The Rise of the Counter-Establishment

...Blumenthal's political history owes a great deal to the left, which treats any sober appraisal of the effects of our New Left and New Politics movements as just another form of McCarthyism...

...by Philip F. Lawler foreword by Richard John Neuhaus How do the Catholic bishops and the staff of the U.S...

...Only mainstream Democrats, working with-in their own party, can overcome the leftist provocations that so divided the country, and that stirred the New Right toward its surprising victories...

...the corner offices of corporate executives who still pride themselves on their `responsibility.' " Could it be that the Washington Post's hit man is now actually a candidate for one of Bob Tyrrell's soirees with Richard Nixon...

...They believe in institutions, including big ones, which they often run...

...My colleagues and I at Prodemca—many of us Democrats who had the presumption to favor aid to the Nicaraguan resistance—have been a regular object of his attentions...

...Economy" as a case study, this work offers, not a critique of the content of that statement, but an analysis of the process whereby the bishops arrive at their positions...

...What is missing is what was decisive: the transformation of liberalism and the Democratic party during the hey-day of Stokely Carmichael, Tom Hay-den, and eventually George McGovern and Jesse Jackson...

...More likely, Blumenthal was possessed by a rancor for the new conservatism, and by a welter of research, but was reluctant to ground his book on the failed left-liberalism of the Democratic party...

...The least one can say is that a writer who is so confused about his own basic political outlook should be less judgmental toward others who are testing new ideas and new alliances...

...Over and over he transforms offhand remarks or trivial incidents (which, despite his sporadic footnotes, are obviously based at best on hearsay) into events of momentous significance...

...More likely, it simply reflected a longing for a return to some form of the economics of hope...

...He worries that the new conservative counter-establishment will exploit this popularweakness to seize American politics in an enduring grip of irrationality and myth: an ideological dementia where anti-Communism, religious fanaticism, and crackpot economic theories all hazily commingle...

...Because Blumenthal cannot bring himself to turn a critical eye on the movements that transformed the Democratic party during the Mc-Govern era, he is left with an explanation for the rise of Ronald Reagan and the new conservatism that endows them with mysterious powers...

...At the end he turns plaintively toward "GOP traditionalists whose bastion is the Senate caucus and whose leader is Robert Dole...

...It is, however, badly compromised by Blumenthal's inability to resist catty, ad hominem thrusts which overwhelm his intellectual and journalistic judgment...

...His assessment is not unlike the homey metaphor used by Congresswoman Pat Schroeder: Reagan's is the "tenon" presidency...

...It argues that Ronald Reagan has overcome these Penn Kemble is chairman of the executive committee of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and president of Prodemca, a nonpartisan citizens' group that supports democratic development in Central America...

...Supply-side philosophers, to be sure, hoped that their ascendency marked a departure from liberal concerns about redistribution and equality...

...These Republicans still frequently find a natural sympathy in the old familiar places—the great law and ac-counting firms...

...That last season's admirer of Gary Hart is now inching toward Bob Dole's dressing-room door...

...Using the bishops' "Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S...

...Catholic Conference produce pastoral letters on public policy issues...

...Even if one should grant that the new conservatives are a gang of cranks and mercenaries, in two successive elections Ronald Reagan won substantial electoral majorities...

...Yet the personalities and the intellectual propositions of the new conservative counter-establishment, as Blumenthal portrays them, are so far-out and far-fetched that they seem bound to self-destruct...

...That a writer who owes his start to In These Times ("the Independent Socialist Newspaper" published by the Institute for Public Affairs) is now the vanguard of his own tendency of neo-neoconservatism...

...Reagan has raised conservatism out of its sectarian feuds and isolation by insisting that "all we need to have is faith, and that dream will come true...

...It notes how the zest for tax cuts and go-go entrepreneurialism of Jude Wanniski, Jack Kemp, and Irving Kristol conflicts with the born-again fiscal conservatism of David Stock-man...

...His scornful style works against his efforts to make the reader take his subject mat-ter very seriously...

...the investment banking houses...

