Editorial / The Twenty Years' War of the So-called Liberal
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL THE TWENTY YEARS' WAR OF THE SO-CALLED LIBERALS by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The year was I960. John F. Kennedy had promised "to get the country moving again." He built up our military. He...
...The most idiotic and ruinous was probably the so-called women's liberation movement...
...And then halfway through the 1960s came the tragic myth that passed so quietly from the realm of fantasy into the current wisdom...
...It is one of the many splendid achievements of Norman Podhoretz that in his new intellectual memoir, Breaking Ranks, * he chronicles the vegetant myths of the era, notes their spread amongst the intelligentsia, and assays their pernicious consequences...
...The greatest threat to peace was not the USSR, but the U.S.A...
...Their claim to represent black people is based on the diligence of press agents...
...There were also the New Left's blowzy revelations...
...Look at the enormous arabesque of laws they have now fixed upon the lowly Americano...
...He has forced the issues, dominated the debate, and remade American government...
...Its consequences appear to have been nebulous, but in its bizarreries and in its paralogistic reasoning it served as a precursor for vaster, more consequential claptrap, for instance: that fat corpus of lies that composes the legend of Camelot, the protean legend that is forever being revised just as modern Soviet history is always being revised and kept harmonious with the political needs of the hour...
...Most of the major ideas of our time are pish-posh, and most of the public thinkers of the day devote themselves to the decidedly distasteful exercise of disguising these ideas as creditable and at one with American constitutional process...
...Suddenly America jumped with reformers...
...he has written the agenda for the nation...
...He favors higher taxes, less industrialization, slowed growth, and an array of enthusiasms that his older brother never heard of, for instance: environmentalism, consumerism, and women's liberation...
...They have won many battles in the bureaucracy, in the legislatures, and in the courts...
...America itself was a criminal state...
...I speak of their essential claim that there are no intrinsic differences between men and women, only "culturally-induced" differences...
...The venerated Anthony Lewis spoke for millions of the brethren when he wrote of Andy's "unique ability to advance American interests and ideals...
...Unfortunately, Lewis does not name names, and there leaps to mind no left-wing nation or movement that is under Andy's spell...
...Only the insane and the criminal were truly free...
...Lee Harvey Oswald was an avowed left-winger of a particularly indelible sort...
...Connoisseurs of the absurd chose different movements to follow and were never bored...
...their real natures almost always lied about...
...Today it is idealism...
...At home he asked for a round of tariff reductions, lowered taxes, passed an investment tax credit, worked for the industrialization of backward parts of America, and called for a society in which race would not determine one's role...
...Never before have so many influential Americans adhered to so many palpably absurd beliefs...
...Look at the idiotic sonorities and the incoherent philosophies that now are uttered by our leaders...
...They opened America to a plague of charlatans, and they successfully disfranchised millions of Americans not taken in by their obsessions...
...This first lie is the most riveting, for its basic weirdness and illogic came to prefigure much of the mythology of the era...
...Moreover, the evidence against him was irrefutable...
...There was the moonshine about the pure idealism of youths whose every move seemed so self-serving and whose nonviolent poses so often ended in riots, burnt-out libraries, and bombs...
...Everyday the claim is made by those who thump for him...
...Today the claim remains intact...
...Taking one thing with another, it was a Whiggish administration, a development that surprised no one...
...Their social analyses, beginning with the Port Huron Statement, were flyblown or nitwit...
...Can Camelot II be raised on the foundations of Camelot I? Does Teddy faithfully follow in the footsteps of his fallen brother...
...In flesh and in spirit it is humbug, but that merely establishes its continuity with our time...
...The women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s succeeded in doing what so many other fevered groups in those years accomplished...
...Any washroom attendant in the land is possessed of enough knowledge and intelligence to observe that Andy is the most irresponsible ignoramus to participate in United States foreign policy in years...
...It has paid for the opportunists' gold watches, taken the heat off white bigots, soothed black racists and self-loathing whites, while profoundly damaging racial harmony...
