The Conservative Crack-Up

...Then there was that report . . . to the effect that thirty-seven million Americans were dying of starvation...

...and from the general urban scene...

...often I think so...

...Neoliberals merely sniff the Zeitgeist: they are "all nose and no brain...

...After three decades of inveterate reformers, social engineers, and mountebank therapists the evidence of the traditionalists' good sense was all over the place . . . jumping out windows, dying of drug overdoses, and writhing in numerous other social pathologies...

...In the stifling political environment of campus life in the 1960s, Tyrrell was altogether right to feed on this rich inspiration...

...Apparently flung aside with some force by one of the liberal Republicans in the house, Tyrrell's magazine was splayed on the far side of an unused desk among piles of other discarded writings...

...workers would have vast stretches of leisure in which to compose poetry or sonatas, midst the marijuana fumes...

...But this truly iconoclastic position actually deflated Mencken's reputation, and none of his many chrestomaths even chose to include articles from this era...

...Like most exposés, it occasionally goes too far...

...How can one favor increased wealth for the poor without supporting economic growth...

...Tyrrell also might have finessed revealing Kristol's amazing command of an ideological sensor so acute that it could isolate a vestige of conservative loyalty even in a David Gergen (gergen, n., a Republican suffering from terminal Postitis, see below...

...I believe that the experts will agree that he can be dismissed as a malcontent, but do not turn your back on him...

...until the eruption of Tyrrell, we could hardly breathe...

...no less than H.L...

...So I stole it...

...And much more, he had a defiant style and wit galore that was not prevalent among the Reagan forces...

...One sees it in the appearance of solid well-being of the people on the streets, the close-to-murderous traffic, the incredible exfoliation of apartment houses, and the general aspect of restaurants, theaters, and shops...

...Tyrrell was prophetic...

...Mencken disdained Coolidge and Harding and had no clue as to why the economy thrived during their administrations...

...As he writes in his new work, "Once through a season or so of neurotic longhaired girls, their guitars, and their e.e...

...Sex would be for our time what religion had been for the middle ages and with the same promise of celestial mysteries...

...In part, The Conservative CrackUp is a devastating expos...

...But as a real Whangdoodle, Tyrrell is his own man with his own unique voice and a new set of targets, and puritanism—a threat to the country on a par with anorexia at a fat farm—has nothing to do with it...

...It was within that kaleidoscopic rapture of drugs-liberation-dissentrevolution that The American Spectator was hatched" in "a dilapidated old farmhouse standing shakily on forty hilly acres of eroding Hoosier topsoil...

...The great Clod Populist, muttering that Americans 'were the real losers' " when they spurned him in the 1972 election...

...The impetuous among the faculty might in the dark of night slip into a Marcusean paradise of wild libidinous evoes, where there could be tragedies: untimely hernias...

...How can one reasonably expect an improved environment without encouraging scientific research...

...There, looming before him, as he recounts in his book, were an expanding crowd of bug-eyed messiahs, heralding a New Age, wherein war would be passé and the citizenry would convene daily to monitor the government's business...

...In every major confrontation, Mencken stood by the intellectualoids of his time and won their adoration...

...THE CONSERVATIVE CRACK-UP R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...

...But Bob had had the wit to emblazon the cover of his magazine with articles on sex...

...Tyrrell, you will be happy to hear, also oversteps the bounds of propriety in ravishing the left...

...Yet Tyrrell found his own carnivals of buncombe in the city culture that Mencken esteemed...

...Like most sophisticates of his day, he revered the sexual freedoms of the Continent and disdained the taboos and restraints upheld by mere commoners...

...Quite possibly I am on the losing side...

...Of course, the administration was more indignant at the sham attack on Montague than at the real assault on Clark Kerr...

...At the time, I was obsessed with sex...

...During the crest of Reagan's prestige in the early 1980s, neoliberals moved cosmetically right...

...CI The American Spectator June 1992 53...

...After spending four years in the chlorinated tub with other near naked amphibians kicking in his face, gasping for breath and snatches of the Mozart or Puccini blazing on the loudspeaker, or giving a clogged ear to Coach Doc Counsilman's counsels on Bernoulli's law, Tyrrell may have been suffering a few holes in his ozone layer...

