I'm John Batchelor, conferring with Brad Watson, who teaches at the Hillsdale School,

Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C. He's a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. That'll be a

factor here. He is also the author of Progressivism and The Strange History of a Radical Idea.

James Davidson Hunter regards what we have right now as the results of a crisis that hit in the middle of the 20th

century. And the crisis can be described as we lost a shared identity and the substitute of

sentimentality was not adequate. I like the idea that

Norman Rockwell was a makeover of American shared identity. Did it work, Brad?

Yeah. I mean, according to Hunter, you know, as we share, as we search, rather, for a new form of

shared identity in the 20th century, we look to,

you know, sort of very diluted sources, if you will, for this identity. So, you know,

Norman Rockwell's romantic vision of the American, recent American past and present, We look to that for a romantic conception of

solidarity and identity, or we look for it in secular historians like, for example, Arthur

Schlesinger Jr., who spoke in the middle part of the 20th century of the vital center and how

the vital center had to be preserved

in America. But by that, he simply meant, you know, freedom versus totalitarianism, the great

battle, the great struggle that America was involved in in the middle part of the 20th century.

But Hunter sees these as relatively empty vessels into which, you know, and you can, people can

pour whatever concoctions they want. They are not,

you know, strong sources of national identity. Freedom can mean, you know, has come to mean

almost anything. And, you know, sentimental art is not enough. It's not an ethical framework,

as the hybrid enlightenment was. So we're desperately searching for something

by the middle part of the 20th century, something that is no longer there, but we're not finding it,

...