Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Who Hates the Rich? George Gilder's article, "The War Against Wealth" (October 1979), was interesting and, on the whole, accurate and on the mark. I think he oversimplifies,...
...That this is not merely a peculiarity of my own experience is attested to by the similar experiences of many others...
...Watson Cuernavaca, More/os, Mexico RET replies: Some people will say anything to get into The American Spectator...
...war against wealth is more diverse than George Gilder indicates...
...Moral Strabismus In your September 1979 issue, John Podhoretz writes (in "The Talkies"), "The Wanderers is a good-natured and sweet-tempered reverie...
...If you ever run across the people who put this magazine together for you do give them my very best, as from someone who has done a little of this himself...
...It strikes me all the more strongly as I continue my own steady ossification that conservative attitudes are a form of maturity while liberal demands on "society," as they grow more extreme, bear an uncomfortable resemblance to the demands that unruly adolescents make on confused and indulgent parents...
...Now this might be a mere semantic quibble, as debates about labels often are...
...Comp...
...The critical mind is commendable, but what positive vision do neoconservatives hold of the good life either for the individual or society...
...I suggest that the composition of the troops in the U.S...
...I'll stick to the NYRB, which, although shamelessly leftist, is truly intellectual and critical in content and editorial tone...
...I mention this not in order to suggest that religion is a necessary feature of intellectual orthodoxy for conservatives, without which all other insights wilt, but because it strikes me as genuinely strange at the level of psychology...
...It is hard to imagine someone trying to reincarnate H.L...
...G. Stuart Pierce Kingman, Arizona A Tone of Forced Humor Thanks a lot, but no thanks...
...failure to teach simple Eng...
...a surprising wist-fulness...
...To get a perspective on real class position it is worth considering that a family income of more than $25,000 puts you into the upper fifth, that Jimmy Carter managed to remember a deprived childhood in one of the richest families in his county, and that the Kennedys still often pose as bumptious outsiders...
...Certainly many of the authors seem happy enough to identify themselves with conservatism pure and simple...
...Gilder replies: Mr...
...as Peggy Lee sang, "That's all there is...
...Good luck...
...Andrew Greeley still writes bitterly of "Brahmins who look down their noses at the Irish" and the Wall Street journal fantasizes about discrimination against Catholics (who exceed WASPs in per capita income...
...Please cancel my subscription...
...I particularly appreciated Rachel Mark's sensitive account of her friend Lilly-Maria's tragic loosening of her ties to reality...
...Stein writes about the producers and writers of the television dramas and what motivates them to believe that businessmen are evil, even though they themselves are successful businessmen in their chosen field...
...I think he oversimplifies, however, in describing the motivating force/group behind the notion in the U.S...
...Tyrrell exemplifies our Eng...
...Is it no more than an elevation of the critical mind, with special reference to the excesses of statism...
...I do not have any idea of what he looks like, but when I read his prose I get a picture of someone two inches shorter than he would like...
...Podhoretz shows not a little of his own moral and intellectual strabismus...
...It may be true that he is much praised, and appears on the op-ed page of the Washington Post, as you say, but I, Squire, shall avert my eyes...
...Gilder's analysis of the "declining rich" rings true, but so does Stein's analysis as transmitted by the book review...
...not exactly what the times call for...
...It was a qylt6 "sensible letter, but, poor fellow, he was only sneered at by Mr...
...These are not easy questions, but they are necessary ones...
...It could be quite good...
...Gilder refers to the fact that television dramas repeatedly transmit this message, and that reminded me of Benjamin Stein's recent book, The View from Sunset Boulevard (which I have not read, but have read reviews of...
...Tyrrell manages this, and does it without any clear idea of the true inwardness of the English declarative sentence...
...But I am afraid that I will never renew, or at least not until you can bring yourself to get rid of Mr...
...whether they run newspapers, banks, movie companies, schools, or political offices, they run America...
...they betray into anarchy and demagoguery the classes below them and damage most deeply the prospects of the poor...
