William F Buckley, Jr.
Judis, John B.
kin's exercise in Deep Thinking, Being and Doing. In it the United States is labelled a Colonized Society, with the oppressing Colonies duly dubbed the Violence Colony, the Plantation Colony, the...
...Joyless orthodoxy is more apparent across the aisle: conservatism is New York City, liberalism is Tehran...
...From Tokyo to Berlin, Moscow to London, Roosevelt was challenged with opportunities to wage peace or war, yet adopted a foreign policy as fleeting and insubstantial as wind over sand...
...The revolutionary faction grasped the power of the new technology and used it to stunning advantage...
...He failed at this, and was dead before the opening of the second session...
...This suggests that conservatives have enjoyed a moratorium on liberal opprobrium, when in fact the Washington sky has been brown with mud these last eight years...
...Liberals have also continued to plink away at other perennial targets: If your wife stays at home with the kids, they'll snipe at her...
...The Society continued to grow (though not less cranky) and in 1961, when Buckley proposed another attack, he was opposed by staffers William Rusher and Frank Meyer...
...Bloomingdale's is less crowded than GUM because millions of persons in the New York metropolitan area who might otherwise choose to shop there cannot afford to-either because they are unemployed or because they expend the bulk of their income on food, housing, fuel, medical care, tuition and transportation...
...Though he drove a stake through Ayn Rand's heart, that wasn't enough to bring the old girl down, if the large number of her current fans is any indication...
...the national newsmagazines had influence far greater than they retain today...
...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...
...Their knowledge, as it were, would set them free...
...Yes, all the capital letters are in the original, and what we are talking about is the way the ordinary citizen is oppressed by police, the workplace, TV, and the schools...
...These are not unreasonable positions...
...That it was stormed by celibates suggests the likelihood that there were stakes involved other than the happiness of Catholic marriages...
...Secularization in the West was well along, and with it the privatization of morality...
...We are not Klansmen...
...Muggeridge insists the true purpose was "the passionate desire and vital necessity of the revolutionary clerisy to destroy the idea that the hierarchical magisterium possessed supreme authority in the Catholic Church, authority unavailable to any other segment of that community...
...He was also a bit aloof and high-nosed as a lad, but after the army was a regular enough guy and ready to put the world on track...
...Unlike earlier factions who attempted to "update" or "modernize" Catholic teaching and practice, the disaffected faction in the 1960s had the spirit of the times on their side...
...Liberals will be reminded of the foulest aspects of the right and praise themselves once more for having stayed away...
...NR writer (and American Opinion editorial board member) Medford Evans put it this way: "My view on the subject is that National Review should refrain from making any criticisms of other periodi Cl,- Cmd Nc E.crtm...
...Buckley...
...Those words also describe the condition of the Catholic Church, Mrs...
...2 (4 issues) O Personal $35.00 O Institutional $55.00 Check enclosed-111 Please charge my VISAL MasterCardC NOTE: All subscriptions payable in advance...
...We may say love your brother, but never bugger him...
...That so lively and cooperative a subject comes across a bit pale is no credit to the author...
...Despite his own preferences, and those of 95 percent of his sixty-plus member commission to study the Church's traditional teachings about sex and procreation, Pope Paul VI-saying that he was unable to find a basis for overruling the Church's traditional teaching-issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae, in July 1968...
...His defense of the impure George Will (who criticized Agnew and Nixon) riled the paleocons, the neocons have attacked him for harboring Joseph Sobran, and lunarcon John D. Lofton of the Washington Times has charged Buckley with being soft on sodomites for publishing gay rights essays by an anonymous author...
...Obvious questions aren't answered...
...Inevitably one's laughter is tempered by the realization of the influence IPS exerts on our decision-makers...
...As the theologians demanded respect for their views on moral and theological issues, so the bishops staked their claims for greater autonomy and for a share in the Church's teaching authority, when acting "collegially...
...Just call us at 802/649-1996...
