If you’re a conservative, it’s easy to get depressed nowadays, both on political and cultural grounds. You may find yourself wondering whether you are doomed to the position of permanent enemy of the mainstream; permanent complainer about the status quo, malcontent, outsider. Writing indignant attacks is sometimes necessary, and of course always fun, but if that’s all you have in prospect, you get to feeling that everything you write amounts in the end to a relentless lobbing of tomatoes against hardened concrete walls, and that its only real effect is to make Frank Rich feel virtuous for withstanding all this withering fire (though somehow, you suspect he would probably feel virtuous anyway). If you get to feeling this way, it can get a writer down. It’s important, it seems to me, to be able to look at the country and feel cheerful and encouraged now and then.

Lord knows, it’s hard enough to do at the moment. For a conservative today, the political situation is bad enough: the precariousness of Republican control in Congress; the horror show that would follow the Democratic restoration in the House particularly; the inability of the Dole campaign to get any purchase on the public mood; President Clinton’s magical ability to transcend his own reputation to get people to think he’s better than they think he is; his gift for soaring above his troubles, chuckling like a sea gull, or whatever kind of bird chuckles; the way the whole Clinton White House glides effortlessly above us earthbound critics, high as a kite, so to speak. That, summing it all up, is the good news.

The culture situation is far worse. The New York Times, the week before last, accidentally juxtaposed two stories, that together, it seems to me, say a tremendous lot about Modern America.

A museum in Peoria is running an exhibit of some old Dick and Jane readers from the 1940s and 1950s. The last edition was 1965. The show is a big hit and got held over, and the curious thing is, the Times reported--as usual, cluelessly--that throngs come and look at these old books and cry. "Any time we had people crying in the galleries," the museum’s public affairs director said, "we knew they were looking at Dick and Jane pictures."

It’s a strange scene for an art and science museum, where the customary rocks and paintings don’t ordinarily get that kind of rise. Especially strange because, as the experts pointed out, in those retrograde Dick and Jane books, "mother cheerfully does the housework, father wears a suit to work and on weekends mows the grass and washes the car."

The experts were stumped, until it hit them that--of course--everyone feels nostalgic about his childhood, and nowadays ’50s nostalgia is a fad.

And that’s true, but so is this (a fact so obvious, there’s no way it would ever occur to an expert): when they ponder the Dick and Jane era, people cry because life was better then. They remember it. They know it was better.

Why and how?  Well, that very same issue of the Times had a front page story about the seven-year-old boy suspended from second grade on charges of sexual harassment. You recall that he’d kissed a classmate and didn’t even attempt to deny it, the little stinker. When museum-goers contemplate Dick and Jane’s world, how could they possibly not cry? 

There’s a deep, devastating cultural realization that has hit this country over the last few years, you can see it spreading; that, despite immense gains in some areas over the last several decades, the country for the first time in its history is worse off than it used to be; worse off than it was a generation ago. We are collectively not doing the job our parents and grandparents did. We’re not keeping this place up worth a damn.

It’s a hard realization to reach, for one thing, because it risks denigrating the big gains we have made since around 1965--in the fair treatment of blacks, for example; in hugely increased national wealth and power; in medicine, science, and technology. These are gains that mainstream intellectuals often want to ignore, but they’re important and shouldn’t be ignored.

And whenever you make this assertion, furthermore, that the nation is worse off, all things considered, than it used to be, you can always count on some older, wiser person materializing to tell you that you’re full of baloney, that young people don’t realize how easy they’ve got it--which suggests that on top of everything else, our crankiness quotient is way up. But of course there’s some truth to it. We live in the lap of luxury. Our poor are better off in many ways than the rich used to be.

But at the same time, many young people today, the same ones who are living in the lap of luxury, don’t grasp that an America with good public schools and generally admired government institutions, with no street crime to speak of, with families, relatively speaking, largely whole, with strong public morals and morale is even possible.

This issue is an emotional flashpoint today. I think it’s the emotional flashpoint. I claimed in an article a while back that nostalgia has become a political act. Nothing angers the left more than what the first lady calls "nostalgia merchants." As far as the left is concerned, it’s all a sham. As one reporter wrote in response to Dole’s convention speech, "Dole’s outrageous declaration combined dewy-eyed nostalgia, tunnel vision, and outright error. For most Americans, and many others across the world, the American dream seems more real today, more accessible now, than in the heady days after World War II."

But I’m reminded of E. B. White commenting in 1977 about an earlier piece of his that discussed the Manhattan of 1948: "The last time I visited New York," he writes, in the late 1970s, at the end of his life, "it seemed to have suffered a personality change, as though it had a brain tumor as yet undetected. The city I described has disappeared, and another city has emerged in its place. But I remember the former one with longing and with love."