...By the early nineties, as the right dissolved into xenophobic denunciations of the Mexicans and Japanese for working too hard, the neoliberals were nearly pure left...

...Even Paul Tsongas upheld his pro-business stance ("Democrats are all for employment...

...In point of fact, the most famous assassins in recent American history have been progressives of one sort or another...

...Simon & Schuster/319 pages /$23 reviewed by GEORGE GILDER 50 The American Spectator June 1992 In other words, it may have been something in the water...

...and neopundits Peters and Kinsley are all harpooned...

...Poverty seemed to me then almost as enticing as sex and far more readily available to an anti-feminist in Cambridge...

...In The Conservative Crack-Up, Tyrrell understands the redeeming power of discipline and tradition, declares his own disdaiit for sexual liberation, and shows an acute eye for its costs in the lives of men such as Muggeridge and Taki...

...Faced with a male anti-feminist, even conservatives cringe and curl their lips, thinking him somehow sullied by the contagion of his subject...

...I had spent the previous three years researching and writing Sexual Suicide, a somber diatribe against feminism...

...Here the weisenheimer prose gives way to eloquence and insight, and no one has written as profoundly and perceptively about the lives and careers of these men...

...And we're off, with Chet Jastremski splashing away toward world records far in the lead but Tyrrell ready to take over as soon as he can get out of the freaking water...

...He was a supreme positivist in an era when positivism crashed in smithereens before Goedel, Heisenberg, Einstein, Solzhenitsyn, and the butterfly effect of Chaos theory...

...right of the fifties and sixties, from Richard Weaver's fulminations against William of Occam and Libertarian screeds against the Pentagon and FBI to traditionalist proposals for an American theocracy "consistent with the fantasies of some revered Spanish monk of a distant century" from Whittaker Chambers's dismal prophecies of doom for capitalism to a regrettably forgotten speaker at the Philadelphia Society with glowing eyes and orange hands, achieved through a gargantuan diet of carrots...

...cummings, it was back to a clean well-lighted place for me...

...Gary North was for sex, including every last one of the two sexes, and David Brudnoy was against this extravagance...

...Tyrrell sees both the moral and heroic dimension of entrepreneurial life...

...In The Conservative Crack-Up, Tyrrell upholds his Christian roots and beliefs...

...In liberalism's greatest triumph, comparable in its dimensions to the conservative victory at...

...Not one of [its] principles or proposals can be adhered to for long without slamming chin first into a contradiction...

...The Democratic party has virtually no existence except as an aggregation of special interests financed by government...

...T yrrell is at his best in pillorying the neoliberals...

...But though Tyrrell worshipped William F. Buckley, Jr...

...The issue is why conservatism cracked...

...Columbia University collected profound apologies from Bloomington when Professor Rudolph Montague, visiting from New York, was pasted with a cream pie during a Marxoid discourse on "Progressive Solutions to the Urban Crisis...

...It struck me right away that out there in Bloomington, Indiana, wherever that was, and by whatever means, sexual or bionic, they had come up with a real all-out Whangdoodle—as Kentucky Colonel Henry Watterson had termed the 28-yearold H. L. Mencken—not a bogus Whangdoodle, no sophomoric simulation of William F. Buckley, Jr...

...Tyrrell has outraged the entire American publishing and thinking establishment...

...52 The American Spectator June 1992 Although Tyrrell does not extend this insight so far, it clearly applies to the contrasting careers of his mentor Mencken and himself...

...In a fateful scoop, Tyrrell also warns us against a dire threat from the right entirely unreported before, a towering menace in the guise of the most exalted critic and elegant polemicist in the realms of neoconservatism...

...But in all his Carnivals of Buncombe, Mencken never wrote a sustained polemic with the uproarious wit and transilient trenchancy of The Liberal Crack-Up...

...A feminist...

...The professor's role was performed by a Vietnam vet, then a sophomore at the university, and the pie-throwing, accompanied by the cry, "Montague, you Commie," was a smash hit...

...campus...