...But thanks to Buckley the more outrageous views are rarer, and he's surely part of the reason that the right is an interesting place to be...
...Not everyone on the right was supportive of the man whom Judis has dubbed the "patron saint of the conservatives...
...We may bash the commies-and their spouses...
...7. Consolidation and institutionalization-or counter-revolution...
...in truth, she thinks it more than that), Mrs...
...29.95 Illustrated A Selection of the Conservative Book Club PHOTOS COURTESY FDR LIBRARY AND US ARMY SIGNAL CORPS...
...We are not storm troopers...
...Though he was again opposed by Rusher and Meyer, who were joined by NR staffers Brent Bozell and William Rickenbacker, on February 3, 1962 he published the famous editorial, "The Question of Robert Welch...
...Ending this tragic estrangement could eventually earn Jack Kemp the saintly status...
...God and Man at Yale was his Big Bang...
...The award-winning international journal covering intelligence, counterintelligence and related aspects of international afffairs, business and law enforcement...
...Here are the ideas, here is the style of the lumpen-bourgeoisie, the half-educated, half-successful provincials...
...4. A triggering incident...
...Muggeridge tells us, which is nowadays "like a city ravaged by war...
...It's like going to an acid test without having to take the drug...
...the modulations of its echo can be read fortnightly in National Review...
...Poetry editor Hugh Kenner once got William Carlos Williams to contribute a poem, only to be denounced by readers for printing a poet who had belonged to a Communist front organization...
...Muggeridge's argument is that in the 1960s and 1970s, during and after the Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church suffered what amounts to a successful revolution, quite like the upheavals that transform secular societies...
...And blacks, despite their overwhelming sup port of positions held by many conservatives, don't feel welcome in the ranks, perhaps because some conservatives still hold that blacks were better off when they were slaves...
...Muggeridge says that when Pope John XXIII realized, during the first session of Vatican Council II, that events were out of control, he attempted to organize a movement among the bishops to bring the proceedings to a close...
...This isn't to say that "Saint Bill" completely cleaned the stable...
...J udis ignores much of this dynamism, but then he cannot be expected to exalt the vivacity of the conservative movement, as he is a socialist with his own interests to look after...
...6. A radical phase proclaiming a new order...
...0 WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY, JR.: PATRON SAINT OF THE CONSERVATIVES John B. Judis/Simon and Schuster/$22.95 Dave Shiflett N ewcomers to politics, especially those of us who strayed in during the Reagan years, have been entertained when complete strangers walk up at parties and list our every flaw...
...The spires have fallen, the wells are poisoned, the government is in exile...
...A penetrating contemporary chronicle, always amusing, POLITICAL PIX is custom-made for anyone interested in the events that shape and shake our world...
...The heart of Mrs...
...The magazine was necessary for several purposes: sway opinion leaders, recruit and lead the conservative army, Dave Shiflett is a writer living in Virginia...
...But again, every anecdote seems to have a political undertone, and a book obsessed with politics is bound to be a little flat...
...Like snap estimates of the weight of Manhattan, however, these appraisals are usually a little off and if you haven't got anything else to do you can spend the evening in rebuttal...
...Old conservatives can relive the days of the great struggle...
...Racist, pro-Franco, pro-smokestack, pro-greed, anti-Semitic, anti-fag, antiheliocentric universe-the denunciations come like hornets and don't stop until the nest empties...
...Along with a solid base of stuffed shirts and conventional types, it is also home to goldbugs, star warriors, tax slashers, soldiers of fortune, privatizers, and other freethinkers you won't find in the liberal camp...
...B uckley has taken other stands to put him at odds with conservatives...
...explains the nature of the devil many liberals still see in conservatives...
...For your own, and each gift subscription, send $39.00 to: POLITICAL PIX ~ Box 80411 VISA and Mastercard are welcome...
...If you think abortion is murder, they'll shoot twice...
...There has been no truce...
...the missal became a weekly throwaway...
...His discipline in these matters earns the reader's respect...