Evidently, we nostalgia merchants are on to something, and when E. B. White and Hillary Clinton disagree, my money is on White.

However, looking at America’s classical age--for purposes of discussion, let’s say the late '30s through the early ’60s--doesn’t have to be depressing. It doesn’t have to generate mere relentless attacks on the modern order. When you look at an earlier age, that was better in key ways than your own happens to be, you can recommend melancholy or recommend renaissance.

Granted, a modern American, looking back at fifty years ago America is not quite a fifteenth-century Florentine looking back at 500-years-ago Italy. The analogy is not terribly close. In fact it’s blatantly crazy. But let’s suppose we decided to stage a renaissance, to crumple up and throw out a whole bunch of failed, modern institutions, and build new ones, not with the intention of reproducing or recreating the American past, which can’t be done and isn’t desirable in any case, but with the intention of being guided, inspired, and encouraged by the classical precedents.

And no doubt the problem we face is substantial. Big solutions are in order. A renaissance is not too big a solution for our particular problem. It’s not just the ideology of the mainstream newspapers and the TV news. It’s not just bias at the teacher’s colleges and universities, and the museums, and the art community. Not just Hollywood and TV entertainment. It’s the textbooks. It’s every children’s story book. It’s the schools. This culture is, in the words of Jack Kemp, and the sainted Rhoda Karpatkin, editor of Consumer Reports, "not acceptable." We need a new one.

And the fact is liberal dominance of today’s mainstream institutions is not even the liberals’ fault. They choose to put out the mass market newspapers and magazines. They run the museums, they produce the movies and TV shows. Conservatives are too busy for that sort of thing, most of the time, and the country pays the price. Granted, with the significant exception of the Christian groups, conservatives are mainly happy talking to each other. It’s our fault.

So here are some new institutions I’d love to see. I should make clear at the outset of this wish list that I don’t want to imply a belief that the conservative powers-that-be have been sitting around on their rear ends, idly sipping tea and running down Darwin, and whatever else they do for relaxation. In the extraordinary range and vigor of today’s conservative think tanks, and magazines and journals and books, you can see a bona fide renaissance underway right now. It’s a great time to be a conservative writer. But this particular ongoing renaissance focuses mainly on politics, broadly interpreted, and I’m shopping for a cultural renaissance.

It’s also true, of course, that ideas don’t create institutions, never have and never will. Rich people do, or politically, organizationally talented people, community consortiums, stump speakers, civic leaders. A writer saying what institutions he wants to see is a little bit like a halibut making suggestions about nuclear submarine design. It’s not that a halibut might not have a certain kind of wisdom to bring to bear. It’s just that nuclear submarine designers and halibut move in different circles, to the ultimate dissatisfaction of neither. Neither pines for the other’s company and there’s no sense pretending otherwise.

But ideas of this sort maybe do have indirect effects. I’m hardly the only person around saying this sort of thing. Everything on my personal institutional wish list is floating around in some form or other in the air. I’m merely summarizing what many people think and what many have said.

Each such list gives the cultural climate just a little nudge, and after lots of nudges, maybe the thing will move some day.

I’ve got a bunch of things here; I’ll dwell only on the first two, and run through the rest quickly.

Desperately needed institution number one. Intellectual and cultural life centers on books, books center on New York, New York centers on the New York Times. The entire national book market resolves around one of the most widely disliked, justly disparaged institutions of the age, and most reliably left-leaning, even as it moves from editor to editor. The New York Times Sunday Book Review, of course. It calls the shots, in some cases even leftists themselves can’t stand it.

Leftists and other people have reason to object to the Times’ theories that there’s no such thing as literature anymore, only expertise; that books are opinion delivery systems; that good prose is irrelevant, and probably ought to be regulated by the FDA.

Many conservatives have noticed the Times’ habit of handing their books, in the cause of professional disinterestedness, to their ideological sworn enemies. At the Times Book Review "the air is thick with the whine of grinding axes," as no less a wacko leftist than Gore Vidal once put it.

To be fair, it runs the occasional superb piece, and although for my own part, I can rarely bring myself to read it anymore, I chuck it with genuine regret into the garbage can. There’s nothing wrong, of course, with leftists reviewing right-wing books, and vice versa; what makes the Times Book Review so objectionable is its dishonest protestations of neutrality and objectivity, and its monopoly status. That’s why this matters. Even if the Times Book Review were a model of probity and intellectual seriousness, how could it possibly be good to have one magazine running the show?  It swings more weight than every other book review put together. It defines the market that defines the intellectual community and plants the flag of orthodox leftism right at the heart of modern educated society. That’s not its fault, its our fault.

Why the conservative movement allows the book world to be bossed by an institution like this is utterly beyond me. I think even the Times itself finds it astonishing. Particularly given that the conservative world nowadays (as even some liberals concede) is where the ideas and good books and popular books are coming from.