...First, the commendation...
...That was your chance to sack Tyrrell, and you blew it...
...About ten or eleven months ago a Belgian wrote, you from Brussels saying jnore^or...
...I will come back...
...One still vivid in my mind asked me to renew my subscription almost before I had received my first copy, another was a frank begging letter asking for cash, and now this latest effusion suggests that I go into the street and sell subscriptions for you...
...This is an insight one hesitates to state directly, or to carry too far, as one values the friendship of liberals whose intellectual confusion cannot fairly be explained in this way...
...What then of neoconservatism...
...less the same thing...
...Duncan Clark McLean, Virginia (continued on page 39) Get Rid of Tyrrell Ever since I subscribed to The American Spectator I have been in receipt of a series of letters imploring me to get money to you somehow, anyhow...
...that success in business is the result of wickedness...
...Benjamin S. Neuhausen Rye, New York Mr...
...I suggest that the beginnings of answers to these questions are likely to be found in the conservative tradition, and in religion...
...I liked the emphasis on neoconservatism as a form of realism...
...Neoconservatism cannot remain forever merely a critique of liberalism...
...The scions of the most powerful families all imagine that there is some conspiratorial elite far above them that rules the world, and that they themselves are middle- or upper-middle-class...
...Neuhausen is of course right about the ethnic diversity of the War against Wealth...
...Please cancel my subscription...
...In charging critics of gang movies with outrage and in upholding the "importance" of mindlessness, Mr...
...It is a great mistake, however, to accept the self-descriptions and class identifications of any group of American citizens...
...Whence all this delicacy about referring to oneself as conservative...
...Mencken and imitate William F. Buckley at the same time, but Mr...
...There are a lot of things about your magazine that I like, particularly its physical appearance...
...one leaves the theatre with a pleasant sense...
...None of the authors refers to any experience of religious conversion as a part of his passage to conservatism, neo or otherwise...
...The prefix "neo" ought to grate on the ear of anyone with an appreciation for the mother tongue, and doubly so for anyone of a conservative temper, who should feel uncomfortable with its connotation of avant-gardism as the locus of wisdom...
...The number of truly wealthy WASPs, after all, is too small to man any army...
...Your half-hearted attempt to tweak Ronald Reagan along with your other, more liberal targets was transparent and gives the lie to your announced independent stand...
...When you do get rid of him, as indeed you must if the magazine is to survive, let me know...
...To me, Mr...
...Why this unattractive neologism, "neoconservatism...
...One reviewer stated that the producers and writers are newly successful and from modest backgrounds and "unfashionable" ethnic stock, and are resentful of a big-business establishment that they view as established, old-rich, upper class, WASP, and discriminatory...
...Tyrrell...
...wish I had been a Wanderer, '' or aesthetic imbecility in its beatitude...
...At Harvard, for example, according to my sample of a decade ago, there are virtually no self-acknowledged members of the upper class...
...The most difficult lesson for the American upper classes to learn-whatever their ethnic or social background-is that they are it...
...Robert C. Weissberg New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico Unattractive Neologism Regarding the symposium in your November 1979 issue, "Why Are There Neoconservatives ?," I would like to offer both a commendation and a criticism of the views presented...
...Nothing dies so hard in this self-abasing society as the belief that one's minority is "unfashionable" and one's background "modest...
...In my own experience, the passage to conservatism and the passage to religion were so closely related that it is not easy for me to imagine them occurring separately...
...It is rare these days to see really clean printing on good paper, highly skilled layout and make-up, good artwork imaginatively placed...
...Now, the criticism...
...Daniels...
...But there is one striking omission in all the essays which suggests the possibility of something more involved...
...Tyrrell for a couple of solecisms, not bad ones, but the sort of little errors any foreigner might slip into...
...I found the articles replete with cynicism, smugness, and a tone of forced humor reminiscent of a college newspaper...
...When they degrade their country, they abase themselves...
Vol. 12 • December 1979 • No. 12
