Outgrowing Democracy: A History of the United States in the Twentieth Century, by John Lukacs. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1984.

If the nineteenth century inspired confidence in the prophets of progress, the twentieth has lent authority to the anatomists of decline. In the aftermath of two world wars, Auschwitz, and the Gulag Archipelago, we are no longer much interested in Enlightenment optimism; our elective affinity is for Dostoevsky and Conrad, Freud and Weber, Burckhardt and Tocqueville, Newman and Kierkegaard—all of whom looked beneath the surface of their undisturbed time and warned of the cataclysm to come. They were the ones who understood the darker side of human nature and the perils of human pride. In part because their admonitions went unheeded, we live in a broken world, one in which original sin, whether taken in the literal or metaphorical sense, is a basic assumption. The most thoughtful inhabitants of this world do not doubt that they are witnessing the decline of the West; they are divided only concerning the possibility of renewal.

What I have described in general terms is in fact an experience of life and a view of the world that is distinctively European, or to be more precise, Western European. The decline of the West means thedecline of Western Europe and of its civilization; it also means the passing of the modern age, which had its beginnings with the rise of Europe during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The political exhaustion of Europe that began in the trenches of the Western Front seventy years ago was completed by the Second World War. That was the meaning of the postwar division of the continent between two nations whose historical ascent coincided with Europe’s decline—Russia and the United States. Of the two, it was the latter that stood astride the world in 1945, the “year zero” that marked the passing of the Modern, Bourgeois, European Age and the full emergence of the American century.

Few men know this as well as John Lukacs, who left war-ravaged Hungary, the land of his forefathers, to take up residence in the United States, where he has become one of our most original and profound historians, the author of such classic works as Historical Consciousness and The Last European War: September 1939–December 1941. Because he has long been convinced that history is a form of personal knowledge, it was only a matter of time before Lukacs undertook to write this history of his adopted homeland—a penetratingly critical, though well-intentioned, examination of a great nation’s rise and fall. Throughout, his point of view is that of a cultural-spiritual European, which, according to him, means someone who possesses a historical consciousness, Europe’s most important contribution to the world.

One of Lukacs’s principal criticisms of the United States is the failure of most Americans to recognize and to accept this European gift, a failure that is indicative of a deeply-rooted determination to distance themselves from their European heritage. Thus, the history of American decline is the history of Americans’ revolt against their European parents. In a defiant effort to assert their cultural-spiritual independence, they have stubbornly refused to affirm the truth—experienced by Europeans at the Marne, at Dachau, and at Munich—that man is finite and sinful. They are, that is, unwilling to abandon the nineteenth-century idea of progress, with its attendant idolization of science and technology. This is the central thesis of this excellent book, which might more accurately have been entitled Outgrowing Europe: The Rise and Fall of the United States.

Lukacs would be the first to admit that the illusion of progress was easy for Americans to sustain, for although their country took part in both world wars, relatively few of their number died and life at home continued with only minor disruptions. This circumstance, joined with the fact that the United States seemed always to be on the victorious side in any armed conflict, contributed greatly to American self-esteem and optimism about the future. More, it emboldened many Americans to regard their country as the “redeemer nation”—the title of a fascinating study by Ernest Lee Tuveson. As early as 1900, Senator Albert F. Beveridge proclaimed that it was God who took “the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the redemption of the world.” Americans had yet to learn that pride goes before the fall.

This messianic belief in America’s sacred mission went hand in hand with an unshakable conviction that the country was unique in not being subject to the vicissitudes and limitations that beset other, and lesser, nations. It was in this confidence that Woodrow Wilson led the United States into war in 1917, an event that Lukacs regards as more consequential than any other of our century, including the Russian Revolution. This president, who once opined that America had “the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world,” was everything that Lukacs dislikes about Americans—self-righteous, ignorant of the past, and possessed of an ideological cast of mind. Worst of all, “his knowledge and interest in European civilization was minimal. . . .”

Whatever Wilson’s failings, however, he and his successors presided over the most powerful and, for that reason, the most influential nation in the world. During the 1920s, the Americanization of the world began in good earnest and the end is not yet: witness the global popularity of American blue jeans, soft drinks, music, movies, and television programs. The Great Depression at the close of the decade occasioned what in retrospect we know to have been a minor crisis of self-assurance, one that Franklin Roosevelt was able to minimize while at the same time he kept a watchful eye on Nazi Germany.