...The old nun was stripped of her habit...
...Buckley was more interested in burying cranks, not praising them, and as the movement's Martin Luther he sailed his inkwell at the isolationists, anti-Semites, incurable racists, and John Birchers...
...His impression seems to be that while the current conservative corpus is an imperfect beauty-a Lollobrigida minus an eye and a couple of teeththe old model also had numerous boils and the temper of a piss-guzzling snake...
...But those of us who came to Washington to promote freedom and harmony cannot help but be taken aback by these slanders...
...Not everyone supported this beautification project...
...But, no, it is not funny...
...And to some degree or another, all of us will admire the boy who scolded the king, and many of us will praise him...
...the old hymns were sung no more, replaced by Father John Pepsicola strumming his latest tunes...
...too many lives were shattered...
...Dwight Macdonald, in a Commentary review entitled "Scrambled Eggheads On The Right," said: "The McCarthy nationaliststhey call themselves conservatives, but that is surely a misnomer-have never made so heroic an effort to be articulate...
...Lyons's article drew flak from conservatives who felt the movement had few enough friends as it was without shooting one of them...
...But the pictures didn't stop...
...What manner o f statesman...
...In assessing the Church's future prospects (as though it were a human organization...
...Reagan "casts a spell" over the nation-an observation that strikes the modern mind as being a bit supernatural...
...By the time he was in boarding school he was a strong debater and quick to argue political and religious issues...
...He writes for The American Spectator, and many other publications the Church's power structure, they grew resentful...
...The sexual revolution was in the foreplay stage...
...In truth, Judis's talk of saints and such doesn't fit the conservative movement...
...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 PIX, a six-page broadside published 50 times a year and delivered by First Class mail...
...But the Birch problem wouldn't go away, forcing Buckley finally to take out the pole ax...
...Some of the solidest conservatives in the country are members of the John Birch Society," Meyer cautioned his editor, "and we should act in such a way as to alienate them no more than is strictly necessary from a moral, political, or tactical point of view...
...Yet our adversaries look into our eyes and see a skullful of gremlins...
...We do have our beliefs...
...Yet, all in all, the strength of the radical forces was such that there was little need for moderation...
...But Judis does not fall into the puerile snideness sometimes encountered in M. Kinsley, nor does he seem to suffer the self-righteousness of the dread Sid Blumenthal...
...Ollie North not only suffered the lash of the shyster Nields, but was scorned by the entire left...
...Judis's description of the Birch affair is a particularly revealing part of his book...
...48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 cals except in the one case when we earnestly feel that a spokesman for conservatives has made a grievous error...
...Why's that...
...In her book, Mrs...
...From time to time, however, Judis does offer an observation that is at odds with reality...
...Birch Society founder Robert Welch pledged $1,000 to National Review in 1955 and another $1,000 two years later, though not without informing Buckley that Ike "was on the wrong side...
...Harper's editor John Fischer noted its "conspiracy theory of liberal control" and its "grave doubts about freedom...
...Judis tells some interesting stories, like about the time some of the Buckley children (WFB not among them) burned a cross at a Jewish resort and played unchristian tricks on some of their Protestant neighbors...
...The religious academics are the Church's information industry and knowledge elite...
...who responded to Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Senator McCarthy...
...Judis also believes Mr...
...Newcomers, who arrived after the beaches had been What manner o f man, Franklin Delano Roosevelt...
...A nne Roche Muggeridge introduces her moving and beautifully written book with a passage from the Lamentations of Jeremiah on the fall of Jerusalem: "How doth the city sit desolate that was full of people: how is she become as a widow that was mistress among nations...
...Frederick Marks carefully documents the course of Roosevelt's prewar and wartime diplomacy, tracing a pattern of fiery rhetoric unsupported by concrete action, of commitments made and then quickly withdrawn...
...Muggeridge commits neither the sin of presumption nor despair...
