Mueller: A patriot who was sucked into the corrupting maw of Washington

The obituary for the US attorney Robert Mueller, who died recently, read: “He had two daughters, Reuters and UPI.” Well, now: How dedicated must Mueller have been to journalism to name his she-offspring after two of the world’s foremost news agencies! How would he have named his sons? Al Jazeera and TASS? Careful reflection clarified matters. The “daughters.” should have been “daughters,” for the intrusive tadpole-like seraph had changed a full stop to a comma. So start again, but now adding brackets for clarity. “He had two daughters. [Reuters and UPI].”

The two girls were, in fact, given those exquisitely WASPish names Cynthia and Melissa, while in his own bizarre way, Mueller embodied both the best and worst of the USA. In doing so, he exemplified why the US is so profoundly different from Western Europe. This wretched subcontinent now resembles an exotic mosaic beneath which the sewerage pipes have ruptured during a cholera epidemic. Even as the stench of bodily waste wakens the European mosaic from its eighty-year coma, with war to its East and South East, it cannot even begin to assess the scale of its ruination around it, never mind reverse it. 

Mueller was a true blue-blood Episcopalian whose ancestry was part-English, part German and wholly patrician. He studied at St Paul’s School, New Hampshire, the very acme of Yankeedom. His fellow students had given-names such as Winthrop, Drexler, and Anson, while another trinity, namely Duty, God and Patriotism were the cornerstones of this high-born caste. However, that  triangle was wearing pretty thin by the late 1960s, and the paddy fields of Vietnam beckoned his generation towards their malarial waters. Most of his peers sought and got exclusions from conscription: He did not, and with two university degrees under his belt, volunteered to serve in the US Marines, winning a Bronze Star for valour under fire. That is a sentence that, with the necessary adjustments, would be simply impossible to write about modern European lawyers.

Mueller’s legal career first took him to San Francisco, where he served as a prosecutor, before ending up in Washington, where he finally investigated the allegations over Trump’s illegal links with Russia in 2016. By then he  was suffering from Parkinson’s Disease which seriously limited his cognitive abilities, meaning that President Biden, the Vice President Harris and Mueller were all operating at the roughly same dysfunctional level. These years were sorry ones, as attested by his investigation’s conclusion about Trump. “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Indeed. Nor did it exonerate Kamala Harris, Donald Duck, Ho Chi Minh or even me. Verdict on us all: Not guilty. 

In short, Mueller was a great patriot who had been sucked into the corrupting maw of the Washington beltway; nonetheless, he had selflessly served his country in ways that would be inconceivable not merely for the lawyers of Europe, but for its bourgeois-class generally. Despite the corrosion of values caused by leftism, critical race theories, PC and wokeness – all variants of the Marxist disease that has infected the West for the past century – the USA still produces an educated middle-class that will serve their country in war. Though I deplore the continuing US hostilities against Iran, I equally recognise that the men and women who are flying the F-35s, the AF-18Es, the F-15Es, the B-52Hs, the B-2s, the C-17s and the tanker aircraft that make their operations possible, are patriots of honour, all of whom could be earning far more money in the private sector.  

They belong to the vital Golden Third of the US population, a 100 million strong demographic whose members do not write novels, or go to the theatre, or talk about Derrida, but they love their country, and are prepared to risk their lives in its service. Much the same terminology, with modifications and excluding the murderous fanatics, would apply to a great many  Iranians, who might despise the evil regime they live under, but also love their country.  Whereas it absolutely does not apply to the upper middle classes of any western European country, who are instead obsessed with the unprincipled objectives of wealth, status and esteem. 

There is no Golden Third in Europe: Welfare states have effectively created  government monopolies over virtue, as civil servants discharge duties that in previous generations were done by volunteers and religious orders. Goodness, kindness, charity, and moral engagement: These are now the professional obligations of paid-professionals working to union rules.  When their shift comes to an end, so too do their duties. This is a concept completely alien to those who join their country’s armed services, just as it was to those who founded and ran the first health services and hospitals. That these often led to the cynical exploitation of the dutiful, the loyal and the timid is undeniable. Nonetheless, when the twinned-ethos of social generosity and public duty have been effectively extinguished by the creation of a well-paid government secretariat, with them perishes the notion that members of a society owe any obligation towards it. 

Once that happens, it is relatively easy to unstitch those other vital elements that bind a society: Trust, work-ethic and social culture. This column  has repeatedly remarked on how the death of the French restaurant signifies the collapse of civil values in France. That the German motor-industry is on its knees – something that most of us thought impossible twenty years ago – is probably a related illness. In both cases, mass-immigration, and the powerful demoralising effect it has had on native communities, prompt those anguished and unanswerable questions – what is happening to my street, my city, my country? 

In the case of the USA, the despicable duopolies that governed there after Reagan, with their economic neglect of the working and lower middle classes, have torn the fabric of society apart. Yet enough of the traditional value-system has been retained by the Golden Third to enable the USA to remain a viable social and military entity. This is not true of Europe: Too many tribes, too many sectional interests, too many languages, too many geographical barriers between them render a real spiritual and political unity quite impossible. We Europeans might have the comforting illusions of unity,  but merely for the mayfly life-expectancy of an imagined seraph beneath the pinpoint-hieroglyph that is this .

Kevin Myers is an Irish journalist, author and broadcaster. He has reported on the wars in Northern Ireland, where he worked throughout the 1970s, Beirut and Bosnia.