Capitol Ideas/The Center Folds
Bethell, Tom
Communists read these writers at underground universities, along with the eighteenth-century free-marketeer Adam Smith and such contemporary American conservatives as William E Buckley, Jr. They...
...S enator Joseph Biden offered Thom- la as a golden opportunity when, at the beginning of the hearing (when media attention is at its peak), he waved a copy of Richard Epstein's book Takings before the cameras and practically defied the nominee to come right out and say that he believed in this nonsense about people having a right to property...
...Republicans do not know how to cope with the Democrats' desire to be ever more compassionate with the taxpayers' money, because they have foresworn the one strategy that would upset the present symbiotic (rather than adversarial) arrangement in Washington: playing offense...
...They aren't...
...It's really a one-party system with the Republicans enjoying the perquisites of office and delegating policy to the Democrats...
...Why, then, should anyone vote Republican...
...It would wither away and die, no doubt to be replaced by something more vital...
...Before the hearing began, Biden had confided to him that the questioning would begin with the topic of economic rights—an area potentially perilous to Democrats (but only if Republicans are willing to exploit it...
...Nonetheless, the system is broken...
...Typically, however, moderate Republicans are trying to remove this key distinction by eliminating the right-to-life plank from the GOP platform...
...Precisely how friendly so many of these former protesters are to the ideas of American conservatism is really quite breathtaking...
...is The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...Of course, abortion opponents undermine their own cause by timidly refusing to express it...
...The point is that Republicans are in no hurry to fix a system that they do not regard as broken...
...Interestingly, every one of those I have interviewed was surprised by the rapidity of Communism's local collapse in 1989...
...Rich people (like Senators Kennedy and Metzenbaum) are perceived as heroically at odds with their own self-interest: rich, but unselfish enough to help the poor...
...No longer...
...True...
...So it's nice work if you can get it and perhaps it's understandable that Republicans have been taken in...
...a reference to Kenneth Duberstein, the assistant to Howard Baker who was mysteriously elevated to chief of staff in the waning days of Reagan's presidency...
...The mistake is to imagine the Republican leadership as somehow frustrated by their minority status and eager to change it...
...CAPITOL IDEAS THE CENTER FOLDS Back at last to "the center," as La people within the Beltway think of Washington in relation to the U.S., and as Moscow until recently thought of itself in relation to the Soviet Union...
...The Dukakis tank commercial probably did as much to elect George Bush in 1988 as the furloughing of Willie Horton...
...Later, a White House statement finally and reluctantly supporting Baltic independence ignored Yeltsin "but ten times repeated the word 'Soviet,' which now has no context except as a Gorbachev Tom Bethel...
...Republicans then contemplate their own philosophy—which amounts to little more than businessmen helping businessmen—and they feel like moral pygmies by comparison...
...President Bush seems certain to win it...
...Pro-abortion senators confidently assumed that the Supreme Court nominee could be embarrassed politically by eliciting anti-abortion sentiments from him...
...Singer NOW MEET A FEW OF THE PEOPLE WHOSE ARTICLES, LETTERS AND INTERVIEWS ARE MAKING THE FORWARD GREAT TODAY Saul Bellow • Alan Dershowitz • Art Speigelman • Marek Halter • Ronald Reagan • Abba Eban • Amos Oz • Alfred Kazin • Stephen Solarz Harold Bloom • Ariel Sharon • Leonard Fein • Ruth Messinger • Oliver Sacks • Ruth Wisse • Steve Reich • Max Lerner • Irving Kristol Martin Gilbert • Adin Steinsaltz • Lane Kirkland • Moacyr Scliar • Aharon Appelfeld THE FORWARD IS CELEBRATING ITS ONE YEAR ANNIVERSARY IN ENGLISH Already we've earned a reputation for in-depth, objective news reporting and wide-ranging cultural coverage...
...My suspicion is that if this move were to succeed, there really would no longer be any reason for the party to remain in existence...
...Remarkably enough, Republicans have actually lost the initiative on the abortion issue in the last decade...
...The Communists are gone now, some to retirement, others—I kid thee not—to become international bankers and entrepreneurs...
...Singer • Leo Tolstoy • Sholom Aleichem • Louis Brandeis • Meyer London • Sholom Asch • I.J...
...Meanwhile, let us hope that secession proceeds apace in every corner of the globe...
...As I write in mid-September, the Yugoslav military (primarily Serbian) is waging war on Croatia, and I have no doubt that all good Beltway types are quietly rooting for the Yugo-Feds...
...They recognize the danger to the governing classes everywhere if secession (otherwise known as indepenby Tom Bethell dence) is permitted to go unchecked...
...Here was Clarence Thomas, an attractive and obviously intelligent nominee, sounding at times like a defendant taking the Fifth as he ducked and weaved with confusing responses...
...When the Germans, the French, and the rest figure out what the bureaucrats have in store for them they will probably rebel, and it's a good bet that the European superstate will never materialize...
...The collapse of the Soviet Union is construed (no doubt deservedly) as a victory for conservatives...
...The federal budget has been expanding by leaps and bounds, and congressional spending is unconstrained;or rather, is constrained only by Republican refusal to raise the taxes to pay for it...
