The Conservative Crack-Up
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
The Conservative Crack-Up Excerpts. by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. ^ Origins I date the Conservative Crack-Up as beginning on the afternoon of July 1, 1987, when President Ronald Reagan stepped to...
...and there were years in the 1960s and early 1970s when all the world's Olympic teams combined could not beat us in a dual meet...
...Their first urge is to exclude, rarely to include, which is the first impulse of the political virtuosi...
...Sufficiently blessed with guile, a politico or an intellectual can avoid the truth for a very long time...
...Conservative Party When in June of 1978 Governor Reagan's aide, Peter Hannaford, asked me to host a dinner party at which the candidate might be introduced to leading neoconservatives, I flew to New York and put together a soiree at the Union League Club...
...Tell them the deal is tied up on Capitol Hill...
...Stories must be told, slogans devised, legends promulgated...
...An athlete cannot dupe a stopwatch...
...This was political Washington in the 1980s, and the Country Club Republicans were on the alert...
...Stop by the office after lunch for coffee," he insisted...
...Occasionally one encountered an epigonous Lord Byron...
...These were the antiradical socialists led by a man who became a major influence on my antiradical compatriots, Professor Sidney Hook, the most competent polemicist of his generation...
...Reason told him so...
...Not that there were not plenty of distinguished writers in the Republic addressing conservative themes...
...Now they went into a capital fury...
...Never again did he show any interest in the creation of a two-party media or in William Simon's salutary vision of a conservative counterculture...
...They always livened up receptions and dinners, to say nothing of seminars and street demonstrations...
...While at Harvard Law School he had written our public policy column at the recommendation of Professor Pat Moynihan, then an unofficial Spectator adviser...
...They had been educated beyond their means...
...He also had a proper capacity for comedy and contributed to some of the most ribald departments of The American Spectator...
...It was a drive for power, a coup de main against them, and the President seemed to be leaning our way...
...The conservatives' political libido is only slowly roused...
...Perhaps it is mean and uncharacteristically divisive of me to remind the reader that, while the mandarins of the Kultursmog celebrated every left-wing movement coming out of the 1960s, only the conservative movement was gaining a national following sufficient to capture the White House in the 1980s...
...Quite possibly I am on the losing side...
...Possibly there was a gastroenterologist and a showgirl, but there was only one distinguished writer...
...They did not expect to win...
...But in sport one's efforts are submitted to a final arbiter—the stopwatch, the finish line, the left hook to the jaw—the judgments of which are pretty much indisputable...
...But if this is a petty point, let me make a larger one...
...I objected, and sought further explanation...
...The ad was neither illegal nor in dubious taste, but some in the White House wanted to avoid controversy over the President's conservative ties...
...ideas and the lust for power...
...Most of the paleos were thoroughly dominated by the conservative temperament, so much so that they were prisoners of their private musings...
...22 The American Spectator April 1992 imperfections, as I diagnose them, could be detected in their futile maneuvers during the Bork hearings...
...I cannot actually report having spotted a young squire wearing a powdered wig, but doubtless there will come a day...
...A rapture of gratitude for the life he had led overcame him and, swelling with warm memories, the old atheist looked heavenward, palms upturned, and exclaimed: "Sometimes I'd like to look up and thank G-G-G...
...Later we hoped to broaden the group to include Human Events and other responsible conservative journals...
...The American Spectator April 1992 27...
...Cut a deal," he replied impassively...
...Perhaps I should be a big enough person to let this last point pass unremarked...
...and, adrift in their hollow pedantry, they could recognize neither superior intelligence nor their own limitations...
...Others thought a political campaign for a Supreme Court nominee unseemly...
...The conservative movement was not only the Republic's underdog movement, it was also the least celebrated of movements...
...protests and boycotts in bucolic Bull Snort, Georgia...
...A decade before, his luncheon companions had included the likes of President Richard Nixon, and so effectively did he lunch in those days that his influence in the Nixon White House spread despite his presidential endorsement of Hubert Humphrey...
...Every few years a new conservative prodigy would pop up and be the honored guest at a conservative assemblage, then he would disappear, never to be seen again...
...In the magazine's house advertisement, which listed famous subscribers, we regularly reproduced a photograph of Ronald Reagan's old address label from his Pacific Palisades residence...
...If so, someday history will credit me with having extended the influence of neoconservatism beyond the circles of policy analysts and into a power center that no neoconservative had ever perceived or analyzed, to wit, the province of high couture, wherein at that very moment dwelt some of the geniuses destined to be the giants of American public life in the 1980s...
