Where Do We Go From Here?
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Now that the above writers have set us straight on the glories that have overtaken the Republic since The American Spectator's arrival ! have asked the following...
...Erich Eichman, formerly managing editor of The American Spectator, is managing editor o f the New Criterion...
...The war in Vietnam was the central event of the post-1945 era...
...Wladyslaw Pleszczynski is managing editor of The American Spectator...
...In this regard, the preoccupation of the Reagan Administration (and...
...What now...
...I f i n t e l l i g e n c e , reason, and good humor had found a new home, I decided I would move in with them...
...The trouble was...
...And while we read our newspapers and write our articles, let us keep the party motto ever in mind: Take the long view and tell b e t t e r jokes...
...But the plausibility of those noble motives is reason enough to be on guard that some squandering and mortgaging of a d i f f e r e n t sort does not go on now behind President Reagan's equally noble motives...
...so be it...
...RET ROBERT ASAHINA It's always tempting to think that the most historical change (which...
...Send for free sample and fragrance list...
...Two years into the Reagan Administration, it is tempting to answer, "What do you mean ' w e , ' white man...
...If established Communism is to collapse in the Soviet Union and its s a t e l l i t e s , American foreign policy won't be the catalyst...
...Political associations are important, of course, but just as important are what TocqueviUe calls civil associations, including educational, intellectual, moral, and civic associations...
...A. Lawrence Chickering is executive director of the Institute for Contemporary Studies...
...It has, to be sure, become apparent in the past two years that conservative politicians as much as any others are i n t e r e s t e d in ideas chiefly for their campaign-slogan value...
...What next, men...
...For that much The American Spectator surely d e s e r v e s some of the credit...
...Save $14.00...
...Fed chairman Paul Volcker eased up before the election, but he may resume the monetary crunch a f t e r the voting...
...The day approaches...
...b) sane _9 and awakened members of the intelligentsia whose numbers are negligible but whose insights and influence are important...
...A New York, NY 10005 212-344-4288 Serving Wall Street area since 1895 linear moral codes dear to conservatives and with the principles of taste derived from them...
...Or so 1 thought at the time...
...But it's one thing to say that the American effort was, as Ronald Reagan put it, " a noble cause," and another to act on that...
...After a rocky first year, coherence and calm seems to be emerging in the Administration's foreign policy...
...The prospect of future, increased inflation under President Kennedy maintains incentives to save through real estate, fine arts, and comic books, rather than in more traditional, productive ways...
...bad luck...
...Fred Barnes is National Political Reporter for the Baltimore Sun...
...At last, here~ an educator who~ not afraid to tell it like it is, who's willing to own up to what's really going on in our ~hooks today, to name names as he cites our "crimes against education": that government funding has led hundreds of students into fraud and cheating, that taxing real property is absolutely the wrong way to finance education, that a liberal coalition has set out to destroy private ~hools, that much desegregation research is virtually worthless, that colleges are basing their investment decisions on misguided moral judgments...
...is Deputy Assistant to the, President and Director o f Presidential Speechwriting at the White House...
...The Soviets are allowed to e n g i n e e r coup a f t e r coup and pour money into subversive activities against the West, but to point this out is to be branded a McCarthyite...
...Essentiat Products Co., Inc...
...What does this incomplete list of accidents, disasters, good fortune...
...For eleven years, from 1969 to 1980, Theodore M. Black served on the New York State Board of Regents, the oldest and most powerful school board in the country...
...And it is the c u l t u r e - - a n d the country--that is ultimately at stake...
...There, we were encouraged to learn at our own rates, and so in the fifth grade I was doing twelfth-grade math but did not know how to write...
...In short, as Ronald Reagan announced when he took the presidency in order officially to put a hold on all that, for fifteen years or so...
...But moralism in politics, so disdained by conservatives when practiced by the New Left...
...When The American Spectator was founded f i f t e e n years ago, American liberalism had just achieved its greatest victories, and seemed to'stand at the peak of its power and p r e s t i g e . Yet a s t u t e observers could see that the appearance of health and' vigor was deceptive, like the flush on the cheek of a consumptive...
...Warren was one of those charming blue-collar Detroit suburbs where unwelcomed black families were apt to find their homes torched, where men proved their mettle by the redness of their necks...
...overseas economic sanctions genuinely political in nature...
...Conservatives are constantly chiding liberals for simultaneously favoring less restrictive social, and more r e s t r i c t i v e economic, measures...
...If during the McCarthy days someone had p r e d i c t e d that within twenty years both Africa and Southeast Asia would be under Communist control he would have been considered insane...
...to some e x t e n t , of c o n s e r v a t i v e s and neoconservatives in general) with the agenda of the so-called New Right seems ill.advised...
...The battle lines haven't really changed, have they...
...So as to verify my claim regarding The American Spectator's diverse origins...
...I was a s t u d e n t in Taiwan and Hubert Humphrey had j u s t delivered a speech in Salt Lake City...
...Indeed, in the final analysis, it is the condition of our culture and not that o f o u r political institutions which will determine what we can achieve...
...These have been the two principal values of American society, and there is a natural tension between them that can never be eliminated, nor would I want it to be...
