The Outside Story
Brookhiser, Richard
1 philosophizes with a hammer, smashing away at the most sacred idols of the American political tradition—Lincoln, the "myth" of equality in the Declaration of Independence, the apocalyptic strain...
...On his hair and on his grin, which could light up his face—except when he was trying to be funny...
...Who best understands the principles that inspired those clean structures, and who is best able to sustain them, are ultimately issues of every presidential elecWe Americans owe Daniel Patrick Moynihan a large debt...
...tial that even he seems weary of squinting at it...
...Mencken wrote brilliantly on the subject in Making a President, but it is increasingly hard for readers to sympathize with a point of view so comprehensively nihilistic as to dismiss the entire political process as a peculiarly virulent species of buncombe...
...C Free atalog' Call (203) 453-9794, or fill out and send this ad to Audio-Forum Room 230, On-the-Green Guilford, CT 06437 State/Zip I am particularly interested in (check choice): ^ Spanish ^ French ^ German ^ Polish ^ Greek ^ Russian ^ Vietnamese ` 0 Bulgarian ^ Turkish ^ Hausa ^ Other `— ti a^Iws00 THE OUTSIDE STORY: HOW DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS REELECTED REAGAN Richard Brookhiser/Doubleday/$16.95 Terry Teachout UI1O—EI1%p THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 37 The Outside Story is unusual, perhaps even singular, in the civility which its author brings to the analysis of partisan politics...
...Surely they meant something by it...
...And Mr...
...No pigs...
...This insight earned Moynihan the "racist" and "sexist" epithets, and left him for a time a political pariah...
...because they are, in fact, different...
...Brookhiser's frame of reference, unlike that of so many of his contemporaries, is remark-ably wide...
...His set pieces on the various Democratic candidates, for example, are consistently sharp and amusing: Fortune gave Mondale baleful, fishy eyes...
...Liebling's The Earl of Louisiana is exemplary...
...Ferraro pegged her discussions of Lebanon and Central America to trips she had taken there as a congresswoman...
...I auoia'FaRUm offers the best in self-instructional foreign language courses using audio cassettes — featuring those used to train U.S...
...Four achievements, one flop, a million draws: what could the Democrats offer instead...
...And besides, there are contradictory elements in every tradition, and memories are always faulty and partial...
...Yet this state-enforced transfer of resources from the young to the old has produced an unintended result: The poverty rate of children in the United States is now seven times that of the SARKES TARZIAN INC WRCB...
...And the alternative has previously seemed to be that starchy, humorless species of liberal punditry of which Theodore White and Elizabeth Drew are the most flagrant practitioners...
...Mencken would certainly have thought so...
...Moynihan makes many telling points in Family and Nation...
...Brookhiser's argument...
...Between 1934 and 1939, she and her husband Gunnar devoted their considerable energies to constructing family and population policies for Sweden...
...Brookhiser's sense of humor is more a mat-ter of overall lightness of tone than vigorous one-on-one headknocking...
...In The Outside Story: How Democrats and Republicans Reelected Reagan, Richard Brookhiser has taken as his model a more modest brand of political journalism: the kind of colorful, personality-oriented writing of which A.J...
...CHANNEL 3 CHATTANOOGA TENNESSEE KTVN, CHANNEL 2, RENO, NEVADA WITS, 92 3 EM...
...Mondale made it up Terry Teachout is associate editor of Harper's...
...This is certainly true of Bradford's recollections of Roman history, for example, which need to be refreshed by some attention to Roman texts, and of his reading of the Declaration of In-dependence, which.is so glaringly parModern American journalists have had trouble finding a via media between grimness and frivolity when it comes to covering presidential politics...
...While their comprehensive proposals aimed, in essence, at the socialization of child rearing, their analysis of the components of family policy was without equal...
...During the 1960s and early 1970s, he labored almost alone to place the family on our political agenda...
...In either case, until it can find a reasonable way back to the principles of the founding, its prospects for the future do not look good...
...Consensus was the glue that held his position together...
...Brookhiser is very nearly up to the supremely high standards of his model...
...Brookhiser modestly omits) to sit down and write about it afterwards with the kind of deconstructionist zeal that penetrates the woozy surfaces of stump rhetoric to isolate the hard nubs of fact within...
...The Allan C Carlson is editor of Persuasion at Work, published by the Rockford Institute...
...The truth," he once remarked, "to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache...
...Witness this cogent analysis of Mario Cuomo's Notre Dame speech on abortion: There was only one weak spot...