...Irving Kristol was our veteran luncher...
...One, Richard Darman, had caught me just as I was leaving the hotel to pledge that he was not only an admirer but also an "intellectual"—yes, an intellectual!—and he assured me that the Public Interest's executive editor, Mark Lilla, would vouch for him...
...Conservatism is not an ideology...
...many are excellent haters...
...Think of it, with the entire audience against me, all other debaters onstage in superlative dudgeon over my every expressed thought, Kempton still calls me the "conformist...
...They amounted to a very small percentage of the early conservatives and that percentage steadily diminished as the movement grew...
...He was an inveterate user of snuff, which he delicately picked from ornate little boxes and jammed into his soiled nostrils, whereupon he would sneeze uncontrollably into a filthy handkerchief...
...Were they to don powdered wigs, my guess is that the powder would make them sneeze...
...William Faulkner was at work, as were the poets Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, but of the serious litterateurs only Dos Passos became active in the conservative movement...
...In the 1960s and early 1970s it received nothing comparable to the publicity attending the antiwar movement, the youth movement, or the gruesome feminist movement...
...Conservatism's time of greatest strength preceded that date, and it has been a rocky road ever since...
...some of the greats have been able to drive out the truth altogether...
...Is it possible that she too noticed the full shoulders and flowing sleeves, and passed a recommendation on to Carolina...
...They would insist on wearing their monocles in an offended King's presence or on smoking their water pipes in the court's non-smoking section...
...Equipped with very few assets beyond an urge to power and a gift for words, McCarthy launched a successful challengeto an incumbent president...
...It is not of the same genus or species...
...Yet out of a curious perversity I had rather lose with Socrates, let us say, than win with Lenin...
...Tell them the material is lost in the pipeline...
...The higher rates he could pay to his writers made me and other conservative editors fear that we would be abandoned as both our writers and readers swarmed to American Views...
...Scientists have found that the tomato is not a vegetable but a fruit, the dolphin is not a fish but a mammal, the koala bear is not a bear but a marsupial, and the brain of a teenager is not a brain but a gland...
...These excerpts are reprinted with permission from his new book, The Conservative Crack-Up, to be published in May by Simon and Schuster...
...They had a soft spot for the defeatist themes of Whittaker Chambers, the drift of which Russell Kirk imparts when he laments: "I am a conservative...
...and then you screw 'em...
...Nonetheless, I am sticking with July 1, 1987...
...A Café Intellectual On September 22, 1982, I awoke in the Hay Adams Hotel and prepared to lead representatives from Commentary, National Review, Policy Review, and the Public Interest into a luncheon with the President...
...And yet only the conservative movement was to attract enough support from the citizenry to capture the White House...
...They form few coalitions...
...Republicans were in a sweat over reports of an impending hostage swap between Jimmy Carter and the Ayatollah...
...After blowing several million he folded his right-minded endeavor and returned to that perverse bourgeois custom of bequeathing great wealth to those who oppose its creation—that is to say, to institutions awash in the Kultursmog...
...In the early days of the Reagan Administration, when a paleo of some academic distinction failed to get a prized presidential appointment, he called a distinguished conservative at the Heritage Foundation who had opposed him and challenged the amazed man to a duel...
...Do the same with a conservative and there is comparative stillness...
...The political challenges of the 1980s answered my questions about them...
...Nat Glazer, shifting characteristically from foot to foot like a bespectacled jazz man, fell into a highly cerebral discussion of subway graffiti with the former governor...
...No Conservative Heroes Mention to a Liberal one of his embalmed and sanctified heroes, or, better still, one of his many imagined villains, and he will gabble on inveterately, according to the party line of the moment...
...The Irrefutable Stopwatch A background in sports is a splendid corrective for the delusions of politics and la vie intellectuelle, two areas of human endeavor that can revolve wholly upon fraud...
...Gesticulating in his usual vigorous manner, Sidney was fondly recalling those battles that had been fought with The American Spectator as his ally...
...wars fought against poverty, against war, against smoking in public places, against fur coats...
...Reagan's adviser on the 1980 campaign, Peter Hannaford, read them and commissioned a memo from Rusthoven that became a prominent ingredient The American Spectator April 1992 25 in the Republican presidential nominee's acceptance speech...
