Beyond Peace (25 page)

Great leadership will be needed to meet the challenges we face in the world in the era beyond peace. It is significant that none of the other current leaders of the Western world, although they are able men and women, have public approval ratings equal even to Boris Yeltsin's. Churchill once observed that one of Britain's nineteenth-century Prime Ministers, Lord Rosebery, “had the misfortune to live in a time of great men and small events.” Historically, leaders have not been recognized as great unless they have led during times of war. We must change our thinking. Keeping peace should be recognized as an event as great as waging war. Those who meet the exciting new challenges of this historic era beyond peace will earn the mantle of greatness, because they will have had the good fortune to live in a time of great events of their own making.

What role will the United States play in this era beyond peace? In the beginning of the twentieth century we were not a military or economic superpower. While we played a significant role on the world stage, American world leadership was not an indispensable factor for maintaining peace. Today the United States is the strongest and richest nation in the world.

It is clear that there is no substitute for American leadership. What is not clear is how the United States should lead. History shows that the lessons of the past can be used to resolve the problems of the future. We face lesser dangers than we did during World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. In those three wars, the danger was tangible—we could see it, feel it, touch it. Even during the Cold War, we faced a clear and present danger. By mobilizing our economic, political, and military resources, the United States and its allies could meet and defeat those threats.

With the end of the Cold War, the threat is less but the challenge is greater. We undoubtedly have the means to maintain the military power necessary to secure the peace for which
we have sacrificed so much. The cost will be far lower because the danger has diminished as a result of the end of the Cold War. But we do not have a foreign enemy to unite us or a cause to inspire us. The profound question is whether America will unite behind a policy of enlightened world leadership—one of the greatest causes any nation could have.

We should welcome the opportunity to meet this challenge—not just for those whose freedom is threatened, but for ourselves. Only when we are engaged in an enterprise greater than ourselves can we be true to ourselves.

Are we worthy to lead? We cannot unless we project values that go beyond peace, beyond our security, beyond our wealth. Two hundred years ago we caught the imagination of the world because of the ideals of freedom for which we stood. Today the United States must once again demonstrate not just that we are the strongest and the richest nation in the world, but also that we are a good and principled country, an example for others to follow. That is our challenge beyond peace. How we meet that challenge will determine not only our future but also the future of peace, prosperity, and freedom for the rest of the world.

The ultimate test of a nation's character is not how it responds to adversity in war but how it meets the challenge of peace. The end of the Cold War offers us a providential opportunity to address long-neglected domestic problems, to return to our founding principles, and to achieve a true American renewal. Our future and the future of the world depend upon whether we meet this challenge. A strong, unified, growing America can help make the next century a century of peace and freedom. A weak, fractured, stagnant America could be the catalyst for another grim century of tyranny and war.

America is the greatest, most successful social experiment ever conducted in the history of man. Nothing is more essential to the world's peace and security in the twenty-first century than the renewal and strengthening of America itself and the preservation of what it means to mankind everywhere. Unless we successfully address our serious domestic problems, they will insidiously erode our prosperity, corrode the soul of the nation, and extinguish what Lincoln called “the last best hope of man on earth.”

Constant renewal has always been part of the American experience. But “renewal” and “change” are not the same. Change is good only if it happens to be improvement. Change that destroys what is good is bad. One hundred years ago, Marx's colleague, Friedrich Engels, inspired millions with the slogan “We must change the world.” The changes he advocated left a terrible
legacy of death, destruction, and brutal repression in its wake. As Irving Babbitt warned, “Where there is no vision, the people perish. Where there is sham vision, they perish sooner.” The change we need today is the kind that restores the best we have lost, preserves the best we have, and leads us on to something better.

Restoring the best we have lost is the first essential. The domestic problems that plague the nation today result directly from the destructive changes in cultural values, social policies, and behavioral standards that have marked the course of the past three decades.

Many of our opinion leaders are satisfied to think of the United States as just “one nation” among a hundred and eighty moral, if not necessarily military or economic, equals. Most Americans disagree. We want, and the world needs, America to be something more.

From the beginning, America has been more than a place. It represents the values and ideals of a humane civilization. Our central mission is to preserve and advance those values both at home and abroad.

In my first Inaugural Address twenty-five years ago, I said, “To a crisis of the spirit we need an answer of the spirit.” That was true then. It is still true today. The violence, discord, viciousness, and slovenliness that so mar the quality of life in America are products of the spirit, and they require answers of the spirit. These are behaviors, not conditions. We will get America back on the path of civilization when Americans once more respect and demand civilized behavior.

From the 1960s on, our laws and our mores have been driven by the cultural conceits that took hold during the heyday of the counterculture, including a denial of personal responsibility and the fantasy that the coercive power of government can produce spiritual uplift, cure poverty, end bigotry, legislate growth, and stamp out any number of individual and social inadequacies.

Some have called the 1960s the second-most-disastrous decade in American history, second only to the 1860s, when the nation was drenched in the blood of civil war. As Rush Limbaugh put it, “In the eyes of the 1960s activist, America could do nothing right. The United States was no longer perceived as the greatest experiment in democracy and freedom in the history of the world, but as a center of militarism, imperialism, racism, and economic oppression.”

