Astonishing Moments
ASTONISHING MOMENTS Distinguished observers select the single most astonishing development of the last twenty years. Hilton Kramer Editor, New Criterion Looking back on the last twenty years,...
...Charter Subscriptions begin in January, 1988...
...Self-inflicted AIDS carriers...
...How could Mr...
...Lewis E. Lehrman Founder, Lehrman Institute That Jack Kemp might be elected President of the United States on a platform based unequivocally on the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence and upon the idea of a restoration of the authentic American Constitution in every significant respect—this fact is the most significant political event since the candidacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...At a stroke, this proposition removes the basic socialist objection to capitalism as a system...
...But football has always had a slight flaw for me, and that is my tragic love affair with the GIANTS...
...It's no wonder that we have relinquished our position as the world's unquestioned industrial leader...
...To this day, I find the whole thing impossible to believe or to understand...
...Today it all seems like a dream...
...Nonplussed or not, however, the fact is that, where Richard Nixon was concerned, the seven deadly sinners were to truth and fairness what Teddy Kennedy is to anorexia...
...Otherwise, the most astonishing development of the last twenty years is the utter abandonment of socialism as an economic ideal, as evidenced by the world-wide consensus to cut steeply progressive tax rates and deploy free-market forces to fight poverty...
...Apparently this way consisted of something other than scoring more points than the opposing team...
...Their combined effect was to elevate anti-American sentiment, anti-middle class morality, and anti-intellectual cultural values to a position of commanding influence in our society, and so entrenched has that influence remained—despite the political changes of the last twenty years—that it even now dominates many of the institutions of government, business, culture, and family life...
...it is on the side of people everywhere...
...Arch Puddington Radio Free Europe/Radio...
...Does anyone...
...Moreover, since as conservatives we take our ideas seriously, it's good to have the hope that everything we and our mentors have predicted about the fate of our country may not come to pass after all...
...We have turned the Fabian inevitability of gradualism to our own ends...
...Don't miss an issue...
...The Soviets could quickly crush the rebellions of dissident satellite bosses such as Nagy in Hungary and DubCek in Czechoslovakia, but against the nonviolent moral force of the Polish workers...
...David Horowitz Former editor, Ramparts If I were looking at the twenty years ahead, as the intoxicated young radical I was in 1967, what would appear most astonishing to me would be my own passage over to the other side of the political barricades...
...It was tried extensively, and has failed spectacularly...
...Elliott Abrams Assistant Secretary of State The American defeat in Vietnam and its aftershocks—including the boat people, the fall of Laos and Cambodia, our greatly compromised ability and willingness to act forcefully to defend U.S...
...The cutoff of federal funds to liberal advocacy groups, the reforms that crippled the foreign service union and allowed the President to set his own foreign policy...
...T. Boone Pickens, Jr...
...Certain senile Supreme Court Justices...
...My introduction to corporate America as a geologist at Phillips Petroleum over thirty-five years ago was an eye-opening experience...
...Their work laid the foundation for Reagan's tax cuts, Thatcher's privatization, and the spread of the free economy around the world...
...They were GIANTS like Bert Lahr was a LION...
...Editor, National Review There is the temptation, in response to RET's invitation, to be funny, but I'll resist it...
...Thatcher retires there's a possibility that pound notes will be the only product produced by the British government...
...The shutdown of the Departments of Energy and Education...
...Whether this folly of the intellectual class, with its attendant decadence and despair, will also corrupt the common sense of the people will be the central challenge of the next twenty years...
...Heretofore, conservatives would have—and I must say not without reason—considered it perverse for a young man to propose to spend his days at a typewriter...
...While most Europeans consider estate tax rates of 70 percent (77 percent up till 1977) with an exemption of $60,000 ($75,000 after 1977) virtually confiscatory, virtually every American I knew either thought such rates the essence of social justice or an essentially unremovable slice of American reality...
...Boy, was I naive...
...What...
...No doubt conservatives have changed as well...
...R. Randolph- Richardson President...
...Jack Kemp Congressman, New York The single most astonishing development of the past twenty years is Bob Tyrrell's move from Bloomington to Babylon-on-the-Potomac...
...The return of federal lands to the people of Alaska and other states...
...Bigotry against Christians (if they take their religion too seriously...
...It is in its way the most singular human event of our time...
