Peggy Noonan's column in today's OpinionJournal displays all that's best in her work: fine writing, incisive commentary, a strong and supple wit. Unfortunately, it also contains the rest of the Noonan package: the intellectual dishonesty, the sense of self-importance, the transparent political hack-work.
Let's start with what's best -- in this case, her clear and persuasive restatement of an important American idea.
In the America of 50 years ago and a 100 years ago and 1776, this is how it went:
You, a citizen, decide you want to belong to a group but you believe in "A" and they believe in "B." There is a clash. Here the old American myth kicks in. You, the citizen, stick with what you believe, and don't join the organization. You won't lie about what you believe, and they won't change what they believe. So they don't let you in. You pay a price for where you stand. But you can keep standing there.
You keep your integrity, and maybe in time the group will change and you and your suffering will be the reason. (This is the story of, among others, Dr. King in the Birmingham jail.) Or maybe the group won't change its ways, ever. But you have your integrity and they have their rules and this is America.
Now that rough old myth has been disturbed. Now it's, "I have my views and your group has its views. If you don't accept me with my views you're wrong, and will suffer in court." Now you insist on joining. You insist they change to accommodate you. You don't respect their position, you insist they alter it. You get a lawyer. You weep and rend your garments.
This is not a good way to convert people. It is however a good way to push people around.
Powerful stuff, that, and a principle worth fighting for. But there's the rub. Ms. Noonan isn't fighting for principle, here; she's fighting for simple ideological advantage. And in the process, the "rest of the Noonan package" that I discussed above becomes all too apparent.
For starters, an intellectually honest columnist would have looked her largely conservative readership in the eye and spoken some unpopular truths. She would have pointed out that Tom Daschle, Anna Quindlen, and an atheist Eagle Scout (the only examples of this whine-and/or-sue mentality she managed to work into a 1500-plus word column) are just the tip of this particular iceberg. She'd have written that private institutions like, say, Harvard, have every right to enforce wrong-headed policies such as speech codes and racial preferences, and that the young men and women damaged by these regulations should stay out of court because "they [Harvard] have their rules and this is America." In short, she would have aimed her verbal fire at a diverse group of deserving targets, not just convenient targets of partisan opportunity.
Second, a less self-involved columnist could probably have found a way to take Tom Daschle to task for his silly post-election whining about talk radio without telling us of her own stoic courage in the face of cruel liberal invective. She certainly would never have implicitly compared the nasty letters and the unpleasant shunning she receives on the Upper West Side to the concerns, however misplaced, of a man who has actually received weapons-grade anthrax in the mail.
And a columnist who had more than hack-work in mind would have had the courage to take on an element of the Republican base. She might even have gone so far as to exhort religious conservatives to quit complaining about their consistently unfair portrayal as simple-minded misogynist yahoos in too much of the mainstream media, and to simply accept the fact that "you pay a price for where you stand."
Yes, a different, better columnist would have done all these things, and more. And as someone who genuinely admires her enormous gifts, I hope someday that different, better columnist is named Peggy Noonan.
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