European Document/The Neolib Spanish Right
Buckley, Reid
THE NEOLIB SPANISH RIGHT Reid Buckley The officials and functionaries of. the little northwestern seaside town and their buxom, sweating, coifed, and perfumed wives were agog, ajitter,...
...in the creation of risk capital, in the 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 feasibility studies for, and in the establishment and staffing of, new enterprises (in which the state may choose to become a financial partner), and in social and industrial research, over which, First of all, [there must be] a superior organism on the government level, for the planification or co-ordination of scientific and technical national policy, which defines global and estimated necessities, distributes resources to different areas, co-ordinates research institutes and controls their production, promulgates the exploitations of the results of the national effort and organizes the transference of technology with other nations, especially with those of Europe and Latin America...
...But that is not to be...
...history, has been able to achieve only limited reforms along these same lines, Fraga took offense again, as though I were drawing an unfavorable comparison between his political abilities and those of Ronald Reagan...
...He continues: The truth is t h a t . . , in the majority of the nations of the West, what we have is a system of mixed economies [this startling aperfu he himself italicizes], with an important public sector, and with a private sector that, as Galbraith has explained, comprehends.., two different realities: small and medium-sized businesses, on the one hand, and, on the other, the big companies, with a capacity for planning, research, and self-financing...
...But he was not content with a mere facial lift...
...Chesterton fails worst not in these mundane affairs, but in those works he would have considered most important --his explications of Christianity and Catholicism (the two are interchangeable with him...
...His most famous book along this line (or any of his many lines) is probably The Man Who Was Thursday...
...He would deliver commands in machine-gun bursts of his grating Galician voice, on which he would expect immediate action, to which he demanded progress reports and final execution within thirty days...
...When I allowed as how the Great Communicator, on the heels of one of the most unpopular Presidents in U.S...
...Of course, people can grow out of their superstitions...
...Second, his job was to mitigate the fascist image of Spain: to make less unpalatable to the Francophobic world a dictatorship that was in fact much less oppressive than myth has it...
...You could swear Chesterton had been paid by the word...
...the little northwestern seaside town and their buxom, sweating, coifed, and perfumed wives were agog, ajitter, and aglow...
...You'll get action...
...I t is rash to take a bead on Gilbert K. Chesterton...
...There is here a terrible afflatus...
...He went to Italy only eight years into the Fascist regime...
...but among the leaders of Spain's moderate right-wing, he was the stand-out, and still is...
...The Man Who Was Thursday has to be one of the worst books Chesterton wrote...
...Chesterton emphasizes over and over the nightmarish quality of his eventsma sure sign of trouble...
...Many an early pilgrim to Stalin, Mao, Castro (and Hitler) should have Richard Brookhiser is Senior Editor at National Review...
...Can the Great Conservative Hope basically approve Keynesian formulas, and is he really under the illusion that the State can create employment at anything other than prohibitory cost...
...What he was voicing is his conviction that the Marxist prescription has won the day...
...The individualist spirit," he states, "has been progressively replaced by a collectivist ethic...
...He ends on comforting words, but he plainly subscribes to the Galbraithian myth about the latterday corruptions of the free enterprise system, and a paragraph or so before protesting his distaste for collectivism he advocates " a serious income policy . . . . " He says, so as not to be misunderstood, " I mean, to control all income...
...From a centrally directed economy of state-owned, state-managed, stategranted, and, often also, statesubsidized monopolies to a workers' socialism there is little ideological distance to travel...
...To get it past the eversuspicious Caudillo took some doing, and it is ironic that this victory for moderation should have led to Fraga's downfall...
...it is by far the worst I have read...
...He had fame, honor, and love in his lifetime...
...In the last 30 years there has been achieved, in fact, [thanks to] strong public spending, and a cavalier [alegre] budgetary and monetary policy, structural full employment...
...Hard to deny...
...In his 1975 collection of essays, A National Objective, he makes the commonplace observation that in the "post-modern" era a "very profound" change has affected Western nations...
...Fraga goes on to say that Spaniards must prepare for themselves" new reforms of economic institutions," concluding this essay on the "agony" of capitalism with a ringing call to search for "the salvation of the finest personalist values" that were once (as he puts it) to be found in the origins of the capitalist system, and not "cede to the temptations of the tribal values that are the backrest of collectivism...
...He would listen-impatiently--to petitions...
...The smart money ticketed him for future glory...
...lackluster, riven by schisms, the party crashed in the 1982 elections, which brought socialist Felipe Gonz~lez to the presidency and established Fraga's Alianza Popular as the nonCommunist and non-fascist alternative...