...Mencken, by contrast, showed slavish conformity to the reigning intellectual trends...

...Bombs too went off...

...Before bursting forth on the national scene, Tyrrell was first marinated for ten years—six hours a day—in a chlorinated natatorium...

...A real Whangdoodle doesn't mince...

...Hilton armed could blemish our spotless record...

...Mencken's blind materialism was not a trivial aspect of his thought...

...Now, in The Conservative Crack-Up, our wonderful Whangdoodle has divulged the source...

...The formerly neo Clinton is now pure hard left, with a mad feminist wife, seeking condoms and litigation rights for toddlers...

...Gergens all, stricken by Postitis...

...Mencken was a superb journalist, a luminous stylist, and a relentless polemicist...

...No matter what a Democrat says (try Daniel Patrick Moynihan), he must invariably vote with the National Education Association and NOW...

...Tyrrell's quarry was the harvest of Mencken's own set of archaic superstitions and phobias...

...Enveloping the political arena, the Kultursmog can smother all conservative themes, twist them out of shape and caricature them, because conservatives have no countervailing cultural power, scant literary imagination, and little will to dominate the world of entertaining ideas...

...yet written...

...Chancellor Clark Kerr of the University of California was assaulted during a speech on the I.U...

...He reflects that the most successful conservatives ultimately play to the Kultursmog...

...Tyrrell retreated to a farmhouse in cornbread country to assault the redoubts of city culture—the Kultursmog—where Mencken's scientism, rationalism, secularism, and libertinism had almost totally triumphed...

...George McGovern...

...Like nearly every fashionable thinker, Mencken assumed that religion was in decline and mostly good for laughs...

...Mencken was a man of urbanity battling against the benighted rural regions of cornbread and revival...

...Conservatism has not yet had a mass murderer on its side...

...The planet earth could be imperiled by pestilence and flames, and Michael Kinsley would insist on making just one more point about New York financier Felix Rohatyn's tax writeoffs...

...Tyrrell attended Indiana University and was a member of its world-beating swim team, which held nine global records and lost points only when, halfway through a race, one of its stars, possibly Tyrrell, discovered he was swimming the wrong stroke...

...the Indiana library wastwice torched...

...The country club Republicans took over, and no matter what great goals they planned each day after arranging a tie and socks to rhyme with their lime green trousers, they immediately tripped every morning over the Washington Post on their front doorsteps and fell flat on their faces in the Kultursmog, in awe of the moral superiority of Mary McGrory, Richard Cohen, and Colman McCarthy...

...Just as the wily Tyrrell had presumably planned, I rushed back to the lead editorial and "The Continuing Crisis...

...But Mencken revered it as dumbly as any pygmy at his totem pole...

...At that time, I was a pathetic victim of what Tyrrell in his new book, The Conservative Crack-Up, calls the Kultursmog...

...Tyrrell retorts, "Well, the hell with that...

...I now realize he was right...

...Above all, Mencken espoused theregnant fantasies of materialist science...

...Contrary to his protests, Mencken was in fact perfectly attuned to the Zeitgeist of the interwar intelligentsia...

...What is the meaning of all his talk of Puritan Chic...

...It was not through defiant truth-telling that he became the most influential journalist of his era, but through dauntless submission to all the delusions and prejudices of the reading classes...

...T he Spectator kited even higher, lovely as a cloud in the Kultursmog, becoming a national conservative beacon, as avidly read by dissident students at Harvard and Berkeley as at Indiana...

...Then Old Beagle Ears waved his magic wand, doubled the power of the state, and by the middle of his fated reign, the number of poor had jumped to thirty-four million...

...Hilton Kramer, he reveals, is the embodiment of the homicidal intellectual, and frankly I wish he had remained on the left...

...Surely, it was also impertinent to reveal that the gergenized Michael Deaver, the veritable Nicholas Brady of the Reagan Administration, in whom so many of us so long reposed our hopes for the future of the nation, ended up on Martha's Vineyard worshiping at the shrine of Lillian Hellman and William Styron...

