Why Are There Neoconservatives ?
al, Elliott Abrams, et.
WHY ARE THERE NEOCONSERVATIVES ? A symposium. Sniffing the intellectual winds of our glorious era, and poring piously over the learned reflections on neoconservatism, we grow apprehensive. It...
...They wouldn't have to compete anymore with the upthrusting tackies in doubleknits called the middle class...
...The great modern enterprise is freedom...
...Grant that all injustice, poverty, disease, and war are the products of inadequate social arrangements, and there follows a reasonable desire to rearrange...
...Now it's I don't have time for children, et cetera...
...But by then opposition was concentrated in the political class, which prevented us from providing the Vietnamese with the means of defending themselves...
...It probably has to be said again-and, in fact, it is a good sign that it is said often-that "Left" and "Right" (in opposition to "Center") are words that the seating arrangements in the French National Assembly gave to the lexicon of politics, and they aren't very good words for a constitutional democracy to use...
...Something frightening has always lived in the air around Lilly...
...Politically I am a neoconservative only insofar as I apply those standards to everything, including politics, and always seem to come up on the neocon side...
...But isn't the lesson equally apparent to anyone working in a business organization, or, for heaven's sake, to anyone who has simply gotten married and tried to manage the affairs of a small family...
...Christopher DeMuth, 33, is Lecturer in Public Policy and Director of the Harvard Faculty Project on Regulation at the Kennedy School of Government...
...You ask why I am a neoconservative...
...I was vaguely liberal, but only in the sense of not wanting to be accused of harboring unfashionable attitudes...
...A first-year graduate student in English at Yale, I suddenly discovered a world elsewhere, the world of strange and horrible events that Hannah Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a book that I had just read...
...Neo-conservatives are less sanguine about the range of achievable goals, and lean to the view that the achievement of many of these lies in our hearts and not in our state...
...The population explosion heartens more than it frightens us...
...I don't mean to sound pompous or sanctimonious...
...And so such a policy will be opposed...
...It was not the sort of suggestion one made in my household...
...As liberals today are statists, they have weak defenses -in their public rhetoric and in their private thoughts-against the socialist ideology of our nation's chief enemies...
...Anyone who embraces equality as an ideal is in danger of serving a self-imposed lifetime sentence of resentment and jealousy...
...Radicalism had become a dead-end for me...
...AS far as our experience in Vietnam is concerned, the lesson is that our policy there was no good...
...It is our tattered, downwardly mobile former elites who are primarily interested in arresting a system that confers such precarious and transitory benefits...
...If we oppose many social welfare programs, it's often because we think they rob their supposed beneficiaries of their dignity and place them in a debilitating culture of dependency...
...I mean, you guys will defang the nuclear arms race and all that, won't you, in the interests of all humanity, for heaven's sake...
...But becoming an intellectual, I decided, not only meant learning about politics...
...I don't much care whether Alger Hiss was guilty...
...Yet in my research I saw the world entering a new dark age, as Idi Amins and Pol Pots proliferated...
...and ultimately, not much could be demanded...
...So we think that our institutional traditions and constitutional heritage should be modified only with the greatest caution and deliberation...
...We wish we could call out clearly for the downfall of corrupt despots, but we fear, for example, that what may follow the Shah or Somoza will be even worse...
...I want to save the whales...
...It holds that the United States is a force for evil in the world and that, accordingly, the power of the United States should be diminished, not enhanced...
...In business and in government, in the prestige academic departments of economics, government, and law, in medicine, architecture, journalism, and religion, we seem for the moment to be in a world of old swingers and young fogies...
...But I don't consider myself primarily a defender of free enterprise or capitalism...
...That is to say, they want to portray neoconservatism as a very narrowly based operation, intellectually limited, and not to be touched by any young intellectual desirous of advancement in the realm of higher cerebration...
...Their sense of virtue is the opposite of the civic virtue I have in mind...
...When you think about it, the French resisted it pretty well too, following their initial catastrophic innoculation...
...I can't help thinking that the lofty ideas of our adolescence were corrupt to the marrow...
...But I was not up to Adorno...
...Spending most of my time reading modern novels and literary-political journals, I came to the conclusion that intellectuals and not English professors knew how to go about understanding what had happened in the twentieth century...
...Winston Churchill and Irving Kristol are right in saying that, in politics, liberalism is the natural tendency of the young and conservatism is the natural tendency of the adult...
...Make no mistake about it, an increasing number of people in America would like such a system because they have made the rational calculation that they would profit by it...
...We all have reason to hope that my analysis is wrong...
...Neoconservative objections to specific government programs are more often pragmatic than ideological...
...It is flattering to believe that the implications of the issues themselves (which one is uniquely intelligent enough to perceive) dictate ideology, but I doubt it...
...She is not a creature of my imagination...
...Charles Homer, 36, is Senior Legislative Assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York...
...The mere suggestion, for example (made in rash disregard for consequences in the middle of my tenth grade "Urban Sociology" class), that an impoverished childhood, or even ancestral slavery, need not condemn one to a life of illiteracy and violence was enough to evoke the passionate enmity of students and teachers alike...
...This analysis has the virtue of absorbing all of today's political battles...
...The last time she called me it was to ask, in lowered voice, if I didn't think the weather had been particularly frightening lately...
...Quite so...
...given that my bent is personal rather than political, I take the liberty of answering with a story...
...Today's liberals have abandoned the liberal tradition of leaders such as Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Humphrey, and Henry Jackson...
...The proof of this is that when President Nixon mined Haiphong harbor, he got his peace treaty...
...But in the United States, we feel that many social security programs have been breaking up families, contributing to unemployment, and, by reducing capital investment, making life more difficult for our grandchildren...
...According to my two roommates (acquaintances from Yale), who were much further along the path to becoming intellectuals than I was, the writer one should read was Herbert Marcuse, who had managed to synthesize Marx and Freud...
...But not forever...
...She had dropped the Lilly, and insisted upon being called Maria...
...The result was a growing disenchantment with the tradition of democratic socialism-not because I thought men like Howe constituted a threat to liberal democracy but, rather, because their ideas seemed muddled, impractical, and contradictory...
...Surely, I argued with my wife, there could be a democratic socialism, but she didn't agree...
...One of my roommates spent the whole summer translating Adorno., Adorno, he said, understood the pernicious effect of capitalism on culture...
...And when I returned to graduate school in the spring of 1965, enrolling at Rutgers to take a degree in comparative literature, I wrote a long paper on Marcuse's latest book, One-Dimensional Man...