Lukacs has expressed respect for FDR because the patrician leader recognized that Hitler’s defeat was necessary to the preservation of Western European civilization. He was right to bring the United States into the war against Germany, but because, like the majority of his countrymen, he distrusted Europeans—not excluding Winston Churchill—he refused to take seriously the Russian menace in the heart of the old continent. Lacking Churchill’s historical sense and political acumen, he persuaded himself that the Russians were, like the Americans, young, virile, and destined to be co-rulers of the postwar world. As a result, he bears a major share of responsibility for the subjugation of Eastern Europe, including the land of Lukacs’s birth.

But if the decade following the end of the warwas one of deprivation and despotism in Eastern Europe, it was one of prosperity and freedom in the United States. All, however, was not well in the best of all possible nations, for as Lukacs argues persuasively, it was precisely during the middle years of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency that the first signs of America’s decline began to surface. Not surprisingly, he is disposed to regard the United States’s failure to act decisively during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 as the paradigmatic manifestation of that collapse of will that has by now undermined the trust of our allies and encouraged the recklessness of our enemies. But be that as it may, there is more than one reason to believe that American decline did indeed begin before the onset of the catastrophic 1960s, and in the main body of this work Lukacs presents a detailed and disturbing account of that melancholy process. Here I can call attention only to some of his most telling analyses.

Among Lukacs’s most provocative chapters is that which examines the effects of inflation on American life. He does not confine his discussion to monetary inflation alone, considering as welt the geometric increase in population, bureaucracy, academic degrees, “rights,” regulations, communications, and appetites. The root cause of this inflation, he suggests, is the American insistence that limits are arbitrary and artificial, affronts to initiative, progress, and the American Way. Lacking a developed sense of human limitation and increasingly reluctant to delay gratification or to cultivate the habits of self-discipline, Americans are being overwhelmed by the proliferation of just about everything.

Indeed, the “new immigration” alone threatens to unravel the nation. According to a recent Associated Press report, the Hispanic population of the United States now stands at 16 million, a figure that is likely to grow to 47 million by 1990. And as Lukacs points out, nearly two-thirds of all immigrants since 1968 have come from Asia and Latin America. His alarm at this statistic is not the result of racial prejudice, but of his objection to the inevitable and already manifest cultural consequences. Clearly, no country can culturally assimilate such a massive influx of people within a brief span of time; more likely, the immigrants will force the creation of a new hybrid culture, cheered on in this case by cultural relativists and those for whom uncritical celebration of the “Third World” has become the litmus test of liberal orthodoxy.

Here too, it is the decline or dilution of Western European, culture that exercises Lukacs, who cites with approval what Herbert Agar wrote shortly after the Second World War: “We belong to the West, without which we must perish. We do not belong to Asia.” Naturally, then, Lukacs deplores not only unregulated immigration and the encouragement of non-European cultures, but every attempt to reorient American foreign policy in the direction of the Pacific, to the neglect of the Atlantic. He recalls with a shudder General MacArthur’s famous description of war-weary Europe as “a dying system. The lands touching the Pacific with their billions of inhabitants will determine the course of history for the next ten thousand years.” Whether or not this is so, Lukacs insists that the destiny of the United States is inextricably intertwined with that of Europe. That is why, in the spirit of Bismarck, he is highly critical of American imperialism, which, like British imperialism before it, channels too many energies into the non-Western world.

It would be a mistake, I believe, to dismiss Lukacs’s defense of Europe as outdated and nostalgic, for when all is said and done, Europe remains the most important and critical area of the world, that in which the danger of nuclear war is still the greatest.

And despite what our cultural gourmets tell us, European civilization remains nonpareil. But even if it were not, it would still be our civilization, existentially constitutive individually as well as collectively. University courses in “World Civilization” and misguided enthusiasm for the former colonial peoples serve only to weaken our participation in a common culture and hence to muddle our sense of identity and loosen the bonds of community.

There was a time, from around the turn of the century to the mid-1950s, when we did live together tolerably well. Lukacs characterizes these years as America’s “bourgeois interlude,” but unlike theMarxists, he does not intend “bourgeois” to be taken in a pejorative sense. He is, in fact, an unabashed admirer of bourgeois life which, he maintains, had little if anything to do with the spirit of capitalism. Of Western European origin, it had much to do with the city and with city dwelling. Bourgeois culture was thus urban, urbane, and dedicated to the cultivation of the interior life, one that is distinguished by a sense of privacy, a love of disciplined liberty, a recognition that truth is more important than justice, and a bias in favor of permanence—with regard both to possessions and to residence. Above all, this culture was verbal, reverent in its attitude toward words and thus toward thought. Unlike so many today, Lukacs knows, and has the courage to say, that visual cultures are inferior because they are connected “with the atrophy of thought” (Huizinga).

