The Liberal Crack-Up

...Under McGovern's leadershi p of the Democratic party, according to TyrreU, that difference disappeared...

...Getting girls onto hockey teams is a matter not of justice but of dogma...

...Heaven knows, American conservatives endured much of the suffering of a banished band of ~migr~s or a banned, clandestine movement during the decades when they were denied fair representation in the media, academia, and the corridors of power...

...What philosophy does he adhere to in the 1980s...

...But one cannot help wondering: Is he wasting his breath...

...Like Roosevelt before him, Mr...

...And Tyrrell, one has to admit, is easier than most to read between the lines of...

...Tyrrell labels him environmentalism's Walt Disney, and no man more richly deserved his nickname...

...Even neoconservatives seem only able to get back to the Vital Center...

...Nowhere, as The Liberal Crack-Up, his latest eyewitness account of the region, demonstrates, has that pretense to extraordinary revelation, which Bishop Butler told John Wesley was "a horrid thing, a very horrid thing," been more widely or avidly gone in for...

...For, like Franklin Roosevelt before him, it has been Mr...

...It was nurtured, Tyrrell shows, not in times of female slavery, but in the gnostic seventies, when Tom Wolfe's Third Great Awakening was at its steamiest and the search was on with a vengeance, as Tyrrell shows, for "ontological refurbishment...

...for Tyrrell's, "reality came to be that which tinkled and crashed and declaimed in his head-not what was humming or sprouting about his feet, not life...

...Tyrrell uses the word in exactly the same sense that Knox does...

...Elsewhere he talks about "all those timeless arrangements, traditions, prejudices and nods to the supernatural that comfort ordinary men and women...

...But even satirists must be for something...

...It cannot even be obliterated by storm troopers and holocaust...

...Bowing to critics of her thesis that all men use the fear of rape to subjugate all women would mean going into schism...

...We all know what it is like arguing women's liberation...

...Not all right-to-lifers are supply'-siders, not all libertarians are patriots or exponents of anything resembling Judeo-Christian ethical, not to mention moral, values, and not all Democratic politicians in the years ahead can be expected to dig their own graves...

...No wonder today's feminist-maniacs (to borrow yet another Tyrrellism) are so resolute in their opposition to facts...

...It may be that in these disintegrating times satire is the only mode available to anti-liberals...

...Henry Wallaceites took over...

...Rusher's Midwest origins, Ivy Aram Bakshian, Jr., currently a thriceweekly columnist for the Washington Times, has served as an aide to three Presidents, most recently as Director of Speechwriting for Ronald Reagan...

...Tyrrell's point is that tile Bible Belt has moved eastwards...

...Not for us," he-writes, adopting the regretful tone of an explorer overtaken by the rainy season, "to thread our way through the uncharted jungle of sects which, in that favourable climate, flourish so luxuriantly...

...What we are left with as conservatives--and Mr...

...Conversely, I found some of the critics less competent and, for that matter, less loyal, than they gave themselves credit for...

...He writes frequently on politics, history, and the arts and is the author or co-author of five books including Winning the White House, which appeared in England this September...

...ideologues replaced idealists and began what Tyrrell calls "a running argument with life as it was led by normal Americans...

...So some of the carping--and there isn't all that much in Mr...

...Rusher seems to strike the same note--is reasonable grounds for measured optimism...

...As Mr...

...He looks forslayings in the spirit and talkings in tongues not among the hills of Appalachia, but in the lecture halls and media centers of intelligentia...

...Enter New Age Liberalism...

...New Age Enthusiasts are now in power...

...For him it's an old problem...

...League education, Republican ancestry, and long-time activism in the realms of conservative journalism and politics give him a unique if occasionally schizoid view of events...

...Reagan embraced many profoundly ideological positions and brought rtiany ideologues into his administration...

...No wonder Susan Brownmiller never has second thoughts...

...One might call him the Yank at Oxford of the American Right...

...Tyrrell documents the forces that have cracked up liberalism: affluence, media magic, rationalism, disenchantment with freedom ("They had worn bikinis...