...These regimes' claims to legitimacy were just that, claims, of no higher standing than any others that could by whatever means be made to stick...
...NAOMI DECTER I am a neoconservative born and bred...
...He believed that if he could protect the South (which he did, at great cost to us and to the South Vietnamese), the Communists would tire...
...I measure everything by this fragmentary vision...
...The key difference, in my view, is that neocon-servatives are concerned with the lives of individuals, while liberals are more concerned with the condition of society...
...He had not yet been translated into English, and my German was simply not strong enough...
...Order, and hence liberty, were only possible for me and my kind anywhere if America remained strong...
...Nevertheless, I found myself gravitating towards Dissent magazine, whose editor, Irving Howe, strongly opposed totalitarianism and espoused the values of a democratic socialism that owed more to writers such as Ruskin, Tawney, and Orwell than it did to Marx...
...They knew, alas, what you did with it, having been on the underside during the preceding decades, when we enforced the peace through the superiority we then said we needed...
...Consumed by the idea that they were meant to be "happy," and that if they were not, someone, somewhere, had failed them, they never had a moment's satisfaction in life...
...Philosophy-especially German philosophy-was beyond me...
...Perhaps for these reasons the usual positions of the generations seem now to be strangely reversed: At least within the opinion-making elites, those under 40 appear to be considerably more conservative than those over 50...
...But the Herbert Marcuses, I hope, are few in number...
...Why did one student activist move incrementally rightward as his peer group moved crablike to the Left...
...I soon learned, however, that I was behind the times...
...If I had grown up at a different time in a different place, I might have been tempted to reject heredity and training, if only briefly, in the name of youthful rebellion...
...If they can't hack it, too bad, we'll draw the line someplace else...
...But this necessitates an equal and opposite downward movement...
...RACHEL MARK In my eyes, the world is entirely a personal place...
...By the early seventies, moreover, I became more determined to become a man who could understand things rather than only appreciate things...
...The encouragement of individual creativity, which has been America's great contribution to the twentieth century, is now under assault by a burgeoning class of homegrown statists...
...As there is but one means of rearranging social patterns, the state, liberals tend more and more to be statists...
...Behind such issues as inflation, taxes, and government spending, or quotas, race, and "social justice," lies the issue of statism...
...We think that, for all its many, many injustices, the United States has given more freedom and more opportunities both for self-rule and for economic advancement to more people over a longer period of time than has any other political system in the history of the world...
...Conservatism stands, the Republican Party blocking the view," we might have paraphrased Spender in those days...
...There was no stanching the flow of her in those years: She wrote stories, poems, even plays, which, under her own direction, were staged frequently by her friends in Upper West Side living rooms to the delight of assembled parents...
...Adam Meyerson, 26, formerly managing editor of The American Spectator, is a doctoral student at the Harvard Business School...
...The movement's goals were so morally right, they were met with such vehement resistance, and then they succeeded so spectacularly, that the movement is bound to remain the crucial domestic political experience of my generation...
...Towards the end of the summer I bought two of his books and spent three days trying to translate two pages of one of his seminal essays...
...Capitalists are dangerous to liberal democracy because, as Sidney Hook has said, "for them freedom first means profit first...
...Government...
...One could say that the lessons of personal life are indeed ineluctable, and that ''liberalism" in the modern sense is simply the political expression of modern man's fear of middle age, of his clinging to his adolescence, kidding himself about life's possibilities...
...But when the export of American grain and technology is separated from larger strategic considerations, we are left with little but self-congratulation about our own "efficiency...
...We worry that all the wrong incentives are at work, that economic rewards are increasingly flowing to those who are best at building political coalitions and amassing political power rather than to those who most efficiently provide goods and services that people want...
...Often in defending the war, President Johnson and his supporters appealed to the memory of Munich...
...Call his evasion a failure of nerve or a lack of civic virtue...
...So I became a defense analyst of sorts, looking at (and worrying about) what the Soviets were doing on my beat, from Luanda to Ho Chi Minh City, and debating SALT in Little Rock, Dallas, and Washington, as one of the hardy band guilty of the main charge of being on the side of the U.S.A...
...Why should these things go together?- and they do tend to...
...Roger Kaplan, 33, is a program officer with the Smith Richardson Foundation in New York...
...She knew several languages so I suggested to him that she apply to the CIA...
...But French or French-inspired ideas played an important role in the radicaliza-tion of the post-World War II generation...
...In any case, Albert Camus and George Orwell, my two heroes, had not become intellectuals by earning a doctorate in English...
...But we seem to have learned from it the wrong lesson-a bad habit, really-of re-flexively relying on extensions of federal power whenever any aspect of the nation's life seems to leave room for improvement...
...It believes that the American system is destructive of civilized values...
...And it follows that liberals will see extreme statist societies as less awful than will neoconservatives, and will see our own as less a uniquely valuable place with special lessons to teach...
...Not legislating for humanity...
...I asked him whether he thought the CIA should exist...
...They still haven't tired of it...
...I give her that name in a polite effort to protect her, though I wager that if she were to glance at this in one rare moment of lucidity, she would know herseif immediately...
...Let me end with an example...
...About the only thing left is the proposal to require everyone to buy a health insurance contract, and the list seems not to be expanding in advance of actual legislation...
...He was trying to fix a SALT deal with the Russians at the time...
...The writings of intellectuals may be difficult, I said to myself, but at least they did not label everything ironic, ambiguous, symbolic, or whatever other terms graduate students in English used to display their ingenuity as readers...
...it also meant moving to New York...
...This was rather an infringement of her rights, she felt, and she disregarded the restriction...
...Looking back, however, I realize that I was not a good liberal even then...
...C) What issues-political, cultural, or economic-most disturb you today...
...Of the two options-pull out and cut your losses, or attack the North-he chose neither...
...We resisted the French vice, which the Napoleonic armies carried throughout Europe, for a long time, as did the British of course...
...Scott Thompson, 37, is associate professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University...
...she has been in for a bit of a rest...
...We cling to the market economy because, even though it is often heartless in the short run, we feel that over the long run it lets more people make more decisions about what's most important for themselves than any other form of economic organization we know of...
...He was aghast...
...It was a New York City public school whose great distinction was its service to "gifted" children...
...In particular, the most serious danger facing the country is the determined thrust against the market economy...
...All this has the result we see around us: Andrew Young's foreign policy is the purest essence of the liberal view, as Moynihan's is the soul of the neoconservative view...