...Although he deceptively begins his book with its only dull stretch—ruminations on the life and aristocratic Roman glories of Luigi BarziniTyrrell then quotes Russell Kirk's brave lament: "I am a conservative...

...Because he truly attacks the icons of the intelligentsia, Tyrrell has never achieved the honors and acclaim that Mencken won...

...Professor, you must mean personpower...

...Tyrrell's interesting answer is lack of lust for politics and flair for communication...

...In general, feminists rarely read or fondle anything whatsoever except other feminists...

...Mencken, he never accepted the dolorous European strain of conservative thought now and then espoused at National Review, where the Hapsburg pretender sometimes held forth as a columnist...

...Some of the best chapters of The Conservative Crack-Up offer elegant biographical reflections on leading conservatives, from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, to Kristol, Buckley, and Malcolm Muggeridge...

...Like every aristocrat and intellectual of his time, Mencken scoffed at the titans and culture of commerce...

...The articles on sex turned out to be extremely solid work, buttressed by footnotes and illustrated by alluring black etchings of a turkey and a bearded king, possibly Lear...

...or Whittaker Chambers, but a real Whangdoodle, like Mencken himself...

...Their conservatism dissolves in its acids as they rise in the clouds of celebrity and they shrink from association with their more adamant followers...

...Taking note of the decline of interest in conservatism, they slipped back "to wherever it was that liberalism might take them: voting rights for trees, Medicaid for house plants...

...Fortunately for us, he has never recovered...

...It took not a neo-Mencken but an anti-Mencken, Tyrrell, to attain the elegant flair and torchlike flame that Mencken unleashed in an earlier time, and to transcend it with an inimitable iconoclastic humor and authority all his own...

...In the entire world there is no job—as far as I know—so thankless as criticizing feminism...

...Neopresidents Gephardt and Hart-pence (remember them...

...Even George Will, whom Tyrrell confesses was the Spectator's first Washington correspondent, was gergened, succumbing to the D.C...

...B ut we already knew most of this from the incandescent Liberal Crack-Up...

...Montague became a hero on the left and Tyrrell became a hero on the right...

...Merely "one of those gassed up hags bemoaning the tyranny of her glands," so he wrote in my stolen issue of The Alternative (as the Spectator was then called...

...Read his lips, he's a liberal...

...As Tyrrell writes, "Traditionalists had been alarmed by the emergence of a secular, rootless, mass society, devoid of fixed values and utterly toothless against the perverse and the inhumane...

...In order to grab my attention, you had to go for my glands—unless, of course, you were so lucky as to command a raft of intriguing statistics on the plight of the poor...

...Mencken never launched a work that combined hilarity with the profound insight and penetration of The Conservative Crack-Up...

...For example, he might well not have actually named the eminent journalist who, under the stress of covering the Reagan boom, suffered throughout the 1980s from the enduring anguish of a severe case of Koro (an African and Far Eastern malady, in which the patient senses a sudden shrinking of his male member...

...In the light of twentieth-century physics, nineteenth-century determinism and materialism turned out to be a huge superstition...

...display the decline of conservatism and register the crack-up of theright...

...The Conservative Crack-Up takes a grand tour of the U.S...

...it is only employers they, can't stand") only until attacked for it...

...Of all these amazing events at I.U., only Professor Montague was a hoax, contrived by conservatives...

...How, for instance, can one oppose racism while advocating quotas...

...Here in 1973, he had it all, the entire portfolio of ideas that was eventually to bring Ronald Reagan to the presidency...

...and Susan Sontag declaimed that "the U.S...

...In The Conservative Crack-Up, it becomes clear that Tyrrell is no mere new Mencken but something decisively more audacious and important: a genuine and original critic of the superstitions and bigotries of the most influential intellectuals of his day...

...laughed them out of the house...

...It is emitted from "universities, policy institutes, protest movements, the media, and all those other groups that serve as the smokestack industries of American culture," with the presumed distinction that unlike the factories of Gary and Detroit, the liberal stinktanks of Washington and Cambridge offer no worthwhile products with the smoke...

...while atop the most intellectual cheerleader of the class of '72...

...spending culture to such an extent that he declared the nation "under-taxed...