...I suggest this mental test: If the e n t i r e New Right social a g e n d a - - anti-homosexual, anti-abortion, antisex-education statutes, school-prayer guarantees, the death penalty--could be implemented, but only at the cost of...
...Where we have unfailingly gone--to guard the past and be t r u s t e e s for the f u t u r e . No matter who is in office, one can always find employment in that line of work...
...90 Water St., Dept...
...I wondered where all these women had been at 13, when the big battle is supposed to occur between the tomboys and the cheerleaders--while on another part of the playground, the boys play hardball...
...Their finicky concern for sexual equality allows them to invest their self-centeredness with political significance...
...But when they tried to buy one, they found no one in the United States hadeven heard of it...
...the race riots and assassinations, at home: the Cold War...
...Over time, we should mo~,e in the direction of a flat tax on consumption, and remo.ve saving from the tax base altogether...
...And yet dimly, I recall that those, who designed the modern social security system believed themselves to be paying a r e t u r n to those who provided us our moral capital, not mortgaging the future...
...When 1 returned home, i told all my friends with bad backs about this marvelous belt...
...the growth of the welfare state...
...They don't realize that they've won, t h a t American politics is boring now--and that's the way it should bel Pick up a novel, I want to say, pour yourself a drink, and relax...
...to protect their fathers' investment, and to carry on the fight of t h e i r mothers...
...Little did I know t h a t while I was working on g r a d e school book reports some renegade college students in southern Indiana were working on another Alternative...
...our Editor asks...
...Assorted loud, single-issue constituencies have played an important but distinctly secondary role in this realignment...
...the Bay of Pigs...
...Although f i f t e e n years may not amount to a drop in heaven, here in our part of the earth a few t h i n g s have changed since then...
...the space race...
...the civil rights movement...
...However misguided, counterproductive, or even disastrous were some of these policies, the best liberals never lost sight of the past or the f u t u r e . And of course, much squandering and mortgaging did go on, hidden behind all those noble liberal motives, hidden even to liberals themselves...
...or, worse, the extent of Soviet disinformation among us...
...Does anyone actually believe that gay teachers are able (or even have it in their minds) to persuade a significant number of hormone-crazed adolescent boys not to chase g i r l s - - a n y more than straight teachers can (or have to) talk them into straight sex...
...and invited me to become a contributor to what was then called The Alternative...
...Where I was once pessimistic only about Greece, today I am pessimistic about the e n t i r e f r e e world...
...is no less opprobrious when practiced by the New Right...
...Practically, they are an important limiting factor, for our political processes invariably respond to their discipline...
...Vietnam is gone, and little can be done to change that, even with the most conservative, anti-Communist President this country is likely ever to see in the White House...
...Is there no hope...
...He told me the cost of one in Germany was $44.00 in American money...
...The Reagan Mideast proposals should become "talking points" as opportunities multiply through competition between Hussein/Arafat and (less openly) Begin/Assad for Washington's attention and future reservations at Camp David...
...the Suez crisis, the Hungarian revolution, the Cuban missile crisis...
...If Reagan allows that...
...CHARLES HORNER It was fourteen years ago...
...In fact, be concluded, its effectiveness has been so proven, tts purchase is included under Germany's national health coverage plan...
...Reagan's leverage to press major policy changes will be limited for the rest of his term, so he should concentrate on educating the country to a new public philosophy and idealism...
...Tile building was supposed to levitate...
...Where do we go from here...
...What really are the ten or twenty conservative priorities...
...Unfortunately, slightly more is required to maintain civilization than the f l o u r i s h i n g of The American Spectator...
...P~ad it...
...We'll be ready...
...The student loan program was advocated as a solid investment in an exciting age to come...
...has been either the most baneful or the most beneficial) has taken place during the most recent p e r i o d - - whenever that was...
...I graduated in 1970 and began teaching in a city school, "trying zealously to overcome racial prejudice in all its forms...
...ANDY STARK Fifteen years ago, I was in the fifth grade at a " ' f r e e s c h o o l " in Vancouver, Canada modeled after A. F. Neill's famed "Summerhill...
...Perhaps nothing more than the truism that change is the only constant in history...
...People really don't cotton to the fact that their President, even an amiable one, likes to hang around with the Lear-jet crowd...
...Terry Eastland is editor o f the Virginian-Pilot o f Norfolk, Virginia...
...Now that the above writers have set us straight on the glories that have overtaken the Republic since The American Spectator's arrival ! have asked the following writers for some thoughts on where we and our conservative President should go from here...
...This was, I admit, a fairly ridiculous form of hypocrisy--imagine going down to campus after high school to watch t e a r - g a s canisters being thrown around and returning home to a good dinnerwbut its effect was to check me against the excesses of the time and to leave me open to the forces of virtue as expressed later in, say, The American Spectator...
...Yet I am reminded that the President's ranch is located in mountains that also serve as the site of Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden's progressive dude ranch...
...Aram Bakshian, Jr...
...Boston was about to fly apart, and too many educated women were parading around expressing the great gut feeling of their movement: that love and marriage was a machine to destroy their identity...