...I took a summer class from him in 1969 and left convinced that, though the snobbery of H. L. Mencken & George Jean Nathan was great fun, liberty, democracy, intelligent debate, and academic excellence as advocated by Hook were to be the fundamental values of The American Spectator...
...There were libertarians with huge bronze dollar-sign medallions hanging from their necks and' dozens, possibly hundreds, of pretentious Anglophiles imitating Winston Churchill...
...Seated round the campfires, planning the great revolt against Liberalism, there were economists, philosophers, businessmen, politicos, and even a few social scientists...
...A Hoosier by birth, Peter took his law degree back to Indianapolis, where he practiced the forensic arts and continued writing a very competent series of pieces on public policy for us...
...There is a body of opinion, most recently represented by the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne, that holds that there were portentous fissures in conservatism from its very founding in the 1940s, when its fractious alliance of traditionalists, libertarians, and anti-Communists could put one in mind of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in its last irritable days...
...An impatient RN turned to me and repeated: "You cut a deal," and looking back towards the river he added...
...In politics and in the life of the mind one can go far on a honeyed tongue and plastic principles...
...Possibly a future Thucydides or Gibbon will take issue with me on this date...
...Origins I date the Conservative Crack-Up as beginning on the afternoon of July 1, 1987, when President Ronald Reagan stepped to the microphones and with ill-considered joviality announced Robert H. Bork of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as his nominee to replace Associate Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr...
...Now Irving would become a White House presence to the benefit of the conservative revolution, or so I believed...
...Reagan followed his elucidations pensively as all good pols should when intent on seduction, and, if I recall correctly, threw in his own observations on fugitive art...
...Walter Annenberg's Half Measures Returning from his stint as ambassador to the Court of St...
...The Podhoretzes and the Glazers joined the Reagans in the walnut-panelled fastness of a private dining room...
...Well, the hell with that...
...I do recall that when the room's air conditioning went berserk the gallant within me arose and covered her shivering shoulders with my blazer...
...The Bork hearings represented a watershed...
...That was John Dos Passos...
...I reminded Murray that at university debates, at egghead talk shows, wherever intellectuals gathered, I was always outnumbered, but to no avail...
...Sidney taught philosophy at The American Spectator April 1992 23 New York University, where he had propounded the ideas of John Dewey, carrying on battles against those whom he perceived as enemies of enlightenment, progress, and democracy...
...The members of the conservative movement whom I came to know were frequently hard-working, and many were keen competitors, but they were usually appalling fatalists...
...He was silently peering out on a bleak expanse of the river...
...reforms abominated, thence reforms reformed...
...Conservatism is not the opposite of Liberalism...
...He brought in a fine editor and rerouted some of the best conservative writers into his pages...
...Were they geniuses...
...Espresso...
...No Olympic team in the world was superior to our college team...
...Is there a comparable conservative impulse...
...Supplied with the evidence from Yahweh, what a great rabbi Sidney would have been...
...Richard Nixon and the October Surprise The only glimmer I ever caught of the RN that prowled through Liberal nightmares came while we were riding along the East River Drive in the back of his ancient armored limousine...
...Nat, formerly on the faculty at Berkeley, now on the faculty at Harvard, had recently pondered graffiti's sociological significance in an essay in the Public Interest...
...Some conservatives were complacent...
...Finally, in the Bork hearings the conservatives again demonstrated a failure of the imagination that has dogged them since their early days, when they marched forth with their free market economists, their philosophers, many businessmen, some politicians, but almost no literary talent...
...The absence of a literary sensibility among the conservatives abetted their proclivity for narrowness, for it shut them off from imagination and the capacity to dramatize ideas and personalities...
...I think it took two years, but eventually Annenberg lost interest...
...Many American Spectator writers had been his students and many more his disciples...
...they simply are not very communicative...
...Many were simply not very bright and those who were had no political judgment...
...It became the rage of 1981 once that singularly exquisite designer, Carolina Herrera, drew attention to its beauty...
...Cappuccino...
...The evidence, there's just not the evidence...
...Some of the tracts were illuminating, but others were perfectly balmy...
...The daily news that is warmed up and seasoned by the chefs of American journalism is frequently not the significant news of the day...
...The walking sticks would keep getting caught between their legs...
...For years I wondered about those who read them and prescribed them so ardently...
...Government was not for them—at least not the government of the United States, at least not in this century...
...Write Reason A facility with words is as essential to a political culture as it is to any social undertaking...
...It happened all the time...
