The Great American Majority

Never discuss religion or politics. A familiar admonition, but I will dare to discuss both in the same post.

In the March issue of “First Things”, George Weigel, makes some observations regarding our recent presidential election. He reflects on the word narrative" as a recent addition to the vocabulary of news reportage. "He's created a compelling narrative." More, “Who's creating the narrative?" Following are some quotes from his article.

"Such postmodern rhetoric reflects a cast of mind in which human beings have no secure grasp of the truth of things, be that historical truth or moral truth. There is only "your truth" and "my truth", which is to say, you've got your story, and I've got my story. Narrative is all, and narrative has no tether to an objective truth of things that we can know by the exercise of our reason.”

"... a senior producer at a major mainstream-media network told me in the early 2008 presidential primary season he was appalled by the callousness, indeed cynical craftiness, with which "the narrative" was manipulated by focus group-besotted campaign managers for the most minute electoral advantage.... in a country in which American Idol has become a major cultural reference point, is it any wonder that we have elections that resemble American Idol and their dominance by narrative -- which is to say elections that are substantively vacuous?”

Weigel goes on to enumerate many issues that could have been debated in the course of the presidential campaign but were not.

Quoting the article, "The American people elected a young president with less governmental experience than any other major-party nominee since Wendell Wilkie, because... he was the winner on American Idol: The 2008 Election Edition ... we should not delude ourselves on this point however: narrative, not substance, is what put the 44th president into the White House."

"American liberalism has never engaged in the kind of cleansing of the stables that William F. Buckley Jr. conducted among American conservatives in the 1950s."

"... [the] left that cannot confront its failures of analysis, nerve, and seriousness during the last half of the Cold War is a left that is unlikely to understand, much less cope with and still less defeat the multiple threats to freedom that defined the post-Cold War post-September-11 world. A left that refuses to see that its embrace of abortion on demand is a self-indulgent exercise and a betrayal of the legacy of the classic civil rights movement is a left that is unlikely to chart a path away from a brave new world of manufactured humanity, in which misguided ideas of compassion are married to technological marvels to produce de-humanizing consequences. A left that cannot look at Europe and see the human, social, economic, financial, and cultural failures of debonair nihilism is not a left that can grasp, much less appeal to, the sturdy religious instincts that continue to animate the great majority of the American people."

I suppose, if your leanings are toward the left side of center you might consider George Weigel's comments to be exaggerated and contain just a tinge of the sore-loser attitude. And if you are of the more conservative bent I can visualize your heads nodding in agreement with what he has to say. But I have to ask myself after reading this article , What are the "sturdy religious instincts that continue to animate the great majority of the American people"? Do they really exist? Who is elucidating their “narrative”? Where is the voice of this great American majority? If we are a majority, why are we unable in a democratic society to effect the changes we desire?