Robert Nisbet’s The Present Age 35 Years Later – The American Spectator

On Jul 17, 2023

Thirty-five years ago, on the eve of the end of the Cold War, the great conservative thinker Robert Nisbet wrote a small book titled The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America, which diagnosed the ills of modernity in Spenglerian fashion but held out hope that America’s “moralizing militarism,” bureaucratic centralization, and cultural and spiritual decline could be reversed. Thirty-five years later, that hope is fading in the wake of two long and costly wars in which the United States sought to replicate American democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the continued and seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, and a cultural decadence that would have been unimaginable three decades ago. (RELATED: The Failed Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt)

Nisbet, a sociologist by profession who died at the age of 82 in 1996, marked the beginning of the “present age” in America when the United States entered the First World War in April 1917–a war that “was at its height by far the largest, bloodiest, cruelest, indeed most savage in history,” and that led to an even greater war two decades later. “The Great War,” Nisbet wrote, “was the setting of America’s entry into modernity–economic, political, social, and cultural.” The global conflict proved in all countries, including the United States, the truth in Randolph Bourne’s observation that “war is the health of the state.” (RELATED: In Defense of Community Defense Groups)

President Woodrow Wilson in his crusade to make the world safe for democracy perverted democracy at home with his use of the Espionage Act and Sedition Act to persecute and prosecute those who opposed his war policies. More generally, Nisbet wrote, America’s entrance into the war “gave dynamic impact to the processes of secularization, individualization, and other kinds of social-psychological change which so drastically changed this country from the America of the turn of the century to the America of the 1920s.” The war diminished old religious and moral values and elevated materialistic and hedonistic values. It was the birth of modernity in the United States, and we have never looked back since.

Nisbet believed that the myth of America’s triumph in the Great War combined with Wilson’s moralism led to a hubris that manifested itself in subsequent wars — World War II, Korea, Vietnam. And it led to the growth of what President Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex” and the rise of a scientific-technological elite that to this day exercise an inordinate influence over U.S. foreign policy. It also led to the greater centralization of power in the national government — most especially in the presidency. Nisbet called the growth of presidential power the “new absolutism” manifested in a “highly centralized, unitary political Leviathan.” This phenomenon started under Wilson, expanded exponentially under Franklin Roosevelt, and has continued uninterrupted to this day.

Nisbet noted that James Burnham perceptively recognized the New Deal as part of the “managerial revolution” that was then sweeping the globe. The Second World War only increased the power of the “managers,” especially those in the federal government’s bureaucracy. That war and the subsequent Cold War led to the rise in the United States of the national security state and what Nisbet called “government by deception.” Nisbet wrote that every president from FDR to, surprisingly, Ronald Reagan engaged in systemic lying to the American public; the Kennedys, he noted, were particularly adept at it.

Meanwhile, the decline of religion and a counter-cultural revolution led to a change in mores among the American people. The Left in America successfully challenged and overturned traditional middle-class morals and behavior by infiltrating then capturing the nation’s educational and cultural institutions — a process that has virtually been completed since Nisbet wrote The Present Age. Just imagine what Nisbet would have to say about the push for “transgenderism” and the LGBTQ+ movement.

Nisbet, however, was not a full-fledged libertarian. He understood the value of a robust foreign policy in the face of challenges by other great powers, and admired the thinking of John Lukacs and George Kennan in this respect. He also in his book The History of the Idea of Progress, paid homage to the geopolitical insights of Sir Halford Mackinder who warned the democracies to take measures to ensure the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. What he opposed in The Present Age was a moralistic, crusading foreign policy that has frequently sapped America’s strength in peripheral wars of choice.

The Present Age is only 136 pages, but on each page there are insights and gems of wisdom and perspective that are worth pondering. Nisbet was unafraid of confronting uncomfortable truths and battling sacred cows. He worried that Oswald Spengler might be right — that American and Western civilization “has entered its final stage” manifested in “symptoms of decline, the stigmata of decadence and fall: a surfeit of wars and military commandos, political despotism everywhere, and torrents of money pouring through weakening moral foundations.” But Nisbet took comfort that in civilizations “there are no inexorable, unalterable laws against which the human will is impotent.” The diseases of civilization, he wrote, rest upon ideas. The problems of the present age, he concluded, “are all subject to arrest and reversal.” Let’s hope he was right about that, too.

The Wise, Wise West