...He began to set up a periodical like The American Spectator under a different name and format, a biweekly titled American Views—an intellectual review similar to those he found in London...
...Some are almost nonverbal, for instance, many conservative businessmen...
...On those teams all of us were accustomed to training and to winning...
...I remember one fellow whom I found particularly amusing...
...But, unlike Liberals, most conservatives keep their hates to themselves...
...They reach out to others only reluctantly...
...We see its manifestations everywhere: reforms heaved up...
...What immensities passed between us I cannot now retrieve from memory's dark hole...
...And off we lurched...
...On religion Sidney's views were less rooted in Western tradition...
...24 The American Spectator April 1992 Through the evening I had stayed glued to Nancy...
...It was in the headlines, and I naturally asked RN what he would do were he President...
...The reactionaries never could drag us back into another century, not even when aided by one of Professor Schlesinger's mad cyclical swings...
...We were on the last laps of the 1980 election...
...In fact at times there is no pulse at all...
...The dim ones among them were like dim ones everywhere 26 The American Spectator April 1992 in modern America...
...He was a confirmed atheist, convinced his destination was a compost heap...
...Neither the President nor his fellow conservatives seemed to notice...
...Ins and Outs At some point in the spring of 1981 I got a call from Peter Rusthoven, associate counsel to the president...
...but what a great man he already was...
...When I took up with the conservative movement in the 1960s I noticed these quaint figures tottering around, boasting of their arcane insights and of the esoteric tracts they read...
...These poor fish composed the reactionary wing of the conservative movement that was so frequently pointed to by supposedly alarmed Liberals...
...Paleos Most of the fuddy-duddies who came to be referred to as paleoconservatives were notable flops in the Reagan Administration...
...Conservatives are not even very long-winded in execrating their enemies, contrary to all the Liberals' myths about conservatives' hate campaigns...
...I entered the conservative movement from an athletic background in which I had never been on a team (not even a high school team) that had lost a championship or even a dual meet...
...In the decades since the 1960s, the journalists have often passed over the truly significant while hyping the trivial, and transmogrifying piffles into towering calamities...
...Late in his long life and after a pleasant supper with the Irving Kristols, we were exiting through the lobby of the New York Athletic Club...
...and we all knew precisely where we stood in national and world standings—again, thanks to the irrefutable message of the stopwatch...
...often I think so...
...Possibly this was because they had lost so often to the century's waves of reformers or because totalitarianism was on the march and appeared so formidable or because many of their founding evangels, such as Albert Jay Nock and Richard Weaver, actually scorned politics...
...Whatever the reason, many were afflicted with an obstinate fatalism...
...In fact, when Pat Moynihan left the Nixon White House to become ambassador to India, Irving was in the running to replace Pat as the President's chief adviser on domestic policy...
...Other students of conservatism will date the Conservative Crack-Up from November 4, 1986, when the Republicans lost control of the Senate, or from November 12, 1986, when the Iran-Contra hullabaloo was auspicated...
...That did it...
...Murray Kempton and the Kultursmog Etched sharply into my memory is a debate in which three participants and a hostile upper-crust Manhattan audience had at me for an hour or so, after which one of the debaters, that master of garbagespiel Murray Kempton, charged me with dishonoring Mencken's legacy by being—get this—a "conformist...
...I acceded, but here I was allowing low prejudice to marginalize Ronald Reagan's conservative friends...
...The loyal opposition was not in a very good humor to begin with...
...In fashion this look of full shoulders and ample sleeves came to be known as the "puffed sleeves look...
...In the New Age neither words nor simple mathematical computations conveyed meaning...
...Anyone who cares for freedom is obligated to defend it, and so during the last third of this century I have fallen in with some of the major participants in the era's political debates...
...Poseurs I can remember spending many happy times observing the arrivals and departures of college boys with monocles, walking sticks, capes...
...If ever there was a fellow who could say "I got my job through The American Spectator" it was Peter...
...A government fit for their participation would be one suspended somewhere in the vapors of yesteryear, far away in old Europe in a time when government ministers wore powdered wigs, tucked dainty handkerchiefs up silken sleeves, and walked with elegant walking sticks...
...If this comes to you as a revelation, remember that the march of science abounds with unanticipated discoveries...
...Their response was no concerted effort comparable to the political campaign being mounted against him and later against Judge Thomas...
...Eventually Rusthoven joined the office of White House Counsel Fred Fielding, and now my former Spectator colleague was on the telephone...
