We Lost. Now What?

One Nation, Two Cultures: A Moral Divide, by Gertrude Himmelfarb (Knopf, 192 pp., $23)

The Nineties are looking more and more like a stand-up monologue consisting exclusively of good news-bad news jokes. The Soviet Union went bust, but Bill Clinton was elected president; the Dow is up, but morality's down. The front-running presidential candidate is a Republican who first calls himself a conservative (sort of), then gives a speech in front of a roomful of conservative intellectuals in which he makes fun of Bob Bork. Ideologically speaking, the prevailing level of confusion has rarely been higher. Every time I open the paper these days, I think of poor old Mr. Jones, the upper-middle-class gent in the Bob Dylan song, who'd read all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books and knew something was happening, but didn't know what it was.

So just what is happening? The simple answer-simplistic, really-comes from Rich Karlgaard, the publisher of Forbes, who was recently quoted as saying, "The right won the economic argument, and the left won the cultural argument." Alas, conservatives who don't get culture (and their name is legion) don't get Karlgaard's point, while those who do get culture but think it ceased to exist in 1960 (or 1860) have been reduced by postmodernity to the kind of frenzied spluttering Bugs Bunny used to inspire in Daffy Duck. As for the libertarians for whom Karlgaard speaks, they are the remittance men of Western culture, living happily off the income from a dwindling trust fund whose capital they do nothing to replenish or protect.

The not-so-simple answer comes from Gertrude Himmelfarb, America's preeminent Victorianist, who in recent years has been writing with increasing frequency about the way we live now, and whose latest book is a concise, clear-eyed look at the culture war and what it really means. Once or twice in a generation-if that often-a very wise person writes a very pithy book that compresses everything that needs to be said about a given topic into the briefest of compasses. The Road to Serfdom, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, The Abolition of Man: Books like these are made to be given to puzzled friends. They change minds, and lives. One Nation, Two Cultures is such a book.

The manifold virtues of Himmelfarb's book start with its title, in which she answers Mr. Jones's question with four well-chosen words. Yes, she says, there has been a culture war, "a revolution in the manners, morals, and mores of society," and the Left has won it:

What was, only a few decades ago, a subculture or counterculture in American society has been assimilated into the dominant culture. . . . Most [Americans] lead lives that, in most respects, most of the time, conform to traditional ideals of morality and propriety. But they do so with no firm confidence in the principles underlying their behavior. . . . Even when they complain about the "moral decline" of the country (which they continue to do, in very large numbers), they offer little resistance to the manifestations of that decline. They believe in God, but they believe even more in the autonomy of the individual. They confess that they find it difficult to judge what is moral or immoral even for themselves, still more for others.

But at the same time, the losing side, far from rolling over and playing dead, has launched a resistance movement:

There is, however, another culture (or set of loosely allied subcultures) that coexists somewhat uneasily with the dominant culture. This might be called the "dissident culture"-the culture not of the three-quarters of the public who redefine family to include "significant others," but of the one-quarter who abide by the traditional definition; not of the 55-60 percent who think that premarital sex is acceptable, but of the 40-45 percent who think it is not. . . . They do not think of sexual morality as a "personal matter" that can be "boxed off," as is now said, from the rest of life. Nor do they think of religion as a "private affair" that should not encroach upon the "public square." Nor are they apt to engage in such circumlocutions as "Who am I to say . . . ?" or "Personally . . . but . . . "

It is this tension between dominant and dissident cultures, Himmelfarb argues, that explains "the peculiar, almost schizoid nature of our present condition: the evidence of moral disarray on the one hand and of a religious-cum-moral revival on the other." But the fact that the dissident culture is neither monolithic nor coercive but democratic-"It is entirely voluntary, its members being free to move in or out at will"-allows those who belong to it, however alienated they may be from the radical nonjudgmentalism of the dominant culture, nonetheless to remain "loyal to America as a country, a nation, and a polity," and thus open to the responsible political compromises and accommodations that are made possible by true tolerance, as opposed to the Tolerance Lite of the hard cultural Left.

The value of One Nation, Two Cultures lies less in the originality of its analysis-little of what the author has to say will come as a total surprise to those familiar with such influential books as Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah or Myron Magnet's The Dream and the Nightmare-than in the concentration and clarity of its presentation. But Himmelfarb's emphasis on the necessity for loyalty to the idea of an American polity is decidedly her own, and recalls the stern stance she took in response to "The End of Democracy?," the now-notorious First Things symposium in which several participants suggested that a time might be coming when "conscientious citizens [could] no longer give moral assent to the existing regime." Such language, she contends, is dangerously hyperbolic, just as it is irresponsible for alienated conservatives to abandon the public square altogether, much less to call into question "the legitimacy of either the law or the 'regime.'"

Original, too, is the fact that unlike so many aging cons and neocons, she views the current crisis with the guarded optimism of a historian accustomed to taking long views. Despite the myriad horrors wrought in the name of the '60s, she notes, neither dominant nor dissident culture has resorted to widespread repression or violence. The two cultures remain one nation, split but not sundered; Bill Bennett's Index of Leading Cultural Indicators is showing modest signs of improvement, and it is now possible to broach in politically mixed company ideas that once would have gotten you tossed out of the better sort of cocktail party. For Himmelfarb, the glass is exactly half full:

Nor do the old labels, pessimist and optimist, apply to those who are neither apocalyptic nor utopian, who do not think of themselves as either at the nadir of Western civilization or at the zenith of a brave new world, and who do not aspire to solve all problems but only to mitigate some of them.

So temperate a tone is unlikely to appeal to the angry alarmists who tend to dominate the cultural conversation on the right. Yet I confess to finding it sympathetic, not least because my own view of such matters has become unexpectedly benign, if not precisely sanguine. To be sure, I still feel deeply alienated from innumerable aspects of contemporary American culture, sometimes to the point of actual despair. But despair, as John Lukacs once remarked, almost always involves a large, sinful dose of self- indulgence-especially given the fact that amid all the craziness, there is no shortage of reasons for hope.

It's worth noting, for instance, that Rich Karlgaard's declaration of left-wing cultural triumph came deep within an admiring Vanity Fair profile of such "conservative babes" as Wendy Shalit, Danielle Crittenden, Kanchan Limaye, and Amity Shlaes, none of whom is exactly hoisting the white flag. Gen-Xers continue to emit inchoate but nonetheless unmistakable signs of dissatisfaction with the cultural orthodoxies of the baby boomers; the Internet, for all its atomizing effects on American life, also offers members of the dissident culture a way to bypass the elite media and create virtual communities of their own. You can even hear new tonal music in the concert halls nowadays.

Small victories? Perhaps. But if history has anything to teach us, it is that there can be no such thing as an earthly paradise, and that those who shed the most blood in this bloodiest of centuries did so in the hopes of making everything right, right now. "If a counterrevolution is unlikely," Gertrude Himmelfarb writes toward the end of this invaluable little book, "a more modest reformation is not." I can think of worse things.

Mr. Teachout, the music critic of Commentary, is writing H. L. Mencken: A Life.