From the WSJ Opinion Archives
WONDER LAND
'Tradition!'
John Paul, Tevye and now Hillary.
The Papa, the Papa! Tradition!
The Papa, the Papa! Tradition!
The seven straight days that Pope John Paul II held the world stage in death has left many impressions, but none stronger, perhaps, than the idea of, the splendor of . . . tradition!
That long and intense immersion in ritualistic Catholicism on a Roman piazza may have seemed far off in many ways, but our own oh-so-worldly politics might profit by rediscovering the attractions of . . . tradition.
As in Tevye's famous tradition-bound village in "Fiddler," tradition forces the claims of the past to sit beside those of the future. John Paul's funeral from St. Peter's Square was a rare moment--rare in our time, anyway--when past and future appeared to coexist in calm balance.
The liturgy of that grand final Mass for the departed pontiff was likely not much different than what in 1549 sent Pope Paul III to his Father's house. And yet as the cameras caught faces in the crowd, one had to notice how uniformly young they were. Despite the liturgy's great length, the young congregants kept still. Their eyes were fixed on the ancient rites, and their minds held to the idea of spiritual faith. This was the old idea that John Paul had retranslated for them in the modern world. What we saw that day is called a living tradition. One did not have to sign on the dotted line to feel that something about the atmosphere in St. Peter's looked attractive, comfortable and worth having.
There is something more important to be had from this event, though, than being hooked on a feeling. Because John Paul kept intact the idea of a commonly held tradition, the Catholic Church as a whole--not just its disaffected parts in the U.S. and Europe--will surely move on to confront the by-now-familiar claims being made on it to "change" and adjust to the modern world. The name for this process of ecclesiastical adjustment is--as it has been from time immemorial--politics. What the cardinals will do in that conclave is no less politics than the politics practiced by politicians in America's smoke-free rooms. The difference is that the college of cardinals, still sharing a tradition, will get something done. By contrast, the arguably even more mysterious conclave we call the U.S. Senate increasingly gets little or nothing done.
Somehow in the U.S., the waters parted in recent years, and now Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, are wholly on opposite shores. This divide has a lot to do with the decline of any shared idea about what constitutes an appropriate American social order. While it drives Democrats crazy to hear this, the burden for the decline falls on them.
Some of them know it, and like characters in a Flannery O'Connor story, are seeking re-immersion in the post-2004 election waters of "values." Sen. Hillary Clinton came to the river in a speech last month to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Her subject that day was the dangers posed to the young and to embattled parents by modern media. When she spoke of parents who "worry that their children will not grow up with the same values that they did," Sen. Clinton was singing from Bill Bennett's well-worn hymnal. She ended with a call "to set some standards and values."
It certainly sounds as if the author of "It Takes a Village" wants to restore something lost, something we might call . . . tradition. But how can Democrats on one day make claims for recovering values and on the next stand in the well of the Senate bellowing that the Bush judicial nominees are a mortal threat to unfettered "privacy"? Some among them must see this doesn't compute.
But it was precisely this same sense of something important being lost--"some standards and values"--that brought forth the formerly apolitical "religious right" 25 years ago, culminating in the Democratic meltdown in 2004 among most traditional families.
This didn't happen last year. From about 1970 onward, Democrats deployed a strategy of constant cultural and legal challenge, successfully upending a lot of tradition in the U.S., often overnight with a ruling from the bench or a university administrator waving a new policy into existence. Co-ed dorms? Did anyone seek the advice and consent of Sen. Clinton's "parents" on that?
The erosion of social tradition happened in the long-ago "due process" lawsuits that effectively took control of decorum in public schools away from principals who'd held it for most of the 20th century--when there was no "schools" problem. It came in the battles over the tradition-obliterating notion of what's appropriate in museum exhibitions, with the sudden claim that Manhattan's community standards must prevail in Cincinnati. The breach came over patriotism, an American tradition from 1775 to 1975, when progressive Democrats turned that over to the yahoo "conservatives."
Yes, these are familiar complaints--and all of a sudden they're getting a hearing. That's because a political society in which nothing is held in common is a society likely to crack, like anything stale. It is hard not to notice that virtually everything on the political table now is a death-struggle. Faith-based initiatives? Unacceptable. Standards for educational performance? Ditto. This is the conservative argument for allowing some hard cases to come through legislatures--abortion's limits, gay marriage vs. civil unions--where traditions and ideas can be broadly argued, and changed.
Another important use of social tradition is that it gives people a deeper common identity, but even that bare minimum is in decline here. Many people are increasingly seeking their primary identity in the blue or red cloud formations of politics. Money that people like George Soros once gave to charities is being rechanneled into politics. (Yes, I know; it's because we're "losing" America.)
The "values" revival may be a traveling tent show on its way to 2008. Or it might be real. It at least suggests recognition that something useful has been lost, not just the values themselves but the underlying yeast, the one element in the mix that makes something new possible at all. Tradition!
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