...What excites us about modern times is that the lives of ordinary people in most countries are improving so rapidly-that so many are living so much longer, in such better health, and with so many more opportunities...
...God forbid...
...To close on a note of optimism: Who can doubt with which man our countrymen stand...
...Instead, the Act somehow became an indistinguishable, irresistible political precedent...
...This picture is overdrawn, for neoconservatives do see some crucial roles for the state...
...it's an evasion that is commonplace among many people on the liberal-left who don't want to think about difficult questions lest they compromise their own moral self-regard...
...With this in mind, we asked some of our younger writers to contribute to a symposium on neoconservatism, addressing themselves to the following questions: (A) What makes you neoconservative or at least not liberal in the way that term is being used today...
...Of course, those who had special experience with Communism-the Mensheviks and their intellectual successors, or labor leaders with long lives and long memories -had a special understanding of its horrors...
...The proof of this is that, despite the efforts of the Communists, opposition began to melt away very quickly as soon as the draft ended...
...Their reports on the neocon-servatives' doings strike us as generally dissembling attempts at damage control and intimidation...
...What followed was that President Johnson made an enormous, an appalling, mistake...
...One cannot engage in argument with those enthralled by such Utopian dreams...
...This last step became respectable after I asked a professor what books I should read to learn about urban politics and, to my amazement, he recommended William F. Buckley's The Unmaking of A Mayor...
...Intervening was right, but we intervened in the wrong way...
...Tom Bethell, 43, is The American Spectator' s Washington columnist and Washington editor of Harper's...
...The best deal possible for the U.S...
...Not much, in fact, was demanded...
...Nozick in his own way brought all this into focus...
...This last is the closest she has ever come to telling me the truth...
...Some of these ideas were perfectly sound, perfectly respectable...
...It was becoming clear to me as a social scientist that the state in fact seldom had any more claims on the citizen than it could enforce...
...Or, put more constructively, we must consider how some portions of "Left" opinion in domestic matters may be enlisted in the "pro-America" coalition on foreign affairs...
...Nitze said he didn't know about any of that, since his instructions were in fact from the U.S...
...Anyone who has worked inside a government bureaucracy must know how hard it is to coordinate the activities of a group of people to achieve a preconceived objective...
...In my case it was as though I woke up one day quite unexpectedly and involuntarily believing that (a) the economy should be deregulated, (b) we should take a tougher stand with the Soviets, (c) affirmative action is abhorrent, and (d) higher education is to a large extent a waste of time...
...There was once a powerful consensus directing the role of the United States in world affairs...
...Bred, because I was raised on the notion that one is wholly responsible for one's own life...
...Lilly and I went through elementary school together...
...But the way a lot of people these days behave toward children leads one to suspect that this position was not arrived at very thoughtfully...
...But our faces are fresh and our spirits are bold...
...I have reservations about nuclear power, and think there's a good case to be made for affirmative action...
...He was right, whoever he was...
...When Lilly's pregnancy occurred, in the summer of her fifteenth year, her mother attended to the abortion, referring to it later as "Maria's own private little biology lesson...
...Born, because there is an element in the Jewish gene pool that sometimes transmits the acceptance of life for what it is: a difficult, often painful and frightening, but always profoundly satisfying venture...
...TOM BETHELL Genes," or something similar, must cause ideology...
...Now we were 15, and we were ferociously sophisticated (she far more than I, owing to her greater appetite for knowledge...
...If a political position is inimical to the idea of individual will and responsibility, I am against it...
...And believing that the growth of state power will solve few of our society's problems, while limiting our liberty and creating new and unintended, unforeseen problems, neoconservatives strongly oppose the growth of the state...
...and explained why this was not a good place to make a stand with American bodies...
...I put in obligatory appearances at antiwar rallies...
...It is that I came out of Harvard College a liberal, so I went to work for the federal government-where I looked around and realized I was really a conservative...
...Shoring up liberal democracy, it seems to me, should be the central concern of all intellectuals, which means defending liberal democracy against the enthusiasts who praise capitalism and the enthusiasts who praise socialism...
...Neoconservatives fret...
...and that, upon announcing this fact to her parents, she had received their permission to continue these experiments, so long as she would carry them on in the privacy, and safety, of her own home...
...Throughout my territory-the Third World-rebel cliques, corporals, and student mobs were overthrowing with abandon governments that didn't perform...
...we think that social policy decisions should be made principally by legislatures, not by courts or administrative agencies...
...They are still making war...
...But when markets are destroyed-as recently happened, but fortunately only briefly, with the energy market-then we are all quite abruptly at the mercy of the statists-in-power, with their doctrines of ''fairness," with their set-asides and allocations, with their five-year plans, rations for the proles, and commissaries for the commissars...
...Marcuse would have to do instead, and for the next three years I was a devout Marcuse- ite, convinced that Marcuse was right about the "repressive tolerance" of capitalist America...
...But we have learned in the twentieth century that the dream of socialist freedom and solidarity leads to the nightmare of totalitarian slavery...
...The "semantic infiltration" of which Senator Moynihan has eloquently spoken is easy for our enemies if one starts with their view of the role of the state...
...Lilly was Rasputin, in tatters...
...Yet there was something in me that resisted Marcuse-resisted, in general, the world of intellectuals...
...Instead, neoconservatives are inclined to see American interests as threatened by a statist world, and "socialist" regimes as but another form of limitation on individual liberty...
...So there is a curious paradox: One can be quite right on economics and exasperatingly wrong about strategy...
...What had happened was simple: In college I came across, in order, Edward Ban-field, the Public Interest (which he gave as assigned reading), Samuel Huntington, Henry Kissinger, and Nathan Glazer...
...At least we were spared the wrong lessons from the twenties, from the Depression and the New Deal, and from the labor organization movement...
...In every other detail my story is faithful to the truth...
...It seems to us that the eminences of polite thought are up to something...
...Despite my desire to be an intellectual, the world of ideas confused, irritated, and bored me...
...We fear that too many decisions are being politicized-not only in business but also in medicine and now the arts...
...X3ut I hate to generalize...
...1 do think that people are too quick to let the distant lessons of political events overrule the immediate lessons of their personal lives...
...She had actually dragged herself a full four years through college-America's most prestigious-before she fell unmendably to pieces...
...She was scornful of my airy contempt for capitalism-scornful because she knew that I had not the faintest idea of what life was like in societies that pledged allegiance to Marx...
...He had so far surmounted life's obstacles as to have escaped whatever distinctive stamp of feature God had given him, and he bore a close resemblance to his tweed jacket and his dun bow-tie...
