Confirm thy soul.(SHELF LIFE)(Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now )(Book review)

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IN her new book, Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now (Collins, 192 pp., $19.95), veteran conservative author and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan diagnoses the malady of America's political culture in the post-9/11 era. The illness began, she writes, with partisan "teamism"--and subsequently "degenerated" into outright "gangism."

She summarizes the tone of the decade's politics as follows: "From the Left: Bush lied, people died. The chimp started the war to pay off his corporate cronies. From the lunatic fringe of the Left: 9/11 was an inside job." And from the Right: "You don't support the war? Then you are not a patriot. ... You criticize Bush? Now, while we're at war?" The Left "indulg[ed] in grim, and mindless, triumphalism," showing "a smirk of pleasure" whenever bad news was reported from Iraq. The White House, for its part, resorted to "the last refuge of the adolescent: defiance. Their attitude was: 'Oh yeah? We're Lincoln, you're McClellan. We care about the troops and you don't.'" Both sides, reports Noonan, have been called "thuggish"; and in both cases, she says, the charge "was not unfair": "I was starting to feel that Washington was a city run by two rival gangs that had a great deal in common with each other, including an essential lack of interest in the well-being of the turf on which they fought."

Even after the (almost universally recognized) success of the surge strategy in Iraq, it's hard not to read the quotes in the above paragraph through the prism of one's views of the war. Someone on (my own) pro-Iraq-War side will feel the bile rising: But dammit, we were right; all we needed to do was double down and get serious, with more ground troops. Why can't she see that? And I can easily imagine someone on Barack Obama's side feeling equally angry: But dammit, we were right; just because Bush won back the family's house and car at the poker table doesn't mean he wasn't crazy to have bet them, and have lost them, in the first place. Why can't she see that?

To appreciate Noonan's point, therefore, requires a certain level of abstraction from the political rages of the day, and--as if to prove her point--this kind of detachment appears increasingly rare. Political culture, like every other kind of culture, needs cultivation: It needs a willingness to restrain the urge toward the lowest common denominator, recognizing that the demonization of political opponents depletes the common fund of good will, with dire consequences for society.

Pervading Noonan's book is the theme that catastrophic events are impending--in her ...