...The most insecure of the assistant presidents, which is to say the most inveterate schemers, had been politely telephoning me for a week to reassure me that each was a genuine conservative and a faithful reader of The American Spectator...
...My associates were for the most part conservatives, for I have found them to be freedom's most reliable defenders...
...Yet many of the paleos were hopeless incompetents, and frankly I cannot see them as effective politicos even in the baroque world of their dreams...
...What is more, all the conservatives' R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...I dreaded his presence at dinner parties and prayed that he would be seated next to some hypochondriac other than me...
...In the early 1960s, when the conservative movement was taking shape, I was swimming six or more miles a day on a legendary athletic team, an Indiana University swimming team that held three-quarters to four-fifths of all world records in men's swimming...
...I was innocent enough to go along, but once the fainthearted in the White House had distanced the Administration from us, what other magazine would authoritatively defend the Reagan Administration when it deserved defending...
...At any rate, on the eve of the 1980 election Carter was obviously pursuing a deal...
...A Political Zoo The political zoologist speaks of the Liberal impulse and with good reason...
...He asked that I cease and desist from claiming the President as a reader of the magazine...
...No poet, playwright, or novelist of distinction was sufficiently ideological or political to commit to National Review or Modern Age or any of the political organizations of the nascent conservative movement...
...There never was any reason for the Liberals' alarm...
...Yet in researching the early years of the conservative movement I came across an amazing and intriguing datum...
...Despite his ardor for combat and the high seriousness of his thought, he was a man of endless generosity and kindliness...
...The look was perfect for Nancy, giving her a stately bearing to offset the slight skittishness that occasionally glinted from her large and beautiful eyes...
...It is not that conservatives are restrained by high principle or that their dispositions are mild...
...The drinks flowed, the blarney proliferated, and the Podhoretzes' residue of Liberal haughtiness for Reagan was greatly reduced by the time we exited into the Manhattan night...
...They claimed an enormous appetite for intellect, but many of the things that they got most intensely intellectual about were not for me: the history of the briar pipe, the source of Winston Churchill's bow ties, books by someone by the name of Tolkien, science fiction...
...Conservatives and Freedom Enormous suffering has been occasioned in this century by political...
...Sidney Hook and God In the 1960s, the New Left had provoked hostility on the left itself, and from that quarter we got some of our most effective allies...
...When I asked how, the former President's impatience enlarged into exasperation: "There are a million ways to screw 'em," he said...
...Unfortunately this was not intellectual New York in 1969...
...What do such intellectuals drink in the early afternoon...
...In his 1968 presidential campaign he demonstrated what Adlai Stevenson and other political songsters had demonstrated before, to wit, that a literary sensibility can vastly assist the pol in his need to communicate...
...More so than any other century in history, the twentieth century has been dominated by politics, and political misjudgments have meant concentration camps for millions, torture and death for millions more...
...I could never understand their rise, so I could never understand their fall...
...James's, Walter Annenberg decided to pitch a few pennies from his vast fortune into an attack on the Kultursmog...
...When the opposition portrayed Judge Bork as an imperious fogy, the conservatives were utterly incapable of dramatizing his well-known wit and heartiness, or of even recognizing the high drama of one man standing alone against the Senate's kangaroo court, presided over by real kangaroos...
...And perhaps others will hold that the real crack-up came during the Clarence Thomas fiasco, when the White House advised this conservative judge to conceal his ideas and principles and present himself as cleverly inane...
...The Washington Post had just described The American Spectator as Washington's new "in" magazine, but some in the White House wanted us out...
...To be sure, an economist of Milton Fried-man's intellect is likely to have an active imagination, but even an imaginative man like Milton would have to spend years channeling his imagination away from chill economic statistics and towards prose and oratory were he to become as politically effective as, say, Senator Eugene McCarthy...
...is the founder and editor-in-chief of The American Spectator...
...Then he laid siege to the Podhoretzes, admiring an essay or two that had been brought to his attention...
...None believed that we were there merely for lunch or to establish some-thing so vague as an informal relationship with our friend, the President...
...but"—and he shook his old head in amusement—"I can't...
...I shall mention no names, but had the duel come off, the paleoconservative in question might well have blasted a hole in his silk slipper...
...There were, Rusthoven said, complaints from the public...
...We have heard ad nauseam about the skittishness, why not more about those eyes...
Vol. 25 • April 1992 • No. 4