...Among the former, one thinks of his flirtation with a third-party movement in 1976 and his somewhat bigamous posture toward Ronald Reagan's candidacy in 1979 and early 1980, when he nearly suffered the fate of Rumpelstiltskin (who, as readers of the Brothers Grimm will recall, was split asunder) in his efforts to keep one foot in the Reagan camp and the other in that of Representative Phil Crane, of whose embarrassing primary performance the less said the better...

...But, based on two and a half years spent as a senior aide to President Reagan, I am forced to conclude that most of it isn't...

...Now they yearned for 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR . DECEMBER 1984 straitjackets...

...Perhaps one should first ask: What philosophy is there to adhere to in the 1980s...

...So we have butterfly-fancier Paul Ehrlich basing his account of man's destiny on a metaphor taken from "Star Trek...

...Peace can be preserved if only we can lay our hands on copies [ of Leningrad and Vladivostok telephone directories...

...Rusher's personal political pilgrimage since the 1950s has had its eccentric moments--but also its intelligent hours...

...Rusher's book--is warranted...

...Charles's answer (but not the Gipper's) was that, if it was true it was because his words were his own but his actions were his ministers...

...No room here for the cut and thrust of debate...

...One sees the same thing Ln even the noblest of exile groups and underground movements, internal jealousies, factionalism, and conspiracies along with an obsession for ideological purity that sometimes pits reasonable men and women against each other over unreasonable trifles...

...Now, thanks to Bill Rusher, it has been addressed--and comprehensive is the word for this tightly constructed yet wide-reaching account of the emergence of American conservatism (to use a blanket term for what is, at best, a loose coalition) from the status of political pariah to the potentially dominant force in American politics...

...And it is this interior tinkling, crashing, and declaiming, uncorrupted by logic or the evidence of the senses, which, in TyrreU's analysis, New Age Liberals were responding to when they stepped forward to receive baptism in one or more of the six contemporary enthusiasms so graphically documented in The Liberal Crack-Up...

...citizens to ordinary Soviet citizens...

...And they do more than attend altars...

...Tlley have persuaded legislators, educators, media packagers, and even, as I discovered last December, Christmas-carol updaters, to make unisexualism intellectually axiomatic...

...New Age Enthusiasts vent such quantities of what Tyrrell calls "cheap thought" because they have no need for the valuable variety...

...Nature," he writes, "cannot be obliterated by rhetoric...

...Hardly a chapter goes by without the reader being sent chuckling to the dictionary or at least feeling his lip curl contemptuously at the thought of all that "riot of idiot enthusiasms" which surround him...

...Since then others, thank goodness, liave taken up the task of cutting a path through North America's sectarian jungle, and none wields a meaner machete or writes with more relish and literary aplomb about latterday Shakerism than does R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...With few exceptions, I found the technocrats much more loyal and con-" servative than their critics gave them credit for...

...The result, in too many of our number, has been a lingering sense of persecution that is sometimes, but far from always, warranted...

...TyrreU overcomes the one-saneman-in-a-loonybin syndrome by dropping into satire...

...Reagan has voluntarily placed himself in the position of King Charles the Second, of whom the Earl of Rochester wrote the mock epitaph: Here lies our sovereign lord, the King, Whose word no man relies on...

...he uses grandiloquence to mock its pedantry, learning to expose its shalgowness and rambunctiousness to make sure that his own writing will never by any chance be mistaken for it...

...But haven't these same ideological acids made organized thinking along non-liberal lines as impossible...

...Subject at differing times and on different topics to at least three distinctive pulls (Republican party loyalties, intellectual conservatism in the Buckley mold, and the misnamed populism of the New Right), Mr...

...And we have adult men and women, often possessors of post-graduate degrees, urging the American government to dismantle its military defenses in favor of a letter-writing campaign mounted by ordinary U.S...

...The best contemporary conservatives can do is imply what they stand for...

...Rusher graciously points out, "The intellectual history of the movement had been ably described by George H. Nash in his The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 (Basic Books, 1976...

...Or New Age Enthusiasm...

...Even as this review is written, there are nervous little political appointees (not to mention office seekers) who occupy or wish to occupy third and fourth echelon posts in the Reagan Administration and who blame every failure and frustration--every job or promotion denied--on allegedly "nonReaganite" technocrats...

...Hence one of the biggest challenges facing thinking conservatives and Republicans in the next few years is finding an heir supple and inspiring enough to fill the old cowpoke's rather large boots once he departs...