...In our own country, we worry about-the decline of self-restraint, hard work, private charity, and other old-fashioned virtues that may be necessary both for economic advancement and for the survival of liberal democracy...
...All too often they complacently inveigh against big corporations, the CIA, the FBI, and the Department of Defense without even attempting to consider how a liberal democracy should go about defending itself in a world that is not rich in liberal democratic regimes...
...CHARLES HORNER The student of international affairs will ponder the relationship between the growing influence of American "neoconserva-tism" on the position of the United States in the world and the conduct of American foreign policy generally...
...But in the early 1970s I was moving, Nixon notwithstanding, to what seemed a new and intellectually vigorous conservatism...
...Moreover, the tone of moral superiority that pervaded the work of many democratic socialists began to irritate me...
...The "pro-America party" takes proper pride in the achievements of the United States and maintains that the United States is a force for good in the world...
...Soon I was reading The Ripon Forum and sometime after that even began glancing at National Review...
...Her own parents were a mystery then, and it was only much later, when she and I had been reacquainted after a hiatus of four years, that I saw how she had taken the breath out of them...
...I had long since lost interest in Freud, whom I have come to regard as the most overrated thinker of the twentieth century...
...And what of foreign policy...
...And, as we grew, I watched them dropping like flies around me, always in retreat: from the university to the carpenter's bench...
...The rest of us were the Queen of Sheba, Delilah, Cleopatra, Isabella...
...she has had polyps removed from her vocal chords...
...I'm simply trying to get the best deal possible for the United States...
...W. SCOTT THOMPSON How does a loud liberal of the sixties become a neoconservative of the seventies...
...It was much easier for him to think of me as, well, a nice guy but strangely right-wing...
...The important point to bear in mind is that a market economy is the principal obstacle blocking the ambitions of the political class...
...They continually advertised their concern for the poor, the sick, the aged, etc., and continually labelled those who disagreed with their prescriptions callous and venal...
...Or he should have said: We inherited this line from the French...
...The strange thing about political ideology is the way in which apparently quite unrelated issues group themselves together coherently in the perceiver's mind...
...The great strength of capitalism is that it generates widespread and rapid upward mobility-economic and thence social...
...We'd like to campaign for comprehensive national health insurance, but are afraid that its costs would interfere with the achievement of other humanitarian ends...
...The climate of the school has changed somewhat since then, though on Parents' Day it is, I am sure, awash with the rich and famous...
...Enter Paul Nitze, strategist and homme serieux...
...So I left for law school and went to work in private industry-where I looked around and realized I was really a socialist...
...but it is curious, if they remembered that Munich could not stop a totalitarian power, that they did not remember how a totalitarian power thrives on war, lives only for war, will never tire of war, certainly not sooner than a democracy...
...As a result, the world of English studies, with its Seven Types of Ambiguity and Anatomy of Criticism (two bibles for graduate students in English) no longer compelled my attention...
...I lacked such talents...
...it may yet prove more important to minimize the influence of the "anti-America party" over foreign policy than to weaken the grip of the "regulators" on our domestic life...
...Civil rights had to do with a very important idea, the sanctity of the individual (and, therefore, his political rights...
...But living, as I always have, at the very heart of the "liberal" ethos, I had ample opportunity to observe the effects of its denial of responsibility...
...Hayek and Aron, I learned, belong to a tradition of skeptical Whiggism that includes such writers as Hume, Adam Smith, and Walter Bagehot, writers who offer a moderate and prudential defense of a market economy as the best means of preserving liberty, maintaining political stability, and spurring economic progress-progress that would benefit all levels of society, including the poor and the dispossessed...
...I don't believe there's any such animal as a "new class...
...And there are those on the "Right," supporters of the free market, who believe-quite mistakenly-that the workings of trade and commerce, on an unregulated basis, can moderate Soviet international and internal behavior...
...At one level, we can understand that the application of proper economic policy can accelerate productivity, restore economic vitality, reestablish national and international confidence in the American system...
...But to do so one needs to dust off the notion of civic virtue-not the idea of civic virtue, I should add, advanced by the likes of Ralph Nader or John Gardner, who radiate a smug assurance that they always know what is in the public interest...
...it means that fewer parents see fewer of their babies dying...
...Lilly was thus sent, as I was, to the city's most fashionable private school...
...I suppose she is ashamed to say she has lost control, though the fact announces itself in every conversation...
...I have heard from her intermittently in the years since her breakdown...
...You feel an obligation to attract the captain's attention under such circumstances, but the bridge seems to be deserted and the navigator has lost his charts...
...Socialists want a society planned by an elite group of disinterested men who somehow speak for the people although they have not been elected by the people...
...Thus, there are those whose views on domestic affairs are of the traditional "Left," but who nonetheless recognize the requirement for a stalwart national defense and a firm and consistent foreign policy...
...It would seem that society is failing to convince a lot of people that they owe it anything...
...Naomi Decter, 27, is a researcher at Newsweek...
...In fact, it comes very close to defining liberalism as that term is currently understood...
...The two regimes had little in common, and Marcuse's attempt to unmask the so-called "formal" freedoms that existed in the United States was a denial of the obvious fact that Americans possessed liberty whereas Russians did not...
...It is this that separates neoconservatives from conservatives: this support for a minimum of social provision, distributed usually through the state...
...they are words that came out of the experiences of the first totalitarian democracy...
...Yet the more I read, the more I realized that Marcuse's equation of Soviet Communism with American capitalism was absurd...
...This, however, is not so much an answer as a reformulation of the question, since it does not say why a particular set of ideas should be thought to have wide political appeal...
...Socialists are dangerous to liberal democracy because the state's takeover of all business will first seriously weaken productivity and then create a climate of bitterness, cynicism, and envy- a climate that will result in the erosion of liberty...
...What a time...
...The civic virtue I have in mind would be modest in its pretension to understand the problems that beset us but would also be stern in its defense of liberal democracy...
...And Lilly-Maria went on weekending with her series of lovers at the family cottage by the sea, together with her parents...
...Eventually, all this had an impact...
...In addition, I became an American citizen in November 1974...
...In practice, this means a willingness to engage in argument with democratic socialists like Irving Howe but a refusal to have anything to do with those, like Herbert Marcuse, who feel only contempt for democracy, who think that only they have "true consciousness...
...And if we're more suspicious of the environmentalists than we ought to be, it's because we feel they are denying to the mass of citizens privileges that the exclusive few already enjoy...
...The underlying question is what the state can successfully, or ought to, undertake: to make society over, or to make it somewhat less rough, the better to guarantee social peace and individual liberty...
