On May 16th, Peggy Noonan became the first woman, and writer, ever to be awarded the Pilgrims’ Medallion for service to the nation.
The society, founded in 1903, especially honors links between the USA and Great Britain. The first speech on British soil by a new American Ambassador to the United Kingdom is to the Pilgrims of Great Britain and the first speech by a new British Ambassador to the United States is to the Pilgrims of the United States.
Noonan’s sobering speech of acceptance was delivered just after the only toasts the Society ever gives: ‘To the President of the United States’, and then ‘To Her Majesty the Queen.’
Here is her text in full:
I thank you, Jim Zirin, for your very beautiful words. I sometimes in speeches joke and say, ‘I found your introduction almost embarrassingly flattering, but that’s because I wrote it.” Let me say here something I have never said: Could I have a copy? I want to put it on my wall at home.
It is a great honor to be honored by the Pilgrims USA. I have attended your events, I have been moved by and align with your great intent, which is to encourage and deepen ties between and among the English speaking peoples of the world. Your original declared intent, when you began 113 years ago, was to foster affection, regard and commerce of all kinds with Great Britain, with England. And I must say as a little Irish Catholic girl from Brooklyn who grew up with relatives who referred to the English simply as “the hated Black and Tan” , I thank you not only for your generosity of spirit but your relaxed standards! I hope my great aunt Bridget is not looking down at me disturbed.
I want to mention something that I thought of in the cab coming down, and jotted down. I once wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal on the tenderest words never said in American political history. They were written by Thomas Jefferson in one of the early drafts of his beautiful Declaration of Independence. He took a moment to put his heart on his sleeve regarding how he felt about parting from Great Britain.
After damning British government rule of the colonies at great length and with great specificity, Jefferson wrote that we can no longer be joined as one, we must renounce our old love, and there is tragedy in this: “We might have been a free and great people together!” We could have traveled through history together, joined, constructive.
It’s a lovely, brief passage. But the Declaration was too long, there were many editors, they cut Jefferson’s cry of the heart.
Too bad! Because in it Jefferson captured not only the head of things but the heart of things.
And yet all these years later if anything is obvious it is that we have been a great and free people together, we are such friends, we do have a special relationship, and for a million reasons we should, always.
And you are devoted to that. And to be the first woman, and especially the first writer, to receive from you the Medallion of Service, I experience this as a very great honor.
I want to speak briefly about the current political scene here.
Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.
Mr. Trump will be the Republican nominee, and I keep telling people we must pause for sheer amazement. A reality show tv star, a real estate developer, a brander, no previous political office –. No matter how you feel about Mr Trump, pro or con, it is cause for amazement. I think it fair to point out that in this cycle his supporters were the only people having a good time, who were cheerful, who seemed to me not angry but hopeful. But we have never had a year like this, we will always remember it, and when I speak to college students and they ask me if it’s always been like this, the to and fro of politics, I say no, no, it has never been like this!
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in my work over the years, I first wrote of it in a book in 2000. But I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
Simply: There are the Protected and the Unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected this year are pushing back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel, perhaps unconsciously, that they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.
Britain may leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is only one front in that battle, but it is salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.
If you are an unprotected American—one with limited resources and negligible access to power—you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
Many Americans said they were suffering from illegal immigration—its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine—more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred from that that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment—another word for the protected—nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket—an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on their people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims—not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls—the unprotected — who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate or blessed, but because they’re better.
This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
And a country really can’t continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about, respectful of their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. I am thinking maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
I’m going to close, but I want to end with this. Many wise political figures have said very wise things to me over the years, but one that sticks with me that I think of so often now is something Margaret Thatcher said to me, in conversation, in the middle or late 1990’s, as we spent a weekend together at the home of a mutual friend on Long Island.
It was a few years after she’d been removed from the prime ministership by members of her own party, in what was in effect a coup, or an uprising. The proximate cause of her fall was the poll tax – she had backed and pushed a change in the tax system that she thought would be more efficient, more just, and popular with those aspiring to rise.
But it was unpopular, there were demonstrations, big pushback, and within a year she fell.
So when I was with her at our friend’s house, late one evening, Mrs Thatcher told me what she had learned from that episode. I hadn’t asked. I tend not to say things like ‘Tell me what you learned from your disaster!’ But she I think wanted to tell me. And what she had learned she said is that people feel they live closer to the edge than political figures understand, a major change suddenly proposed might make them feel not more secure but less, you have to be aware of how anxious people are not to lose what they’ve got.
I wish the elites of our nations knew what she so painfully learned. You have to respect peoples’ anxieties. You have to listen. You can’t just dismiss them as racist, as politically incorrect. If you’re going to lead you have to be responsible, and you can’t allow yourself to live too differently or experience life too differently from the other people in your country.
You have to stay one of them in your head and heart.
That is all I have to say. I thank you.