...In addition, the more of other people's money you seek to spend, the more the media will call you compassionate...
...I do not refer to the 1992 presidential election...
...As I say—Beltway nightmare...
...Such defensiveness only confirms the Democrats in their moral righteousness, however deluded, and encourages them to press the attack further...
...and reminded (in a prior Oval Office tete a tete) that even if he were not confirmed the ensuing publicity would do wonders for his lecture fees...
...But such philosophizing does not come easily to Republicans, to put it mildly.which will lead inexorably to quotas...
...but soon enough it is likely to pose problems for Republicans...
...But that is what Republicans never want to do...
...crvIrnkrz RENEWING A TRADITION OF EXCELLENCE ESTABLISHED WITH THE YIDDISH FORWARD IN 1897 FORWARD We have bureaus in Washington, New York, Paris, Tel Aviv, Moscow and Jerusalem...
...One important issue dividing THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 9 the two parties today is abortion...
...This has been cleverly labeled the New World Order by President Bush...
...Peretz • Eugene V. Debs • Bertrand Russell • Emma Lazarus • Mark Twain I.B...
...If we no longer had to send 25 percent of our income to the American "center...
...lifesaver," Evans and Novak reported...
...At that moment, the supporters of abortion were briefly on the defensive...
...In addition to the former Soviet Union, Yugoslavia is breaking apart, much to the disgust of those elites who had fondly imagined that here Communism would at last emerge in respectable and humane garb...
...As long as the Soviets constituted a real threat, and the Democrats remained subservient to their McGovernite wing, people did have a real reason to vote Republican...
...My guess is that official Washington admires Gorbachev and the relics of the Soviet system as much as it does because it recognizes its own analogous position...
...The White House response was to press for marginal alterations in the language, detectable only by trained lawyers, but preserving intact the features of the Democrats' bill, THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 lI...
...And let's not kid ourselves: Republicans worry about it almost as much as Democrats...
...They fail to recognize that, in an age besotted with envy, advocating the expenditure of other people's money has been the camouflage of choice for the rich...
...Perhaps the strategy will have worked (the Judiciary Committee has not voted as I write this), but it shows a poor grasp of politics to advocate a defensive crouch in the glare of television lights...
...The mental escape route open to them is to see that it's not government's job to help anyone in a tennis tournament...
...The Jerusalem Post calls us "America's premier Jewish newspaper...
...Elsewhere in the world, power seems to be moving away from the center...
...Instead he began his evasive maneuvers...
...The specter of the Kremlin likewise worked to Ronald Reagan's advantage, both in 1980 and 1984...
...this year, Governor Pete Wilson made the same error in California (see my "California Calamity" in the September TAS...
...He loves American literature, particularly Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti...
...The hunger of Western intellectuals for a planned world will have to find satisfaction in some other fantasy...
...All agreed with the Reagan policy, but not one expected the Communists simply to give up...
...Within a -tiplicity of jurisdictions, surely, one or two might adopt the principles of self-government that inspired the framers of the U.S...
...Today, however, military differences between the two parties are no longer important...
...The Wall Street Journal's "Washington Wire," a compendium of Inner-Beltway conventional wisdom, imputed the distaste for Yeltsin to the cherished Washington belief that the "world economic tide" is supposed to be moving in the direction of countries "banding together rather than breaking apart...
...Last year, President Bush yielded that high ground to the Democrats...
...To complete the fantasy, Judge Richard Posner of the Seventh Circuit would be "on" next, for the further edification of the committee and the country . . . One wonders how long it would take for Biden to decide that, under the circumstances, live television coverage of confirmation hearings was no longer appropriate...
...It would be nice to see Richard Epstein himself as a nominee to the Court...
...And that is why the Republicans have for so long remained in the minority...
...For a complimentary issue, please call or write to Amir Cohen, FORWARD, 45 East 33rd Street, #602, New York NY 10016, (212) 889-8200 For subscriptions, call toll-free (800) 272-7020 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1991 should the eloquent Epstein ever appear as a nominee before the committee—instructed (in my fantasy) not to evade the questions but to suggest politely that income transfers appear unconstitutional on their face...
...In recent years, admiring chapters of economics textbooks have been devoted to the Yugoslavian economy...
...Fisher's editor presumably thought this use of the word "threatened" was perfectly acceptable...
...They greet American conservatives as soul brothers...
...It is as though one day the Pope were to become an agnostic, call Satan into the Vatican, hand him the keys, and vanish into a retirement home...
...Near the elegant Czech parliament, amidst heroic monuments from the pre-Communistpast, stand behemoth, blockheaded statues of Marx and Engels, and the blockheads are as ugly to the eye as their ideas were destructive...
...The name of Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser and Old World Order enthusiast, surfaced in connection with this Yeltsin-bashing...
...Republicans instinctively want to play defense...
...Part of the problem is that the liberal ideology of today's Democrats seems to be morally intimidating to many Republicans...
...Maybe the people will get peculiar ideas here, too, inspired by some Yeltsin-like "demagogue" on this side of the Atlantic...
...There's precious little evidence for T this interpretation of events, of course...
