Hand It to Them - Rediscovering American Scripture - American Citizens Handbook

National Review, May 14, 2001 by Jay Nordlinger

Several of these characteristics, the NEA would choke to enunciate today. "Since the people are intelligent enough to govern themselves, they do not need protection by censorship"-this would appear to preclude campus speech codes. Furthermore, that good democratic citizen "rejects all group claims to special privilege"-bad news for affirmative action. And get a load of this one: Under "Puts the general welfare above his own whenever a choice between them is necessary," we read, "avoids the abuse of public benefits (e.g., the misuse of unemployment compensation by a process of malingering)." This is truly a foreign language.

This section, like the Handbook itself, is hardly naive or unrealistic. The effect of the whole is not at all treacly or goody-goody. Yet it is a strong antidote to cynicism and the suffocating cloak of irony: Our good democratic citizen "is critically aware of differences between democratic ideals and accomplishments, but works to improve accomplishments and refuses to become cynical about the differences."

An essay by Henry Steele Commager comes as a hell of a jolt. If anyone represents the old liberalism-the liberalism of this volume-it is Commager. The gulf between him and, say, Eric Foner today is enormous. Of course, Professor Foner is no liberal; we simply have to call him that, in accordance with a foolish and misleading political taxonomy. (Angela Davis, the Communist Party official, is often described in the press as a liberal, as we Right-types have long liked to note.) In "Our Schools Have Kept Us Free" (another of those titles), Commager makes a stirring case for common education, and in particular for its assimilative power. "How, after all, [are] millions of newcomers to become 'Americans'-in language, in ways of life and thought, in citizenship?" The common school, he writes, has served "the cause of American democracy." The truth is, this most heterogeneous of modern societies-profoundly varied in racial background, religious faith, social and economic interest-has ever seemed the most easy prey to forces of riotous privilege and ruinous division. These forces have not prevailed; they have been routed, above all, in the schoolrooms and on the playgrounds of America.

Commager wrote these words in 1950. And how are the "forces of riotous privilege and ruinous division" faring now? Pretty well, huh? This is what compels us "conservatives" to retreat to school choice and let-a- thousand-flowers-bloom, the common school, which bound the country together, having crumbled, not least because of the illiberal urgings and practices of the NEA.

The Handbook is stocked with key documents (the Magna Carta, the Gettyburg Address), portraits, mini-bios, aphorisms, telling facts, assorted tidbits. Its second half is dominated by the "Golden Treasury" (sigh, snort), which is an anthology of literary and other items with which civilized people should be acquainted. It begins with the Bible, moves on to Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, et al., and continues in a glorious potpourri, a storehouse of pluralism and diversity (a good word stolen and perverted by a race-obsessed New Left). We have in this book the evidence of a nation, and a civilization. Here, the bond holds firm; the salt retains its savour.