...Whether in economic, demographic, or figurative terms, California has continued to bewitch our nation, blinding its moral vision, dementing its youth, and unnerving its l e a d e r s h i p . It has been responsible for turning the American dream into one of life as an endless vacation, and in its malevolent view of the rest of the U.S...
...A. LAWRENCE CHICKERING At the end of the sixties, while trying to be ideologically mischievous in my job at National Review, I was fortunate to be rescued from my squishy New York Times liberalism by some radical black intellectuals with whom I had become friendly...
...It also keeps alive the incredibly tiresome conviction that the sixties generation is more perceptive about social and political matters than people who grew up in dull, boring decades like the thirties, the forties, the fifties--or even the seventies...
...We were encouraged to question everything, and I recall leading a student revolt against the number system, in which we wrote our own laws of mathematics...
...But i t ' s easy to forget that the fifteen y e a r s before 1967...
...Politics became an immediate concern after Vanderbilt, while I was 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 studying f u r t h e r a t Oxford, a s the way in which I had been brought up began to clash conspicuously with the way the world was going...
...given the moral s t r e n g t h of the antiwar movement...
...At home, Reagan had better stop acting like a New Yorker caricature of a conservative...
...I propose that we r e e l e c t this p a r t y for a n o t h e r f i f t e e n y e a r s , no m a t t e r who is in public office...
...They excuse the bloodiest ideology ever invented by man by insisting upon the shortcomings of capitalism...
...My own views have' changed very little, but then 1 had already reached the age of reason in 1967--if the statisticians are to be believed...
...The first is whether the P r e s i d e n t ' s political handiwork, given the latent tensions within his coalition, can nonetheless become a new t r a d i t i o n of its own...
...Unlike the death of Violetta, however, liberalism's subsequent decline was swift, and not pretty...
...The task for The American Spectator remains the same as ever...
...Liberal economists and conservatives now pilloried as " s u p p l y - s i d e exr happen to have been right on this point...
...The colonels were simple, unworldly p e a s a n t s with the mistaken b e l i e f that good intentions, a faith in God and country, and a censored press could turn a country around...
...Our burden outside is to keep up the pressure, and don't expect that those inside will e v e r satisfy us...
...And the necessary "'cultural revolution" is barely astirring...
...Bad men~or misguided men--cbmbined long ago...
...Communism will fall of its own immorality, cruelty, and economic inefficiency...
...Yet the a r c h i t e c t s of t h e s e and other uprisings came to know each other...
...Men's colognes too...
...it was reason against barbarism...
...Surely not the two dozen or so murderers on death rows across the country who would be executed instead of serving life sentences...
...This should not have come as a surprise and it should not be a cause for lespair...
...TAKI A funny thing happened on my way to cover the Greek elections fifteen years ago...
...By the t i m e I got to college, startling transformation had taken place: Liberals no longer seemed so respectable...
...they maintain civilization...
...the "opening" of China...
...When busing came to Boston, I began to part company with my sixties cohort, who appeared increasingly to know nothing about the situation of ordinary black people--or white people, for that matter--livi.ng in the same city...
...To say I was overjoyed at the colonels' power grab would be a gross understatement...
...On the whole, they appear to consider other things more important...
...LiberaLs, conservatives, or .somewhere inbetween-it wilt stimulate you to action, for it cannot b e ignored...
...Charles Homer is Deputy Assistant Secretary o f State f o r Science and Technology...
...Our unhappiness is an important part of the political context within ~vhich they must act...
...The abolition of a corrupt parliament did...
...TERRY EASTLAND Fifteen years ago, as a freshman at Vanderbilt, I was elected class representative to the student body government, t found campus politics boring,'however, and despite the tumult of the times, was not much interested in national politics...
...And soon enough, I was writing for The American Spectator...
...The incident was not forgotten, and a year l a t e r a girl in my philosophy class nominated Malcolm X as the greatest philt)sopher of this century...
...Now, from his varied experience as an educator and his strong belief that we can achieve excellence in education, he has put his often iconoclastic ideas and always keen insights into a hard-hitting, readable new book that confronts education head-on Without equivocation, he comments upon: I disruption in the classroom _9 decreased teacherproductivityn drugs _9 sex education _9 t e s t i n g _ 9 library...
...Given public opinion that flits between hawkishness and dovishness and the need to get along with queasy European allies, a President doesn't have that much l a t i t u d e in foreign a f f a i r s ; I hate to say it, but it's true...
...I could not believe the extent of Western _9 P nawete...
...Although controlling the budget is obviously critical, political obstacles will be great until after the 1984 election...
...A good deal of moral earnestness has been rightly expended by conservatives in an effort to push against the lies about America perpetrated by the Left in the 1960s and carried into the culture since...
...To me the feminists had failed to grow up: They were still worrying about how turning into a woman was going to take all the fun out of life...
...Throughout its history, readers of The American Spectator have been reminded of the limitations of government policy.But these are limitations of a conservative as well as of a liberal administration...
...they were closed-minded, narrow, even u n i n t e l l e c t u a l . About this time I happened a c r o s s a copy of The Alternative ( a . k . a . , The American Spectator) in a college lounge...
...A decade later, I'm back in the White House writing presidential speeches...
...and there were conservative politicians who were well disposed toward ideas...
...Greece and her political leaders needed some time off...