...He has been the goading force behind public policy for 20 years, and America now appears as the most colossal banana republic ever heard of...
...Investigations unparalleled in American history have been undertaken...
...America began the Cold War, and craftily manipulated it...
...Civil-rights opportunists saw its usefulness, and the old hate-America crowd was refreshed...
...Now we are approaching 1980, and on this man's legacy contemporary Kennedyites hope to make Edward Kennedy President...
...They even exported their mischief...
...At JFK's death the curtain went up on one of the most preposterous periods in American history...
...They drove good sense and learning into hiding...
...Nowadays humbug is prudence...
...When does the proponent of affirmative action ever identify with quotas...
...Yet no right-wing conspiracy has turned up, and the evidence still proclaims that on November 22, 1963, it was Lee Harvey Oswald, Marxist and friend of Fidel's island paradise, who put a bullet in JFK's brain...
...There have been milder myths of course...
...There was that balderdash about 1960s youth being America's most gifted generation...
...Considering the public discourse and the public policy of the past two decades, it is apparent that America's so-called liberals have been waging a Twenty Years' War in which words and ideas have become weapons in a violent struggle against meaning...
...What they could not accomplish through democratic forums was accomplished in less democratic forums...
...Lewis' sobering acknowledgement that immoderation and irresponsibility are possible on the Left...
...His career is one of the most delicately cast acts of political impersonation yet seen...
...Thirty years ago such argumentation would have been put down as a sign that the afflicted were non compos mentis and suffered public intoxication...
...The so-called liberal should find solace here...
...Perhaps in the wee hours and after many jugs have been passed...
...Southern racists . rejoiced over it...
...Millions of dollars have been spent to prove them right...
...And then up comes the sophistry: "Just as only conservatives can take some radical steps in politics-Nixon and China-so Young has used his position to push left-wing governments...
...Look at the occult mores that now haunt and harass the once jaunty Yank as he sets out to take a bride and raise some brats...
...This myth simply had no basis in fact, and apparently never needed to...
...Nonetheless, they turned the event into a racial melee, claiming Andy's resignation was an insult to blacks...
...Khrushchev, Bulganin, Malenkov-they rise and fall...
...So, have the so-called liberals finally agreed to the man's fundamental imprudence...
...ERA failed continually in local legislatures, yet the so-called friends of liberty merely took their case to the...
...After the mythmakers had done their best to poison relations between the races and betweeri the generations, they began poisoning economic relations and filling millions of not very intelligent people with visions of technologically-induced Gotterdam-merung...
...Yet most of the time they claimed to be indistinguishable from men, and woe to him who would make bold to suggest that the experiences of thousands of years of recorded history plus the findings of various branches of science indicated the opposite to be true...
...Teddy is for reducing armaments, diminishing American influence abroad, identifying with the forces of revolution in the Third World, and avoiding disagreements in general-especially disagreements with the Soviets...
...As I see it, the first lie in this Twenty Years War against meaning came with the death of JFK, and the claim that he was assassinated by "the Right...
...No area of human existence remained free of the plague...
...In the grand ipse dixit style of the era they went on to argue that: a) blacks have a more profound stake in South African civil rights than American Jews have in the survival of Israel, and b) that blacks have an exceptional interest in Middle East oil...
...He challenged the Russians in outer space, and he flinched not at all from facing up to them in the Third World...
...Hence Israel ought not to trade with South Africa, and Israel must mollify the Arabs, thereby assuring cheap and plentiful oil for poor blacks...
...Whether they were visionaries or villains, only the latest edition of the official history will tell...
...All polls clearly indicate their disregard for the varied opinions that exist among American blacks...
...The actual accomplishments of these works of art are always dutifully obscured...
...They do not do so well at the polls, and this leaves them melancholy and fraught with pessimism over the fate of the nation...
...If Lewis' lucubrations were typical of the mountebanks' rhetoric, the behavior of the "black leaders" was typical of their tactics...
