Editorials/Neolib Vapors/Slob Sisters
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
E D I T O R I A L...
...It is a plausible enough thesis, but it does not explain the ravening escapism of our time...
...Both liberals and conservatives tell us that the good life is the life filled with the fruits of a robust gross national product...
...If the civil rights division was opposed to affirmative action, it was nonetheless in favor of "affirmative recruitment," and something called "out-reach...
...By comparison most of the popular figures of the present are fantastical...
...Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, and Norman Podhoretz are the senior intellectuals in this group...
...As the source pointed out, "controversial" always means "conservative...
...Much more recently a legislative strategist who does not wish to be identified went to see Senate Judiciary Chairman Strom Thurmond and asked him why he didn't speed up the confirmation hearings for Reagan's judicial nominees...
...No retreat...
...E D I T O R I A L S...
...Our liberals are lost in gloom and their customary morbid preoccupation with gripes, hobgoblins, and the malfunctioning parts of utopia...
...This bizarre yearning to escape explains the vast market that America now provides for celebrity...
...Such liberals came to be called neoconservatives...
...The world of celebrity takes in the rock stars, the TV stars, and all those lesser fish who have been seen on television and in the public prints and who have not actually been convicted of a major crime, or, at least, a large number of major crimes...
...and it is painful to witness the contortions that the politicos go through simply to avoid standing for anything at all...
...For all I know they may already have spent an hour or two in pre-dawn meetings with Strike Force attorneys and vigilant Trustbusters...
...What is rarely noted about their point of view is that it has not changed fundamentally from the early 1960s when a liberal favored modest and temporary welfare for the "deserving poor," very little social engineering to transform us all—rich and poor—into Spinozas, and a staunch stand against totalitarian aggression...
...Through the past two decades these men have been consistent and honorable in their political stands...
...In the end the campaign succeeded...
...Alas, most of the locals remain oblivious...
...In 1985, if the news magazines have us right, we numbered no scientists or industrialists among our elect...
...I could understand an escapism that exited a grim reality for a charming fantasy, but where is the charm in to-day's world of popular entertainment...
...Leaders of the old civil rights movement were STRANGE NEW RESPECT: CONT'D Shortly after the 1980 election Paul Weyrich, the president of the Free Congress Foundation, went to a joint Senate Steering Committee-Wednesday Club meeting in a dining room of the Dirksen Office Building...
...These are momentous issues...
...Springsteen is no Sinatra...
...The conservatives are in the glooms too, vexed as they are by liberal treachery and fears of what Secretary of State Shultz might do next...
...In various respects his enforcement had "outstripped prior Administrations...
...When I arrived it was still dark...
...The neoliberals are generally goaded by the same values, but being a generation younger—products of the 1960s and 1970s for the most part—they are somewhat timorous and desirous of applause...
...mittee failed to confirm Reynolds, but he stubbornly stayed on at the civil rights division...
...To some degree today's escapism is explained by the ease with which Americans can flee reality...
...Reynolds had made it clear to me a couple of months earlier that he knew what was at stake in this contest...
...Senators Alan Simpson of Wyoming and John Chafee of Rhode Island were already seated...
...We were ushered through oaken vestibules and introduced to Ed Meese and Deputy Attorney General Lowell Jensen...
...In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as liberalism was being swept toward the romance of gauchisme and the mountebankery of basic American cheap thought, some liberals declared their opposition to those who were Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Post column syndicated by King Features...
...others, usually the females, wear their fat sisters' underwear—here I have in mind the legendary Bruce Springsteen and Madonna, as she is called...
...Then Senator Chafee said, `Hi, how are you,' and Simpson turned around and saw me...
...The Senate Judiciary ComTom Bethel/ is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Our escapists would rather dwell on the galoots in work shirts and the gals in underwear, That is fine by me...
...Some of these celebrities are admittedly clever and accomplished, yet their personal achievements are secondary to thepublicity that enhaloes them and makes them attractive to the public...
...If I've got one thing on my agenda it's to stop social issue legislation from coming to the floor.' " Simpson said he had used the argument that the social issues (normally a code word for abortion) would so tear up the new Republican majority in the Senate that they wouldn't be able to pass anything else...