...At your bookseller or mail the.coupon below to order...
...government control of industry or Defense Department cutbacks, would the tradcoff be worth it...
...The two groups, who now delight in being declassd among the " r i g h t p e o p l e , ' ~ r e q u i r e a certain kind of leader...
...I found her husband Ted Hughes a better poet...
...Their agonies reminded me of my junior high students, terrified at 13...
...Our Editor has asked us to ponder where we go from here, and two questions come to mind...
...To give up on style out of scrupulousness is to confuse being moral with being serious, and being seriotlswith being interesting...
...It seemed self-indulgent to fuss about such an adolescent problem when real adolescents all around them were about to go through a tangible hell...
...It could happen again, as pressures, to undo the damage lead to extreme policy in the other direction...
...I have been one ever since, but that isn't the only rut I'm stuck in...
...But it seems to me unlikely...
...To be a child at a free school in one of the most bucolic cities in the world during the 1960s was to be the hope of the f u t u r e . It was a burden and r e s p o n s i b i l i t y I took seriously, pausing often to mull it over as I struggled with my calculus, the difficulty of which had increased appreciably since my decision to take a stand against the laws of subtraction and multiplication...
...TaM Theodoracopulos is the European editor of The American Spectator...
...It simply makes conservatives and neoconservatives look like r e a c t i o n a r i e s , and does nothing to advance their legitimate political aims...
...ROGER KAPLAN You ask: What has been happening in the past fifteen years or so...
...When I finally settled down to r e a d the more serious articles I found them perfectly sensible, and t h e n s t a r t e d r e a d i n g Commentary and the Public Interest - - I was hooked...
...Tomorrow you may n o t b e a b l e ~ ~ to: lh~fireM...
...As for my views, I have always been a f r e e - m a r k e t , c o n s e r v a t i v e Republican with a strong belief in the importance of moral and cultural underpinnings in any society worth living in, which I suppose also makes me a t r a d i t i o n a l i s t . I believe that what Ronald Reagan has managed to pull together is a combination of (a) the traditional Republican vote from the bulk of both party wings...
...are still great and were very imperfectly corrected by last year's tax program...
...So let me take as my text not Tonto but Lincoln: " I f we would first know where, we are, and whither, we are tending, we could then b e t t e r judge what to do, and how to do i t . " Where are we...
...How it was, and is, used throughout Europe.by tennis champions, Olympic bobsled medalists, soccer players--by all kinds of people who are constantly putting incredible strains and stresses on their backs...
...The dominant ethos among the Democrats was thus e s t a b l i s h e d . This program~ though called " l i b - e r a l , " had little to do with the liberalism of P r e s i d e n t s Truman, Kennedy, and Johnsonmespecial!y in foreign affairs...
...Welt, t h e r e is good reason for suspicion--contemporary culture, especially in its "progressive" variety, can look both empty and evil--but the suspicion should stop short of making conservatives what they so often appear to be: squares in popular culture, philistines in high culture...
...McCarthyism...
...The weather is fine every day, and the rest of the world seems very unreal...
...as social policy is aimed at making everyone above average in income, status, and reading scores...
...His best shot now is to stand firmly in El Salvador...
...Yet in spite of this, and in spite of not being able to predict' which way they will go politically, I do find one encouraging sign...
...Moral earnestness of that sort is never really misspent, but it is deadeningly misapplied if carried over into the side of life where style holds sway, the side of life where the counterculture made its strongest appeal...
...Five years later, all that changed...
...The second and, ultimately, the more important is whether Reaganismma powerful political fact of life--can, in appropriate forms, come to be represented in our culture-at-large...
...Without wanting to, the colonels helped bring some kind of sanity to Greek politics...
...Nevertheless, it is in the past fifteen years or so that an effective alliance between them was forged...
...Of course: There were conservative intellectuals before the late 1960s...
...But that is only the business at hand., More important for the long run is properly understanding liberty and virtue...
...I s u s p e c t the f u t u r e holds for us the prospect of a more fundamental break with our immediate past--for better or worse...
...Socialism was in vogue, as was self-indtrlgence and, worst of all, a skepticism about truth and life that easily turned into cynicism...
...That's easy: the free world's media...
...marched across Memorial Bridge, and surged with a mob of thousands toward the Pentagon...
...During the next fifteen years, cons e r v a t i v e s and n e o c o n s e r v a t i v e s should remember as well that no one can legitimately take credit for all the good while disowning all the bad...
...By 1970 1 had seen the political expressions of that 'revolution firsthand, in Madison, Wisconsin, my home and the university's...
...If the time comes when those inside and out seem to be enjoying a rapprochement, only two possibilities can explain it: Either we are going soft, or they are abandoning their policy responsibility, under difficult institutional and political circumstances, to do the best they can by our values...
...I have asked these writers to begin i f "possible by sketching the political positions they held fifteen years ago...
...I f an e l e v e n - y e a r - o l d can be said to have any politics a t all, I suppose I was somewhat liberal, if only because t h a t seemed the only non-Neanderthal alternative...
...Inevitably, I found myself not merely feeling but arguing against these things...
...There never was a real choice betwee~ liberalism and conservatism (or neoconservatism) in Warren...