It used to be different, of course. In the old days, the Times Sunday Book Review spoke from the left, or leftish. The Herald Tribune from the center-right. No one’s going to resurrect the Herald Tribune, unfortunately (it folded thirty years ago and reportedly just held its final annual reunion). But there’s no reason there couldn’t be a new book-review weekly, not just about books but culture in general. Not merely a conservative New York Review of Books, but more like what the New Yorker used to be--a culture weekly with a lot of reviews of books and art, music, theater, film, so forth, with editors who are fanatic for good writing. A weekly that’s so beautifully written, you can’t help reading it, whatever your politics. Conservative magazines ought to address the whole country, not just other conservatives. I miss this nonexistent culture weekly so much, it hurts. Someone ought to sit down and do it.

There’s another magazine I miss too, very different in character. Americans, it seems, read newspapers less and less; younger people especially don’t watch TV news either. Why is that?  As far as the mainstream is concerned, the answer is obvious: because they’re dumb. Mainstream journalism wreaks with contempt for the American public.

As Michael Wines wrote in the Times’ "Week in Review" last Sunday, if Whitewater can’t be reduced, "to a snappy haiku, or even a catchy slogan like, ‘Oh, what a feeling,’ how can anyone expect J.Q. Averageperson to grasp it?"  It’s true to a point--when you expose the population to a full generation of rotten schools and educational appeasement, the nation deteriorates. This is another point the mainstream experts have trouble grasping as they debate the fine points of the sexual harassment curriculum: the ignorance level is rising. At some point they’ll have to stop debating and start filling sandbags.

Unquestionably, ignorance is up. But there’s far more to this story. The mainstream press--the "monopartisan press," as Michael Barone put it recently--makes no secret of its liberal sympathies. And one reason no one reads the newspapers or watches TV news anymore is that no one likes them anymore. A catastrophe in the making, as many people have pointed out, for democratic government.

But public issues still interest the public, obviously, or at least some part of it. Talk radio does well. And it’s false to claim that people have given up reading. People magazine does well. Mademoiselle does well. Car & Driver does well--Car & Driver being a much better magazine than CBS is a TV network. Intellectuals sometimes miss the gigantic business that romance novels, for example, do. The market is thriving. People do care, do read.

A new kind of weekly news magazine might conceivably do great. And I mean a real magazine, not the wretched ghost of one on the Internet. Life magazine, for example, in the late ’30s and ’40s, had a tone that’s hard to describe--many of you, I’m sure, are familiar with it--wry and to a degree skeptical, nothing like the heart-warming stuff that eventually took over the magazine and sank it. But Life’s old-time writers, the remarkable thing is, wrote about America as if they were Americans, where today’s typical reporter aspires to be an expert observer of America, in the sense that an entomologist is an expert observer of cockroaches.

I can’t help suspecting that a lower-middle-brow news magazine, weekly news magazine, with short, funny, beautifully written stories, with first rate photos (preferably black and white), with sports and gossip (which people of all brow levels still pay money to read), willing to take on and be funny about the sacred cows that automatically induce dewy-eyed sappiness at nearly every newspaper and TV station in the country to the disgust and scorn of most Americans (particularly that holiest sacred cow in the whole sacred herd, orthodox feminism), and with that magic ingredient X, the quality of being written from the spiritual inside of the country. I bet such a venture would succeed. Anyway, I’d subscribe.

I have a bunch more institutions, but here’s a quick list. It was Tucker Carlson, I think in the Weekly Standard, who was first to point out what a disgrace it is that Dorothy Rabinowitz didn’t win a Pulitzer prize. She’s a good candidate, it seems to me, for journalist of the decade. In bypassing her, the Pulitzer prizes declared themselves morally bankrupt. They couldn’t have made it clearer if they’d filed for Chapter 11 in moral bankruptcy court. Magazines are hard to start, but prestigious awards aren’t. Put a few big-cheese liberals on a committee, give a few big-cheese liberals prizes, and you’re in business. High visibility awards that conservative journalists have an honest shot of winning would do a lot for the cultural climate.

Schools are the most important issue in the country. A generation of rotten schools has shaken American culture to the foundation. You can see it all around you. A first-rate piece in the latest Public Interest shows how to change things--one school at a time. A small group of people who actually care about education start a school, and parents and children beat down the doors. But I wish, speaking now in part as a college teacher and in part as a father of young boys, that a Serious Schools Association existed to support the country’s serious schools, to offer advice on curriculum and textbooks, to put its official certification on diplomas--if you went to a serious school, there ought to be a way for college admissions committees for example, to be informed of the fact--to help principals resist, when they want to resist, the waves of garbage that keep overwhelming the education world.