...Simpson had his back to me when I came into the room," Weyrich recalled...
...O elegance and a semblance of sophistication...
...Even the Supreme Court vibrates and steams...
...Routes in-to fantasy are provided not only by radio, TV, and print, but also by film, video cassettes, and specialized TV: cable networks focusing solely on entertainment...
...He was telling Chafee that the Reagan Administration had been intending to send social-issue legislation to the Hill, `but I've stopped it,' he said...
...The neoconservatives ended up in coalition with conservative Republicans of the Buckley-Reagan sort...
...He seemed a mite on the defensive...
...radicalizing the political philosophy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John E Kennedy...
...Perhaps they had worn him down after all...
...This brings Washington back to its historic concern for limited government, personal responsibility, freedom, and the dignity of the original liberal vision...
...Yet, for a complete ex-planation of contemporary escapism, one must scrutinize prosperity itself...
...Unemployment is receding...
...The figures that fetched popular interest in a given year in the 1920s might be drawn from science (Thomas Edison), industry (Walter Chrysler), politics (the great Coolidge) and finally sports (Red Grange...
...Thus, though they are full of brag and bounce today, the neoliberals will America's weakness for escapism, so the Americanologists tell us, began with the Depression, in harsh times when the embryonic broadcast industry could, for the first time, cheaply transport hard-pressed Americans in-to glittering fantasies...
...Moreover, I am unconvinced that many of these wretches can sing any better than a United States senator taking his morning shower...
...In sum, the neoliberal has a small view of the world and a short memory of history...
...That last can't be right, can it...
...One of his ancestors (William Brad-ford) was on the Mayflower...
...It will be interesting to see where the neoliberals end up...
...Reynolds himself went to Andover and Yale, and worked in well-connected law firms—more plausibly the curriculum vitae of one who would rather switch (the definition of civil rights) than fight...
...Madonna is a third-rate Mae West, thumpingly amplified...
...After breakfast we went to a series of meetings with key Department figures, among them Reynolds...
...A spare, gaunt, bespectacled figure, he ate his scram-bled eggs but left his sausages untouched...
...Instead we were fascinated by a huge army of pop singers interlarded with some TV entertainers...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 9...
...About the only Washingtonians abounding with gusto are those neoliberal writers who are admired by both sides: by the conservatives for espousing embryonic conservative values and by the liberals for execrating the aforementioned mossbacks who make conservative values plausible...
...Weyrich recalled that Simpson went on: `I got Howard Baker to go to Jim Baker [President Reagan's chief of staff at the time...
...If we buy into quotas we are locked into a caste system," he said...
...It is not even the world of high jinks once confected by the Beatles...
...The neoconservatives, on the other hand, have already left a mark...
...not endure as anything more than wisps of pietistic vapor...
...The neoconservatives may have suffered enormous abuse, but they and their values have also become ,quite influential...
...After all, one can-not go on forever espousing the values of those one is abominating, particularly if those whom one abominates are growing increasingly powerful...
...America has begun its fourth straight year of economic recovery...
...The half dozen journalists assembled (pragmatists all, eschewing extremism of left and right) were wondering why senior government officials in Washington go to work so early...
...As they have demonstrated, they are not eager to fight for their beliefs against the odds...
...Just because the Department had not supported busing, he said, it had not "backed off on civil rights enforcement...
...In a struggle with them the neoliberals will break and run...
...Most Americans are prosperous, and the polls proclaim that they are abrim with optimism...
...Take that tale back to imperial Rome...
...We numbered few politicians and no distinguished artists...
...NEOLIB VAPORS Here in our nation's capital these are grand and gaudy days, as the historians will in due course note...
...Hence you will hear the neoliberal gabbing about the need to improve productivity even as he pooh-poohs capitalism...
...Gross private domestic investment has in-creased 50 percent since 1982 and gross private savings have risen 30 percent...
...and from there we would proceed to Attorney General Ed Meese's private dining room for breakfast...
...The issue was results versus opportunity, quotas versus merit...
