These are the realities of our lives that Himmelfarb's doctrinaire insistence on rigid, traditional forms of family and behavior (she is in favor of making divorce more difficult) would deny. Himmelfarb is like those people you used to run into who insisted that they weren't against interracial marriage but merely "felt sorry for the children." Her pompous insistence that we restore the outmoded stigmas attached to things like divorce is the sort of thing that causes at least as much misery as divorce itself.

Himmelfarb's remove from the realities of most peoples' lives would be laughable if it wasn't so insulting. Conceding that some single mothers must work, she writes, "but married women who work to supplement their family income may decide to forgo the amenities provided by that additional income." Amenities? The married working women I know aren't working for amenities but for necessities. How can someone who extols the virtues of family be so ignorant of what it takes to sustain a family today? And why should working mothers swallow this blinkered insult from a woman whose professed dedication to stay-at-home mothering apparently didn't impede her own career as an academic and a writer?

Himmelfarb is so intent on blaming the changes in traditional family structure on the '60s that she never considers the economic reasons behind those changes. (Those reasons include the decline in well-paid, staple jobs as businesses have increasingly turned to using cheap foreign labor.) Himmelfarb does offer some hope, though, for families who might need to supplement their incomes: Child labor. "Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century accounts of working-class life are replete with stories of children laboring part-time and contributing their meager earnings not only willingly but proudly to the family," she writes. Child labor, she tells us, would deter the destructive effect of "children commonly receiv[ing] allowances from their parents to be spent for their personal satisfaction."

Here again, Himmelfarb simply ignores the economic realities of labor. According to her, today's working women are merely looking for "amenities," while the working children of the 19th and early 20th centuries proved themselves good little doobies by "proudly and willingly" contributing to the family income. Funny, I've never heard those lofty ideals espoused by my father, who as a schoolboy in the Depression commonly worked from the end of the school day to midnight delivering groceries because his family needed the money. And I doubt if I'd hear such ringing tales of civic virtue from his contemporaries who were in the same position. They wanted to save their own children from this kind of drudgery.

As with all this moaning and groaning about the decay of society, it's both inevitable that Himmelfarb gets around to the "diseases" of popular culture and predictable that she has no idea what she's talking about. She makes the now-familiar mistake of identifying "The Basketball Diaries" as one of "the movies that so eerily prefigured the Littleton school massacre," obviously referring to the clip endlessly repeated on the TV news in which a black-jacketed Leonardo DiCaprio shoots up a classroom. Never mind that the movie -- released before DiCaprio became a star with "Titanic" and "Romeo and Juliet" -- was a flop that played mostly in urban art houses, and that the sequence is a fantasy that occupies less than a minute of a film whose subject is drug addiction. (How come Leo hasn't inspired a wave of high school junkies?)

It goes without saying that the right to an opinion includes the right to an uninformed one. But for far too long the pronouncements of academics and politicians and other "experts" who have no understanding of popular culture, no notion of the ways in which audiences actually experience movies and music, have been accepted as unimpeachable. "The obscenity and sadism of videos and rap music," says Himmelfarb. Crap, say I. Gertrude Himmelfarb couldn't name three rap songs; she couldn't name one song currently in the top 10 and couldn't tell Jay-Z from Q-Tip if her life depended on it. (Even the phrase "rap music," instead of "hip-hop" tells you how little she knows.) For someone with a reputation for being so learned, she seems never to have learned something most people find out early on: If you have no experience of the subject at hand, the smart thing to do is shut the hell up.

It just never occurs to Himmelfarb that the courteous and decent thing to do is to shut up when it comes to matters about which she has no knowledge or that are none of her business. In her view, there are those who need to be told and those equipped to do the telling. Near the beginning of "One Nation, Two Cultures" she quotes Adam Smith's observation that the well-to-do may be able to safely indulge in vices that would be ruinous to the lower classes if "all the more difficult to resist because they came with the imprimatur of their social and intellectual betters." Then, a few pages later, Himmelfarb bemoans the "loss of respect for authority and institutions" as one of the signs of societal decay. But just as she never gives any reasons why the well-to-do should be regarded as the "intellectual betters" of the lower classes, she never tells us why authority and institutions automatically deserve our respect. The notion that authority has to earn respect never occurs to her. Has she never had a stupid boss, never encountered some rule that made no sense? And just where has blind respect for authority ever gotten us? Certainly not to nationhood.

