OPINION
6A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
OUR VIEW
Yes, Virginia there
is a Santa Claus
Editor’s note: The following editorial, written by veteran newsman
Francis P. Church, first appeared in The New York Sun in 1897 and
was immediately lauded by the Sun’s readers. It became one of the most
famous editorials ever written, the first truly viral communication of its
time long before the internet and Facebook. It now stands as the most
reprinted newspaper editorial in history. We take pleasure in keeping in
the spirit of the season today in reprinting it as well. To all of our readers,
the staff at The Daily Astorian wishes you a Merry Christmas and a
Happy New Year!
Books for the Trump era
By ROSS DOUTHAT
New York Times News Service
T
AP Photo/Laura Haapamaki
Santa Claus leaves for his annual Christmas journey from the San-
ta Claus Village at the Arctic Circle in Rovaniemi, Finnish Lapland,
in 2014.
W
e take pleasure in answering thus prominently the
communication below, expressing at the same time
our great gratification that its faithful author is num-
bered among the friends of The Sun:
“I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no
Santa Claus. Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?”
— Virginia O’Hanlon.
115 West Ninety-Fifth Street.
Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been
affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not
believe except what they see. They think that nothing can be
which is not comprehensible by their little minds.
All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are
little. In this great universe of ours, man is a mere insect, an ant,
in his intellect as compared with the boundless world about him
as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of
truth and knowledge.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.
He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion
exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its
highest beauty and joy.
Alas! How dreary would be the world if there were no Santa
Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There
would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make
tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in
sense and sight. The external light with which childhood fills the
world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe
in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all
the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even
if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that
prove?
Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no
Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that nei-
ther children nor men can see.
Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not,
but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive
or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the
world.
You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise
inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not
the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the stron-
gest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy,
poetry, love and romance can push aside that curtain and view
and picture the supernatural beauty and glory beyond.
Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing
else as real and abiding.
No Santa Claus? Thank God he lives and lives forever. A
thousand years from now, Virginia, maybe 10 times 10,000 years
from now, he will continue to make glad the hearts of children.
he Donald Trump presi-
dency is not yet officially
upon us, but the Trump era has
already been good for political
reading lists. Book buyers baf-
fled by Trumpism and seeking
understanding have turned to var-
ious sociologies of the ur-Trump
voter, making best sellers out of
J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,”
Nancy Isenberg’s “White Trash”
and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s
“Strangers in Their Own Land.”
Liberals looking to feed their
sense of alarm have been steered
toward Hannah Arendt’s “The
Origins of Totalitarianism,” Sin-
clair Lewis’ “It Can’t Happen
Here” and Philip Roth’s “Plot
Against America.” “What Is Pop-
ulism?” by German political sci-
entist Jan-Werner Mueller has
been widely recommended; so has
Mark Lilla’s anatomy of reaction-
ary thought, “The Shipwrecked
Mind”; so has Richard Rorty’s
“Achieving Our Country,” from
back in 1998, mostly for a pre-
scient few paragraphs on “the
nonsuburban electorate” and its
potential affinity for strongmen.
The racial element in Trumpism
has sent people back to W.E.B.
Du Bois on “Black Reconstruc-
tion” — once they’ve finished,
of course, with the latest from
Ta-Nehisi Coates.
But for your last-minute
Christmas shopping, I have some
slightly different recommenda-
tions to make. The Trump-era
reading lists I’ve seen include
many worthy titles, but they also
tend to focus heavily on the dark
forces lurking somewhere out-
side enlightened circles — in the
hills of Appalachia, in the postin-
dustrial heartland, in the souls of
racists and chauvinists and cryp-
to-fascists. They are anthropolo-
gies of populism, cautionary tales
from history, blueprints for blunt-
ing revanchism’s appeal. But they
do not generally subject West-
ern liberalism itself to rigorous
critique.
And that might be what lib-
eral readers need right now: Not
just portraits of the Brexit and
Trump-voting domestic Other, but
a clearer sense of their own worl-
dview’s limits, blind spots, blun-
ders and internal contradictions.
Internal critics
So my reading list starts with
two of liberalism’s sharpest inter-
nal critics, both deceased — a
reactionary of the left, Christopher
Lasch, and a conservative lib-
eral, Samuel P. Huntington. Their
most-cited works, Lasch’s “Cul-
ture of Narcissism” and Hunting-
ton’s “Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order,”
have obvious applications for our
culture and politics today. But the
books I would recommend are a
little different.
