Peggy Noonan’s 2024 book, A Certain Sense of America, a compilation of about 80 of her Wall Street Journal columns from the past 8 years was, is a revelation for those struggling to make sense of American identity and history at a time of intense polarization.
Noonan, as a former speechwriter in the Reagan Administration, is unabashedly the product of a bygone era. Yet, as a millennial who politically came of age during the Trump era, I encountered her as something new and refreshing. She is no Trump supporter, yet empathizes with the desire to make America great again; she values good character and civility, praising these virtues even when politically inexpedient; she calls for moral humility without losing conviction. As I grappled with these paradoxes, Noonan at turns encouraged, surprised, and challenged me to reevaluate long held assumptions about my nation.
Of course, the book is about more than America. Noonan’s description of Tolstoy’s War and Peace could easily describe her own book:
“It is about life—parties and gossip…, religious faith and class differences and society, men and women and personal dreams and private shames. It is about military strategy, politics, and the nature of court life, a world that exists whether it is that of Czar Alexander in 1812, or the White House or a governor’s office today.”
Where War and Peace expresses Tolstoy’s sense of Russia, Noonan’s work is suffused with “a certain sense of America,” as the title suggests. While this sense of America is the unifying theme of the book, I am struck by another theme: Noonan’s Christian realism – a realism that both informs, and is informed by, her sense of America.
The content of Noonan’s writing is as remarkable as her prose. Certain themes stand out: civility (good), the woke left and Trump (both bad), American history (especially the Civil War), faith (particularly Noonan’s Catholic tradition), and the fragility of institutions. Pervading all of this is “a certain sense of America”: “That she (America) is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement.”
Noonan has no illusions about America’s sins, but this acknowledgement only serves to deepen her patriotism: “With all her harrowing flaws (we have always been a violent country, for instance) she deserves from us a feeling of profound protectiveness. Our great job as citizens is to shine it up a little, make it better, and hand it on, safely, to the generation that follows…” Nor is Noonan’s patriotism abstract; for her, America is not primarily an idea but rather the American people – past and present, liberal and conservative, saints and sinners. In an era of identity politics and endless culture wars, her simple answer to “what is America?” is timely. For better or for worse, it is us – and, mostly, it is for better.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking column in the book is “What Comes After Acheson’s Creation.” With characteristic bluntness, Noonan acknowledges that “the old order that more or less governed things after World War II has been swept away” and “[t]he changed world that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall is also over.” Noonan calls on policymakers to draw on the wisdom of Dean Acheson, one of the main architects of the postwar American-led order, and to think creatively about building a new order. Her aim is not so much offering specific policy proposals as articulating the urgent questions of our time – “What is America’s strategy now—our overarching vision, our theme and intent? What are our priorities? How, now, to navigate the world?” – and to offer principles that can guide our responses.
I do not know if Noonan would embrace the term “Christian realist”; however, this term aptly describes her approach to foreign policy. Noonan is openly Christian, and as she writes in the Foreword, “Religious faith is a constant subtext here because it’s my constant subtext.” She does not explicitly endorse the realist school of international relations, but her emphasis on national interest, human fallibility, and institutional frailty places her under that umbrella. Hers is a moral realism, though; national interest is not divorced from perennial moral principles, and it entails responsibilities to the American people, to other nations, and to the world. Noonan’s love of America leads neither to isolationism nor globalist utopianism. Her distinctly American brand of Christian realism is best summarized in her own words:
“In the workings of history I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance—how did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right (different but complementary) gifts?…the only explanation…(David McCullough) could come up with was: ‘Providence.’ That is where my mind settles, too.”
If America’s existence is good and Providential, then America can and should be a force for good in world affairs. For Noonan, however, Americans can only succeed in this endeavor if we acknowledge both our strengths and our weaknesses, our power and our limitedness, recognizing that Providence alone is the author of history.
Americans must heed Noonan’s call for creative, proactive thinking about the new world order. If America struggles today to articulate a coherent vision of itself internationally, that is because of its inability to articulate a coherent vision of itself at home. Instead of a nuanced perception of American identity, today we see extreme self-loathing and wholesale rejection of our history and cultural heritage, or a simplistic nationalism that glosses over our failings. Policymakers and voters alike could learn much from Noonan’s sense of America — a sense inextricable from her approach to America’s place in the world. Noonan’s thoughts on American foreign policy are a valuable contribution to the Christian realist discourse, and Americans of all religious and political persuasions will benefit from grappling with the paradoxes Noonan embodies in her refusal to conform to our politically polarized world.