...This book takes great relish in the intellectual contradictions that can be found in the pro-Reagan camp—contradictions that conservatives them-selves have addressed in quite open ways...

...Washington, D.C...

...One can pretty well match the "themes" once promoted by the New Left to the issues where the New Right and neoconservatives achieved their greatest moral and intellectual victories: quotas, accommodation to Communism, the exculpation of criminals, the celebration of self-gratification, the renunciation of personal responsibility, the disdain for economic effort...

...They have faith in established procedures, disdain plebiscites, and are suspicious of passionate social movements...

...It is hard to imagine that the Republican party will renounce the conservative counter-establishment, or the ideals and faith that it has so successfully exploited...

...20005 Please send copies of How Bishops Decide Please send copies of Challenge and Response ^Check enclosed...

...The trouble is, it can't land...

...Get America moving again," as John F. Kennedy once said—and we can sort the benefits out later...

...One expects, therefore, a conclusion to this book which summons the reader to rally again to the familiar forces of progress...

...I accepted the offer to review his new book with the expectation that it might explain whatever broader perspective under-lies his animadversions...

...It is not clear, however, whether Blumenthal really fears this prospect, or merely finds it contemptible...

...That is, of course, unless one believes that you can delude most of the people most of the time—an undemocratic premise that Blumenthal might be reluctant to acknowledge...

...This effort at conservative myth-making is explicitly compared to the liberals' prolonged exploitation of the epic of the Great Depression and the triumph of FDR over Herbert Hoover...

...But whether Democrats or Republicans lead, it is inconceivable that our popular democracy will ever renounce the American faith—the faith that has so profited Ronald Reagan, and that Blumenthal finds'so dangerous and so contemptible...

...Mainstream Democrats—not traditional Republicans—offer a far greater potential for relieving our political life of the polarization and ideological extremism that have strained it in recent decades...

...THE RISE OF THE COUNTER-ESTABLISHMENT: FROM CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY TO POLITICAL POWER Sidney Blumenthal/Times Books/$19.95 Penn Kemble Sidney Blumenthal is the jaundiced eye through which the Washington Post views the politics and culture of the New Right, the neoconservatives, and those it believes are the "objective" allies of these distasteful usurpers...

...It also treats figures such as Norman Podhoretz and William Buck-ley, whose efforts have centered on foreign policy and politics...

...Economy, edited with a foreword by Robert Royal...

...This is, of course, the rise of the New Left in the 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 1960s and 1970s—a movement that attained greater force in the universities, the media, and cultural affairs than anything yet attained by the conservative counter-establishment.' The theories of supply-side economics which Blumenthal so attentively explores were far too recondite and problematic to have achieved much vogue had not the Democratic competition fallen into abject defeatism: the zero-sum, no-growth economics of Carter's last days...

...But this, surprisingly, is not the case...

...contradictions with a shameless optimism and appeals to America's sense of national destiny, and that a network of foundations, think-tanks, and propagandists is now in place—the counterestablishment—that will strive to sustain this mystical synthesis when the President leaves office...

...Beirut, or for other lapses that would shake a "normal" presidency...

...There is, however, another explanation for the rightward trend in presidential voting and in popular political opinion—and for the rise of the new conservative ideologists—that Blumenthal curiously neglects...

...Those with dark imaginations may find in Blumenthal's importunances toward the old financialand Republican establishment some evidence of the protean capabilities of the left...

...It affords a much firmer explanation for the intellectual realignment that has taken place than the lure of the long-neglected writings of Whittaker Chambers and Milton Friedman...

...I am still confused...

...Ronald Reagan, like Roosevelt, is a purveyor of dreams...

...Also available: Challenge and Response: Critiques of the Catholic Bishops' Draft Letter on the U.S...

...It is all wings and no body...

...Has Arbatov decided that detente Republicanism is now the only alternative to the Reagan Doctrine...

...But what Blumenthal seems most to despise is the American tendency toward a politics that em-bodies elements of faith...

...If Blumenthal is right in his contention that the voters simply succumbed to snake oil salesmanship—and in his fear that they will do so in the future—then one has to conclude that the voters themselves are contemptibly gullible...

