Editorial/A Positive Proposal from the Ashes
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial A Positive Proposal from the Ashes R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. I have often said that ours is one of the most intellectual and influential audiences of any periodical in the Republic, a...
...Perhaps our Chevy Chase reader is denied the time for serene reflection so abundant in Lucasville, Ohio, or, for that matter, Oberlin, Ohio, or greater Antioch...
...The chances of one of the Democrats' capable leaders gaining effective control of the party are something on the order of the Pope's chances of gaining control of the Holy Roman Empire...
...It can, of course, endorse and encourage candidates, and it must denounce bad candidates...
...A positive statement...
...As a result the Republicans just do not come up with very many politically astute leaders...
...No writer I know has ever read it, and only a few claim to have seen it...
...Not only are we burdened with this bizarre hind (the "weakest" president in his lifetime, according to former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan), but we have an almost equally ludicrous crowd in the Congress, and our culture is dominated by quacks and low-grade morons...
...The American Spectator and National Review publish higher percentages of Republican writers than practically any other nationally circulated intellectual review, yet no Republican has telephoned or written anyone here or at NR to let us in on the Good News...
...What we have is a one-and-one-half-party system, incapable of nominating competent presidential candidates and incapable of resisting the pressures of one-issue zealots...
...If they did, they might be the most powerful party in the land, for many of the libertarian and nonradical ideas now in the ascendency are ideas congenial to Republican tradition...
...I suggest that the organization set up shop in Washington, and include intellectuals, businessmen, and the occasional pol capable of remaining sober until the dinner hour...
...As a result, laws are passed on Capitol Hill that are as unwelcome to the average American as influenza...
...I suggest the formation of a national organization, a very high-toned crowd, willing to propound sound policies and to hoot down the policies of the established parties when they take on the dimension of placebo and con job, as they usually do...
...For years it has suffered the incubus of Hooverism...
...So desperate for applause has this sad dunce become that he now tries to inspirit his subjects with White House press releases trumpeting every heroic turn in his war against unruly hemorrhoids...
...Washington's good restaurants are overpriced but necessary to statecraft...
...It embraces the largest number of voters, but because it is in the hands of quacks and parasites it is unable to protect or reflect majority opinion in the United States Doubtless there are competent men in the party...
...The mess we are in is generally attributable to our political leaders' inability to sense this and act on it...
...The two-party system is no more...
...Rumor has it that the thing is actually quite presentable...
...There have been more abominations perpetrated during the Wonderboy's first two years than Harding and Coolidge would have presided over had they reigned for 100 years...
...Their ineptitude in this department is highly amusing...
...Our organization ought to function as a party in every sense, though it ought not to nominate candidates...
...I have often said that ours is one of the most intellectual and influential audiences of any periodical in the Republic, a judgment thunderously confirmed by the exquisite quality of letters received at this office...
...Even by doing what is foolish and trendy he does not enlarge his political power but only puts off the day of his demise...
...A positive statement...
...What is the "positive statement" we can make about our parties, parties that allow so much mischief into our lives...
...Your sick essay on Senator Kennedy," writes a Chevy Chase, Maryland, eminence, "did not amuse...
...in politics they are implausible...
...In the late 1940s, Clark Clifford counselled President Harry Truman to cultivate intellectuals...
...the Republicans simply are not very moderne...
...Until a proper name is agreed to, I suggest that checks be made out to me personally...
...Those with an impulse to give generously ought not to stifle their natural instincts...
...Intelligent northern Democrats will forever be intimidated away from sound policy...
...Neither group will ever again control the Democratic Party...
...for some serve in the highest realms of government, just on the periphery of the good Jimmy's halo, and these people tend toward the fastidious...
...Even then they have to worry that they might be ambushed for allowing a taxpayer to abscond with a few nickles or for putting America on a collision course with progressive Cuba or for imperiling the furbish lousewort...
...In brief, a Republican candidate gives many supposedly fair-minded Ameri-canoes feelings of alarm and malaise...
...The thing is simply too weak...
...Republicans belong in business and in suburbia...
...Muzzy-headed liberalism might have brought us to confusion in years gone by, but it is no longer ascendent...
...If I ever get out of here, your money worries are over," writes a satisfied subscriber from Waupun State Penitentiary in Waupun, Wisconsin...
...Our organization will become the new second party, with erstwhile Democratic and Republican officeholders already in place...
...From Cambridge to Berkeley, new ideas are vanquishing it...