...The most palpable were the studied slovenliness of her appearance and the dullness of her once-inextinguishable eyes...
...I reach this position from my earlier idealistic liberalism, not as a Saul on the road to Damascus, but through a lengthy and steady evolution, adjusting to what I think have been real trends in the world, not by contriving increasingly farfetched rationales to explain the realities of power in a barbaric world...
...We are proud to belong to a species that has landed on the moon...
...was the green light for the Soviets to dash for the number one spot...
...She calls me to account for sudden disappearances: She has undergone treatment for migraine headaches...
...Defending liberal democracy means defending the political vocation...
...she was familiar still, but four years had wrought some remarkable changes...
...I also harbored doubts about the antiwar leaders-already the Big Men On Campus in 1968 v ly senior year) and acting like it-and concerning the war itself I was always more confused than adamant...
...We welcome more than we fear advances in technology, even though we recognize that they often require careful safeguards...
...Before 1973 or thereabouts, I was not interested in political matters...
...I tried to get a job working for Senator Paul Douglas' reelection campaign in Illinois...
...The Vietnam war has, if anything, left us too introspective, and too morose about political action...
...My faith in Marcuse was shattered not by a particular book or a particular professor but by my wife, a Hungarian emigre whom I married in 1967...
...Surely, we reject the Maoist notion that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun...
...It is a self-sustaining circle...
...Our heroes come from musty civics books- Lincoln and Washington, Jefferson and Madison...
...The professors who caught my fancy were Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson and Daniel P. Moynihan-for their civility and seriousness before I came to appreciate their scholarship in any depth...
...Now I'm beginning to think that I booked passage on the Titanic...
...Elliott Abrams, 31, is a lawyer practicing in Washington, D.C...
...CHRISTOPHER DEMUTH I have a cute answer for people who ask about my politics...
...In the early seventies my first two articles on politics were published in Dissent...
...That other liberal conceit, that in matters of war and peace all the world thinks like us, may have a frosty test in the 1980s...
...Perhaps this is because people fail to realize that rhetoric and symbolic behavior play an enormously greater role in politics than they can ever play in private life, and that for this reason there are few "lessons" of a practical nature to be learned from any singular political success or failure...
...They were filled with bitterness: toward their parents, who had toilet-trained them too early or too late...
...Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia came at a good time for me as for many, as we sought to codify our instincts and lessons...
...Ghana dissipated its substantial political and economic inheritance, becoming more a banana republic than the beacon Nkrumah intended...
...What they had in common was, at least, an unwillingness to accept the prevailing liberal pieties-which we may summarize for present purposes as "Always and everywhere, public housing is good and military power is bad"-and a willingness to criticize, indeed to satirize, these pieties when logic or experience proved them inadequate...
...The intellectuals were mistaken, both those who came up with the "limited-war" theories and those who tried to explain the war politically...
...The neoconserva-tive critique of American domestic policy, gaining force from failed experiments in "Great Society" programs, extends into foreign policy as well, but not yet as forcefully...
...It may now be a time for stark choices...
...Instead, liberalism today is a philosophy embodied by such men as George McGovern and Andrew Young...
...But I did not know how to go about questioning the premises of democratic socialism until I read more political theory, especially Friedrich Hayek's The Constitution of Liberty and a number of works by Raymond Aron...
...Perhaps because I felt a need to resist her strong anti-Marxism, I began to read more political theory and modern history to see if I could find arguments to refute her...
...it lives with them as best it can, and, if it is successful, maintains a political system in which private citizens can solve their own problems without stepping on other people's feet...
...They gave her stomach aches...
...Another answer is that in the current state of democracy there are no true liberals anymore, just as there are no true conservatives-just politicians with different constituencies, dictating appeals to different sets of general ideas according to the contingencies of the moment...
...But neoconservatives also have a sense of progress, and are happy to live in the late twentieth century...
...When I didn't get the job working for Senator Douglas I went to work for his opponent, Charles Percy, a close neighbor and not exactly Philip Crane, but nevertheless a Republican...
...An all-powerful Politburo might decide that, with respect to detente, a joke is a joke but, since they are now the world's number one power (as codified in SALT II), the will of the party founders must be carried out...
...In a static, politicized economy, many of our beleaguered preppies would sink no further...
...I can't help asking myself what these people are living for...
...In those yeais, such an attack might have brought in the Chinese...
...from the marriage bed to the sex-therapy clinic...
...We worry about the military buildup of the Soviet Union, a buildup which we cannot explain without inferring belligerent and aggressive intentions, and which we see as the greatest threat today to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...It believes that the United States is a failed, or at least seriously flawed, society...
...And we are faced with a rather dour set of objective circumstances, such as the Soviet Union's dominance of the world's military and political affairs, chronic inflation, and the prospect that the social security system will break down before we have worked our way up to the payout window...
...She had contrived, while still out west, to have her name legally changed...
...Periodically it comes back to them and they get feverish and sweat it out, but they have for the most part let conservative governments rule...
...It emerged that she had experimented with drugs...
...We are the first to come to maturity in an America where black citizens are not subject to institutional public humiliations...
...Of course I could not know then how much his successors would botch it, for America and thus for humanity...
...Capitalists-especially of the libertarian variety-abhor governmental intervention and regard politicians as corrupt men who meddle with their lives...
...As Marcuse said in a recent interview: "It is most striking, the extent to which the ruling power structure can manipulate, manage and control not only the consciousness but also the subconscious and unconscious of the individual...
...Nevertheless, I remained faithful to Marcuse, perhaps because I sensed that he too was an aesthete and that his criticism of capitalism was based on his distaste for the vulgarities of mass culture...
...If that position is supported by people who place the blame for every ill and the burden of remedy exclusively on some vague, all-encompassing vision like "society" or "culture," I oppose it all the more heartily...
...But we should also reject the notion that the sensible and healthy patriotism our situation requires will grow out of microeconomic theory alone...
...Stephen Miller, 38, is a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...And neoconservatiyes are conservatives with a liberal attachment to the common man...
...I was compliant, but could never, and even now cannot, bring myself to think of her as anything but Lilly...
...His wife work for the CIA...
...Our ideas are as old as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke...
...Witness, for example, the fact that the State Department's annual volume on "human rights" in countries receiving American aid includes comments on medical care in those countries...
...SALT was going to succeed, a friend asked, wasn't it...
