Intelligentsia / Among the Infrallectuals

...What is it to them if Christian music, literat u r e , art, and a r c h i t e c t u r e have declined in t a s t e f u l n e s s or intelligence or simple faith...

...Vaginal politics is out...

...self-sacrifice to seekers of comfort and self-fulfillment...

...The estrangement between labor and the Democrats did not go unnoticed by the Right...

...Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, and other New Right ideologues advanced the idea that blue-collar workers, with or without trade union leaders, could be convinced permanently to abandon their historical loyalties to a Democratic party now under the sway of new-class elitists incurably hostile to the traditional values of patriotism, family ties, and equality of opn n r t n n i t v and heedleq~ n f wnrk~rg' 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982...

...As a result, school systems, mental hospitals, and prisons across the country are a wreck...

...Both parties suffered under this arrangement, because both were performing unnatural functions, duties for which they are not fitted...

...That was what he had to say at the t i m e . " Instead the country to learn from now is Japan...

...And what has this to do with the believer, who still has to love his God, love his neighbor, and give witness to the world...

...And Ralph Nader reminds one of those street-corner evangelists who shout from soapboxes while the uninterested world walks on to its more productive business...

...Having babies is in, even among the most driven c a r e e r women...

...The age to which the churches submitted themselves was liberal...

...This prediction came all too true in 1969, when construction tradesmen battled antiwar demonstrators in New York and other cities...

...With the obvious exception of professional sports, probably no nongovernmental institution presents so inviting a target for armchair strategists as the labor movement...

...The old Roosevelt coalition of urban machines, the solid South, and bluecollar workers was now defunct, strategists like Fred Dutton intoned and the Democratic party's future rested with a new alliance of young people, minorities, and above all else, the educated middle class--a coalition dubbed the "conscience constituency" by Michael Hattington...

...As with so many other counterculture ideas, the notion of labor as marginal and reactionary inevitably worked its way into the general political consciousness...

...The craze in house plants and gardening, while drawing on American t r a d i t i o n s , ctwes something to the back-to-nature spirit of counterculture communes...

...ties as men is now almost universally observed in principle, if not always in p r a c t i c e . But the more radical branches of feminism, which were perceived as assaulting the family and distinctions between the sexes, achieved almost no influence beyond Manhattan literary salons...

...But what does all this mean to American society in general...

...After this discovery Sadlowski's momentum collapsed, and he lost badly...

...The call to repentance and salvation in Christ--central to the meaning and purpose of Christianity--was largely replaced by sermons on collective guilt, and environmental explanations for individual faults and wrongdoing...

...a cornerstone of his presidential effort was the concept of labor's relative unimportance to the Democratic party's future...

...A Christianity in lock-step with the fads and current assumptions of the World is incapable of teaching the World anything...

...Plenty...

...It was so colossal in its misunderstanding of E1 Salvador that it failed to anticipate the large turnout in the election this spring...

...In George McGovern, the New Politicos had a candidate willing to put these theories to the test...

...looked the other way when discipline broke down in the schools, and that makes fun of religious beliefs that try to make some distinction between man and other animals...

...obedience to free spirits...

...I n foreign policy, the intelligentsia, especially the media, persists in its double standard of bashing unsavory regimes allied to the U.S...

...businessmen were "socially irresponsible"mthat, in self-interested pursuit of filthy lucre, they mistreated workers, raped the environment, and deliberately made unsafe toys, cars, and tires in order to scrimp on costs...

...Dope-smoking dropouts have become coke-snorting real-estate brokers, but now they do it out of hedonism, not to make a political statement...

...Most Americans today appear to support tough laws against pollution and strict safeguards on nuclear power, even if it means a slight drop in economic growth...

...Instead, it is fashionable today to bash American managers for taking too short-term a view of their profit opportunities--to knock them, in other words, for not being smart enough capitalists...

...Norman Mailer today is a universal laughingstock...