That's one reason I'm deeply suspicious of Himmelfarb's calls for a return to "civility." I have yet to hear that word used by a contemporary conservative in a way that didn't make me suspect that what they were talking about was actually servility, a world where everyone knows his place and acts according to a single accepted -- or enforced -- standard. Himmelfarb seems greatly threatened by any questioning of what she sees as self-evident standards of acceptable behavior. And so she writes to close questions down, to deny any mysteries or complications in American life that cannot be solved or contained by those standards.

It's not just the obvious people who don't fit her vision of a civil society -- people who choose not to marry or who choose to have kids outside marriage or to not go to church. There are whole spectrums of our national experience and expression that her narrow vision of America cannot admit. Himmelfarb's is not a country that would find room for the utopian yearnings of the transcendentalists; the search for freedom in Huck and Jim's journey down the Mississippi; the simultaneous desire for communion and declaration of individuality you hear in Ray Charles' or Elvis Presley's explorations of American music; the breezy disrespect that has always characterized American comedy; or the casual, cheerfully cynical and deeply anti-elitist tone that most of us would recognize as our collective native character.

Finally, "One Nation, Two Cultures" betrays a deep discomfort with the idea of democracy itself. I don't mean that Himmelfarb would prefer a dictatorship, but the idea that democracy is strengthened and not weakened by allowing people to make personal choices that some of us may find deeply distasteful clearly drives her crazy. And surely, it can't be just liberals who are bothered by the intrusiveness she espouses. For all of her talk about conservatives being dissidents within the prevailing culture, there must be conservatives who feel as if they are dissidents within their own party, like a woman interviewed on CNN before the Iowa caucuses, a former Republican who was voting for Gore or Bradley because, she said, she was sick of being judged by the Christian right.

Himmelfarb tells us that "the Republican Party is still dominated by a largely secular business community and by pragmatic, nonideological politicians," but surely they have ceded the upper hand to the fundamentalists and ideologues. Is it any coincidence that the death on New Year's Eve of Eliot Richardson -- the former attorney general who resigned rather than follow Nixon's directive to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (that dirty work was done by that great respecter of authority Robert Bork) -- passed almost unnoticed? What place would there be in today's Republican Party for Eliot Richardson, or for that matter what place is there for the conservatives who defined themselves in that vein?

Implicitly, they too are the people Himmelfarb judges and finds wanting. Conservatives (with some justification) used to complain that liberals had unreasonable expectations of people's goodness. But unreasonable expectations are at the heart of the folly of what Himmelfarb espouses. She stands for a strain of conservatism demanding a level of virtuousness that both common sense and basic understanding of human nature will tell you is unreasonable.

Himmelfarb says that we live in an age of people reluctant to make moral judgments. Let me appease her by offering one. It is morally obscene to propose, as she does, the sacrifice of people's happiness and even their lives in order to "raise standards."

"A moment comes and if you wish to look upon yourself as human you take some action," says a character in Alan Furst's novel "Dark Star." Himmelfarb prefers principles to action. But nowhere does she own up to the consequences of those principles. We can outlaw abortion -- but if we do, young women will maim and kill themselves trying to rid themselves of unwanted pregnancies. We can babble on about the perils of "value-free" sex education -- but kids will experiment sexually with or without information that might save their lives. We can make divorce more difficult -- but people will grow bitter in loveless marriages and pass on a deep suspicion of the institution to their children. We can insist that private charity must replace government assistance -- but people will lose their homes, will starve, and some will die.

This is not an alarmist vision, but the perfectly foreseeable result of the standards Himmelfarb endorses. If human misery and even death are an acceptable price to her, she should have the guts to say so. Then we can see whether the principles she upholds are those of a fool, a damn fool or a scoundrel.

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