...Fascist and racist were epithets too good for such as I. The terror was clear beneath the rage, as was its source: If those poor little black children up in Harlem, who had nothing but lead paint to eat for supper, could be asked to be responsible citizens, what might not be demanded of us, who dined often on steak and Brie, and most of whose ancestors had escaped slavery in the time of the Pharaohs...
...The wife of a democratic-socialist friend of mine was looking for a job...
...For one thing, it created a repressive atmosphere most unpleasant to live with...
...But all are united in their opposition to totalitarianism, and all understand the role that national power and assertive-ness must play in resisting it...
...The Depression, World War II, and the civil rights movement in turn persuaded intellectuals that to be "liberal" meant to be on the side of more government...
...Farm-state politicians anguish over Hunger in America, just as oil-state politicians anguish over The Future of the Free Enterprise System...
...And their sense of virtue-both smug about themselves and cynical about others-is a luxury the country cannot afford...
...The military men and others who counseled an attack upon the source of the problem, they were right...
...I no longer kept up with the latest work in art, music, poetry, and fiction...
...But much of the harm is done...
...Much of the generation of the sixties' quarrel had to do with this...
...This gets me off the hook at Brattle Street cocktail parties, but the punch line is only a joke, and in any event I don't believe in dramatic ideological tergiversations...
...We don't object to the idea of the welfare state, and think it's worked rather well in such countries as Sweden and West Germany...
...I think that "nature" or psychological makeup must ultimately be invoked...
...Grant that injustice, poverty, disease, and war are in part simply endemic to the human condition, and in part the result of ignorant or mistaken or evil acts by individuals, and a very different result emerges...
...the creatures who inhabit it are its movers, and by the small creations of their imaginations, their spirits, their wills, they form its history...
...For I was an aesthete, I said to myself, not an intellectual, and I prided myself on my ability to appreciate Matisse, Klee, Stravinsky, Bartok, Yeats,- Stevens...
...All too often they protest their faith in democracy yet eagerly defend the idea of trade with China while abhorring the idea of trade with Chile or South Africa...
...But over these matters CBS, not The American Spectator, reigns...
...Instead, liberals are willing to focus on those regimes' goal-the use of state power to achieve "social justice"-as indeed they should, this goal being the liberals' own...
...I feel more optimism about the future of the Soviet Union than I do about the future of America...
...As for myself, I certainly counted myselt a liberal during college days...
...And I'm proud to be a neoconservative...
...The fact is that it means something when people your own age not only don't want children, but manifestly don't like them...
...Sometimes we are accused of being indifferent to the suffering of the poor, but it does not please us that poverty, disease, and starvation have afflicted most of our brethren throughout most of our history...
...She complained of her suffocation, of her inability to "relate" to them, of their stuffy, authoritarian, interfering ways...
...Nothing could have been less tempting...
...Her Halloween costumes were the most amusing and ingenious, always...
...on the other hand, they continued to regard governmental intervention as the answer to all the diseases that afflict advanced industrial societies...
...It will cost a lot and we will pay for it with additional taxes, but if you don't like it you can vote for my opponents in 1966 and against me in 1968...
...On the other hand-and the military men did not try to conceal this, quite the contrary-the risks of attacking the problem at the source in 1963 or 1965 or 1967 were very real...
...But his consciousness, subconscious, and unconscious, of course, are not controlled by the "ruling power structure," which means that he has the right-and indeed the duty-to lead the people out of the desert of false consciousness and into the promised land of socialist freedom, a land where, as Marcuse said, "labour would no longer be the measure of wealth and value, and human beings would not have to spend their life in full-time alienated performances...
...STEPHEN MILLER My political education began in the spring of 1962, when I decided that I wanted to become an intellectual...
...This was freedom, I thought, and I envied her...
...Given the support we could expect from our European allies, that might have been too much...
...They are, on "social issues," rather conservative...
...Neoconservatism, or, if you prefer, paleoliberalism...
...But since that seems not always to be the case, I prefer a distinction Norman Podhoretz has drawn between a "pro-America party" and an "anti-America party...
...Statists" can worship totalitarianism, but not all "anti-statists" understand how to resist it...
...Neoconservatives are liberals with a sense of tragedy...
...I didn't think it was the weather...
...It extinguished her...
...Such "rightists" can be as much in favor of the idyllic life of some lost pre-industrial era as the anti-industrial "progressives" who seek withdrawal from the "corrupting" influences of modern society...
...I will account for my transition by reference to the influence, at least symbolic, of Nkrumah, Nozick, and Nitze, while confessing that mine may just be a perverse need to rub across the grain...
...the crowd-pleasers on the faculty seemed glib and supercilious in comparison...
...He should have said, We'll give our allies help, but no men...
...Even Lord Melbourne's admonition, "that most solutions would do more harm than good," looked better than the attempt to apply confused Marxist-Leninist formulae in alien soil...
...Their responses are here presented in alphabetical order...
...A lot of people used them selfishly though...
...B) Where have you stood in the past...
...His child, secured against any threat of vulgar difficulty, was free to flourish in the most benign circumstances...
...My pessimistic perception is that the powers are moving back East after hundreds of years of westerly motion...
...For, in the realm of foreign relations, there need be no necessary connection between approaches to domestic problems on the one hand and conceptions of our international predicaments on the other...
...Political radicalization may be over for a time, though the linking of Hiroshima and Harrisburg by the nuclear know-nothings is a sign that the illiberal forces are regrouping around the slogans of isolationism (unilateral disarmament) and a kind of hostility to progress from which only the most wealthy strata of our society can benefit...
...from the employment agency to the welfare office...
...By contrast, there is an "anti-America party...
...one can be wrong about economics, yet possess profound insights into the nature of our contest with our totalitarian enemies...
...We wish it were possible to live without defense budgets, but realize that it is not...
...It sees no real conflict with the totalitarians that is not of the United States' own making...
...It might have led to a mending of the Sino-Soviet split...
...Not easy, but possible...
...Remember how the "Up With People" singers used to testify what rotten, delinquent kids they had been before being saved by Moral Rearmament...
...It was, in the mid-60s, a place renowned for the rich -variety of experience it afforded the world's most promising people, the children of New York's eminent intellectuals...
...Where did a disillusioned liberal go in the ensuing years...
...Rachel Mark, 28, is a writer living in New York...
...It is true that, in the main, one can divine an individual's views about foreign relations from his views on domestic affairs...
...At the same time, the liberal agenda of' 'unmet needs" is by now virtually exhausted...
...I remember all of this about her now, and yet I remember also taking it perfectly for granted that she should be like this...
