Editorials/Kirkpatrick/Peking Marx
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS KIRKPATRICK Some Americanos have a curious avidity for making matters more difficult than they are. Perhaps they fear idleness. Possibly they forgot to read the instructions. Quite...
...But now the People's Daily has blurted out its apprehensions that unless China departs from rigid Marxist dogma it might "lose touch with reality and be left behind...
...So now the party's sages are coming out with blueprints for a happy future...
...She has been a friend of Big Labor, a friend and loyal supporter of Hubert Humphrey, and to the end she supported Scoop Jackson...
...That the New Age Democrats fail to recognize her significance is obvious...
...They hoot derisorily at Ronald Reagan when he claims an affinity for the policies of past Democratic statesmen...
...I suppose the thing can only get me into hot water...
...Just recently the party's governors assembled in Washington with a learned treatise, "Facing the Facts: The Democratic Governors' View From the States...
...She writes and speaks eloquently...
...PEKING MARX Oh unhappy day...
...More and more voters understand this...
...We cannot use Marxist -and Leninist works to solve our present-day problems," the iconoclastic editorial concluded...
...The horrible news was revealed in a December 7 unsigned editorial arguing that it would be "naive and stupid" to rely on Marxist principles to modernize China...
...they are deluded or lazy or inescapably timid...
...Listen as they cerebrate earnestly on the tube: "The oldest political party in the world, where lies its future...
...So many conservatives will be expecting my solicitation...
...Imagine, teaching art from a "Marxist perspective...
...And for those New Age Democrats so given to envisaging America as a land of victims hounded by oppressors, she-being female-qualifies as a capital victim...
...or when John Lenntfn was murdered, one's ardor for the question will tell us much about he who answers it...
...That his writings ever gained purchase on Western minds is evidence of how effectively a gifted haranguer can play on our baser impulses, for instance, envy and jealousy...
...1 am pleased by this editorial in People's Daily, and I shall long remember where I was when I heard of it...
...All these exertions are quite unnecessary and only make matters more difficult than need be...
...Ambassador Kirkpatrick has, then, impeccable Democratic credentials...
...They do as Jeane Kirkpatrick does, and her support among traditionally Democratic voters, such as Jews, Hispanics, and blue collar workers, should suggest to New Age Democrats the extent of their problems...
...but then, according to the calculations of George Gilder, so do 70 percent of her fellow Americanos, who account for more than three-fourths of the nation's wealth...
...With colleagues, I was laying plans for establishing a sperm bank for conservative geniuses...
...China was so peaceful-as peaceful as the grave...
...That she resisted the gaudy promises of McGovernism cannot be held against her...
...She has overseen a long and quite successful tenure at the United Nations...
...I know of an art prof on a college campus dear to me who laments that so few of his colleagues teach art history from a "Marxist perspective...
...Moreover, the indefatigable Wall Street Journal recently noted that though Democrats outnumber Republicans in the House of Representatives by 253 to 182 this is more a reflection of their ability to gerrymander than their ability to fetch support in congressional districts...
...In fact, as the world hustles along on its busy course, taking up all the ever-changing problems that history presents to us, academe's radical profs are increasingly in danger of, as the People's Daily puts it, being "left behind...
...I can well imagine the seminars of this last fanatic...
...How will the news be received here...
...He held almost no accurate ideas about life, and his greatest contribution to knowledge came not in the realm of economics, politics, or history, but in the realm of warfare...
...What is more, she labored for the party in every presidential campaign of her adult life until 1980 when she took up the campaign of a fallen-away Democrat...
...Marxism remains quite popular on our campuses along with dozens of other archaic enthusiasms...
...They ignore her because, unlike yesteryear's successful Democratic party that favored internationalism and growth, the New Age Democratic party shies from such burdens...
...At the national level they increasingly vote for the party that promises to preserve the splendors...
...McGovernism's rise marked the beginning of her party's incompetence...
...at least it was for Marxists who felt the need to point to an earthly plot where their abstract hooey could be boomed as successful and wholesome...
...When word reaches him of Peking's historic tergiversation I expect he will become quite emotional...
...Times are changing...
...Possibly there will be calls for a physician or, worse, a mortician...
...He provided men with a compelling new rationale for killing each other off...
...My guess is no, and under them their campuses will become living museums, somewhat like colonial Williamsburg...
...If you really want to find a modern-day proponent of the policies of these successful Democratic pols you will find yourself looking right into the face of Jeane Kirkpatrick, possibly the most popular Democrat in the country...
...The life of the mind in our time is often intensely ideological, and as ideology botches more and more political issues the ideologues grow ever more bizarre...
...but they validate his claim by shunning the legitimate heir to HST and JFK, Ambassador Kirkpatrick...
...There the bewildered students sit as the ideologue probes the "critical questions" regarding Henri Rousseau's jungle animals: Were they placed in dignified settings...
...Unfortunately, few of her party's soul-searchers will include the politics of Jeane Kirkpatrick in their meditations, which merely demonstrates again the' disingenuousness and futility of their exertions...
...After all, the Democratic party was the most successful political organization throughout the middle decades of this century...
...Now, my Democratic friends, look around you today...
...And affluence's crapulent face was not seen...
...Democrats seeking renewal should look to their roots...
...He promptly showed the good sense to hire her, though her politics have not markedly changed since she voted for Adlai Stevenson...
...Adults will visit them as tourists wishing to see for themselves the fauna of the 1960s...
...She is admired by voters of both parties...
...At the local level, where these large national issues are irrelevant, they still frequently vote for the party of splendid years gone by...
...Henceforth a question to be asked many times on college campuses, in think tanks, and wherever else our soi-disant Marxists gather will be: "Where were you when you received word that China's Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, had abjured Marxist principles...
...Its policies still reign over vast areas of American life...
...Look to FDR, HST, and JFK...
...As with such similar questions as "Where were you when Pearl Harbor was bombed...
...Were the jungles progressive, were the beasts merely presented as nutritional objects...
...That some in the White House remain ignorant is amazing...
...But now the news from Peking emphasizes the need for new leadership in the world, and I say conservatives must answer history's call.swer history's call...
...Will the word from Peking snap them out "of their ideological dream world...
...Nationwide their congressional delegation snagged a mere 39,000 more votes than the Republican delegation...
...Behind all its rumble bumble about caring and compassion it is the party of isolationism and no-growth...
...Since his expiry more people around the globe have been slaughtered in his name than in the name of any religious messiah or prophet ever heard of...
...Many campuses are now dominated by junior faculty members whose student years in the 1960s were spent in Marxist reveries...
...Consider those handwringing Democrats now demonstrating on the op-ed pages of our great and good daily papers...
...Marx, of course, was bizarre from the start...
...Why not a Baptist perspective or an engineering perspective or the perspective of a militant in the animal rights movement...
...The party has captured but one presidential race since 1964, and the 1976 victory was attended by certain incomparable conditions, never to be repeated one prays...
...Quite often they simply lack the grit to face up to the requirements of the task at hand...
...Red China, as we used to call it, was for Yank Marxists of the 1960s and 1970s a.n exemplary plot of land...
...It was so egalitarian-as egalitarian as the penitentiary...
Vol. 18 • February 1985 • No. 2