...His increasing liberalism found no favor with the Spanish Left, needless to say...
...As sexy propaganda for the A lianza Popular, its "white paper" is a flop...
...This is a document of fantastic political ineptitude...
...J. K. Galbraith...
...and it is far, far from "liberal," if by that you mean classical economics...
...Fraga today is not the Phalangist of yore...
...What is evident, however, is that under its present leader there's not a chance of this coming about...
...The Right has almost always been the Party of Privilege, and so, at bottom, is socialism...
...we have to be made to believe it...
...Flipping along, one comes to another essay, this entitled "Commentaries on the Economic Theory of Prof...
...The philosophical antecedents cited are disturbingly Jacobean...
...Gouging he ruthlessly extirpated...
...One was always acutely aware of his ferocious temper, and of his quickness to perceive the nub of a problem long before the long-winded explanation of it, that keen intelligence at once slicing through the bullbriars of bureaucratic obstruction to seize on--and, miracle to tell, to authorize--the remedy...
...To the other nine, my condolences...
...the role of religion in public education), I was at a loss to define the political and economic philosophy of Alianza Popular, he bristled, declaring that anyone who encountered such difficulty was being willful, because no party had spelled out its policies in greater detail...
...He never forgot anything...
...And it has increased my pessimism over the future of the Spanish non-fascist Right in the elections to come and for the foreseeable future...
...It is modeled on the old song about the Duke of York: THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 29...
...Lovecraft is more definite and direct...
...A call to the Ministry of Information and Tourism next day elicited a prompt call back to say that the racket was being investigated, a follow-up note within the week thanking me for bringing it to the Ministry's attention, and a report one month later detailing corrective measures...
...To fuel its economic expansion during the 1960s, those fat foreign reserve surpluses were essentiai...
...How in the world can the spokesman for the opposition rightwing endorse the fastidious Fabianism of a John Kenneth Galbraith...
...I write of Manuel Fraga Iribarne, who, today, heads the center-rightwing Alianza Popular (AP), the principal party in opposition to Spain's ruling socialists...
...Fraga's ingenuous economics are illustrative...
...Such matters count, but they are not decisive...
...and he proceeded to offer me two tomes of, I would judge, more than a thousand pages each...
...When he was appointed Spain's Minister of Information and Tourism in 1962, he was just 39, and his was easily the second most important ministry in the government...
...I have only skimmed Chesterton's politics, and the historical work he wrote to buttress it...
...Even after the municipal elections this past spring, which the socialists swept, hopes in the future of the AP under its waterwalking chief have held...
...Then as now, prosperity depended on the world's discovery of Spain as a low-cost paradise for the vacationer...
...The third point is that he could not bring himself to eat his words (the intellectual's pride), instead vociferating his right to an economic eclecticism...
...He was appointed Vice President of the interim government following Franco's death...
...Out of this historical mold Fraga Iribarne struggles to free himself and his Alianza Popular, but one fears that neither intellectually nor temperamentally can he do it...
...Unfortunately the story which is meant to carry it is dreadful...
...It staggers under the rhetoric of the pedagogue...
...It is the only game in town...
...A little...
...They seem almost to have been chosen by lot...
...The second point is the political liability of having such a thin skin...
...The second, is to try to see in what measure they are being confirmed by the now discernible development of the world in the [present decade]_9 [The emphases are Fraga's.] And in the balance of this essay he continues his praise of what he calls the Galbraithian analysis of the economic ills of our times, which, on the whole, he finds accurate and pertinent...
...Fraga, in his political thinking, epitomizes the ideological confusion of the Spanish Right...
...I believe, then, that the best tribute we can pay them is to take them for granted, as accepted, in order to gloss them along two lines...
...I have bushhogged my way through its 333 pages, which maybe not ten people in the world will ever do...
...We don't want to be told that something is a nightmare...
...By the book, Fraga should be a winner...
...everything--restaurants and hostels, kitchens and latrines, even the beaches...
...He worked hard also to liberalize the regime, and among his triumphs was the "decree-law" in 1965 on the status of the press, wherein carefully circumscribed .freedom of speech was guaranteed...
...The matter with the AP is Fraga Iribarne, one can conclude...
...There is a deeper problem...
...Oh, wow...
...He would ask searching questions...
...I am an old acquaintance: I am not the hostile Spanish Press, salivating for his blood...
...I have always figured that, whenever I want to sample Distributism--that curious threepronged attack on capitalism, the state, and the post-medieval world--I can get it neat in The Servile State, by Chesterton's friend and political mentor, Hilaire Belloc...
