Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Humanist Resentment We at the Humanist resent being called a "gray magazine" ("Theocracy in America: Campaign '84 Revisited," by Richard Brookhiser, TAS, August 1985). We always...
...wouldn't it be correct and more accurate if it read, "For whom did He or She vote...
...Next month John O'Sullivan answers readers' queries on how we know that we exist.-Ed...
...O'Sullivan may find Penthouse tortuous as to its lately leftish political slant, but his own understanding of political philosophies is equally so...
...for the complete picture we recommend his American Democracy and the Vatican: Population Growth and National Security (available from the Humanist), which will also go a long way in showing why the stands against the Church's power structure of a Catholic such as Geraldine Ferraro do not make her a "clumsy hypocrite" but rather one who possibly understands quite clearly both her religion and the United States Constitution...
...The political crack-up of liberalism is a fact of life...
...I read with avid eyes RET's review essay, "Liberals, Conservatives, and History," (TAS, July 1985...
...I wonder if the heart of the problem might not be this: The crack-up of liberalism thus far encountered has been principally a matter of the poor showing of its candidates in elections...
...Since socialists are on the left and commonly accepted to be so, I conclude that for practical purposes libertarians may sensibly be classified as right...
...My own decisions in this are lightheartedly empirical...
...How Deep the Conservative Tide...
...Contrary to O'Sullivan, smut magazines and their peddlers have enjoyed their respective "freedoms" because of the agitations of the New Age Knaves and their kinfolk, not because conservatives have worked for their right to pander...
...and in all the indexes of cultural influence, it still weighs in as champ...
...Although he correctly observes how men's magazines have been attempting to purchase "redeeming social merit" by the inclusion of "political theory" within their pulsating pages, he is not convincing when he says that such theory has been getting more liberal and more anti-conservative...
...And wasn't that your production manager who called our production manager to ask advice on redesigning your pages...
...But more importantly, O'Sullivan seems to think there was a time way back in the good old days of the fifties and sixties when girly magazines at least represented a vision which was truly compatible with "American political ideas of both [the] left and right," a vision philosophically expressive of "a sort of libertarianism...
...There is no clear philosophical basis for the left-right spectrum which muddles together a number of political ideas...
...why then the abiding dispiritedness and diffidence among conservatives...
...Libertarianism is a sickness of the left, not an option among many views on the right...
...This is nuts...
...William J. Harnack Associate Editor The Humanist Amherst, New York Richard Brookhiser replies: Sorry...
...Essentially it is a cultural movement...
...He misunderstands my point that the libertine libertarianism of Playboy was compatible "with American political ideas of both left and right" in the fifties...
...Meyer's letter except those that he attributes to me...
...Not to get gray, but Brookhiser's statement that we "subsist on anti-religious propaganda" is a good indication that he has not read our magazine but gets his information from Jerry Falwell's direct mail letters...
...To be sure, he can't be faulted for not reading pornography on a regular basis...
...For one thing, this incorrect assessment is probably due to his "occasional" and "furtive" perusals of such literature...
...The quote by Stephen Mumford was taken out of context...
...continued on page 54...
...To aim at liberty rather than Well-being seems . . . irrational...
...I notice that libertarians are generally in strong opposition to socialists on economic questions...
...on the antics of Jesse Jackson...
...An argument can be made, of course, that such inclusions are either simply gratuitous (mere ploys to obtain a reputation for editorial balance, if not objectivity) or plainly derisive: We all remember the Jerry Falwell episode...
...The conservative view of freedom, on the other hand, is aptly phrased by Hastings Rashdall: "A certain kind of liberty is an essential condition of Well-being, but it is not Wellbeing itself...
...We always endeavor to use one bright color, and often use four on our covers, although that is expensive (as you must realize...
...I was not referring to the philosophies of Toryism, socialism, and liberalism, but to the intellectual stock in- trade of practical politicians in the major parties, both of which at the time tended to an unreflective liberal centrism...
...Meyer makes one other important error...
...Where one places a particular party philosophy upon it is largely a matter of taste...
...Any magazine that thinks "For whom did He or She vote...
...Incidentally, your head-note for the article in question-'Who did He vote for...
...But recent issues of Penthouse have in fact been dignified by the likes of Claire Sterling on the perils of terrorism or William F. Buckley, Jr...
...is a joke, is by definition gray...
...Porn Again John O'Sullivan ("Czarists and Pink Leather Boots," TAS, July 1985) certainly seems to know much about Radio Liberty, but not about American pornography...
...On moral questions, I classify them as left by similar reasoning...
...This becomes clear when we remember that libertarians have, in the words of Russell Kirk, a "fanatic attachment to a simple solitary principle-that is, to the notion of personal freedom as the whole end of the civil social order, and indeed of human existence...
...The peculiar sickness of the pornographers is that they inculcate the anti-human notion that people can and ought to enjoy life's pleasures without paying the price for them...
...This is how it would have appeared on our grayish pages...
...This kind of thinking, broadly applied in our time by the kooks on the left, has given us all kinds of trouble: a populace addicted to credit cards and incapable of amassing personal savings, a staggering federal deficit, federal social welfare programs outrageously named "entitlements," a generation of girls only one in five of whom can claim to be virgins by the end of their teens, the greatest incidence of teenage pregnancy anywhere in the world, a festering lot of broken marriages and single parent families, and, of course, the ever-growing use of abortion as a means of birth control...
...This view of the world is by nature friendly to the left which incessantly works to obliterate any notions of absolute standards the rest of us may have...
...His admonitions about timorousness, smallness, lack of imagination are not without effect either...
...but New Age liberalism is only secondarily a phenomenon of electoral politics...
...Then I go to the movies...
...While the resulting prick of conscience might not suffice to make a lion of a lamb, it does stimulate a bit of soul searching, some probing for an explanation...
...Is it any wonder, then, that our many social "liberation" movements have withered in importance in comparison to the reassertion of traditional values successfully heralded by none other than Ronald Reagan...
...If you are speaking editorially, we have been called a lot of things, but never "gray...
...He is wrong in believing that libertarianism can be classified neatly and incontrovertibly as a left-wing idea...
...The reviewer's perplexity with the paralysis of conservative resolve strikes home...
...John S. Meyer Boulder, Colorado John O'Sullivan replies: I agree with almost all the views in Mr...
Vol. 18 • October 1985 • No. 10