For Lasch, it’s “The Revolt
of the Elites and the Betrayal of
Democracy” (1995), a polemic
against the professional upper
class’ withdrawal from the society
it rules and a critique of the ways
in which multiculturalism and
meritocracy erode patriotism and
democracy. For Huntington, it’s
“Who Are We? The Challenges
to American National Identity”
(2004), a book widely denounced
as racist for arguing that the recent
wave of Latin-American immi-
gration might not be easily assim-
ilable and might instead balkan-
ize the country into identitarian
redoubts.
Both books are imperfect:
Lasch’s is too angry, Hunting-
AP Photo/Brynn Anderson
President-elect Donald Trump stands on stage during a rally Satur-
day in Mobile, Ala.
ton’s too pessimistic (I think). But
in different ways they both offer,
in Lasch’s words, a “revisionist
interpretation of American history,
one that stresses the degree to
which liberal democracy has lived
off the borrowed capital of moral
and religious traditions antedating
the rise of liberalism.” And they
illustrate how the Western elite has
burned the candle of solidarity at
both ends — welcoming migration
that transforms society from below
even as the upper class floats up
into a post-national utopia, which
remains an undiscovered country
for the people left behind.
Across the Atlantic
My next recommendation is
from across the Atlantic: “The
Abolition of Britain” (1999), by
Peter Hitchens, Christopher’s
right-wing brother. Writing early
in the Tony Blair era, Hitch-
ens argued that Britain’s rulers
had broken faith with the island
nation’s past, burying its history,
customs and traditions, subjecting
their people to a misguided Euro-
pean pseudo-empire, and tolerat-
ing social decay and disarray as
the price of tolerance and prog-
ress. Nearly 20 years on, you will
not find a clearer case against both
Blair and David Cameron’s shared
worldview, or a clearer expla-
nation for why so many Britons
voted for Brexit.
Then I recommend widening
your gaze to Europe as a whole,
through Christopher Caldwell’s
“Reflections on the Revolution in
Europe” (2009), which critiqued
the Continent’s rulers for welcom-
ing — out of idealism, economic
calculation and indifference —
an unprecedented level of immi-
gration from the Islamic world
that their societies lacked both the
competence and the civilizational
confidence to assimilate.
Shades darker
Which is why my next rec-
ommendations are a few shades
darker: First “Submission” (2015),
Michel Houellebecq’s seem-
ingly dystopian novel about an
exhausted near-future France that
ends up choosing between Isla-
mism and fascism (it picks the
veil), and then one of Houelle-
becq’s earlier novels, “The Ele-
mentary Particles,” whose por-
trait of a loveless, sex-fixated and
disposable modern masculinity
reveals that its author believes the
real dystopia is already here —
that the end of history is actually
a materially comfortable desert,
from which the political and reli-
gious extremisms of “Submission”
offer a welcome and rehumanizing
form of escape.
This is itself an extreme idea,
of course, and so is the com-
parison offered in my final rec-
ommendation, Ryszard Legut-
ko’s “Demon In Democracy”
(2015), in which the author, a Pol-
ish political philosopher, explic-
itly links the ideological conform-
ism and faith in capital-P Progress
of contemporary liberalism to the
oppressive communism of his
youth.
Legutko is a member of Law
and Justice, the right-wing party
currently ruling Poland, whose
ascent has provoked the West-
ern media to panic over its reli-
gious nationalism and illiberal for-
ays. Which is all the more reason
to read him, and to see through his
eyes how the open society as envi-
sioned by contemporary progres-
sives can seem to conservatives
like a closed and stifling one —
closed to transcendence, closed to
memory, closed to the pre-liberal
traditions upon which Legutko
would argue the liberal democratic
order actually depends.
Liberal readers probably will
not finish “Demon” ready to vote
for Law and Justice; Houellebecq
probably won’t convince them
that our civilization’s choice is
porn and cloning or the caliphate;
Hitchens probably won’t persuade
them to become Brexiteers.
But even for the unconvinced,
reading these writers will go a
long way toward explaining the
most unexpected thing about
Western politics in the strange
year of 2016 — the sheer num-
ber of people in our prosperous,
at-peace societies who don’t seem
to want to live in liberalism’s end
of history anymore.