I went to the principal of the school my young boys attend, along with the only other computer researcher in the parent pool, and we both told her that it strikes us that the fancy computers the school is putting in are a waste of money, and worse, a waste of time. The principal told us that she understands, but parents demand it, and no one would send his child to the school if they didn’t have them. At times like that I wish I could haul in the U.S. Serious Schools Association for tactical support.

But we need something else even more urgently. The history of your country is the center of your education. You learn no history, you learn nothing. No one in his right mind trusts the schools any longer to teach history honestly, in many cases even to teach it at all, and we can’t wait for wide-scale cultural reforms to take hold. Our children have to learn now.

What I wish I had was a brilliant new American history book for children, the work of a serious writer and not a textbook hack, a serious historian or a group of them, written with disdain for current fads, written for children and not for morons, a coherent text and not one of the chaotic sidebar-crazed past-up jobs that are so popular nowadays. William Bennett hit it big in the read-it-to-your children market, but what we need worst in this field is first rate history.  And while I’m on history, if conservatives wanted to let the country know where they stand, here’s a radical suggestion: How about a national holiday to celebrate Washington’s birthday?  Or even Lincoln’s?  I don’t want to scare people with extremist talk, but nothing so perfectly symbolizes modern America’s contempt for history than our purge of national holidays. It would be good for morale to undo it.

I want to close with a nonexistent institution that’s particularly dear to my heart, one I’ve written about, one that’s especially impossible--a new museum of history, architecture, and art. Museums aren’t a topic intellectuals worry about a lot, except for art museums, but my hunch is, they swing more cultural weight than we give them credit for. School children, in particular, get bused into museums in large numbers, and the things they see make a big impression.

Museums are badly needed not only because of the sort of people to which today’s museums are entrusted, but because of the wonderful possibilities that go unpursued by a modern museum culture whose most striking characteristic, even more than political bias, is sheer lack of imagination.

Designing history and cultural history exhibits, for example, ought to be, could be, an art in itself. And we’re in an era that’s supposedly interested in broadening the boundaries of art, for that matter in "installation art," but the art of history shows goes nowhere, doesn’t exist.

I don’t know of an effective architecture gallery anywhere in the country, which is a disgrace and, again, the result of sheer lack of imaginative.

And then too, we’re a rich country, and an art market for the educated middle class ought to be thriving. In Paris not so long ago you could buy Cezanne drawings for a few hundred dollars. Dentists collected Degas--dentists, at that point, being still members of the middle class--but we have no middle class art market to speak of. Museums could help create one, but don’t. A new museum could do that and a million other things that ought to be done.

To conclude, Nicholson Baker published a fascinating piece in the New Yorker not long ago on the San Francisco Public Library, which moved recently to a fancy new building and in the process methodically purged more than 200,000 books. Some were duplicates, and the sort of thing that libraries ordinarily do throw out. But others were rare, out of print, valuable, or one of a kind, but not terribly interesting to the current library regime.

The purge was in keeping with the deliberate transformation of the library into a main collection of, "current material relevant to San Francisco needs," plus some "focus collections," many for "affinity groups" (gay and lesbian, of course, environmentalist, and others). Getting rid of the books was also a way to make room for hundreds of computer terminals.

Baker objected to the book purge and evidently got it stopped, or at least radically slowed down, by mobilizing some local opposition. Evidently, far more books would have been destroyed otherwise. But the head librarian was unapologetic. "I’m not convinced," he said, "that Mr. Baker understands the people of San Francisco, or what they want." And of course he may very well be right.

San Francisco’s library is, in any case, a perfect symbol of modern American culture. We handed over this distinguished library to a management that evidently hates books. They still run the institution today. But this is an age, after all, in which much of the contemporary art community makes no secret of its hatred for art, or what most people mean by "art"; an age in which humanities professors (not all, but many) are explicit about their contempt for scholarship; an age in which as influential an exponent of classical music as Bernard Holland at the Times lights into the "self-righteous indignation" of defenders of "so-called high culture"; an age in which all traces of Judaism and Christianity--religion being the foundation of culture--are relentlessly suppressed in the schools in favor of the increasingly explicit pagan animism of the environmentalists, who today represent the established state religion. All this is beautifully symbolized by the once proud library that methodically destroys its books.

For my part, I need to figure out what I’m going to tell the college students I teach, and more important my own children, when they ask me, as they’re bound to do some day, "Your having grown up in a society that for all its faults could say ‘high culture’ without snickering, your having had a shot at the library before they purged it, where did you stand?  When they started the deliberate dismantling of American culture, when they yanked the books off the shelves, and sent them off to the landfill by the truckload, did you do anything about it or merely register polite objections and shrug and walk away?"

It’s a question for each one of us to ponder.

David Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University.