...In several other highly political passages, Judis comments on "the passing of the conservative moment," which sounds like wishful thinking when you consider the herd of nags the Democrats dispatched to snatch the throne away from Uncle Ron...
...3. A weakened government...
...0 "STOP THEM DAMN PICTURES" That's what "Boss" Tweed demanded when he saw the handwriting on the ball (Tammany, that is...
...Paid subsistence wages, without influence in Michael A. Scully co founded the journal This World...
...Arthur Waskow alone could provide material for a whole series of skits on "Saturday Night Live," not to mention the cohort of the undisciplined left that departed IPS with him in 1977 in a salary dispute, depriving the institute of credit for further pearls from the author of Lesbians in Revolt and The Seven Days of Creation from a Buberian Feminist Perspective...
...Religious academics are the Church's "new class," and the tremendous expansion of Catholic institutions of higher learning in this century greatly expanded their numbers...
...The next spring National Review published Eugene Lyons's attack on Welch and his American Opinion magazine, a brave move for many reasons, including the fact that a chief NR financial supporter was a Birch Society member...
...And where the left suffers a strange infatuation with the modern world, you can go to a right-wing party and meet people who speak as if they just walked out of the fifth century-or before...
...Television news had come into its own...
...Saying that Welch was "damaging the cause of anti-Communism," Buckley pointed out a truth that bears repeating today: "There are bounds to the dictum, anyone on the right is my ally...
...Buckley has not been the only heretic...
...All in all, we are out to spread light, not darkness...
...On critical issues, he frequently offered strong, traditional statements, and then undercut them by allowing inexplicable exceptions and neglecting to enforce his edicts...
...Muggeridge believes that for the most part the moderate phase of the revolution ended when the Council ended, late in 1965...
...How this came about and, secondarily, the likelihood of repair and reconstruction, are the themes of The Desolate City...
...In this revolution, the Bastille was the bedroom...
...In that happy if unlikely event, the Astonishing Works of IPS could then be savored with unalloyed enjoyment...
...His stand earned him wide respect, and the financial supporter stayed with the magazine...
...A supposed highbrow ideologue, he reached into the guts of reality and rearranged things...
...The logic is as ludicrous as the rhetoric...
...and bishops, especially those in the Rhine countries and North America, who saw Vatican II as an opportunity to reclaim power and autonomy lost in the preceding hundred years...
...Muggeridge contends that there were, indeed, two aggrieved classes: religious academics, of whom theologians were the most powerful and prominent...
...in U.S...
...A reputed elitist, he has spent most of his adult life broadening conservatism's appeal...
...Perhaps Powell's book, and the immense research effort it represents, will close the chapter on IPS's charmed existence...
...dollars...
...That the devil's day has largely passed is credited to Mr...
...Where else, for instance, can you meet defenders of geocentrism...
...After Mr...
...Tweed aside, we think Emerson had it right when he said, "Caricatures are often the truest history of the times...
...His successor, Pope Paul VI, Muggeridge rightly calls the weakest Pope of this century...
...John B. Judis's biography of William F Buckley, Jr...
...But the magazine continued to print the kind of conservative fantasy disguised as theory that would have offended Burnham," Judis sermonizes at one point, making it clear that his own purpose is political, not historical or artistic...
...For instance, Buckley is said to be a pretty good piano player, but Judis doesn't tell us if he's up to Beethoven or still stuck on Bach...
...His intention here is not to write a laudatory Roots of the right wing, and though he treats his subject with respect, there is an underlying tendentiousness in the book, sometimes reaching the point of excess...
...WIND OVER SAND The Diplomacy of Franklin Roosevelt Frederick W. Marks III Penetrating beneath the stirring public image of Franklin Roosevelt, Wind over Sand reveals how this master of domestic politics failed in the world of nations...
...The bishops desired more autonomy from the Vatican and greater authority in their dioceses...
...IPS's Michael Parenti explains the lines at stores in the Soviet Union by the large discretionary income enjoyed by the consumer there...