...The proponents of one centralized system will naturally support another...
...In September, Clarence Thomas was pressed for his views on the subject from the opposing direction...
...The next time there's a vacancy on the Supreme Court, phone up Professor Epstein, invite him to the center, and ask him to bring along a copy of Takings so that he can brandish it before the cameras...
...In this respect, they have been systematically kept in the dark by their own heads of state...
...Thomas, incidentally, had plenty of time to consider his response on this point...
...But behind them they have left a sad generation of elderly citizens who never knew the ebullience and hope of youth in a free society...
...If you can remember those two clowns, you probably last saw them at an American peace demonstration, where the concern was over flowers, not Communist brutes...
...As Alajos Dornbach (now deputy speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly, once a lawyer jailed for repeatedly defending Hungarian dissidents) told me, he had hoped the "collectivist" French and British governments of the 1960s and 1970s would fail, for that would weaken the Soviets...
...They have left pollution beyond an American conservationist's grimmest nightmare, economies that are years behind the West, and they have left the comic, too...
...If adopted, we would soon see a major and long-overdue rearrangement of the political furniture in the U.S...
...If power is permitted to slip away from the center in Moscow, perhaps the same dreadful thing could one day happen in Washington...
...Constitution—now abandoned here in all but name, and adopted hardly anywhere else...
...Now they want to rebuild their countries with Reagan's America as their model...
...Wouldn't it be nice if we began to experience those centrifugal forces that have been felt in many other parts of the world but not yet here...
...One of the first items in the news on my return to Washington in late August was the White House criticism of Boris Yeltsin, attacked in fierce whispers by anonymous aides as a "demagogue" who threatens the Old World Order...
...total nonsense and bogus statistics from beginning to end, of course...
...This was the Duberstein Strategy, or so we were told...
...A dozen European countries are supposedly moving toward some kind of union, but all is dependent on bureaucratic stealth and the citizenry in the various countries not really understanding what is going on...
...all of which will have to be discarded...
...Our editorials were this year nominated for a Pulitzer Prize...
...Imagine opponents of slavery in the nineteenth century in the same position—yet not confident enough of their own abolitionist sentiments to express them openly to a panel dominated by pro-slavery senators...
...Our arts coverage includes reviews and features on current books, cinema and theater, interviews with the most exciting Jewish writers and artists of our time, book excerpts, poetry...
...He urges moderation in everything...
...let Scotland be an independent country, Wales another...
...Therefore, I confess, the "pro-choice" plank does have a certain Machiavellian appeal...
...and he lauded Ronald Reagan's military buildup that "bankrupted" the Soviet Union...
...That's the way people automatically think at the center...
...The lead sentence of a story about Germany in the Washington Post (by Marc Fisher) suggests such sympathy for Belgrade, to put it mildly: "Germany alone has repeatedly threatened to recognize the breakaway republics of Croatia and, Slovenia...
...fiction and, exclusively, each week, Art Spiegelman's celebrated comic strip "Maus...
...It is precisely at such a moment—when the cameras are so eagerly and mercilessly seeking out signs of doubt or evasion, that the media give Republicans the rare opportunity to play offense...
...It's not too late to learn...
...Beltway nightmare, gentlemen...
...And then there is the rare ex-Communist trying to make it in a political world dominated by what look like nothing so much as Eastern European Reaganites...
...This became more than normally conspicuous earlier this year when lobbyists for minorities (and hence the Democrats) pressed for employment-quota legislation in the guise of "expanding civil rights...
...The Wall Street Journal writes, "The Forward is already delivering news of a kind that doesn't appear in the regular press...
...But now at last people may start asking: What, if anything, do the Republicans stand for...
...But here my analogy ends, for the Pope would not be leaving behind the ruin and sadness that is Eastern Europe...
...The main problem with the Republicans is that they have no real confidence in their own moral legitimacy and they remain uncertain of how to cope with the aggressive tactics of Democrats in Washington...
...Thomas might have reckoned that, contrary to what Biden seemed to imagine, there is much support for such a view, especially among taxpayers...
...How pleasant it will be to see Canada separate into its constituent provinces...
...When Sandra Day O'Connor appeared before the Judiciary Committee in 1981, as the Washington Post pointed out, it was the Republican Senator Jeremiah Denton of Alabama who took the offensive, pressing for her views on abortion...
...Here one begins to fantasize about Republicans on offense, an oxymoron, but still, one would give a lot to observe the huge consternation in Washington MEET SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO MADE THE FORWARD GREAT Abraham Cahan • Albert Einstein • Gustave Flaubert • I.L...
...If Californians, Vermonters, and Georgians, like Russians, Lithuanians, and Georgians, decided that the time had come to take control of their own lives and destinies...
...Margaret Thatcher was an exception, and she stirred up enormous resentment among the superstatists for blowing the whistle...
...Amore immediate problem is that the present Republican leadership is perfectly content with the existing division of labor in Washington, D.C.: in which Republicans are permitted to preside over Democratic policies...
...Oh, that's not the way things happen in Washington," sober Republicans will tell you when you suggest such strategies...
Vol. 24 • November 1991 • No. 11