...The pedantry is awful...
...Many fine, fine people are working their hearts out for the AP...
...The Right in Spain characteristically has been authoritarian, oligarchical, and, in modern times, national socialist (a disease it caught from the Left, but to which it was structurally susceptible...
...You ask, can this paladin of the moderate right-wing be serious...
...From a reading of the party's literature, an American conservative would say that an electoral victory of Alianza Popular would be other than a nightmare only by comparison with a worse alternative...
...The first is to see to what degree they correspond to the development of economic realities in our country...
...because I was struck forcibly yet once more by the amateurishness of this gifted man...
...I quote: To express an identity of principle with the ideas so brilliantly expounded by Professor J. K. Galbraith does not require much time, since for many years now those ideas, born of an intelligent criticism of the "conventional economic wisdom," have been transformed, in their turn, into the conventional economic doctrine of the 1960"s...
...The advent of Opus Dei technocrats in the government reversed the chauvinism and xenophobia of the regime and opened the economy to foreign inx;estment...
...He has no equal intellectually, and no superior in experience...
...If you are puzzled by this reference to John Kenneth, you have reason to be...
...The state becomes involved in the production and regulation of cheese, in the control of zoonosis (for pandas...
...It's sad...
...He proffered them with evident pride of authorship, which distressed me...
...Assistant professor of sociology and political science at the University of Madrid at age 22, legal counsel for the Cortes at 23, full professor of law at 25, secretary general of the National Council on Education at 30, he was a locomotive, a veritable steamroller...
...The idea is simple: The members of an anarchist conspiracy turn out, one after the other, to be detectives in disguise, while the leader, who recruited them all, turns out to be God, or someone very like Him...
...Earlier, when I asked him what would be a principal objective of his right-wing administration to distinguish it from the incumbent socialists, he said that he would at once dismantle the excessive superstructure of the Spanish government, which is too deeply enmeshed in the private sector, and cut down its budget-busting transfer programs...
...Nor is Fraga's association with Franco an absolute disqualification, if the popularity that was at one time enjoyed by Adolfo Su~rez is any precedent...
...When I resolutely declined, he said, Well, take this synopsis: and I came away with Solutions for a DecademThe White Book of Alianza Popular...
...prices, margins or profit, dividends, salaries, and wages...
...Tierno Galv~n, the urbane Marxist mayor of Madrid, expressed to me his conviction that in Spain all political wings are compressing on a center...
...But Fraga is no more than a symbolization of the intellectual flaw which resides in the philosophical acceptance by the rightwing of a programmatic statist solution to all that ails mankind...
...Galbraith, he insisted, had correctly analyzed the failings of capitalism in the 1960s...
...The style of Chesterton's Christian polemics is ~oetter...
...Not that he suffers...
...But when I asked him in a recent interview whether he had not THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 27 changed his mind about Galbraith, whose standing in the United States as a serious economist is not, I observed, tremendous, Fraga became flustered and blew up...
...He did this admirably through cultural exchanges...
...He has them still, and deserves them...
...It was wonderful...
...It has little to do with Felipe Gonz~lez's telegenic youthfulness, nor even with the now 60-year-old Fraga's long, pallid, lugubrious face, his little, close-set, rust-colored eyes, or the limp fatty hand he surrenders to one's grasp, like an inert phallus...
...There had been nothing before like this in all the constitutional history of Spain...
...Deadeningly self-approving definitions of Alianza Popular litter the typescape, such as that it is "a conservative and reformist party: which wishes to conserve the traditional values in our society while [at the same time] reforming those values to the degree necessary for them to satisfy the exigencies of a societal model valid for the final years of the twentieth century...
...Fraga's job was, first, to keep the tourists coming, keep them happy, and multiply accommodations, such as the famous state-owned parador system developed by his predecessor, the Duke of Luna...
...The first point here is that he can take neither criticism nor correction, a pedagogical fault...
...And when BeUoc is pouring, stand back--there is not an ice cube, or a lime twist, to soften the brew...
...he abolished that bane of the traveler in Europe, the gratuities and taxes that are tacked onto every check and hotel bill, and which come always as a stomachsouring surprise, establishing instead an all-inclusive price...
...The odds are that right-wing Spain will be deceived, however...
...The problem is undoubtedly the prose...
...the Spanish pavilion was the hit of the 1964 World's Fair in New York...
...He had been known by his fellow students as "the monster," or as the "Thompson tractor," because he won a "first" in every course he ever took...
...He can only shout and wave at us, like a traffic cop...
...Who is going to read a party platform that weighs four pounds...