...Frank based his prediction on his own study of the history of the Fabian Society, which had taken twenty years to make England socialist...
...First of all, it's rewarding...
...Can you believe that Europeans look down on us while they spend their time playing soccer, and even try to cover it up by calling it football...
...inspired as those workers were by a deep Christian faith) the Soviets did not dare send in their tanks...
...Today, liberals oppose nuclear power, support "affirmative action," claim to believe in the virtues of balanced budgets, and support the use of American military power only when there is clear evidence that a Soviet brigade has actually landed on Long Island for reasons other than attending a cocktail party...
...and that if he leaves an additional $600,000 to his widow, $1,200,000 will not be taxed...
...The Mafia...
...It was then, of course, that the American people realized they didn't much need a federal government, after all...
...Consider the following groups and pronouncements exempt from criticism by today's Jim Farleys and Franklin Roosevelts: •Bigotry against white males...
...If we look back on thirty years of The American Spectator in 1997, perhaps Nicaragua will loom as large as Vietnam—one way or another...
...The frost has melted and the rust has been scraped away...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 21 Norman Podhoretz Editor, Commentary I guess I would have to say that to me the single most astonishing event of the past twenty years was Watergate...
...The appointment of droves of well-qualified conservatives of every type—blacks and women, evangelicals and "ethnics...
...Instead of encouraging imagination, creativity, and resourcefulness, the major corporations stifle initiative and reward complacency...
...Perhaps their trumpets deafened us...
...The liberals have indeed cracked up...
...And we can then take our places in the family firms...
...It has already corrupted the way we think about thinking and bids fair to corrupt the way we think about ourselves...
...It's nice to know conservatives are THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 23 William A. Rusher Publisher, National Review The most astonishing development of the past twenty years—indeed, as I believe Irving Kristol has contended, of this century—has been the worldwide and near-total collapse of socialism as a viable politico-economic theory...
...Other mistakes will no doubt soon turn up to bewitch the mind of man, but it would be some small triumph if our century could record the discarding of at least one grand error...
...The most astonishing development of the last twenty years has been the transformation—more precisely, the inversion—of liberal thought...
...Janet Cooke...
...All that we had to do was to keep butting and kicking...
...Once again, we have seen that ideas have consequences...
...Watergate proved to us Europeans what disproportionate power and influence the seven deadly sinners—as Paul Johnson calls CBS, NBC, ABC, Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, and the Washington Post—have in America and how this power can be ill used...
...Midge Decter Committee for the Free World The most astonishing event of the past two decades—though not admittedly the most important—was William F. Buckley's advising Robert Bauman, on learning of his old friend's homosexuality, that he should resign from the House of Representatives...
...Just call us at 802/649-1996...
...Yet in 1981 the United States Congress with unprecedented speed and without hearings decided that from 1987 onwards a pater familias can go to his heavenly rest with the assurance that $600,000 of his estate will not be taxed by Uncle Sam...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Roger Kaplan Associate editor, Reader's Digest The most interesting development of the past two decades must surely be that in all this time R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., hasn't put in an honest day of work...
...Oh, yes, and Jimmy Carter...
...Smith Richardson Foundation The accelerating pace of change generates "astonishing developments" almost daily...
...We have had peace longer than ever, rising prosperity almost everywhere, a considerable spread of democracy, and, not least, in most Western countries people—with the exception of most intellectuals—have come to their senses and voted in governments to pursue more conservative—in short, less featherheaded—policies than before...
...The situation eventually made the ruling class so uneasy that the owner was compelled to turn management over to a former high school history teacher who gradually reversed the team's decrepitude, thereby furnishing long-awaited proof of the value of history...
...Edwin J. Feulner President, Heritage Foundation The single most encouraging development of the past twenty years was the restoration of market economics as mainstream economic thought...
...Now, for the first time ever, the best of today's political cartoons from all over the-country will: be featured each week in POLITICAL FIX, a six-page broadside published 50 times a year and delivered by First Class mail...
...The event which I consider "astonishing" took place on September 1, 1974, when the Nobel Committee announced that the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science that year would be shared by Friedrich A. von Hayek...
...Our most friendly counselor in our moods of editorial despair was Frank Chodorov, a Grand Street philosopher who told us that it would take twenty years in order to have our way...
...party, their baleful influence remains powerful...