...It is at once less demoniacal and less scornful toward our democracy...

...As a result, he comes down clumsily, and in a most unlikely place...

...To the extent that Blumenthal holds out any response to the new conservatives, he seems to favor—hold your breath—the traditional Republicans...

...MASTER CHARGE ^VISA Card& Exp...

...He wistfully explains that "traditional Republicans, who compose their fair share of the groups excoriated by conservatives, do not think as populists...

...They see modern corporations as part of a world of large institutions protected by laws...

...how the Protestant right's call for a return to straight and narrow morality jars the unbuttoned-down, me-first yuppies of Wall Street and Silicon Valley...

...How Bishops Decide: An American Catholic Case Study 46 pp., paper, $4.00 Discounts for bulk orders...

...When it has come down somewhere, it glides in and, suddenly—flop...

...A less esoteric but also less comforting ex-planation might be that Reagan reflects the dominant values of American civilization, while many of his most ardent opponents do not...

...Bill me...

...how Milton Friedman's hostility to big government is challenged by the massive defense buildup advocated by the hardliners of the Committee on the Present Danger...

...So long as many Democrats allow themselves to be cast as challengers to those values—instead of offering more effective ways to serve them—the public will stay with Ronald Reagan and his successors...

...Signature Name Address City State 7ip THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1986 39...

...But Blumenthal's explanation of the victory of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the conservative counter-establishment cannot stand without just such a cynical premise...

...In the end, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment finds itself in the predicament of that species of albatross called the gooney bird...

...The future of American politics still lies with the most per-suasive champions of that faith...

...Blumenthal scores some easy points in his treatment of the short-comings of the new conservatism's answers to these afflictions...

...In his early pages Blumenthal was scandalized by CEOs who have lavished money on such institutions of the counter-establishment as the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Educational Affairs...

...They do not believe that the market can or should be populated only by Adam Smith's pin factories...

...Those who resort to this ex-planation wonder why Reagan isn't assailed for having failed to reduce the trade deficit, for the loss of Marines in 'The impact of the left on the Democratic party has an extensive literature, yet it still fails to have standing in the eyes of some participants in our political conversation...

...It played as great a part in the resurgence of ideological politics in the United States as National Review and the Goldwater campaign...

...He describes them as "catatonic" centrists whose policies reeked of "fiscal gloom and intellectual exhaustion...

...Roosevelt raised himself up on his crutches to declare that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...

...It lacks the strength at the center to coordinate its reach...

...Its chronicles include Alonzo Hamby's Liberalism and Its Challengers, Norman Podhoretz's Breaking Ranks, and R. Emmett Tyrrell's The Liberal Crack-Up...

...72 pp., paper, $4.00 Ethics and Public Policy Center 1030 15th St., N.W...

...It also raises questions about the obstacles to the bishops' effectiveness as moral teachers...

...His polemical stance is not unlike that of our recent British "entryists"—Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens—who appeal to the readers of the Nation and the Village Voice with a mixture of high Tory snobbery and Leninist scorn for the ungainly workings of democracy...

...It presents a series of intellectual portraits of conservative and neoconservative thinkers, especially those who have shaped economic debate during the Reagan era—Jude Wanniski, David Stockman, Milton Friedman, Irving Kristol...

...The Rise of the Counter-Establishment includes some useful research and has some stretches of lively writing...

...It has soared, it has swooped, it has skittered playfully along the waves...

...Blumenthal is dismissive of the neoconservatives: "a motley collection of exiles, ex-communists and nostalgists . . ." It is also evident that, although they make only a cameo appearance in this book, he has a similar contempt for what could be called the mainstream elements of the Democratic party: the Democrats who nominated and campaigned for Walter Mondale in 1984...

...But his ac-count of recent political history steps over the late sixties and seventies—an intellectual elision which moves directly from the movement of Bill Buckley and Barry Goldwater in the late 1950s to the rise of Commentary magazine and the neoconservatives in the mid-1970s...