...the onset and persistence of stagflation...
...Today I see men and women my age clinging to feminism as a way of retaining that old sixties worldview without actually viewing the world...
...For several days a few months later North H a l l ' s computer c e n t e r fell to occupiers who renamed it Malcolm X Hall...
...The current system is emasculating the natural minority leadership, class and permanently radicalizing all minority groups...
...Leadershave praised it, early readers have been challenged by its bold ideas...
...no one suggested it was an extravagant, short-sighted waste of funds...
...1 wondered how they could possibly be so oblivious, and feminism t u r n e d out to be part of the answer...
...Or that outlawing gay teachers would do anything but drive them (back) into the closet...
...A bunch of colonels pulled off a bloodless coup because--as their superiors, the Greek establishment, and even Konstantin Karamanlis from his exile in Paris had been repeating ad nauseammthere was danger of a Communist takeover if George Papandreou (father of the present Greek ayatollah) was elected...
...my wife and 1 locked arms...
...Martha Bayles is film critic of The American Spectator...
...Those who deal in ideas, in turn, or significant numbers of them at any rate, have acknowledged fully the role of conservatives and t h e i r programs in American politics...
...The politics of encouraging long-term economic reform has suffered from the President's serious overselling of supply-side economics...
...the "'death of the family" or the " t h r e a t " of homosexual teachers as though t h e s e were simply matters to be dealt with by government policy is both a b s u r d and self-defeating...
...Most important would be substituting vouchers for the current legal services program...
...The Washington press corps will scoff at the simplicity of my formula, but I would contend t h a t the fate of the Reagan presidency will hinge on t h e extent to which the President remembers that he is a Midwesterner, and not a Californian...
...And too many peoplemincluding, again, the same groupsRbelieve that our society is good to the degree it simply facilitates and maximizes individual liberty...
...Those are felicitous phrases, and they carry a great deal of truth...
...Style and sensibility can imPlY political ideas of the profoundest sortRthey did in the 1960s rebut they derive in part from different principles of discrimination, mostly social and aesthetic, principles in which conservatives are notorious for finding s i g n s o f "decadence I know," he ansffered, "1 said the same thing when 1 first wore the Prosana Belt...
...it still seems inseparable from the man himself...
...the rising and falling fortunes of I s r a e l . the r e s u r g e n c e of Soviet military activity, the threat of nuclear war...
...They deserve to be heeded and treated fairly, but they are not at the h e a r t of the overall realign.rnent I believe is taking place...
...What of this fall's fashion, neolibe r a l i s m ? Michael Scully has commented that if neoconservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, neoliberals are liberals who have been mugged by r e a l i t y and refuse to press charges...
...They see Pinochet as a monster but forget what a monster Allende was...
...Here is a book that you mnst read nou, if you are concerned about American education today...
...I would go for flamboyantly bipartisan reforms (cuts) in social security, avoiding the disastrous partisan wrangle of last year, which aborted a significantbeginning of reform...
...It is to continue to p r o p a g a t e , wittily and forcefully, the ideas we believe in and the d e s c r i p t i o n of reality t h a t it believes to be true...
...Now they need to associate not simply in order to conserve, but in order to rebuild and, where necessary, to build anew the institutions and habits of a free society...
...ARAM BAKSHIAN, JR...
...A few miles away, on the well-heeled martini slopes of North Vancouver, Margaret Trudeau was beginning the first, tentative gropings toward puberty...
...The good - - o r at l e a s t the b e t t e r - - t e n d e d to a s s o c i a t e at f i r s t l a r g e l y in selfd e f e n s e , and in order to conserve what was under as~sault...
...Through associations like The American Spectator...
...I c o u l d n ' t stop laughing, and was asked to leave...
...But it didn't rise an inch...
...That, I think, is the real contribution of the cultural phenomenon represented by The American -Spectator as a major intellectual force i n American l e t t e r s . For what has happened is this: The tower of ideas has been used by American conservatives...
...it is much harder to effect change in a culture...
...For we sense t h a t many of our institut i o n s - t h e arts, the media, the academic communities--seek to place powerful r e s t r a i n t s o n the Reagan presidency...
...Nothing would disturb the ideological idiom more than replacing publicly provided services With contracts or vouchers...
...If the neoconservative critique of utopian expectations of government has taught us anything...
...the decline of the dollar, the ascension of OPEC...
...or "Kenahorahl" mdown to our little ears...
...Occasionally," he added, "I still say it, although any troublesome condition or pain that persists should be bi'ought to the attention of' your doctor.' ' Tested & Proved In Hospitals Over lunch my friend proceeded to tell me about the Prosana Belt...
...Restoring long-term growth depends on reducing the tax-burden on saving, a burden which is high in relation to our trading partners...
...That they failed miserably seven years after the coup was not surprising...
...As a political creed, t h e r e f o r e , "Reaganism" has a special and, so far, a charmed character...
...And the past fifteen years certainly saw its share of ups and downs: at home...
...Ostensibly, the "sagebrush rebellion" and the intellectual rebellion which made Commentary the nation's preeminent journal of opinion seemed to have little in common...