...Maybe it was the glare of the mighty Sunbelt...
...But a funny thing happened on the way to the cemetery—New York and New England arose in renewed health and vigor...
...Jim Farley and the other pols helped FDR put together the Democratic coalition of a workable majority...
...In the short run, things may get worse...
...Hours after Ronald Reagan's Inauguration, it began: the most astounding 100 days of any presidency...
...I said at the time to my son: "This is the most astonishing thing that has happened in my lifetime...
...Ernest van den Haag Fordham University The past twenty years have been so filled with astonishing developments that it is hard to single out any one...
...Well, in that case, the most astonishing event of the last twenty years is that it didn't happen...
...It is brilliantly edited as shown by the fact that it solicits my contributions...
...The nominally socialist government of France is selling the state's equities in industries as rapidly as it can find buyers...
...Edward I. Koch Mayor, New York City Of all the upheavals of the last twenty years, the one that strikes me as the most uplifting is the prematurely announced death and subsequent resurrection of the great American heartland—the Northeast...
...So let us not despair of the future of our social agenda: anything can happen in Congress...
...Boss" Tweed met his maker in the Ludlow Street Jail and Thomas Nast put bitingly eloquent political cartoons squarely and permanently in the middle of American political life...
...Ask many intelligent Europeans and they will be nonplussed...
...The underlying change in perception is that socialism is a failure everywhere save in the minds of leftwing Democrats...
...He has demonstrated that it is possible to be a conservative and yet be devoted to the world of ideas...
...What majority does the Democratic party represent today...
...Looking backward in 1987, as the sober conservative I have become, what is astonishing to me is the sight of my former comrades—those who tried so earnestly and maliciously in the sixties to subvert and destroy the most tolerant,- egalitarian, and democratic community on earth—not only still-running free, but still pur-' suing their malicious quest to destroy this magnanimous Republic and replace it with another Marxist gulag...
...But if one takes socialism to mean Lenin instead of Marx, it's all too alive in the context of Russian military power...
...For your own Charter Subscription and each gift subscription, send $39.00 to: POLITICAL FIX Box 804A Norwich, VT 05055 VISA and Mastercard are accepted...
...Except for the Defense Department, which, with the help of the Free Nicaraguans, liberated Grenada and Cuba...
...Hilton Kramer Editor, New Criterion Looking back on the last twenty years, the historical event that cast the longest shadow and exerted the most decisive influence on my thinking was the emergence in the late sixties of the counterculture and the anti-Vietnam war movement...
...If taken seriously, it would mean that the discussion on public policy could get back to the moral and practical issues from which it was diverted, a century or more ago, by the dream that the right kind of society could solve the human condition: such has been the major category mistake of our time...
...Even a publication a good deal shakier than Tyrrell's was in the old days (and that is quite shaky indeed) is likely to last longer than the typical love-match made today...
...When ideas become current—when politicians, journalists, or anyone else speak conservative without realizing it, as for many years they spoke liberal without realizing it—their test is no longer how they play in intellectual magazines or for that matter in any magazines, but how closely they correspond to reality...
...Growing up in Oklahoma, I saw the business establishment as the driving force behind the free enterprise system that built the greatest nation on earth...
...Joshua Muravchik American Enterprise Institute The most important event of the last twenty years occurred on January 25, 1987 when the GIANTS won the Superbowl...
...The American Spectator has appeared...
...It's these shifts in the bedrock of opinion that create the future, the era-shaping movements that tomorrow's Paul Johnsons will discern tong after 98 percent of today's news is forgotten...
...Runner-up is a tie between the miraculous rise of Solidarity and the Grenada invasion...
...Almost as nonplussed as I am over what Hunt and Liddy were doing in the Watergate in the first place...
...Football is manifestly man's highest endeavor and the definitive proof of the superiority of American culture...
...It was a dream...
...I'm sure that Frank Chodorov would have savored it if he had lived to see it...
...There is nothing pre-determined about the outcome of that struggle: as always, everything will turn on what good men and women choose to do...
...At the time, one would have almost certainly given us the better chance of lasting twenty years (as we have...
...And if not the most surprising development of the last twenty years, the weakening of family bonds is perhaps the most far-reaching and most difficult to undo...
...What was Richard Nixon's crime...
...United Shareholders Association One of the most startling revelations of my lifetime has been the laziness and arrogance of America's corporate titans...