...Consumer legislation, regulatory legislation, expensive social programs, and all the legislation that has allowed or encouraged abominations like busing and affirmative action are the work of crackpots...
...A Republican presidential candidate struggles against a kind of cultural bias not dissimilar from that suffered by a dressed-up and sanitized Australian aborigine or an Indian untouchable...
...What our country needs is a positive statement not vitriol...
...If by 1980 he still lusts for public office, I suggest that he be barred from the electoral process by reason of mental incompetence...
...The Republicans are going to further degenerate, becoming at one with the Prohibition Party...
...And this inability derives from the feeble condition of their political parties...
...but our political parties cannot scotch them...
...I will contact you accordingly," he politely advises...
...Show me an energetic Republican at work outside a secure Republican district, and you will have shown me a Republican one step ahead of journalistic harassment and an ambitious prosecutor...
...We have as president a cat's-paw, who has been hornswoggled by a Panamanian gigolo and hoodwinked by a Chinaman presiding over the greatest 19th-century military power on earth...
...In time the Democratic Party is going to explode into civil war...
...We shall need a few hundred thousand dollars to open our Washington office...
...Skinner...
...Yet so subject to the fevers of the numbskull Left is this party that its intelligent representatives are forlorn and stultified...
...Possibly egghead Republicans see us as mere literary types...
...Then again, they may have heard we are all in with the Bolsheviks...
...Now it is the party of the Depression and Watergate...
...Republican Party membership is small, and the pool from which it draws candidates has been evaporating...
...Ask the Taiwanese, the Israelis, or any European who reads a newspaper or can sit in a cafe...
...Thoughtful minds in large numbers are heaving off the old claptrap much as they did in days of yore when Galileo put the laugh to Ptolemy and when Pasteur kicked out the bleeders...
...But here we come up against a problem that has troubled Republicans for years, to wit: Only a handful know how to deal with ideas...
...To this day the Republicans have yet to take Clifford's advice...
...All they can do is set up an informal alliance with sensible Republicans on questions of taxation and foreign policy...
...Now there is a positive statement for you...
...Sound Democrats may reflect majority opinion, but they will always be tyrannized by the Party's kooks...
...And so the thing is settled...
...That this image is rubbish transmogrified would be obvious to a tourist from Bulgaria, but the charges have hurt...
...And the mess cannot be laid at the feet of the intelligentsia...
...The rest fear ideas...
...Still, how could he miss the salient feature of our political condition, namely: The leader of the free world is a pert ignoramus...
...Soon statist liberalism will be displayed at the Smithsonian along with the stuffed carcasses of John Kenneth Gal-braith and B.F...
...I doubt that the Republican Party will ever be an effective national party again...
...Of course, not all of our subscribers are so sanguine and courteous...
...With our feeble party system it is now questionable whether the pols ever will take up new prescriptions for our present maladies...
...For some months now they have been publishing their own intellectual review...
...The Republican Party's condition is more interesting, if less auspicious...
...In the best of times, our elected Messiahs are slow to adopt new ideas...
...Let us first consider the Democratic Party...
...Every time an intelligent Democrat steps forward to do what is right in the Senate he takes his political life in his hands...
...By then our organization will have risen up as a gathering place for public persons of sound mind and proven political abilities...
...Its candi(continuedonpage35) EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) dates and officeholders are easily intimidated by antagonists entrenched in the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the media, various law enforcement agencies, and various prosecutors' offices...
...If I am wrong, count me a Democrat...
...We are in a hell of a mess...
...Membership should further be open to practicing Democrats and Republicans, for, as I say, some are intelligent and competent...
...Yet what the Republicans intend to do with it remains a mystery...
...At any rate, I rest my case...
...Possibly Chevy Chase lacks the cultural benefits of metropolitan Waupun...
...intelligent southern Democrats are forever immured from national influence...
...Senators Moynihan and Nunn are evidence of this...
...The quacks who serve as the party's apparatchiks do not trust a Moynihan and never will...
...Another of life's casualties writes from death row in Lucas-ville, Ohio, cheering us with news that his conviction has at long last been reversed and that he will continue his subscription once he reaches "the outside...
...To paraphrase Daniel P. Moynihan's remark on a similar, if narrower, phenomenon, there are significant numbers of influential Americans who feel that campaigning Republicans have no place "in the scheme of things...
...Imagine...
...They need a push...
Vol. 12 • February 1979 • No. 2
