The New Defeatism

Victor Davis Hanson describe the "New Defeatism" in National Review Online. There is a staggering amount of pessimism going around--especially for a country that not long ago won what had been for decades seen as an unwinable struggle: the Cold War. One might add "The New Scapegoating" to go along with this new pessimism--and perhaps even "The New Bigotry"--as a worrying number of Americans are becoming positively European when it comes to their attitude towards Jews and Israelis. Supporters of the war will find this perspective refreshing. Opponents will hate it. Excerpt:

We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.

We are becoming a crazed culture of cheap criticism and pious moralizing, and in our self-absorption may well lose what we inherited from a better generation. Our groaning and hissing elite indulges itself, while better but forgotten folks risk their lives on our behalf in pretty horrible places.

Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die. And, in the latter case, our concern is not out of respect for their sacrifice but more likely a protest against what we don't like done in our name. So ABC's Nightline reads the names of the fallen from Iraq, but not those from the less controversial Afghanistan, because ideological purity — not remembering the departed per se — is once again the real aim.