1. Bush Values
With passing away of George H.W. Bush, there has been a lot of commiseration, among the left and the right, about the loss of Bush values in our culture today. Daniel Henninger writes eloquently about how it came to pass.
With passing away of George H.W. Bush, there has been a lot of commiseration, among the left and the right, about the loss of Bush values in our culture today. Daniel Henninger writes eloquently about how it came to pass.
2. Bush values are definable in words such as temperance, self-restraint, plain-speaking, honesty, duty, forbearance, humility, prudence, courage. These traits emerged everywhere as generations of Americans turned the frontier into a civilized nation. They were necessary.
3. This week, from the anti-Trump metronomes at the Washington Post we heard this: "Trump’s time in office has been defined by a war against virtually all of the norms and institutions that Bush held dear.”
4. Manifestly, George Bush’s death has put in motion a nostalgia for something lost. And it is a nostalgia that appears to be bipartisan. What has been lost, however, predates the election of 2016.
5. Most of the Bush values can be found on any list of what are called—or used to be called—virtues. It is telling that these same simple virtues are now being praised by a media that has done so much in the past 30 years to undermine them.
6. Nobody embodied the Bush values better than Barbara Bush. Here's how Norman Mailer, who was covering the Houston convention in 1992 for The New Republic, covered Barbara Bush's speech (and he reflected the attitude of all liberals):
7. Norman Mailer on Barbara Bush: "She spoke about Family Values. It was no rhetorical gem. It read like one of those decaffeinated pieces of prose that used to blanket the old Reader’s Digest, highly simplified, and emotionally available to anyone whose I.Q. was below 100.”
8. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who by the time of their presidential campaigns represented the victors in the culture wars, still took time to rhetorically slam the losers, who by then really were clinging to what was left from those battles.
9. That three-decades-ago convention in Texas is as good a marker as any for when Democrats and liberal opinion started a long political and cultural distancing from much of the American middle class.
10. Times change. Family values have been displaced by a more media-driven agenda: racism, identity, gender, immigration. But if you want to discover why America lost the personal and political values of George H.W. Bush, forget Donald Trump. Look deeper.
The End.
The End.
