Adam Lambert photo from adamofficial.com. Peggy Noonan illustration from the Wall Street Journal.
Something’s rotten in America, if you believe Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan. All the things that used to be right about the nation have been upended. By Adam Lambert, no less.
Yes, that pesky homosexual has breached the tacit cultural compromise that Noonan, Ronald Reagan’s former speechwriter, argues has kept the folks in the flyover states from rising up in revolt. Or maybe just revulsion.
At the heart of her argument is a recent poll that finds 55 percent of the public believe the country is on the “wrong track.” Despite the fact we’re in the worst economy since the Great Depression, Noonan believes this poll result must be about more than the economy.
And while 55 percent is not a figure we should be happy about, it doesn’t compare to the 80 percent who thought that in April 2008 under George W. Bush’s presidency, and that was before the bottom dropped out of the economy in fall 2008 during the presidential campaign.
To be fair, she admits the economy might have something to do with Americans’ recent turn to pessimism:
The economy has always had an impact on the general American mood, and the [NBC-Wall Street Journal] poll offered data to buttress the reader’s assumption that economic concerns are driving pessimism.
About ‘Other Things’
But let’s set that aside, she says, because:
Something tells me this isn’t all about money. It’s possible, and I can’t help but think likely, that the poll is also about other things, and maybe even primarily about other things. … Various polls [demonstrate] that those things may dwarf economic concerns. Americans are worried about the core and character of the American nation, and about our culture.
Never mind that Noonan doesn’t specify what polls discuss those ‘other things,’ nor does she specify what those polls actually demonstrate. Instead, she opts for the vague worry about the “core and character” of America and its culture. What better springboard for an attack on what she calls “the cultural left” than a non-specific anxiety that has likely been present during every economic downturn?
Indeed, when we abandon what all the data indicates is the greatest proximate cause for Americans’ worries, Noonan is left with a wide open field to cast about for whatever convenient straw man she cares to name. This time it’s the cultural tyranny imposed on “real” Americans (in Sarah Palin’s parlance) by the cultural left in the Big Cities — home, apparently, to all the fake Americans.