...One has to appreciate the long history of left-wing sectarianism to understand why the authentic liberals came to be called neoconservatives and why t h e i r wholly correct line could be nothing other than support for Ronald Reagan...
...Excessively tight monetary policy over much of last year sabotaged the President's program--causing a far deeper recession than necessary, lasting longer...
...Where do we go from here...
...HOW it was invented by a doctor, tested and proved in hospitals and clinics...
...They helped me see the value of emphasizing social and psychological independence for minorities--a view shared by conservatives and liber: tarians...
...In any event, it is possible t h a t the b e t t e r management of illfounded, programs and the more sober pursuit of ignoble ends are the way we are tending...
...Yet because most economic and many foreign policy questions are baffling to c o n s e r v a t i v e s and liberals alike (are d i f f e r e n c e s r e g a r d i n g , say...
...For one thing,-I no longer waste my days in the Santa Barbara sun which on the other hand P r e s i d e n t Reagan can now enjoy with impunity...
...look out...
...even on people so crippled with lower back pain, they had to wear steel braces...
...But today the need for virtue in a democratic republic is underappreciated, and the nature of liberty is misunderstood...
...But it is doubtful t h a t a political figure other than the President could have given real life to this merger...
...the rise and fall of the New Left and the counterculture, the crumbling of the Great Society...
...The disincentives to save (double taxes on corporate equity income, taxes on nominal, not real, capital gains, etc...
...Tax cuts are fine, but you've got to have enough dough in the system for a supply-side revolution to take hold...
...Roger Kaplan is a writer living in New York City...
...I mention the seventies because the college students I now teach have been well indoctrinated into feminism...
...Sit~ce I would have shipping costs, taxes, handling and so forth,.l decided to see and triviality...
...In those days Ronald Reagan kept far away from Santa Barbara...
...They had become glum people, prone to moralistic outrage over minor matters (whales...
...censorship _9 the teaching o f evolution _9 handicappedstudents _9 financing schools _9 affirmative action _9 vouchers andtax rebates _9 and other concerns...
...American liberalism thrived in the early 1960s for precisely this reason: It seemed the only i n t e l l e c t u a l l y r e s p e c t a b l e position...
...ERICH EICHMAN In 1967 I was taken up unpolitically with the preoccupations common to adolescents in the middle of a social revolution...
...political mishaps, and cultural crises tell us...
...How dizzyingly far we have come from those days, the gestation period of the modern social security system, student loans, the nuclear freeze and pacifism, affirmative action, feminist consciousness...
...They applaud regimes resting on force in Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Nicaragua, and Cuba...
...The task ahead is principally one for educators, intellectuals, and writers, including, I hope, those who contribute to The American Spectator as it observes the next fifteen years...
...Looking back, I ' d say the antiwar c r u s a d e did have the effect of l e v i t a t i n g the Pentagon quite a bit ( f i g u r a t i v e l y , of course) and of making victory in Vietnam politically impossible...
...Reagan would do well to remember, however, that the next fifteen years, like the previous fifteen, will be full of the unexpected...
...There may be a kind of virtue in showing irony in the face of evil, in finding value in forms of social behavior that can't be done in horn-rimmed glasses, in not flinching at the harsh sounds and the non-ethical energies of high culture...
...But although the strident first-year rhetoric is finished, positive articulation of a clear global strategy, including defense needs, will be critical to avoid further defense cuts...
...My payment of ~14 q5 ,,qrh pbw r ~ por c,-,pv pl~'h'~.l , and handlin: :." Sighatulm i ( i. ]t,,(~,[ I[ I a t , , .I ~,/'l-il(.([ J ii,,it r( llLIII fill ]un)~/.-I i ".~ I' ill'l :" 'IH...
...Even so, I was a conservative, not yet by reflection but in my bones...
...Mark Lilla is executive editor of the Public Interest...
...Thanks to the efforts of English professors Swander and Silverstein, the occupiers received "suspended suspensions" from the local chancellor...
...William Kristol is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania...
...the spread of suburbanization, the emergence of a national culture through the rise of TV and the completion of the interstate highway s y s t e m , the pill and the "'sexual revolution...
...It is relatively easy to elect a conservative President...
...for conservatives to try to l e g i s l a t e abortion rif:,hts out of existence or school prayer back into the classroom, after complaining on principled grounds that they were illegitimately created or expclled in the first place, is to confuse the political crest with the massive wave of social change...
...FRED BARNES Back in 1967...
...But the novel fact is t h a t the political energy which propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House originated elsewhere...
...And although I was not above claiming oppression for myself, on the whole I considered other things more important...
...for that much, well done...
...else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle...
...abroad, the peak of the Vietnam war and then its protracted and painful winding down and aftermath...
...When the West's intellectuals and media began writing about the horrors of life under the colonels, I felt a bit like the g r e a t Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn must feel today...
...For the last five years he was Chancellor, ofteh taking unconventional starids on the controversial i~ues of those turbulent times...
...Robert Asahina is an editor o f Harper's...
...And Ronald Reagan, neither apologetic nor defensive about his own convictions, could liberate the r e s t of us...
...Yet it's clear" that Americans often want to have it both ways: less regulation, economic and social, of things they support, more of things they d o n ' t . No one ever said the populace had to be c o n s i s t e n t - - o r lacking in self-interest...