...Leslie Lenkowsky President, Institute for Educational Affairs Although I don't think there was any link between the two, the year after The American Spectator was founded my wife and I were married...
...How proud we were when the President vetoed Congress's unbalanced budget, when he shut down the federal government for two weeks...
...Howard Phillips Chairman, Conservative Caucus The most astonishing political fact of the past twenty years is the failure of conservatives during three Republican presidencies (those of Nixon, Ford, and Reagan) fully to comprehend and effectively oppose the control of U.S...
...Yet since then, I have seen that a bureaucratic mentality pervades corporate America...
...There was no greater gulf, I thought, between European and American attitudes than those toward inherited property...
...Did it surprise anyone when the Republicans captured both houses of Congress in '82...
...A fishing industry trade paper reports that socialist New Zealand is using the market mechanism to distribute entry rights in certain fisheries, having concluded this will provide better resource preservation than quotas and regulations...
...national security, which in turn helped produce Iran and Nicaragua—continue to dominate our political culture...
...If you ask how I knew that my love was unrequited, you obviously never saw the GIANTS play...
...now, I am not so sure...
...Liberty The McGovernite takeover of the Democratic party...
...However, it is important to understand what accompanies this deep change in conventional wisdom...
...He had going for him only that Kool-Aid with and without cyanide is indistinguishable...
...But the pictures didn't stop...
...There are now a number of good magazines in addition to National Review...
...The score was 39 to 20...
...But that episode told me about a reach of hypnotic demagogy I hadn't in a lifetime's reading thought still possible...
...The reversal reached its sub-limit last January 25...
...And before Mrs...
...In the Unfree World, Communists are struggling with the familiar dilemma of an ideology overrun by reality, having at last discovered that incentives and uncontrolled prices do more for production than the knout and the Gulag ever could...
...and we can tell our mothers, wives, and mistresses that contrary to what they say it is demonstrably untrue that we are mental cripples and slouches...
...To me, the most astounding thing of the past twenty years is the accuracy of Frank Chodorov's thinking...
...Sadly, it's a brief answer: The Republican party.taken seriously...
...In subsequent years, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, and James Buchanan would join Hayek in receiving this award...
...Skirts are getting higher once more and the stock market follows—what more can you want...
...The "political general strike" foreseen by Georges .Sorel as the workers' only way to introduce Communism has thus come about, ironically, as a workers' movement against Communism...
...When else have those regularly featured in the TAS Current Wisdom section been able to boast of sitting at the commanding heights of America's largest political party...
...Richard A. Viguerie President, Viguerie Company I remember it like it was yesterday...
...John Chamberlain Syndicated columnist Thirty-seven years ago, when you could count professed conservatives and libertarians on two hands, we were hard put to it to round up seven or eight contributors to the first issue of a revived Freeman magazine...
...I have read some good books—lately Roger Scruton's Sexual Desire—among the usual number of bad ones...
...It seems only yesterday that it bestrode the world, while we free-enterprisers cowered in our closets...
...So let's think big: In twenty years, the success of liberty will be assured, our country will be impregnable...
...The reason...
...The most astonishing event of the past twenty years is the Solidarity rising in Poland—a purely trade-unionist protest against a left-wing despotism...
...foreign policy by a commercial clique which has lined the pockets of its banks, law firms, brokerage houses, and multinational corporations at the expense of America's moral standing and geostrategic vital interests, even as their anti-patriotic plunder has been subsidized by unwary taxpayers and favor-currying congressmen of high ambition and low character...
...Democratic capitalism is not only on the side of history...
...22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987 John Von Kannon Vice President, Heritage Foundation I find it most astonishing that the party of Franklin Roosevelt is still a major force in American life—even more the majority party...
...Franz M. Oppenheimer Washington lawyer There is nothing more astonishing than to have one's expert opinion proved wrong, which happened to me in 1981...
...STOP THEM DAMN PICTURES" That's what "Boss" Tweed demanded when he saw the handwriting on the Hall (Tammany, that is...
...Nonetheless, it was The American Spectator, coming on the scene at a time when America seemed to be disintegrating into mental, moral, and political anarchy, that made it known that, for some of us, at least, who didn't much care to take over the family business anyway (mine was in Chapter Ten), the century might be—might remain—American...
...And the reference was to Jonestown...