After 1956, America’s bourgeois interlude drew rapidly to a close. Restlessness, impermanence, and a passion for equality were among the signs of degeneration. So too was the decline of cities and the great exodus to the suburbs, for as Lukacs observes, it is by no means certain that a nation of suburbanites can maintain, much less create, high culture. In his search for the less apparent obstacles to the maintenance of the bourgeois spirit, Lukacs believes he has discovered certain medieval and Indian strains in the American people. Taking his cue from Huizinga, he points to the pictoral character of late medieval culture, comparing it with that of contemporary America. Few are likely to dispute his contention that ours is a visual culture, for as anyone who teaches high school or university students will attest, most of our young people can scarcely read and write and, as a result, are unable to think clearly and well. At the same time, those who are aware of the migratory imperatives of American life and the savagery—as distinct from violence—of street crime will not be inclined to dismiss out of hand the suggestion that the conquest of the American Indians has left a mark on the conquerors.

In view of his many criticisms of American life, one might think that Lukacs would be cheered somewhat by the revitalization of American conservatism. That he is not is a consequence of his conviction that conservatism in this country is insufficiently European, that is to say historical. It is important to understand this in order to dispel the notion that Lukacs is an eccentric who compulsively shuns identification with every group. It is true, of course, that he is a fiercely independent thinker, unwilling to toe a party line, but he has never disguised his indebtedness to such European—and historical—conservatives as Burke, Tocqueville, and Ortega (“the greatest conservative thinker of the twentieth century”).

One of the principal consequences of America’s unhistorical conservatism, in his view, is that its leading spokesmen tend to support the idea of American exceptionalism and of limitless, if temporarily obstructed, progress. As a result, they sometimes substitute ideological nationalism for historical patriotism, accepting too readily the fancy that the world should be governed by American ideals and institutions. What is more, they are excessively, even ideologically, committed to capitalist economics and obsessed with anti-communism, signaling thereby their failure to understand that the principal danger is Russiaand the Russian armies.

Although much of Lukacs’s criticism of American conservatives deserves to be taken to heart, he goes too far when he implies that communism as an ideology matters very little. It is true that no intelligent person in Eastern Europe takes Marxism-Leninism seriously and that everyone, of necessity, respects Russian military might. It is no less true that Russian communism is very different from Western European Marxism; Kautsky and Jaurès were, after all, men with whom one could live. Nevertheless, it is a mistaketo underestimate the role of ideology. The Soviet Union was and is far worse than Tsarist Russia, just as Communist China is more deplorable than its Nationalist predecessor.

Less obvious perhaps, but just as important in the long run, ideology serves as the emblem of power and authority in Communist states, bestowing a form of legitimacy upon rulers whose naked tyranny would otherwise be manifest. Even the pretense of being part of an international and historically “progressive” movement can contribute to a reconstitution of reality that is no less politically significant for being false.

By now, perhaps, I have said enough to suggest the general outline and atmosphere of this intelligent book; it remains to say something about the possibilities of American regeneration. Lukacs is no Spenglerian, but a Catholic Christian who believes with Tocqueville that “around every man a fatal circle is traced, beyond which he cannot pass; but within the wide verge of that circle he is powerful and free: as it is with man, so with communities.” Though the American century is passing, Lukacs holds out the hope that political decline may be the necessary condition of cultural revivification. Indeed, he claims to detect already a belated growth “of historical consciousness among the American people,” the most promising sign of a “painful maturation.”

Unfortunately, what little evidence Lukacs offers in support of this claim is unconvincing. Where and how, one is constrained to ask, does this historical consciousness manifest itself? Certainly not in high schools and universities across the land, where the teaching of history is inadequate or nonexistent. True enough, there seems to be some interest in television “docudramas,” but these often amount to little more than rehearsals of “Dallas” or “Dynasty” in historical dress. What Donald Davidson wrote years ago about Nashville’s replica of the Parthenon—and by extension about our country—does not, alas, seem any less true today: “Pursue not wisdom or virtue here, /But what blind motion, what dim last/Regret of men who slew their past/ Raised up this bribe against their fate.”