...Weathervanes for the Kultursmog, Kinsley et al...

...Tyrrell used the term in 1973 as an homage to Mencken...

...And as predicted by the Spectatorfolk, the incident showed that even conservatives could win media renown if they rivaled the left in violent theater...

...It led him, for example, to the wrong position on the supreme moral issue of his lifetime, World War II...

...It was terrible...

...Further investigation indicated that . . . the problem was really how to get a family of imbeciles off a diet of Coca-Cola and potato chips, and that is, given our vestigial scruples about individual freedom, a difficult demand . He concluded: The New Class, or Puritan Chic as I choose to call it, is best understood as political folderol...

...As late as 1942, his diaries reveal, Mencken's celebrated critical and intellectual powers, his acclaimed nose for the bogus and bombast, did not endow him with the ability to discriminate between Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler...

...The Conservative Crack-Up contains the best sustained defense of Ronald Reagan (and even Nancy...

...Conservatives had few writers or publicists who could long resist...

...But when Tyrrell attended one of their soirees, he discovered that they were all liberals at heart, shocked into breathless rage by sexism, and he was forced to fade away "behind the bulbous paunch of a nearby professor...

...I agree that the right deserves censure, but Irving Kristol is the leading sage of our movement...

...And why, oh why, does Tyrrell feel it necessary to ruin the laureled retirement of William Buckley's alpine pal John Kenneth Galbraith, by quoting his sexist observation in 1984: "That the Soviet economy has made great material progress in recent years is evident both from the statistics...

...Bursting in air were not only evoes (outcries of wild bacchic frenzy...

...It was not until near the end of his career in the mid-1930s that Mencken made a serious attack on the Zeitgeist, turning virulently against Franklin D. Roosevelt and his statist followers...

...After graduation, he dried out deep in the stacks of the college library, pursuing graduate laurels in history, only to emerge in the late 1960s, blinking in wild surmise...

...At the peak of his powers in The Conservative Crack-Up, Tyrrell triumphantly transcends his idol and mentor, and offers both moral and political leadership...

...the Berlin Wall, even William Buckley finally fell, writing a book in favor of a national service corps: a huge new tax hike and regulatory morass for all competent young people, implying a moral value in government service superior to the moral value of creating jobs and serving customers...

...As a real Whangdoodle, Bob Tyrrell flew above all this, propelled by great, ozone-eating guffaws...

...But there is a question...

...It is alarming that his movement to the right continues, for if he ever falls under the influence of those conservatives who reverence the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, he could become truly dangerous...

...the head of the National Organization for Women told Pete Rozelle of the National Football League to prepare for the mass entry of women onto his teams—since girls, once liberated from institutionalized sexism, would grow as bulky and belligerent as middle linebackers...

...Partly, the Russian system succeeds, because, in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower...

...He shows that the neoliberalism celebrated in Newsweek and elsewhere as "America's most exciting new intellectual movement" is almost entirely devoid of intellectual content...

...Where did it come from...

...Imagine, unleashing on the world a Whangdoodle lawyer...

...Mencken's main critics diminished to a few costive academics, for whom in all eras it is a guild rule to deride the untutored writer...

...Nor did our compassionate scribe neglect the poor: How well I recall Camelot's claim that seventeen million Americans lived in poverty...

...thence he hunkered down behind liberal bromides and soon disappeared altogether...

...is a nation founded on genocide" and that "the white race is a cancer of human history" (and eventually won a five-year genius grant of $340,000 from the MacArthur Foundation...

...Surely it was tasteless of Tyrrell to disclose Kristol's early advice to him that he apply to law school...

...And of course, how can one talk of expanding freedom while wishing away one of the greatest extirpators of freedom in modern times, Communism...

...At least literary people, The American Spectator June 1992 51 unlike generals, want to bomb only themselves," wrote Deaver perceptively...

...According to Tyrrell, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I had just followed his "Har Har" declaration and George Gilder's most recent book is Life After Television, published this month by W W. Norton...

...Like the most primitive nomad, worshiping trees and storms, Mencken believed in nothing that he could not see or feel, weigh or measure...