...Far more common are those liberals who are both smug and cynical- smug about their own moral superiority and cynical about the motives of others, especially politicians and businessmen...
...I gave up...
...The story's protagonist is Lilly-Maria...
...It was eight years ago, at the scene of the talks...
...Her mother and father, she told me, had approved wholeheartedly of this decision, acknowledging that she had the right to do as she wished, agreeing that she knew better than they what was best for her...
...But this, by itself, will not guarantee our survival in a world grown increasingly hostile and belligerent toward the United States and what it represents...
...Instead, he chose Rolling Thunder, pacification, counterinsurgency...
...Here, too, one finds a range of views, mostly of the "Left" to be sure, but extending also to the extreme "Right," with its historic isolationism, even its penchant for conspiracy theories which regard both Communism and "high" capitalism as parts of the same apparatus...
...Should I be called a skeptical Whig or a neoconservative...
...In a sense, therefore, my major concern is for the center to hold...
...I have known her for many years...
...We'll never know, but we can't be sure that, given those risks, the prudent policy was not to avoid carrying the war north, Korea-style...
...no one today is calling for government-issued work uniforms, for instance...
...In my heart I preferred the nuances of art to the complexities of political theory...
...She confided, most intriguingly, that she had already done "it"-our conspiratorial and embarrassed language-with the approval of her mother, who had shared her gynecologist's table and signed a form authorizing the doctor to supply Lilly with birth control pills (they were so much more reliable, not to mention convenient, than anything else...
...This is really a contradiction in terms and it is high time for the old meaning of "liberal'' to reassert itself...
...the enormous difficulties of human organization and cooperation, the imperative presence of the market, and the advisability of keeping your powder dry are lessons learned only at the hands of experience-and how can anyone avoid learning them...
...It was becoming weak, and weakness was being glorified, Kissinger's famous lament-"What in the name of God do you do with nuclear superiority...
...This, I believe, is a more fundamental cleavage than that between "conservatives" and "liberals" as such...
...toward society, which had crippled them by wrapping them in blue blankets or pink blankets...
...An active American foreign policy will seem to liberals all too often to oppose "benevolent" statist regimes in the Third World-where the lines between "liberal" statism, socialism, Marxism, and plain old despotism seem blurry to many liberals...
...Thus neoconservatives greatly value the role of mediating structures which teach the individual virtue-structures such as the family, religion, and social traditions...
...A lot of good people honestly came to that conclusion...
...We might have decided regretfully that Vietnam was not the place to make a stand for freedom, preparatory to defending it on our own shores...
...On the basis of exposure to roughly comparable information, plenty of other people are "liberal" on all the foregoing issues...
...Even more important than Marcuse was Theodor Adorno, the presiding genius of the Frankfurt School...
...I had seen Lilly-Maria last when we were 11...
...The most important change in attitude which conservatives must try to bring about is to persuade the all-important college-educated young (who do not know much but want to be in fashion intellectually) that the government now is not the solution to problems but the exacerbator of them (and often the cause of them...
...I have come to appreciate the substantive merits of Barry Goldwater's arguments against the Civil Rights Act of 1964...
...I sensed that he too walked through shopping centers holding his nose high and inwardly jeering at the American consumer, who had such bad taste...
...For, miserable as these people made me, they made themselves more than miserable...
...Surely things would have gone better for us in the past 15 years had Senator Goldwater voted resoundingly for the Civil Rights Act, so as to command attention as he explained the transcendency of the circumstances requiring its extraordinary provisions...
...Having been introduced to modern political history, I found it hard to keep up with the daily regimen of literary criticism-with the 20-odd essays, say, on the meaning of Andrew Marvell's "The Nymph Complaining For the Death of Her Fawn...
...Most probably, behind this difference lies a deeper, if unarticulated, disagreement on the perfectibility of man in society...
...Once I asked one of them what kinds of trouble he had been in before joining the group, and he told me that he had served himself first at the dinner table, almost never took out the trash, and often left his bed unmade for days on end...
...A clue from the examples above is that in first instances I have always been attracted (or repelled) by the characters of specific individuals rather than by the abstract merits of specific policies...
...ELLIOTT ABRAMS A bit of autobiography: Not only was I in general terms a "liberal" in my youth, but I was in fact a certified, card-carrying liberal and served as National Chairman of the campus division of ADA...
...that is to say, that all behavior has moral significance, every action has consequences to be lived with, and the source of the former as well as the response to the latter lie entirely within...
...Our reunion took place after her parents had undergone the transformation to sweet liberality that intellectual and worldly success brings...
...There is always a danger that the intellectual history of an era will be written by ideologues, and the more evidence gainsaying their prejudices the better...
...They could do only one thing well, and that was make war, and they never tired of it...
...Our own state's claims were declining as its performance as a protection agency was Bagging...
...It is these people who are the true enemies of liberal society...
...But I did not abjure socialism...
...Liberals can continue to feel virtuous rationalizing the problems they, through their weakness, helped to create-from the boat people in the China Sea to the Cubans in Africa...
...The mistake is to think that a great and complex society can solve its problems...
...She appeared suddenly quite extraordinary to me, and I was full of wonder at her...
...And I began to read Marx and Freud, for both writers were continually quoted in the journals that I faithfully read...
...For several years I read only history, political theory, and science...
...ROGER KAPLAN There are plenty of matters to be concerned about these days, but there always are plenty of matters to be concerned about...
...The Communists did not tire...
...But wasn't it Irving Kristol, or perhaps Daniel P. Moynihan, who said that the new conservatives didn't go to Harvard or Yale but to City College...
...I take it as a sign that my day has come that my contempt for them has turned to compassion...
...we argue that much existing regulation in the United States is strangling private resourcefulness, is unjustifiably serving particular economic interests, and is just plain stupid...
...We're paying for that now...
...Maybe I should add the usual complication-early upbringing...
...In an era when the raw military power and the intellectual legitimacy of totalitarian societies are clearly increasing, the defense of America and what America represents comes to override other issues...
...What amazes me now is that Lilly managed to remain intact for as long as she did...
...Of course, there are famous stories of intellectuals who started out as Trotskyites and ended up writing for conservative journals or at the Libertarian Party, but one suspects they were never the truest believers among their young comrades, and the political movement virtually never goes in the opposite, leftward direction...
...Intellectuals were masters of understanding who could speak clearly and logically, throwing ideas around with ease...
...What is it that separates neoconserva-tives from today's liberals...
...For the neoconservative, this very goal is, as it were, a red flag...
