Fritz Ermarth sat in the Oval Office as President Reagan and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev sparred, spent 25 years with the Central Intelligence Agency and “earned my pension” by writing five National Security Assessments.

But the Springfield High School and Wittenberg University graduate’s principal fears for the United States do not lie with its foreign enemies.

They involve, he said, “whether my country can succeed in making reasoned, accountable self-government really work.”While in Springfield last weekend to celebrate the 50-year reunion of the Wittenberg Class of 1961, Ermarth said country is beset by a “cultural, civilizational disorder that is a threat to the American way of life.”

With apologies to Walt Disney, Ermarth — the grandson of a prominent theologian and the son of the late revered Wittenberg history professor Margaret Ermarth — calls it the Disneyfication of politics.

“Our public square has been taken over by the values of advertising and entertainment,” he said. He says it’s an atmosphere in which “reasoned, accountable self-government is increasingly difficult.”

“Poor Sarah Palin. She’s a lovely lady. And she professes to believe the things I believe in,” said Ermarth, who identifies himself as a right-winger.

“She may well be competent,” he added. “But she was a governor of an important, interesting, challenging state, and she gives that up to be a celebrity.”

“That’s not her fault,” he said, “that’s our fault. We’ve been letting it happen to ourselves for the last 40 years.”

Drama kings and queens

In Ermarth’s view, Reagan was a beneficiary of the American love of celebrity but “was a man of such solid principles and executive competence that it didn’t overwhelm him.”

Ermarth said President Obama “is also a beneficiary” of that system, “but he can’t deliver.”

Individuals aside, Ermarth sees in the whole entertainment dynamic a political atmosphere as potentially damaging to our governance as drinking is to driving.

“You can’t have a reasoned debate between right and left about what’s consistent with our principles and what works,” he said. “We just hurl bumper stickers at each other.”

Self-discipline

His solution is to find a common ground by reconnecting with a “fundamental sense of values” he likens to “the fundamental principles of physics” in that they are “immutable.”

He sees them in the Constitution, the Ten Commandments and the lessons his mother taught him and a generation of Wittenberg students.

“My mom’s educational philosophy can be summed up with this: ‘Freedom is the right to discipline oneself.’ ”

That principle is crucial to the notion of limited government embodied in the Constitution he said, “because if individuals don’t discipline themselves, then we’ve got to write laws and put regulations in place that constrain” people.

“The whole Wall Street business is an example,” he said. “Spurred and incentivized and tempted by the pileup of subprime mortgages, they basically packaged up this garbage in attractive bundles.”

As a consequence, he said, “we’ve got a major argument about how do we regulate this so this can’t happen again.”

Ermarth said that the ultimate solution is not in regulatory schemes but in values.

“What keeps thing in order is values,” he said.

To those gaming any system the questions involved are whether an activity is legal or profitable.

“But is it right?” he asked. “That’s the last question they ask.”

Get back

“I’m a right-wing conservative, and I hold the left more responsible than the right” for that, Ermarth said.

His view is that the children of the Hippie Generation took their self-serving values to Wall Street. The result, he argues, is the now decades-long practice of “encouraging you to get into debt and misleading you into thinking there are no downstream consequences.

“That has got to stop and it’s going to stop.”

On a wider scale, “what puts us at risk,” he added, “is that for a generation or two, we haven’t educated people to civic respect of these traditions, and hence we can’t argue reasonably and effectively over how to act with them consistently, how to apply them as much as we did. The question is, can we get back to that?”

His first answers are predictably conservative.

“We’ve got to turn off the TV more often, we’ve got to get the kids off the video games and spend less time entertaining ourselves or being entertained.”

Ultimately, he said, “We have to stop and think and recover the capacity to argue rationally and sensibly and amicably about what we’re going to do.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368.