...By the early 1960s, it had started to make sense to talk about "the media...
...The University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 49 stormed, may learn that some of the elders didn't have the attitudes we wish they'd had, but then few of the men who won the West were members of the Anti-Saloon League...
...We may hope Fidel Castro is sentenced to an eternity of shucking mountain oysters in the hot place...
...Young wingers, however, are thankful that Buckley made their movement something worth coming home to...
...She notes, however, that some of the first liturgical changes were claimed (often erroneously) to have early Christian pedigrees...
...We are about great things...
...Buckley apparently kept this admonition in mind when he wrote the second attack...
...She relates, at considerable length, the sad litany of his vacillations...
...Muggeridge writes, "It is clear now that there were in effect two councils, the `conservative' Council, which is now realized to have been a brilliantly clever doctrinal holding-operation, and the radical Council, the enormous media event with its revolutionary stars and its box-office appeal...
...Signs...
...2. A climate conducive to radical change...
...Small things add up, as does the absence of them, so readers will have to look elsewhere for an intimate portrait...
...Old timers also report that the women have gotten much better looking over the years...
...To be sure, Powell gives us this gem, but he nowhere mines the rich lode of foolishness offered by the entire array of IPS fellows...
...More than half the book is devoted to this argument, which Mrs...
...1 (4 issues) O Personal $35.00 0 Institutional $55.00 1988 VOL...
...He was seven when he wrote the King of England and told him to repay his war debt, an early indication that WFB would not let knuckleheads off easy...
...All subscriptions begin with the first issue of the Volume ordered...
...She i,ku `~J I IIH f Norwich, VT 05055 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1988 THE DESOLATE CITY REVOLUTION IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH Anne Roche Muggeridge/Harper & Row/$16.95 Michael A. Scully 50...
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...5. A moderate phase stressing continuity with the old order...
...Admonish your children to walk the straight and narrow and chances are you'll get called a nasty name...
...National Review has some of the dumbest readers in the world," Kenner said, though this was a while ago...
...And so it sat-for a while...
...Muggeridge constructs skillfully, citing seven conditions and stages of revolution, and showing how each applies to the recent history of Catholicism...
...Robert Bork, for instance, will be squeezing buckshot out of his hide for years to come, and Ronald Reagan is under so much fire you'd think he had hired the mob to assassinate Daniel Ortega (only JFK gets away with such things...
...This was what Muggeridge calls the "triggering incident...
...1. An aggrieved class...
...Yet this book, according to First Harvest, IPS's twentieth anniversary anthology, best expresses the philosophy "that has most strongly shaped the Institute for Policy Studies...
...As such, they bear the same relation to those in positions of traditional Church authority as media professionals or academics in secular society bear to those in business or in older professions, such as medicine and law...
...Box 188, Stroudsburg, PA 18360 USA AS ------------------------------------ ---and purge the movement of its undesirables, whom Judis has catalogued with care...
...One old cardinal quipped that he could think of no scriptural basis for the notion of ecclesial collegiality except the line "and they all fled...
...New ways of gathering and disseminating news and information gave the drift from traditional norms a novel power and supercharged the power of novelty...
...Y et the theologians could have done little without the help of bishops, who had their own axes to grind...
...In it the United States is labelled a Colonized Society, with the oppressing Colonies duly dubbed the Violence Colony, the Plantation Colony, the Dream Colony, and the Channeling Colony...
...Reagan formally retires, he says at one point, "conservatives, including Buckley, will once again become the target for liberal barbs...
...Precisely, the knowledge and consequent Council influence of theological experts, to whom the bishops turned for guidance on Council issues and on whom all parties later relied for interpretations of Council documents, made possible the implantation of ideas and phrases subsequently useful in justifying a radical agenda...
...Please add $7.00 per volume for orders outside the U.S...
...But conservatives and liberals will find plenty to like in this book...
...From the left, Murray Kempton called the magazine a "national bore...
Vol. 21 • June 1988 • No. 6