...Within the i n t e l l i g e n t s i a , t h e r e THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1982 37 have also been some contrasting shifts of opinion over the last fifteen years...

...The .business-g0vernment cooperation so often praised by American commentators, for example, exists in Japan only in myth...

...Perhaps most dramatic has been the influence of neoconservative skepticism about the limitations of domestic social policy...

...There is a long and ideologically diverse list of eminent critics convinced that they are better qualified to set the priorities for American workers than the labor leaders these workers elect as their representatives...

...And this is to betray not only t h e i r own congregations, but also the World, which has need of the otherworldly...

...Six or seven years ago, the country that enlightened opinion said the U.S...

...In the main, the movement has won...

...All of which suggests thatthere is still enough humbuggery and hot air in the intelligentsia for The American Spectator to be kept busy for at least another fifteen years...

...Time, said a Baltimore curmudgeon, wounds all heels...

...Though there's probably no more sex than in the past, t h e r e ' s much greater flexibility about who can live openly with whom...

...Chesterton writes somewhere that the Church is the promoter in each age of the unpopular virtue--the one that does.not come "naturally" to it...

...and sophisticated anthropological documentaries will show that primitive superstitions and beliefs in magic are actually rational responses to the world around them...

...indeed the identification of the Equal Rights Amendment with such groups probably contributed more than anything else to its demise...

...Bht you can hardly accuse, say, auto manufacturers of being too obsessed with profit when they can't turn one anymore...

...The intelligentsia was wrong about Castro, wrong about the North Vietnamese, wrong about the aftermath of the Shah's downfall', wrong about the Sandinistas...

...As Deng Xiaoping told Shirley MacLaine when she described how a Chinese nuclear physicist, sent to a rural tomato commune during the Cultural Revolution, said he was much happier on the farm than in the lab: "He lied...

...The intelligentsia has also persisted in its arrogant dismissal of the moral values of ordinary Americans...

...while naively ignoring the even less savory intentions of the movements seeking to overthrow them...

...This unusual (and arrogant) intervention is but a striking example of a renewed interest in labor's political and institutional future...

...Andy Warhol, among those who still remember him, is considered a crashing bore...

...The problem was not simply union " m i s l e a d e r s " whose rigid conservatism prevented the working class from carrying out its preordained revolutionary mission, but the working class itself, grown fat and indolent on the fruits of capitalist exploitation and American imperialism...

...It is no longer assumed that " b o l d " new federal programs will solve the problems they are intended to solve, and there is much greater awareness that well-meaning programs such as national health insurance or rent control can impose high costs and lead to unintended side-effects...

...Occasionally, the efforts to influence labor's course have graduated from theory to practice...

...Liberalism siphoned off the churches' sense of spiritual identity and transcendental mission, short-circuited their appeals to sacrifice and claims to obedient service, preyed on their congregations' sense of being a holy people...

...For most of the last fifteen years, the standard criticism was that U.S...

...Other movements these last fifteen years have left a more lasting imprint, both on the intelligentsia and on the culture at large...

...These sixties and seventies b e l i e f s spawned a War on Poverty, the Peace Corps, sociological i n t e r p r e t a t i o n s of crime, the politics of compassion...

...One of the most exhilarating spectacles during the fifteen years since The American Spectator was founded has been watching how humbugs, charlatans, and public nuisances who once were darlings of the intelligentsia have fallen from grace or been completely forgotten...

...In the 1960s, the New Left took this argument a step further...

...Today egg is on the faces of all those gaga visitors who returned from China's Potemkin villages with enthusiastic stories of a happy, well-fed, unintimidated population...

...So, too, with environmentalism...

...Ecumenism foundered on the inability of large numbers of liberal Christians to discover what they really believed...

...Another shift has been in the form that the intelligentsia belittles U.S...

...business executives...

...If we're talking about New Guinea cannibals or Amazon aborigines, then every effort is made to justify their moral systems as equally valid with any in the West...