...James Q. Wilson Maurice Cranston Collins professor of management, UCLA London School of Economics 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1987...
...For one thing, I am on record...
...Bigotry against Jews (depending on the source...
...There were plenty of anti-Stalinists around, but if you scratched them they were all socialists...
...It's as if Mohammed had opened a distillery, or Moses had gone into hog-farming...
...Tweed aside, we think Emerson had it right when he said, "Caricatures are often the truest history of the times...
...A mad (anti-Christian) preacher, causing 900 people to drink Kool-Aid with cyanide in it...
...Kenneth Minogue Author, The Liberal Mind In the wake of the last British General Election, Neil Kinnock uttered some words which ought to become famous: "Self-interest is not necessarily selfish...
...The two mendacious hacks invented Deep Throat, and the man who chose to turn a blind eye while the Kennedys used the CIA and the FBI to blackmail their political enemies and intimidate business executives—not to mention what they did to Marilyn Monroe—let them run loose on the pages of the newspaper that gave us Ms...
...We Europeans believe in powerful presidents and here was a powerful (?) president of the then most powerful nation on earth who had just won a landslide election and who was run out of town by two mendacious hacks, an editor who once flacked for the Kennedys, and some publicity hungry pols...
...Never has a nation performed so poorly economically and gained so much in armaments and strategic advantage over such a protracted period...
...The important point is to understand what is at stake, to find stomach for the battle, and to avoid the sin of despair...
...And journalism itself, man by man, was never inhospitable to anyone with strong views...
...Making and selling typewriters, perhaps—but surely making use of them was an activity fit only for ne'er-do-wells...
...in the long run—Keynes to the contrary—the laws of nature and of nature's God will endure...
...The Nobel Prize Committee's decision signaled the international establishment's recognition of the importance of the work of these men in support of the market economy, the rule of law, individual freedom, property rights, and the redefinition of the appropriate role for government...
...The team was run by a man who had inherited ownership of it, a fact which furnished Marxists with an unparalleled opportunity to illustrate to the masses, the irrationality of capitalism...
...The rest of the deadly sinners followed, and we got Communist South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Angola as a result...
...When asked why he didn't take certain steps that most observers believed would '§ trengthen the team, he once replied that the GIANTS wanted to win their own way...
...Now socialism has been officially repudiated in many countries, and quietly jettisoned in virtually all the rest, including (incredibly) Red China and the Soviet Union itself...
...But the liberal change is more important, because in the long run, liberals run the country...
...So how has the Democratic party remained such a force...
...entrepreneurs and labor leaders—replacing limousine-liberal Democrats and country-club Republicans...
...Oh, of course, let us acknowledge our debts: there was National Review, there was the Freeman and other smaller journals...
...But nearly all are but symptoms of shifts in widely held perceptions...
...Joy over the triumph of capitalism must be tempered by recalling that the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan enslaved nations culturally and economically far ahead of themselves...
...And, soon thereafter, the presentation to Congress of the first balanced budget in over a decade...
...Michael Uhlmann Washington lawyer The most astonishing occurrence of the past twenty years has been the speed with which nihilism has infected the philosophical bloodstream of the West...
...For us, this means that if the transformation of American ideas was the most important event of the past twenty years, the most important project of the next twenty must be to see our ideas succeed in practice...
...we would have gotten nowhere without them and even today we would be nowhere without them...
...In the early 1960s, liberals favored nuclear power, believed that blacks should have equal opportunities but not special favors, endorsed Keynesian economics, and wanted the United States to use military and economic power to contain Soviet (and proxy) expansion...
...Regarding the latter event, the very fact that the liberation of a tiny Caribbean nation should strike one as unusual or surprising suggests that while McGovern's followers may no longer control the Democratic...
...Buckley not have known that whereas sleeping with girls is nowadays enough to destroy a man's candidacy, soliciting adolescent boys is positively helpful, and constitutes grounds for the claim to the higher candor, bravery, sensitivity, and compassion...
...no one was ever told, "You have right-wing views therefore you cannot do this...
...A penetrating contemporary chronicle, always amusing, POLITICAL PM is probably the best Christmas present to come along since plum pudding...
...Taki Columnist, London Spectator As a European, I found the phenomenon of Watergate to be the most astonishing event of the last twenty years...
Vol. 20 • December 1987 • No. 12