...Two hundred million Americans, ultimately...
...to leave the green room and the wings and go out front, and attend, with respect, to the performance...
...But whenever it feels impossible to write about them with anything else, a mental glance at Washington (the scene of their worst outrages...
...He glimpses only tarnish in the "shining city on a hill" of Puritanism, and has no truck with "ideology" of any sort...
...He recognized that the making of a President is a mere epiphenomenon of the larger philosophy of conservatism...
...State Dept...
...Even the "Nixon-Moynihan" Family Assistance Plan of 1969-1970, flawed and ill-fated though it was, focused some attention on the troubling economics of modern family life, a subject which now promises to dominate domestic policy debates of the latter 1980s...
...Brookhiser to write a book about the 1984 campaign based not on background interviews and astonishing revelations a la Deep Throat but on the simplest method of all, "to focus on what the candidates and their supporters say and do in public...
...Politicians should not be silenced, and the abuse directed at them must not seek to expel them from the human community...
...It is impossible," he observes at the end of The Outside Story, to write about the carryings-on of American politicians without irony...
...Who provided the consensus on abortion...
...More often it is simply a single component of his first-rate journalistic skills, a not-so-simple matter of taking in the obvious and finding it revealing...
...But wasn't Governor Mario Cuomo a prominent and respected one of them...
...Although the book's subtitle is "Observations of a Southern Conservative," Bradford's point is that the original intention of the Framers embodied the highest traditions of antebellum Southern conservatism, and that by "remembering who we are," Southern conservatives may direct the country as a whole back to its Founding principles...
...fortune and high school football (at which he excelled) a nose that looked like a failed design for a can opener...
...and no Mafia-murdered fetuses...
...Twenty years later, though, prominent blacks such as William Raspberry and Glenn Loury are acknowledging Moynihan as a prophet...
...it knows what it does...
...The making of Presidents is necessarily a weightier affair in the age of The But-ton...
...INDIANA 47402 TELERHONE B?2 332 7251 FAMILY AND NATION Daniel Patrick Moynihan/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$12.95 Allan C. Carlson 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986...
...They express unthinking convention, what is done or not done, because everyone does or fails to do it—the morality of head counts...
...Perhaps Mr...
...INDIANA WGTC 1370 AM BLOOMINGTON INDIANA WADI...
...only in 1985 did an increase in the personal exemption from $1,040 to $2,000 become the pro-family centerpiece of the Reagan tax reform plan...
...But Richard Brookhiser is having none of it...
...book's title is a variation on the Nation and Family label used by Swedish social democrat Alva Myrdal in 1941...
...His title, for example, is charming, but the point it makes is perfectly straightforward: presidential campaigns are ultimately about issues and action rather than image and manipulation...
...that "all men are created equal" and are therefore endowed with certain natural rights...
...as foreign 1 I language on I your own...
...He shows also how the Social Security system has been used quietly over the past two decades as a massive income redistribution scheme to reduce poverty among the elderly...
...When, before Notre Dame, had he made a resonant statement of his personal opinion of abortion...
...The nose was also the place from which his voice emerged, about a quarter of the way down the bridge by the sound of it, where the bone ends and the cartilage begins...
...Beneath the fluffy meringue of an adroit journalist at work, The Outside Story is actually predicated on a vision of American politics which sounds at times uncannily like the rational-choice models of James Q. Wilson or Charles Murray: In the course of the 1984 campaign, eight men sought the nomination of one of the major parties...
...On the whole, though, Mr...
...To justify his refusal to appeal to universals he must make a universal argument: he appe,.ls to the distinction between "nomocratic" and "teleocratic" polities, between polities that live by, and for, their customary ways, on the one hand, and those that are "purpose-oriented," that have abstract or universalistic ends, on the other...
...Through progress in civil rights, he said, blacks in intact families were moving toward income equality with whites...
...In the same way, the American Declaration of Independence justifies the freedom of our own people on the basis of a universal principle...
...is a useful and necessary re-lief...
...his politics is an appreciation of the American tradition as it existed before the Great Emancipator "derailed" it, to borrow Willmoore Kendall's term...
...In 1968, Moynihan wrote the introduction to a new edition of Nation and Family...
...People don't take it all in uncritically...
...His three talks have now been published as Family and Nation, which, like Moynihan's earlier books, is entertaining, pro-vocative, and often maddening...
...Moynihan's famous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, reported on the emerging linkage of poverty to family structure within urban ghettos...
...If so, the Republican party had better either rethink its commitment to original intention, or abandon its tradition as the party of Abraham Lincoln...
