Two decades ago, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam lamented that we “bowl alone.” This week, two teams played baseball alone.
Baltimore’s empty stadium as a metaphor for our national travails is almost too obvious: It suggests a city huddling in fear. Civic institutions without civic participation. Families hollowed out. A society emptied of conviction. A political order separated from its citizens. A civilization lacking defenders.
It’s obvious. But as George Orwell pointed out, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
Have we perhaps sunk further since Orwell wrote those words in 1939? At the depth we now occupy, perhaps we must restate not just the obvious but what appears to be the naïve and simple. Such as:
No law, no liberty.
No order, no justice.
No fathers, no families.
No “space to destroy,” no rampant destruction.
These are all surely too simple. But in an age of sophistic over-complexity, simplicity can be useful. When ridiculed for his simplicity, Ronald Reagan responded, “There are no easy answers but there are simple answers.”
There are other simple answers whose restatement might not be a bad idea:
Citizens should define the institution of marriage, not judges.
Congress should debate and vote on key foreign policy decisions.
Conservatives should, with the collapse of old-fashioned liberalism, take it upon themselves to defend freedom of speech, religion, and association against political correctness, the pressure of the mob, and the nanny state.
To return to baseball metaphors: Most of our politics is small ball. That’s how it’s intended to be in our Madisonian republic. That’s how it should be in normal times.
And conservatives should tend to resist the argument that our particular crisis is a more-than-normal one, that our particular moment is a more-than-Madisonian one. Conservatism is a healthy political persuasion because it is inclined to shun alarmism.
But sometimes the facts are alarming. For the first time in 145 years, a major-league baseball game was played without fans in the stadium.
Several dozen Orioles fans, though, did walk to Camden Yards to watch—and cheer!—through the fence. Maybe all is not lost after all.