...At home he is for policies dependent on racial discrimination...
...In exquisite settings all around the Republic simpletons dream of a return to bathos...
...and movements toward moderation and responsibility...
...Here, the fundamental insight was so ludicrous that I have always admired the harridans for having the brass to advance it at all...
...Let us face facts The Me Decade was bequeathed us by Woodstock, not the Jaycees...
...The lie that America was a racist society grew unchallenged...
...When does the proponent of abortion admit to being pro-abortion...
...Of course not, and the audacious genius of Andy will be a matter of dogma with them eternally and anon...
...And then there is Teddy himself: struggling against fat and failure, always melodramatically invoking the name of a fallen brother, always ready with a bromide or a roll from the kettledrums, grave today, arch tomorrow...
...Affirmative action, busing, aspects of detente, much anti-poverty legislation, much government regulation, and every syllable of the goody-goody political rhetoric of the past decade or so constitute one vast idiotizing fraud...
...And what have been its consequences...
...The women of the fevered brow did not always stick to this preposterosity...
...They wrecked the party structure, stultified the election process, and clamored for those idiotic regulatory processes that have done so much to increase inflation, hamper productivity, and scotch innovation...
...Yet to this day, millions of left-wing or liberal dupes faithfully hold to their ben that what happened in Dallas was precisely the opposite of that which all sober men know from plainly observable facts, disciplined logic, and the most elementary common sense...
...Think of it...
...Yet perhaps we should content ourselves with Mr...
...Here you have the one American minority that has supported civil rights doggedly and generously for years, and these popinjays charge that Jews are "insensitive to the needs of blacks...
...In this instance we are speaking of a dozen or so representatives of mainly paper organizations mostly funded by foundations and government contracts or grants...
...In the past, conspiracy myths have existed but always as the dreamy possessions of the lunatic fringe...
...How these mountebanks author, aid, and abet the meaninglessness of our time was tellingly demonstrated during the recent martyrdom of good Andy Young...
...Further, it has allowed deadly blows to be administered to the Republic's constitutional system by encouraging such alien policies as affirmative action and busing, and the murrain of government-imposed equality of results...
...They should take heart...
...In the 1960s and 1970s such myths found acceptance amongst the venerable and influential...
...The gaudy claims of Camelot were not the only tall tales of the early 1960s...
...as do McNamara, Bundy, and Rusk...
...Well, have they ever admitted to Alger Hiss's dubious patriotism or to George McGovern's hollow cranium...
...Otherwise the advocate of abortion is always "pro-choice," and the advocate of affirmative action is chastely indignant over racial quotas...
...And as the years creptxup on them, adding fat to their mid-sections and committing depredations on their lovely hair, they almost all found their way into decidedly nonintellectual and even anti-intellectual enthusiasms...
...Just when civil rights were finally being extended to Southern blacks, and just as real progress was about to be made toward legal equality and racial harmony, the myth grew that the blacks' condition in the South scarcely differed from that of blacks in the North...
...He stood by West Berlin, ordered missiles out of Cuba, and actively supported the interests of the West throughout most of the world...
...At times they would duly cite sexual differences when thumping for special consideration, for instance: pregnancy compensation, special health insurance packages, special governmental and educational programs, programs for the victims of rape, wife-beating, and so forth...
...Middle-class life was organized madness...
...Only rarely does he allow such possibilities to escape the locked passageways of his mind...
...Then they went on to denigrate American Jews...
...If his handlers ever wrote a book for him, it might aptly be titled America Needs A Rest...
...In 1940 he had published Why England Slept, a critique of Britain's apathy toward Hitler and an argument for vigor and vigilance in domestic and foreign policy...
...The heroic North Vietnamese were the party of peace and freedom...
...Notwithstanding all the testimonials to their brilliance, they never did show much interest in the printed word or the life of the mind...
Vol. 12 • November 1979 • No. 11
