who wants the down-in-the-trenches detailof the culture war. But her question—vitally important as it is—remains mostlyunanswered.She is on the mark about it, though, when she refers to “rootless, valueless, weak-minded, irresponsible, adolescent, ‘other-directed’ people,” and says they “constitute moremalleable material, if remaking society is your game.” This gets to the root of the matter in perhaps more than one way.Modern Western civilization has long been overwhelmingly “bourgeois,” centeredon a commercial way of life, with the “acting man” of business and industry central to it.Indeed, the overwhelming portion of the population has become “middle class,” living alife preoccupied with vocation, family and friends. This has historically, as far back as theancient Greeks, been a way of life that has preoccupied itself with the practical affairs of daily living. Their life has not been leisured, and the “bourgeoisie” has chronically beenunable to raise from within itself an intellectual culture—writers and artists—who willcelebrate it and formulate principles and policies appropriate to it. Instead, the“intelligentsia,” except during the Renaissance, has been characteristically at war with it.Certainly this is a chief hallmark of the modern age. What is relevant in the context of Western submissiveness is that, absent an appropriate intelligentsia, the so-called“bourgeoisie” has been without a voice. By its nature, it is a “silent majority.” And thatsilence creates a void into which alienated voices are quick to rush. Not only that, but an “un-idea’d culture” produces the very “rootlessness” Suerefers to, at least under circumstances in which roots are not furnished by “hoary tradition.”A capitalistic economy thrives, however, precisely upon mobility, and even demands it as part of the ever-continuing economic adjustment that occurs in a market. It is impossible todevelop and maintain “hoary tradition” when grown children move half-a-continent fromtheir original homes for jobs and professions. It is even less possible when an alienatedintellectual subculture attacks every “acculturation” that could provide tradition. So,“rootlessness” is part of the package, and this is in effect deracination.The middle class is at the same time affected by the success that marks itsexistence. While supremely busy, its members do enjoy an affluence that exceeds that of any prior epoch. Affluence leads to complacency. People don’t welcome being budgedfrom their comfortable round. It is easier to conform even their thinking than it is to bestir themselves in protest. This leads to setting up all sorts of rationalizations that claim it ismost truly respectable to conform to what the alienated subculture sets forth so insistently.Who among us doesn’t know a great many “moderates” of this sort, who never becomeangry at the Left’s assault but harbor great resentment against anyone who would disturbtheir complacency. (This, in my opinion, was the central issue at stake in the controversyover Senator Joseph McCarthy 45 years ago. He wanted people to
react
to the fact that600 million people had, within the five years immediately before the start of his campaignin 1950, fallen under Communist brutality. The really crucial fight was between those whocared and those who quite militantly insisted that we not care. Of course, the Left was inthe tussle, too, providing, as always, the complacent moderates with its central vision.)
Out of all this is fashioned cowardice, at least of the moral, if not the physical, sort.Such people lead fearful lives, ever apprehensive lest anyone suspect their conformity isless than total. You would think they were threatened with a firing squad or something.The fact that they are not, and may often be threatened with nothing more than a temporaryirritation from their fellow-conformists, shows the extent of their cowardice. It is so profound as to be existential.These, then, are the marshmallows against whom we are pushing when we seek arevitalization of American culture. All it would take to reverse the assault Sue Huck tracesso well would be for a few million of them to buy her book and care enough to talk withtheir friends about it. The despair of contemporary American conservatism lies, though, inour knowledge that they won’t.
A Sprightly Discussion of Issues in the Culture War
Sue Huck is not a heavy writer. Everything she produces is full of bounce andsatiric humor. It is a good thing, too, because the subjects she discusses are deadly serious —so much so that, as the book goes along, one comes to know that the laughter is both areflection of Sue’s own effervescent sense of life and a veil to soften her rage.She discusses the inanities of “liberal” education, the omnipresent propaganda inwhich we are bathed and that produced the “sliming of Pat Buchanan,” the jackbootedexcesses of Waco and Ruby Ridge, the abuse of science that runs riot in so much of theenvironmentalist movement. She moves on through the excesses of an annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, where in 1992 11,000 professors listened dutifully for four days to themes of sex (much of it homosexual), race and multiculturalism. She turnsher incisive mind to the ongoing warping of American law, in the course of it passing alongsome commonsense talk from a federal judge. And she eulogizes such conservative heroesas Edwin Walker, J. Evetts Haley and Petr Beckmann.These are just a few of the subjects discussed in her 58 essays. The book covers alot of ground, but amazingly it does so without repetition and without superficiality.Perceptive readers will want to notice that none of the subjects is “economic.” I amalways amazed at my conservative and libertarian friends who continue to speak, as theydid or might have in the 1950s, of the central issue as being “the growth of government”and its intervention into the economy. That encroachment will always be an issue for thoseof us who value a limited government. But the culture war has introduced a thousand other issues. They are perhaps of a more fundamental nature, since they pertain to the continuedexistence of a distinctively American society.
Her Conspiratorial Understanding
Sue Huck often speaks of the assault as coming from a central source. She hasdone her homework on the extent to which the big money of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations has, by decades of well-greased effort, permeated our public discourse. Thereis an “Establishment [that] stands above both of our allegedly competing political parties.”“The Council on Foreign Relations” is “our unelected ruling-class.”From this center, the conspiracy broadens out to recruit powerful forces. There arethen many strings to the bow. Picking up a term from Thomas Sowell that refers to whatshe often calls “the chattering classes” (the intelligentsia), Sue speaks of “the anointed,”who “know very well how to gain and keep power over us.”
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