...The important distinction, I decided, was not between capitalism and socialism but between freedom and t/ranny...
...It took a minute-or was it two years?- to digest that...
...Incidentally, the same sometimes holds for those who did not go against the political system, or who made their peace with it in the course of this decade...
...We don't quarrel, for example, with the idea of economic regulation by the state...
...If they really were interested in civil rights, they wouldn't support the parody of civil rights which affirmative action now resembles...
...He should have chosen one or the other and gone to the country, but he didn't...
...Such an attack was formerly, and more candidly, conducted in the name of nationalization...
...There is, within the "pro-America party," a range of views on domestic social organization, recognizable differences between a "Left" and a "Right...
...it needs urgently to be reestablished...
...And if ever a child fit the bill, the irrepressible Lilly was it...
...Much of the opposition to the war in Vietnam had to do with young people's sense that they would die for nothing of great value to them...
...Transforming those delicate systems called societies by wrenching them from their roots turned out to be more difficult than Nkrumah (or I) had envisaged...
...It believes, accordingly, that the enhancement of American influence in the world promotes and protects civilization...
...Not to want to die for the freedom of Vietnam may or may not have been a thoughtful position...
...Nevertheless we do object, on ideological grounds, to the growth of government in general...
...But is the drift of a man's political views as he matures simply a function of his turn of mind...
...I think there is some truth in this, but as an argument it smacks of technique, like the way the New York Times used to treat conservatism matter-of-factly as a known type of social pathology...
...And, being democrats, we object to the manner of politicization...
...ADAM MEYERSON A opposed the Vietnam war...
...In this generous atmosphere she grew: Every stamp of her foot elicited a smiling, and ever more understanding, response...
...But in many cases it was: / don't have time to go fight in Vietnam...
...Where liberals and neoconservatives parted company was at the point liberals moved from basic social provision to wholesale income redistribution...
...The question is how you balance the desire for individual freedom with the needs of society and the demands of tradition, How is the authority of tradition to exercise itself...
...Liberals and those who are now neoconservatives joined in supporting social security, collective-bargaining laws, voting-rights guarantees, and much other social legislation...
...The current ideological debate derives primarily from confusion as to what are now the "correct" positions...
...They aspire to the impudent, demoralizing ideal of "equality," whose tedious premise is that life is about nothing more important than the relationships among people...
...The conflict now has to do with the individual...
...This fear of seeming unenlightened has been a major element of liberal support over the years...
...I am (I believe) the only chairman of national or campus ADA ever not to be reelected to a standard second term, this punishment having been the only one available for my crime of supporting Hubert Humphrey over Eugene McCarthy in 1968...
...So, while it would be nice to think that the evolution of my views was a conscious thing, brought about by keen observation and deep reflection, perhaps it was just a matter of growing up, and perhaps I have been a man of *'conservative disposition" (Michael Oakeshott's term) from the start...
...To the extent that markets persist, we have little need of government and all its works...
...But as these influences wane over time, liberalism becomes simply the mildest form of statism, whose more authentic exemplars may be seen outside our borders...
...Her father, having completed the obligatory stint at a western "think tank," and having established himself as the regnant authority in a complex area of foreign affairs, was a much sought-after graduate professor at a great university in New York...
...I worked in civil-rights activities in Chicago and New York City, and in my senior year impulsively blew my savings and grades to go to Martin Luther King's funeral...
...It was, however, manifestly a time to lay these substantive merits aside, in part to maintain a proper appreciation for them later on...
...His wife was a pliant and agreeable university female...
...He turned out to be an intellectual, ideological, and financial fraud, conclusions (published in my first book) unhelpful to my standing among the purveyors of what, in academe, then passed for thought on these matters...
...On the one hand, democratic socialists attacked bureaucracy...
...I was unable, in my extreme innocence, to comprehend that every word she uttered meant its very opposite, and so I argued heatedly in their defense...
...Thus I made my break with the Marxist tradition-a tradition, I felt, that did not pay sufficient attention to political freedom...
...Today's "liberals" thus have less right to that term, of course, than do neoconserva-tives, and are instead better described as New Leftists...
...That May I impulsively quit Yale, found a job in New York, and settled into an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, an area that supposedly was the haunt of intellectuals...
...Today Jimmy Carter, who seeks to denuclearize the world and is proving only 50 percent successful, makes even Kissinger look tough...
...In their different ways both capitalists and socialists denigrate representative government...
...So I returned to Harvard...
...My genetically encoded liberalism-of civil rights and big government for everything but defense-went with me to Oxford in 1963, and from there to Africa for doctoral research on, as it happened, the efforts of a seemingly admirable syncretic Jacobin, Kwame Nkrumah, to unite his continent in a socialist paradise (with ample Soviet help, of course...
...toward their teachers, who had wasted their time with "irrelevancies...
...Today, a more devious strategy is being employed-one of incremental politiciza-tion: regulation, "environmentalism," and the like...
...But my generation does have a few things going for it insofar as clear thinking is concerned...
...This fits the liberals' vision of egalitarianism, but has no place in the neoconservatives' view...
...I also chased girls, cut classes, and didn't make my bed...
...And to hold it we are going to carry the war beyond the 17th parallel, occupy Hanoi, blockade the ports, clean out Laos and Cambodia, and God help us if the Chinese come in...
...The political delusions of the sixties did something to the character of my generation...
...I prefer being called a neo-liberal-someone, that is, who does not categorically oppose governmental intervention but regards the expansion of government into many areas of modern life with skepticism and distrust...
...What I found most bewildering at the time was the contemptuous, teasing hatred she felt for her parents...
...I realize it is just as paradoxical for a conservative to say all this as it is for a liberal to believe in state control...
...It was stupid of them, and we may not like it, but it is ours now and we've got to hold it...
...It's unfortunate that 1776 isn't considered a more significant date than 1789...
...it made a neoconservative of me...
...It did not occur to me that Lilly was extraordinary, though I daresay she took the breath out of the adults who knew her...
...He sort of nodded yes, then desperately changed the topic of conversation, since he didn't want to face up to the difficulties of his position...
...I favor the Equal Rights Amendment...
...Where liberals see "problems," neoconservatives see "conditions...
...Unfocused sentimentalizing about the human situation, which is the proximate flaw of modern liberalism, is also the natural impulse of those who are just beginning to learn about the world...
...Consider the civil-rights movement of the 1960s...
...What a shocking notion...
...with an eye on profit and loss in the short term, they will supply the technical means and skills to totalitarian regimes that in the long run may ultimately destroy free cultures...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
