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In his new collection of Wall Street Journal columns, “A certain idea of ​​America” (forthcoming November 19 by Portfolio), Pulitzer Prize winner Peggy Noonan writes about the history and character of our nation, the remarkable individuals who personify the best of America, the threats to the social fabric and the “better angels” of our democracy.

Read the foreword below and don’t miss Robert Costa’s conversation with Peggy Noonan on “CBS Sunday Morning” November 17!

“A Certain Idea of ​​America” by Peggy Noonan

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Foreword

This is not a book about the daily political life of our country. It’s just about loving America and enjoying thinking about it out loud.

The chronicles collected here are varied in terms of topics. It’s about things that last and things that are worth encouraging. A number of them feature spectacular human beings. As my editor and I read the final years of Wall Street Journal columns, if I said, “I really enjoyed writing that,” or if she said, “I loved that,” or if I said, “That was important to me,” it was in there. Otherwise, outside. We chose about eighty from more than four hundred. We found ourselves more drawn to the themes of the story and its pleasures.

The book is divided into seven parts.

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is primarily about great figures and artists of the 20th century, from Billy Graham to Oscar Hammerstein, from Queen Elizabeth II to Maine State Senator Margaret Chase Smith, and from Tom Wolfe to Bob Dylan, with some detours to the 19th century and the generals of the American Civil War. Looking back over a fifty-year career, I see that from the beginning, what I loved most, what moved me most, was writing honest eulogies.

“I don’t mind being harsh,” on the other hand, is having fun, as a public writer, by taking as much advantage as possible from the people and things you are certain are they deserve it. Is the U.S. Senate changing its dress code to accommodate a senator who likes to dress like a child? Get the stick. Vengeful Prince Harry? Idem. We were certain that a recent Broadway production Cabaret deserved all our attention, in an article whose last line is the summary: “Life is not Shit“We castigate men who are not gentlemen and chastise parents who, as their personal vanity product, turn their children into mindless status robots. Woke academics who express stupid thoughts with trash words also receive criticism. (I’m sorry for doing this.) Use the word “woke”, which is boring and just seems sarcastic, but the point is that when you say it, everyone pretty much knows what you mean.) I believe. that we have been the first to compare contemporary social justice warriors with the social justice practitioners of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We liked to point out that the leaders of the French Revolution were, in large part, sociopaths. There is an article written in the hours following January 6, 2021.

In “Try a Little Tenderness” we turn to love, which we consider to be a very good thing. We call on artists to enter politics. We meditate, after the fire which ravaged Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, on the lasting presence and power of religious faith. We love shamelessly, we swoon and wish to marry, Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace. We mourn Uvalde, Texas. We talk about the endless drama of men and women and we explain to America that there is so much more going on in the office every day than at work. We also declare Taylor Swift an American phenomenon, and if you don’t like her, you can just get rid of her.

“It seems he didn’t follow my advice” has two columns. The first, about Joe Biden, was so spectacularly wrong in its central prediction that it made us laugh. Yet, looking back five years, his reasoning still seemed strangely relevant to me. The second, about Donald Trump, on the eve of the 2016 election, seems to me to have some prescience about his central issues as a historical figure. As I also wrote it, I remember a poignant feeling.

“On America” is about our country’s weaknesses, troubles and triumphs. It includes the story of my great-aunt Jane Jane and how, as an Irish immigrant, she came to love her new country. I would say the overall theme of this section is keeping your cool under pressure. It includes recent college graduates, the Normandy invasion and the fiery, contrarian testimony of an old-fashioned capitalist. Also included is a portrait of the dynamic that produced radical political change: “The Protected versus the Unprotected.”

“Attention” contains columns about the concerns that concern me: the dark potentials of AI, skepticism about the character and motivations of its inventors; the possible use of nuclear weapons and the ongoing tragedies in Ukraine and the Middle East.

“We Can Handle It” is about moving forward, as a nation, through the things that upset us, from the #MeToo movement to the wars on abortion, from creating a sensible foreign policy to the weakness of the American presidency .

This collection takes its title from the famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s “War Memories”, fortunately translated as “All my life I have had a certain idea of ​​France”. This struck me when I read it many years ago and has stuck with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of ​​America and, from the beginning, it has shaped my thinking and guided my work.

What is this idea? How good she is. That it has value. That from her birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, articulating hypotheses and creating arrangements to make life more just. In the unfolding of his story, I saw something legendary. The group of geniuses of the Founders, for example: how come these particular people came together at this precise moment with exactly the right (different but complementary) gifts? A long time ago, I asked the historian David McCullough if he had ever asked himself this question. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: “Providence.” This is also where my mind settles.

De Gaulle said his thoughts on France were motivated as much by emotion as by reason, and the same is true for me. An article here dated July 3, 2019 talks about both:

I’m not really a fan of the purple mountain majesties. I would love America if it was a hole in the ground, although yes, it is beautiful. I don’t just like it because it’s “an idea,” as we all say now. This seems a bit bloodless to me. Baseball was not born from an idea, it came from We— a long, fun game punctuated by moments of excellence and great heartbreak, a team sport in which each player plays alone. The great film about America’s pastime is not called Field of ideasit’s called Field of dreams. And the scene that makes all the adults cry is the one where the young, dark-haired catcher walks out of the cornfield and toward Kevin Costner, who suddenly realizes: That’s my dad.

He asks if they can play catch, and they do it late into the night.

The big question comes from the father: “Is this Paradise?” The correct answer: “It’s Iowa.”

Which brings me closer to my feelings about patriotism. We are a people who experienced something epic together. We’ve been given this shiny, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal and that starting point doesn’t dictate where you end up. We have maintained it, from father to son, from mother to daughter, through the generations, inspired by excellence and despite sorrows. Whatever happened, depression or war, we stood tall and moved forward. We have respected and protected the Constitution.

And by forging and standing tall, we have created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.

We’ve been doing this for 243 years now, since the first 4th of July and despite all the changes that have swept the world.

This is all a miracle. I love America because that’s where the miracle is.

I would say from the above, welcome to my deepest heart.

Here you will see part of the American Civil War. This has been a lifelong concern and followed my interest in Abraham Lincoln, whose life has captivated me since childhood. He is the only American president who was both a political and literary genius – literally a genius – and who exuded an air of mysticism about him. He was completely human (simple manners, inappropriate jokes, depressions, author of angry letters) and yet there was something almost supernatural in his capacity to be just, to be merciful towards his tormentors (the angry letters were thrown into a drawer). What a number. Tolstoy considered him the greatest man in history.

Religious faith is a constant subtext here because it’s my constant subtext.

Anyway, America. For all its heartbreaking flaws (we have always been a violent country, for example), it deserves a deep sense of protection from us. Our great job as citizens is to shine it a little, improve it, and pass it on, safely, to the next generation, and ask them to shine it and pass it on. I think that’s often what I was trying to do. When you see this, I will have been a weekly columnist in The Wall Street Journal for a little less than a quarter of a century. I’m grateful that I’m not short of opinions.

Excerpted from “A Certain Idea of ​​America” by Peggy Noonan, by arrangement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 Peggy Noonan.

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