The 1960s saw an explosion of domestic violence without modern precedent. That was also the time when, in effect, the inmates took over the asylum: when the notion took hold that great universities should be run by their students, and pandering college faculties and administrations supinely acquiesced; when police departments were stripped of the right to police; when the fad for “deinstitutionalization” emptied mental hospitals of their patients, dumping them on the streets; when criminal behavior was celebrated as social protest; when welfare-rights activists succeeded in transforming the public dole into a permanent entitlement; and when the cultural avant-garde, egged on by the news and entertainment media, declared open war on the values of family, civility, and personal responsibility, and mocked the American dream.

Some are beginning to recognize this. One of America's most penetrating social thinkers, Thomas Sowell, asked recently whether anyone has noticed “how many of the adverse trends plaguing us today began in the 1960s?” In a new book,
The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties' Legacy to the Underclass, Fortune
magazine editor Myron Magnet brilliantly analyzes the multiple ills that are directly traceable to that cultural revolution. He argues that the remade system “fostered, in the underclass and the homeless, a new, intractable poverty that shocked and dismayed, that . . . went beyond the economic realm into the realm of pathology.” It stripped away respect for precisely those attitudes and behaviors that have always provided the exit from poverty: thrift, hard work, deferred gratification,
“and so on through the whole catalogue of antique-sounding bourgeois virtues.”

The founders created a land of opportunity. For more than three centuries, opportunity was enough because the culture conditioned people to take advantage of it. But we have now created a culture in which appallingly large numbers ignore the opportunities offered by work, choosing instead those offered by the interwoven worlds of welfare and crime. Our task now is not to invent opportunity, but to enforce honest work as the route to it. We need to get America back on track before it sails off into the abyss.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, the answer is not in our laws but in ourselves. Get our culture and values back on track, and the laws will follow.

In assessing our domestic situation, we must keep a sense of proportion. Karen Elliot House, former foreign editor of
The Wall Street Journal,
has observed that we hear “ceaseless sermons of gloom and doom; decline and fall; America is overextended; America can't compete”—ideas that have been “sold like snake oil, by politicians, economists, and academic evangelists.” We must not allow this dirge of pessimism to become the national anthem.

The United States is the wealthiest and most productive nation in the world. We are still the most religious nation in the advanced industrialized world. For millions of every race, creed, color, and religion, the United States represents the promised land. Immigrants from all over the world still endure great hardship and peril to become Americans. Despite our serious racial problems, the United States has made unprecedented progress toward building a society that judges individuals not by who they are but by what they do. Those who find nothing right with America should compare our record with those of other advanced industrial democracies where status is largely determined by birth or ethnicity. They should consider the plight of Turkish workers in Germany, Arabs in France, or Koreans in
Japan. Most Americans are decent, generous, hardworking people, driven by the ethic of individual responsibility, accountability for their actions, and empathy for the misfortune of others.

Yet most will agree that all is not well in America. Symptoms of our problems are depressingly familiar. Many Americans believe the political system is in gridlock, incapable of addressing serious problems because the political leadership has become inaccessible and unresponsive. Since the Great Society was launched in 1965, the federal government has spent staggering sums on new domestic programs. These programs have not delivered on their extravagant promises. This contributes to cynicism about government in all areas. Ross Perot's appeal is a symptom of this pervasive mistrust.

When President Bush left office on January 20, 1993, the national debt was over $4 trillion. The budget deficit of over $300 billion in 1993 will be added to that debt. There is little relief in sight, even by the most optimistic projections of the administration's budget plan. Low rates of savings, investment, and productivity growth menace America's global economic leadership. The vicious circle of poverty has become worse for millions, despite the billions spent to alleviate it.

There is a growing sense that the social contract essential to a free society has begun to unravel. Since the 1960s, the violent crime rate has increased more than 560 percent. Illegitimate births have increased more than 400 percent. The divorce rate has quadrupled. The percentage of children living in single-family homes has tripled. One child in eight lives on welfare, more than triple the percentage in 1960. The suicide rate among teenagers has more than doubled. Every day, 160,000 students stay home from school out of fear of violence. Drug use continues to escalate, and America's inner cities still suffer the ravages inflicted by over two million cocaine addicts.

The average American watches nearly fifty hours of television a week, a 25 percent increase since 1960, and ten hours more than the average work week. What he sees is mindnumbing,
idiotic, violent, and sexually explicit. A 1991 survey revealed that adults believe television has the greatest influence on children's values—more than parents, teachers, and religious leaders combined.

What many commentators now join in calling a crisis of the spirit has affected all classes in American society. Mrs. Clinton deserves credit for her courage in articulating the absence of higher purpose in life, despite the fact that since the late 1960s many of her most liberal supporters have relentlessly assaulted traditional values in the name of liberation. Unfortunately, most of the administration's remedies would make the problems worse. Liberals remain committed economically to a further vast expansion of the welfare state; socially to an agenda of personal liberation from traditional morality and to equality not of opportunity but of result; and internationally to a weak multilateralism whose object is to make America a follower rather than a leader.