...The problem is that not during the Roman conquest, not under the Moors, not since--not ever--has a democratic, genuinely capitalist, non-predatory, and noncartellist "conservative" political movement existed here...
...Ideologically speaking, no more bureaucratic centralizing of the energies of the society can be imagined, and nowhere is the incompatibility of such activism by government with individual freedom recognized...
...They peered anxiously at their timepieces, squinting, some of them, on account of the farsightedness of age, others on account of the shots of raw red wine that had helped them pass the oppressive hot hours of this unusually turbid August day when the Great Man was awaited for his inspection of the all-important tourist facilities...
...there is frequently no other apparent principle of selection...
...Toward the end of the interview, when I remarked that, apart from obvious social issues (abortion...
...This symptomizes the incoherence that bedevils the Spanish Right...
...I can take from them all what is pertinent to the situation in Spain...
...What's this...
...He and other conservatives, such as the Count of Motrico, squandered capital in 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1984 political in-fighting, with the consequence that they were all beaten out by Adolfo Suarez's UCD, an amorphous aggregation of liberal democrats and Christian Fabians, under which Spain's tendentious Constitution--one of the most preposterous charters ever to be devised by mankind--was jerrybuilt...
...There are sentences that run on at the mouth for as many as 264 words (I counted...
...He was a whirlwind...
...Eventually, Fraga was dumped (1971), and for a time he became a vocal quasi-critic of the regime...
...Spain was just then emerging out of the rigidities of the early dictatorship into the contemporary world...
...The purpose of the charade, the para-deity explains at the end, is to put the police in the position of rebels and criminals--to allow the defenders of order to feel "the courage of the dynamiter...
...And what words...
...It is not "conservative," as we understand the term...
...there is a terrible hubris...
...Su~rez left the UCD on a tangent...
...There is not a character that comes alive, not an incident that moves, not a description that successfully describes...
...Keynes understood that to avoid unemployment.., one had to concentrate on [tirarpor] demand...
...Chesterton knows where he wants our emotions to go, but they don't budge an inch...
...It groans with Academese: "Depending upon the analysis of the socio-economic impactmsimilar to that which one conducts from the environmental point of view--the effects of reconversion should be weighed ex-ante priorly...
...because, instead of being grateful for the gains of the new law, the Spanish intelligentsia at once denounced its imperfections in a manifesto, causing Franco to cast a baneful eye on his young Minister, such as to say, "See what you get for catering to that canalla...
...I bragged to my friends: " I f you find anything amiss during your vacation here, call Information and Tourism...
...In fact, I was: But Fraga should have the sense and maturity to acknowledge his limitations...
...been as modest as Chesterton was about Benito...
...Listen again: _9 . . since the great economic crisis of the 1930's, the State intervenes in the Economy in order to achieve full employment...
...He would expect brief, complete, and satisfactory replies...
...Throughout there is a neo-Utopian, centralist-collectivist tendency to find statist solutions for everything--I mean everything--under the sun...
...His Excellency would arrive from the Basque town of Suances at eleven hundred hours in the thirty-first year of Francisco Franco, and he would depart from nearby San Vicente de la Barquera at fifteen hundred hours on the dot...
...Not reading likely' to appeal to Pepe the Mechanic or Paco the Clerk, moreover...
...Not even the most washed-in-the-blood Chesterton fan can have read them all...
...There were moments, the first, and only, time I read it, so vague and confusing that I literally could not figure out what was supposed to be going on...
...But, [in the process of pumping up] demand, the State has had ever to increase its intervention in the total economy, and [the cheap money policies have brought about] inflationary tendencies...
...Fraga imposed strictest controls on sanitation...
...the right-wing of Spain in this historical dimension cannot do it...
...It is a provoking idea...
...I am neither a Keynesian nor a monetarist," he cried, raising his voice...
...He left a body o f work as vast as--well, as his body: dozens of books, most of them out of print, dozens more articles and essays, moldering unretrieved in the pages of extinct London newspapers...
...Given the current fashion for distinguishing stages in I1 Duce's degradation, Chesterton's puzzled first impression may not now seem so cockeyed...
...Fraga proved himself the nine years of his tenure a first-rate executive...
...He wanted to see Reid Buckley is a novelist...
...Once, at two in the morning, I flew into Madrid from MaUorca to discover that no taxis were available except at limousine rates...
...But it is a pity, when so many of his pages are so well done, that he should continue to be admired for what is weak and shoddy...
...Nor do I think it fair to cite, to Chesterton's discredit, his ambivalent reaction to Mussolini...
Vol. 17 • February 1984 • No. 2
