'When I was young, my mother and father also lectured me about the paranoid style in American politics. “There will always be someone like a McCarthy waving papers and shouting conspiracies,” they preached. At the time, inasmuch as they were agrarian conservative Democrats in a sea of reactionary Republicans, I think they were telling me to watch out for phraseology from our politicians like “cooked up,” “treason,” “traitor”-and especially to be on the look-out when they screamed and frothed, and made all sorts of scary allusions like “some leaders have told me in private” or “the greatest example of (fill in the purported travesty) in American history.” And then I grew old and listened to Howard Dean quote al Qaeda's about killing Spaniards as proof of our blunders and ponder the “theory” that George Bush knew in advance of 9-11; and Ted Kennedy refer to cabalistic meetings in Texas; and Al Gore scream, veins bulging and hair tossed, about the administration's treasonous war; and the Democratic National Chairman alleging that a President was AWOL while in the military; and John Kerry hinting at unnamed foreign leaders contacting him in secret—the conspiracists Chomsky, Gore Vidal, or Michael Moore no doubt all grinning off-stage.

'When I was young, my father used to get me out of bed, in a thick John Kennedy accent, and with perfect Bostonian mimicry order me to start the day with “viga.” I think he meant “vigor” in the sense of the new Kennedesque idealism at home and abroad. My isolationist grandfather would sigh and concede that Harry Truman was right after all, in spending all our hard-earned tax dollars in strange places like Greece and Turkey and sending relatives and friends to worse in Korea. There was a sort of guarded idealism of the need to promote democratic values, coupled with the tragic acceptance that such sacrifice would always be misinterpreted and caricatured. But the idea, my grandfather also added, was to make places abroad a little freer so Americans would not have to be attacked here at home by those who hated us. And then I grew old and learned that somehow Iraq was not like Panama, or Serbia, or Afghanistan, where without the UN, Congressional approval, and mostly alone we took out dictators and theocrats and left the foundations of democracy in their place. Instead, something that made no real sense in terms of classical economic exploitation was said to be about “blood for oil,” or promotion of the Likud party in Israel, or creating a new empire in the Middle East—all this about a country that we debated publicly a long time about invading, went to the UN, got congressional sanction, and toppled its dictator in three weeks, and then stayed on for another year to ensure the Iraqis had a chance for the only freedom in the Arab Middle East.

'The world has changed. What was once liberal is now illiberal, and the old progressivism has become mean-spirited and opportunistic. What was once idealistic is seen as calculating. When I read about the “Jews” now, it is almost always negative and emanates either from the European left or the so-called liberal university here in the United States. Israel, still democratic and still attacked by autocracies, is now hated rather than respected, not for what it has done, but for what it is. The world snored, for example, this week when suicide bombers were foiled in their attempts at getting at a chemical weapons dump so that they might once more gas Jews. Neither Kofi Annan nor Desmond Tutu, for all their recent media appearances, said a word when Palestinians apologized for murdering a jogger in Jerusalem on the mistaken impression that the poor Arab was a “Jew.”

'When I turn on the TV and see some wild-eyed crazy-like public figure ranting, it is not a John Bircher frothing about pure drinking water and statesmen of dual loyalties, but prominent Democratic politicians like an Al Gore or Howard Dean screaming to the point of exhaustion, alluding to the end of America as we have known it, and citing a “betrayal” of the United States. Secret meetings, stealthy friendships, and contorted past relationships—the purported exegesis of all this intrigue and plotting now comes out on NPR and in the New York Review of Books, not garish 1950 pulp newspapers printed in pink.

'When I listen to those who talk of race first rather than last, and identify themselves and others by their skin color, it is almost always by those on the Left, and usually by those who have something to gain by claiming first loyalty to a race or tribe rather than to a common humanity. And when I hear America criticized for being too wasteful in its largess, too naive in its foreign policy, too extended abroad, too simplistic in its support of democracy, it is now always from a Democratic Senator or liberal professor, almost never from the old America Firster or pull-in-our horns Isolationist.