There is something very telling about this latest Peggy Noonan piece. It is not its fey detachment from realism. It is not its narcissistic quality which prompts Noonan to write in a style approaching literary masturbation. When Peggy gets the basics so wrong the soaring rhetoric crashes and and serves only to compound the embarrassment.
Peggy Noonan is not a conservative, she is a Roman Catholic. Her faith delivers her into the conservative camp on several issues, principally abortion. She is opposed to abortion and mentions it in virtually every piece, as she does here. It is important to understand that she arrives at her position on abortion not as the logical extension of a conservative' s regard for the individual as a God ordained political unit, but as an extension of her Roman Catholic faith. Let me hasten to observe that her faith has got it absolutely right on the issue of abortion. But the syllogism is, for me or least, is a political conservatism info informed by my religious faith and from that comes a philosophy which forms opinions about issues like abortion. Peggy Noonan skips the middle step.
The result of that is that Noonan has no real philosophical bonds to the Republican Party or, indeed, even to the conservative movement. Many Freepers have commented that Noonan is wallowing in emotion in these columns and it is hard to argue with that description but I would put a finer point on it, Noonan is expressing a religious mysticism. She applies this mysticism to matters political and wanders in and out of mystical language and in and out of political speak. No wonder her reader is alternately confused and frustrated.
It is not difficult to understand why Noonan herself appears to be confused. Mystics simply see the world in a different way. She operates from her faith, by definition she is not operating from reason. Faith is not necessarily antagonistic to reason but detached from it, transcendental. So Noonan can rehearse Obama's bizarre biography and give it a significance 180° removed from its plain implications. We read her conclusions about Obama's character drawn from his biography and scratch our heads. Noonan genuflects. It is not that Noonan is a traitor, it is not (as I have previously erroneously written) that she is pandering to the salons in Manhattan, it is that she is transported from deduction to intuition.
Political parties need mystics. When a transcendental issue confronts us we need the moral clarity which comes best from faith based vision. If the issue is slavery, civil rights, abortion, or American exceptionalism, we need the moral certainty, the unflinching Churchillian commitment to stand for the right against all odds.
These values do not obtain when one is weighing the advantages of moving the tax scale up or down a few percentage points. In the nuts and bolts of politics we need commonsense and reasoned argument. Other times, we need the insight of the mystic, we need that moral clarity, we need a compelling imagery. I believe that we are as Americans confronted with a moral issue in the election of Barak Obama. Our problem is that we have been confronting a pathological vision with common sense reasoning-a debate in which those with common sense are always destined to lose if the pathology spreads like a virus as it has the person of Barak Obama. In my view, Barak Obama has a vision, a radical, anti-American, ultimately tyranical vision but a vision nonetheless. 50% and likely more than 50% of the country is laboring under a pathology, a cult of personality, a perfect storm of political factors, which will sweep a potential tyrant into office who has no qualification whatsoever apart from the melanin content of his skin. Think of the aftermath of the death of Princess Diana.
To combat this mass psychosis, this political pathology, with an election campaign tethered to common sense, as John McCain has done, is to attempt to use willpower to check diarrhea. That is why I have been maintaining for so long that the Republicans had to redefine the rules of the game or lose this election. Further, that is why I have been so relentlessly pessimistic warning that if Barak Obama were not morally destroyed this election was lost. You cannot triumph over a virus with logic. You must find stronger medicine.
This brings us back to Peggy Noonan and the tragedy of her fatal flaw. Her epistemology, for whatever reason, simply does not bring her to see that Barak Obama is potentially more threatening to her faith than any crazed Mohammedan who plots from outside America to steal her faith and put her to the sword. It is a very great pity that Noonan cannot compute the raw data and, in an epiphany, create the imagery out of her rich talent that would at once define and morally destroy Barak Obama.
Peggy, why do you think we have been keeping you around all this time?