...Cuomo had found, in consensus and prudence, a way of having religion when he wanted it and not having' it when he didn't...
...But this lightness never obscures the integrity of Mr...
...Brookhiser is naive in his belief that the public is more or less rational, that politics is a genuinely serious business in which ends and means must be balanced judiciously...
...If there is a better book on the 1984 presidential elections than The Outside Story, I have not yet read it...
...Or rather, he fancies that he does...
...for while saying he will ne'er consent, he consents...
...But the classics, although they began with their own city or their own political tradition, were not content to remain there, because the claim that their tradition made to be respectable, to be worthy, to be right, required for its own validation an inquiry into the universal question of right...
...Civility is self-conscious...
...He emphasizes that the disorganization of family life has spread beyond blacks and other minorities to white society as well...
...In the end, memory is no match for reason because men want to know that what they remember—their tradition—is good, not just that it is theirs...
...And (Mr...
...In April 1985, Moynihan reviewed his career in family policy as Harvard University's Godkin Lecturer...
...Mondale recited his speech solemnly, like someone explaining the facts of life...
...Without adopting the Myrdals' full social democratic perspective, Moynihan clearly learned from them how to "think about" the family...
...on his hair—brown gone gray, smooth and handsome as a badger-tail shaving brush...
...BLOOMINGTON...
...tion, and themes of its outside story...
...His discussion of the pro-life heckling of Geraldine Ferraro, for instance, is worlds away from the narrow vulgarity of those misguided young conservatives who, emulating the worst excesses of the sixties, take to the streets in search of instant resolution: Civility is not the same as politeness, or manners...
...But this distinction—a theoretical martini that is two parts Oakeshott, one part Voegelin, but that can be made drier—would itself be completely foreign to a genuinely traditional polity, whichwould not know that its tradition is not true, i.e., that it is only one among many traditions...
...It is this view of the political process that has led Mr...
...He also learned, particularly from Gunnar Myrdal, that good social-science research helps only to clarify options: social policy itself must flow from moral judgments, which social science cannot create...
...He came to understand that no large modern government, whatever its intentions, can avoid having policies that heavily influence family formation, structure, and relationships...
...Between 1970 and 1984, for ex-ample, the proportion of white families with female heads doubled from 10 to 20 percent...
...If he is right, however, a return to the "jurisprudence of original intention" would mean returning to the view that only white, property-owning free-men are citizens under the Constitution, or in fact are equal human beings under the Declaration...
...In the last year of the campaign alone, they spoke millions of words and made thousands of appearances...
...After trying a few shots of it on his customers, the larval statesman concludes sadly that it must hurt them...
...In the case of abortion, it recognizes that the gulf between contending sides is fundamental and irreconcilable, and yet that the partisans of both positions have more in common, as Americans, than the sum of their differences...
...It is, at any rate, nice to think so, nicer still to read so witty and compelling an argument for the good sense of the American public...
...Bradford refuses stubbornly to leave the horizon of his own tradition, and rather than following the Declaration's prudent path from America to universal principles and back to America, he rejects any attempt to justify conservatism on universal grounds...
...Sometimes it inheres in an essentially serious piece of analysis...
...personnel in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, ' Japanese, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Learn Italian, more...
...As early as 1965, he had noted the serious erosion in the value of the tax exemption for children and urged corrective action...
...The winner and his running mate then took on the incumbents, the nominees of the other major party...
...Liberalism, he observes casually at one point, "hasn't contributed anything first-rate to art or philosophy—to beauty or thought—since Swinburne or Mill...
...1 philosophizes with a hammer, smashing away at the most sacred idols of the American political tradition—Lincoln, the "myth" of equality in the Declaration of Independence, the apocalyptic strain in American presidential rhetoric...
...This willingness to take his own tradition seriously, to see it as the indispensable starting point for political reflection...
...951 Lti^ TORT `AAYNE, INDIANA CORPORATE OFFICE: BOX 62 BLOOMINGTON...
...is a healthy reminder of the political philosophy of the classics, of that inheritance of thought that antedates America by two thousand years and that stands today as the principal antidote to the nihilism that begins in rootlessness and ends in cosmopolitan tyranny...
...In contrast, blacks from female-headed families were increasingly trapped in a hopeless tangle of pathologies...
...She referred to them for the same reason Baudelaire wrote about sin, or Thomas Wolfe about Asheville: it was all they knew...
...They choose, which means they choose differently...
Vol. 19 • May 1986 • No. 5