...The President needs a new set of friends...
...Even The American Spectator has had difficulty doing justice to the undignified whining, the hypocritical moralizing, and the feckless irresponsibility of American liberalism in this past decade and a half...
...It was a historic time and place...
...after three months, at birth), or only because conservatives don't yet have to be r e s p o n s i b l e for the unanticipated consequences of legislation a r i s i n g from their moralism...
...J o u r n a l s are a crucial form of civil association: Tocqueville says that " i t would underrate their importance to think they only s e r v e to g u a r a n t e e liberty...
...What a mistake: 1 wish 1 hadn't marched...
...Or have they simply been mugged by political expediency...
...the escalation of the Vietnam war...
...Where we go from h e r e " depends on where we think we've been over the p a s t f i f t e e n y e a r s . Some would say we have been through a " b a t t l e " between liberalism and its a l t e r n a t i v e s . I think we have been through a period in which politics played a disproportionately large part in American life, to the detriment of our politics, c u l t u r e , and p r i v a t e lives...
...So, I called my friend in Germany (incidentally, I got that order) and told him i'd like to import some Prosana Belts...
...The race issue is an excellent predicate to promote a decentralist and genuinely pluralistic vision--encouraging a social tolerance that is impossible so long...
...William E Buckley ~ ~ "CballengingY -Malcolm Forbes "A terrific job: -Melvin R. Laird "Must readingY --John Gambling "Ted Black may well ~ ~ i become the Tom Paine of American educationY -Chester E. Finn g l l g i i R l l n u g l l l i l i l l l I ~ HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, IN(" I 12,r~ ) Sixth Avenue, San lhego, CA 92101 Please ~nd me COpL~ of STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT AMERICAN EDUCATION...
...WILLIAM KRISTOL "Where do we go from here...
...The democratic process is no longer taken for granted_9 It is rather like the excesses of the sixties having ensured a Republican revival in America...
...On race especially, small laolicy reforms could make an important difference...
...t 'l ,I I.ll[ q hl!.d ' i } " I'1 3.1d aiqt.I...
...Humphrey sought to close the rift in his own party by capitulating to its l e f t wing...
...They have more to do with the II attractions of style and the appeal of one sensibility over another than with the force (intellectual or otherwise) of ideology...
...Too many people--including almost all Democrats and most country-dub Republic a n s - a r e not i n t e r e s t e d in the question of what kind of people, having what kind of character, our society is now producing...
...But this would be i r r e s p o n s i b l e - - w e are all in this t o g e t h e r - - a n d in any case unconvincing...
...if that sounds like containment...
...I was ecstatic...
...In short, people of a character "the movement" was likely to produce once its countercultural style had been abandoned as a fashion and taken up as a way of life...
...MARTHA BAYLES Looking back over the last fifteen years, 1 find myself wondering why I n e v e r became a f e m i n i s t . As a Radcliffe student interested in poe t r y . I was well s i t u a t e d . Friends encouraged me to read Sylvia Plath and explore my own oppression...
...If the President could s t a r t the economy moving again at home and restore some sense of national purpose and l e g i t i m a t e s e l f - i n t e r e s t abroad, social issues would probably disappear as political problems...
...nor did it alter my conservative beliefs...
...Meanwhile...
...the hot war in Korea...
...It originated in a different political sociology and in a different experience of American life...
...I had discovei'ed, that one way of resisting the moral pressures of the middle class without relinquishing its comforts was by finding "authoritarianism" in its social conventions and by adopting a style offensive to its habits of appearance without indulging in the more pernicious forms of rebellion: drugs, sex, and radical politics...
...Fifteen years ago I was a promising 23-year-old critic and congressional aide, blissfully unaware of the existence of this august journal...
...The next two years will be a holding period, waiting for the economy to pick up...
...Working in the Nixon White House as a speechwriter, I was approached by a rather rum character who introduced himself as R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...By substituting vouchers or contracts for social services, ra combination marketpolitical patronage system could permanently change our politicM landscape...
...How to do this...
...Life was full of promise...
...abroad...
...It could bc that conservatives can take a moralistic high road on these matters only because liberals have taken a rationalistic low road las in the endless futile debate about when life b e g i n s - - a t conception...
...at $16.00 per oz...
...liberals make the reverse charge against conservatives...
...I f this magazine and its w r i t e r s have represented any party over the p a s F f i f t e e n y e a r s it is the P a r t y of Proportion and Humor...
...it is (or should be) that such social i s s u e s figure more prominently in symbolic than in practical politics...
...their unanticipated affinity created a potent political force...
...On the economy the President should pay close attention to monetary policy and should take care to appoint people to the Fed who can be decisively influential...
...MARK LILLA Fifteen years ago, while ~he Editor of this lofty periodical and his henchmen were p r e p a r i n g for t h e i r f i r s t a s s a u l t on the t a s t e and good breeding of Hoosier coeds, I was just beginning sixth grade at Ridgewood Elementary School in Warren, Michigan...
...the nation had been squandering its moral capital and mortgaging its future...
...That's b a r b a r i s m , and the people I have admired most in this magazine are t h o s e who kept t h e i r hats on through it all...
