Peggy Noonan Keeps Losing the Plot

America and Europe and Trump

There are times, and it is the rule, rather than the exception when opining about @realDonaldTrump, that the always erudite and articulate - and previously smart and sensible - @Peggynoonannyc, just comes across as wildly ivory tower disconnected, supercilious, and snobbish.

Today’s piece is a great example on several fronts (such as the self contradictory enthusiasm over the massive revelations by DOGE and simultaneous mockery of the announcement of a potential 8% cut in DoD - does Noonan not imagine there is similar profligacy there, in the house of the $14,000 toilet seat?)...but there is one particular assertion by Noonan whose narrative is so astonishingly at odds not just with history but with morality that it bears highlighting.

"We and Europe have been friends a long time," declares Noonan. "We came from them. Their blood was our starting blood. It may be quaint to note this but it’s true: We go back."

We came from them? Well, technically perhaps, but there is an essential word missing: We came running from them.

America was founded not by Europe, at least not intentionally, but by refugees and the descendants of refugees who fled Europe. By individuals who risked everything to face a wild and terrifying unknown rather than remain European, by epochal visionaries who fought a bloody revolution and established the greatest experiment in human history - dissolving the political bands that connected America to Europe (Declaration of Independence) to form a new nation conceived in liberty (Gettysburg Address).

We share cultural DNA and familial familiarity the way Esau and Jacob have always shared such bonds and we may indeed share an appreciation for the artistic and musical and literary culture of Europe, but we must Never Forget that the culture that brought us Dürer* and Mozart and Goethe brought us Auschwitz, nicht wáhr?

This fable - that America is the conscious product of White European culture - is of late a common trope among disaffected White Supremacists who use it to argue that families like mine who came fleeing from more recent European excesses, are somehow not true Americans. That America's interests lies in going back to their European roots and rooting out the "outsiders." This is a reversal of truth both historic and moral.

And while we are at it, the Jews do not owe a debt of politesse, let alone gratitude, to Europe for creating the conditions that made Israel a modern state, or that is now impelling European Jewish migration there.

America was founded by those who rejected these precise aspects of Europe - and has been sustained by those who arrive here generation after generation seeking not that which connects us to Europe but that which distinguishes us, from Europe and from other cultures as well.

And, since she is quoting lines from one of my favorite movies, let's respond in kind:

Noonan's lament about unnecessarily alienating the European ruling class sounds awfully like Wolsey's:

"You're a constant regret to me, Thomas. If you could just see facts flat-on, without that horrible moral squint... With a little common sense you could have made a statesman."

And Sir Thomas' reply in another context, to his friend Norfolk's similar frustrated exhortation, is the correct response for an America that wants to retain its soul:

"And when we die, and you are sent to heaven for doing your conscience, and I am sent to hell for not doing mine, will you come with me, for fellowship?"

(A Man for All Seasons is a stupendous movie. Have I mentioned that? But on the subject of narratives, it is worth remembering that the magnificence of playwright/screenwriter Bolt’s heroic Sir Thomas is not remotely an accurate depiction of the historical Sir Thomas. Let’s appreciate the fiction, but remember that it is just that.)