...But most of the time, on most of the issues, Bill Rusher has been on target, both ethically and pragmatically...

...Tyi-rell blasts New Age Liberalism...

...Intelligentians, Tyrrell argues, went charismatic in the 1960s...

...In the sixties he started a magazine called The Alternative designed to counter the counterculture...

...Every day I was exposed to both the self-styled, complaining loyalists and the people they denounced as technocrats...

...h o r t l y after President Reagan's election in 1980 1 decided the time was ripe for a narrative history of the conservative movement in the United States from its origins in the early 1950s down to the present," writes William A. Rusher in the introduction to his informative, highly readable, and largely candid The Rise of the Right...

...But its political history, both as a separate matter and in its relation to the movement's intellectual development, had never been addressed comprehensively...

...Feminism, he claims, was touched with madness and therefore futile...

...In other words, he is a religious conservative...

...Nature endures...

...Either believe that history has conspired to hide from men and women the fact that they are interchangeable, or depart into outer darkness...

...But only so long as the disparate elements of the Ne~ Right, Neoconservatism, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1984 41...

...His target is liberal scholasticism...

...Reagan himself appointed to help him run the country, one can only conclude that the gripers are wrong or that Mr...

...Knox talks of Jemima Wilkinson who "believed until 1820, and some of her followers believed even after her death in that year, that she was immortal:" Compare this handful of deluded Quakers in nineteenthcentury New York with the serried ranks of worshippers from all religious denominations who attend today's feminist altars...

...So must it have occurred to Ronald Knox when, on reaching page 558 of Enthusiasm (1950), his monumental study of theological kookiness down the ages, he remembered that North America remained unreported from...

...Since the latter are the people that Mr...

...Before then they had dreamt of building Americanstyle New Jerusalems, but always they had kept in touch with the difference between dreaming and building...

...Her world is divided into faithful and faithless...

...He is after all only a visitor there...

...All of them were part of a unique team that no one but Ronald Reagan could have pulled together and held together at this stage of American political development...

...Whereupon, having allowed himself a twenty-page digression on The Persistence of Shakerism which chronicles among other weird phenomena the doings of two self-proclaimed female messiahs operating out of New York around 1780, he packed his traps and headed meditatively for the index...

...They control the institutions that tell us how to think...

...Knox's enthusiast is John Muggeridge teaches history at Niagara College in Welland, Ontario...

...Reagan's personal qualities as a candidate and elected leader, at least as much as his straight philosophical message (which he at times deliberately mutes or blurs), that has allowed him to lead a minority movement under the banner of a minority party to victory...

...The same thinking is behind his use of humor...

...The emergence of the Right--to which Bill Rusher has made many a priceless c0ntribution--was a part, but only a part, of what brought us Ronald Reagan and a Republican Senate in 1980 and will, barring a disaster, return them this November...

...This is the predicament of today's social conservative...

...Over the years he has got used to the role of defending orthodoxy against established heresy and has developed a style that most beautifully complements it...

...A l l this Tyrrell details for us...

...He never said a foolish thing, Nor ever did a wise one...

...And the very catholicity of his conservative tastes--even his obvious relish for backstairs politics--makes him the ideal chronicler of what he accurately calls the Rise of the Right...

...To say that he has mastered his subject and seen through the ephemeral to the significant is no small praise in a movement that, even now, at what may be the threshold of its triumph, is riven by so many cabals and so much frivolous squabbling...

...Perhaps this is why the final impression left by his writing is not one of bitterness or despair, but of amused detachment...

...Intelligentia may have fallen into chaos, but ultimately it doesn't matter...

...the Vital Center stopped being vital...

...These negatives are the unfortunate but probably inevitable side effects-there are useful ones as well--of a movement that spent so many years in the political wilderness...

...Those who live by incantations think in them...

...But both men, at bottom, were brilliant politicians who, in drastically different times and circumstances, reached beyond the small number of radical purists who shaped many of their ideas but had never been able to win the support of anything close to a gbverning coalition based on popular elections...

...He thinks up a telling refutation of Betty Friedat!'s case against sexist language, only to hear himself singing "Good Christians All Rejoice...

...someone who trusts blindly in the light that is within him...

...Take the feminist enthusiasm...