...I found myself sitting opposite William Brad-ford Reynolds, the assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights who last year was subjected to the familiar campaign of vilification by civil rights groups when he was nominated for promotion...
...The tastes of children create the popular culture of contemporary America, the superpower...
...One would not have predicted that someone of Reynolds's back-ground would have the stomach to resist the collective will of the civil rights, media, and legal establishments...
...All had made their way by beguiling school children and affecting the style of slobs...
...Naturally they have endured tremendous abuse, but considering the sources of this abuse they should consider each salvo equivalent to receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor...
...Many strut and glare at their audiences as the practiced dictator might, but few could make their way in those faraway times when songs were vocally demanding...
...Nonetheless it is apparent that many millions escape their daily grinds to fantasize on these eminences...
...He seemed to have come through the ordeal unscathed...
...In Washington he follows the everchanging tides...
...Apparently "affirmative recruitment" allows the Department "to identify victims in a meaningful way...
...The rhetoric of this town is tortured beyond the outer limits of the scrutable...
...They have had the courage of their convictions and now members of the government such as Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Education William Bennett have taken up the neocons' fight against social engineering, permissiveness, and the notion that poverty can be solved and character built by endless government largess...
...First Senator Mathias and now Senator Simpson has threatened to vote with the liberals if the Administration keeps sending up `controversial' nominees...
...The struggle is serious because the advocacy of civil rights has been taken over by leftists and militant egalitarians seeking to implement their collectivist agenda by redefining "civil rights" to mean "civil privileges...
...These days, he said, "you say the same thing as Martin Luther King and it's labeled ultra-right...
...A doctrine of genetic entitlement is to replace the equal protection of the laws...
...Affirmative action, on the otherhand, entails numerical remedies which could very easily miss those who have been discriminated against...
...The occasional entertainer who might have become noteworthy in a 1920s year-end review would have been someone like Jerome Kern whose work bespoke by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...One theorized it was all part of the Washington status game, another suspected it was the only way to keep one step ahead of the civil servants (who work 9 to 5, but greatly out-number political appointees and pursue independent agendas more or less regardless of election results), while a third thought it was a way of escaping early morning domestic strife...
...Some disport on stage in work shirts and dungarees...
...That is why it is more accurate to say that we are living in a post-liberal era rather than a conservative era...
...I only wish they would insist on the music of Cole Porter and lines written by middle brows with taste, say, the scribes at the New Yorker...
...He ascribes to an old Washington maxim venerated by some of the town's most enduring giants: consistency is the lifeblood of a corpse...
...It is unlikely...
...Few want to be called straightforward liberals, but fewer want to abandon altogether the old appellation and throw in with the conservatives...
...Their party is still influenced by radicals, who, if they are nothing else, are inveterate fighters...
...Chances are, he even shrank from our military action in Grenada...
...It is not an urbane world populated by suave fellows such as the late David Niven...
...But the hordes that seek escape into the ghastly fantasy world of popular culture refute them...
...Inflation is low...
...I just stood there and listened," Weyrich said...
...That's a critical cross-roads," he said, "a struggle that will determine the shape of the country's future...
...Will the neoliberals...
...And, though the champions of prosperity on the left and on the right may dispute me, it is obvious that prosperi-ty is incapable of satisfying the yearnings of millions of Americanos...
...Popular singers and most TV perSLOB SISTERS 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1986 sonalities are insufferably gloomy, and where they ought to manifest sophistication and joie de vivre they reveal merely a dolt satisfaction in being slobs...
...Because I have a major problem with my committee," Thurmond replied...
...He is for defense, but of the small-is-beautiful variety...
...If there was a consolationby Tom Bethell prize for his rejection by the Judiciary Committee it was being able to remain in a position where he could have a say in the outcome...
...Yet from the recent reviews of 1985 appearing in our major news magazines it is obvious that large numbers of Americans cannot bear reality without frequent escapes into fantasy...
...And when it comes time to exert American power on behalf of American interests his desire for love overcomes his desire to preserve our interests and our security...
...C A P I T O L I D E A S JUSTICE DAY We were told to be at the 10th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue entrance of the Justice Department at 7:10 a.m...
Vol. 19 • March 1986 • No. 3