...It was the benighted union officialdom, many radicals had long agreed, which posed the major impediment to a massive transformation of American society...

...Even parts of the late 1960s c o u n t e r c u l t u r e have been assimilated, though minus the politics...

...revealed that the bulk of his campaign contributions came from residents of Berkeley, Cambridge, Manhattan's Upper West Side, and other areas not noted for a heavy concentration of steelworkers...

...According to New Left tenets, this new revolutionary force did not just exclude the working class...

...The hostility toward businessmen is still there, but now it's directed toward demeaning their intelligence and managerial ability, not their motives...

...should learn from was China...

...For if the salt loses its savor, with what shall it be salted...

...In 1979, Ed Sadiowski achieved a degree of public visibility unprecedented for a middle-level trade union official thanks to attention lavished on him by the liberal establishment during his campaign for the Steelworkers' presidency...

...9 The standard comparison, of course, is Japan, itself a change in orientation...

...Instead, the liberal churchmen have concentrated on "how much others have to teach us" and how "we have no monopoly on the truth" and how "we must change to meet new c i r c u m s t a n c e s . " But of course they are really talking about surrendering to circumstances, r a t h e r than meeting them as challenges...

...And there is no effort to understand how the excesses of the Moral Majority could be a reaction to the excesses of a secular intelligentsia that wants sex in the classroom but not God, that...

...Only in the legal profession has this skepticism failed to percolate...

...The basic ideas have been accepted or at least assimilated, while the more radical and confrontational fringes have been rejected...

...Enough to say t h a t , although exceptions to these horrors abound, and resistance lurks in many breasts, lay and clerical, the sixties and seventies have left a t e r r i b l e legacy...

...Law professors, judges, and their allies in the media continue to advocate sweeping social policy changes by judicial fiat, with virtually no concern for the empirical consequences of their actions...

...The consensus is for more material possessions in cleaner, safer surroundings...

...One opinion was as good as the next, and the only b e l i e f s dangerous to a pluralist society were "fanatical" ones, i.e., absolutes...

...Indeed, the role of Sadlowski's backers became pivotal after it was Arch Puddington is executive director of the League for Industrial Democracy and editor of Workers Under Communism...

...in an unfortunate role reversal, the churches became students, and the age--the silly, spoilt, adolescent age of the sixties and early seventies --became teacher (something similar of course was happening in the classrooms...

...Unread copies of Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice pile up in used book stores...

...to the extent that the established churches swallowed such beliefs, they b e t r a y e d their prophetic function...

...On the other hand, the Luddite technology-haters who want to do away with cars, p e s t i c i d e s , and indeed the whole modern world have disappeared with the Medfly...

...It has fulminated for weeks against a heinous massacre in Israeli-occupied Lebanon while virtually ignoring a much more heinous massacre of Syrians by their own government...

...hence it believed in the fundamental goodness of man, evil as an aberration, suffering as arbitrary ("Christ without the crucifixion is liberalism," said Whittaker Chambers), and orthodoxy as "stifling...

...Feminism, for instance, has succeeded in implanting its most important idea into American public opinion: The goal of giving women the same educational and job opportuniAdam Meyerson, formerly managing editor o f The American Spectator, writes editorials for the Wall Street Journal...

...Yet it was not so long ago that liberals and those further left were either openly hostile toward labor or dismissive of it as an institution whose time had passed...

...Influenced by the writings of C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse, the New Left set about to create a substitute proletariat encompassing students and the urban underclass...

...It is a much more instructive model, with much to teach, even though some of the lessons being drawn are false...

...But there-is only mockery for the California insurance salesman who wants the biblical theory of creation taught in a social studies class...

...Let's hope many of today's charlatans are then forgotten...

...it would inevitably clash with this class because of the latter's crucial position within the despised American system...

...Today's lady is perfectly willing to have doors opened for her on her way toward more money and a better job...

...In the sixties and seventies, institutional churches should have been preaching orthodoxy to pluralists...