...What to do...
...and it's nice to see a r e v i s i o n i s t view of it emerging...
...As I am neither insane nox a trendy ~. la Galbraith, Schlesinger, and the rest of the Kennedy apologists, fifteen years after my aborted election coverage in the birthplace of selective democracy I have moved even farther right from where I once stood, to become an even colder warrior...
...Follow the counsel of Edmund gurk~e - "When bad men combine, the good must associate...
...That, it seems to me, is what we conservatives have done, and we should cut it out or we will continue to consign the pre-political part of our c u l t u r e - - a big p a r t - - t o the wrong side, the Left...
...Why, whatever comes next...
...depending on your point of view...
...And w h a t ' s next...
...That is a political education short on politics, but then there are choices that are pre-political (mine were then...
...the growth of the women's movement, the unfolding of the Watergate follies, the decline of the Northeast...
...Andy Stark is Cambridge editor of The American Spectator...
...plus $2.00 delivery charge first bottle, 50 cents each additional one...
...Sometimes aptness resides in forms of contradiction at odds with strictly We've created our versions of Opium, Bal A Versailles, Joy, Oscar de la Renta, 1000, L'Air du Temps, Chloe, Shalimar, Noretl, Halston Night, etc...
...It was race...
...It helped, too, that "the movement" eventually played itself out for me in the form of graduate students in-English at a state university, people you would rather die than have to talk to: [ i i affluent and anti-bourgeois, academically ambitious and anti-intellectual, sanctimonious and immoral...
...More important, it wou'ld be nice if he figured out what has happened to his economic program, namely that it's been s a v a g e l y undercut by rapid monetarism at the .Federal Reserve...
...The past fifteen years or so (this time span is somewhat arbitrary) have taught us t h a t o u r ideas are strong, our wits f a s t . T h a t is why I believe we are ready, And t h a t is why I, for one, relish t h e t h o u g h t t h a t t h e r e is nothing, really nothing, more worthwhile than the life of letters...
...we were intellectuals...
...Need I say that parents and teachers looked on all this bursting, beaming, raining prideful phrases-"From me, this...
...But every bit helps, and in any case to associate under its banner for the sake of educating one another and f i g h t i n g the good f i g h t is, to a considerable degree, its own reward...
...the expansion of higher education...
...it has been behind America's well-developed sense of self-denigration...
...I t a u g h e d . I laughed some more...
...Italy, even Greece...
...Special Free Trial Offer...
...Raising the specter of...
...People who themselves would never choose to live under CommUnism defend Communists against democrats and conservatives in places like Portugal...
...Having had the bad luck to live through the Greek " c i v i l war" of 1944-1947 and to witness what Communists do to people who disagree with them, I knew the red menace should be of concern not only to rednecks who move their lips when they read...
...I have always had my doubts about this...
...I find it rather sad, then, whenever I see c o n s e r v a t i v e f r i e n d s overwrought by this or that policy of the current Administration (which, let the record show, I think is doing as well as can be expected...
...Certainly the economy must revive if the Reagan Administration is to survive past 1984...
...often r e g a r d e d by cons,~rvatives as the golden age of postwar p r o s p e r i t y . likewise experienced severe disruptions (for better or worse): the baby boom...
...l[)h, , . , , - ; a ' . . ( h, ~ I, e:h Io ,'d Name-I Charge my credit card Address I _9 (name of cayd) Card Number- (hty Ntate I Explratmn (late ,' Zip I AS MII n i l l n H n i l i l n l H l l l l l a of California at Santa Barbara, listening to guest l e c t u r e r s Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton (or one of their emissaries) and watching mallards come in for electrifying landings in the Isla Vista slough a few yards from the speaker's podium...
...symbol: politics has once again taken on an exaggerated importance in public affairs land certainly in media coveragc of them...
...and (c) large chunks of the old "working class" Democratic coalition that are now culturally and economically conservative and middle class...
...In other words, stop paying white radical poverty lawyers to take clients away from the indigenous, private minority bar...
...The pre-coup corruption, the bribery among deputies and ministers, the yellowness of the p r e s s , none of this worried foreign observers...
...People who used to laugh at C a r t e r ' s vacuous moralism are very somber now: They talk about tax cuts and throw-weight...
...The issue for me in the sixties was not really the war, and certainly not feminism...
...In a place like t h a t who wouldn't want to call h i m s e l f a l i b e r a l ? Besides, we were the only family on the block that read Time...
...Did not affirmative action begin, not as an abasement of a common moral currency, but as the redemption of a moral debt which had long been in a r r e a r s ? Even feminists and advocates of nuclear freezes told us they were doing what they did for their sons and daughters...
...I am reminded as well of Edmund Wilson's warning to Vladimir Nabokov regarding California: "You know, it is like getting into Yeats's fairyland or under the Venusberg...
...WLADYSLAW PLESZCZYNSKI In the early fall of 1967 1 would spend a few hours each afternoon lying on a hillside behind the Spanish cinderblock student union at the University "Educators, in the privacy o f t h e i r own thoughts as citizens and parents, will concur with more o f what is in t h i s book than they will admit publicly" s a y s Theodore M. Black...
Vol. 15 • December 1982 • No. 12
