Editorial / Dramatic Democrats
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIAL Dramatic Democrats by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. New York T he Democrats have returned from the Big Apple! But they are scarcely the boisterous, ebullient bunch from days gone by. Fruit...
...Who from the Bush Administration has made a similar appearance in our culture...
...They have come up with our catchiest slogans and prettiest lapel pins, and I, for one, am still touched by that little girl back in 1964 who picked the daisy that blew up the world...
...Like guests at a masked ball the Democrats don attractive disguises...
...He also is a reader—all Democrats are readers!—partial to Teilhard de Chardin, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Garry Wills...
...they never did...
...And problems can't be resolved unless they're named and acknowledged...
...Augustine...
...No contradiction is too grotesque for his powder and mascara...
...Then, too, the conservatives need a television network...
...Fear not, the Democrats' political dramatists will blend them all into compelling legends...
...With their obvious money-raising talents, the Republicans could have acted even more ambitiously than the New Dealers and New Frontiersmen...
...He is a ballplayer...
...The Democrats recognize the usefulness of masking their belief in government regulation, high taxation, and social engineering behind the diverting costumes and sonorous dicta of the environmentalist, the consumerist, the feminist, and so forth...
...Consider Governor Cuomo...
...During both the Reagan and the Bush Administrations, Republican leaders were urged to bring in their own intellectuals, as did JFK and FDR, and then—following the Democrats' example—send them off into high-profilegovernment positions, conferring on them the prestige that they need to fight the battles of cultural politics outside government...
...Consequently, to a large extent, the Democrats control its values and rhetoric...
...This article is an adapted and expanded version of an essay that appeared in the Wall Street Journal...
...As I have elaborated in my recent book The Conservative Crack-Up, the Democrats have successfully polluted American political culture with their political ideas and panaceas...
...What is more, Republicans could have given their own journalists access to the White House...
...Pulitzer and other prizes had been won by New Dealers active in and out of government...
...The party of Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion is now the party of Yoghurt, Yoga, and Bumper Stickers...
...Being a gentleman of conservative temperament, he believes his private life should remain private and unmarketed, though I have personally gathered much incriminating evidence that George Bush is a reader, a thinker, and a man in sympathy with humanity...
...He is numbered among the grandest orators of our age, along with the Rev...
...Twenty years and $150 million ought to do the trick...
...Cuomo's state and its largest city, the financial center of America, are practically in bankruptcy...
...If ABC is not interested in increasing its market, certainly Rupert Murdoch should be...
...and he is against scripting...
...Fruit juice tipplers have replaced most of the beer guzzlers and dispelled the cigar smoke...
...There are effective conservative policy responses to the good causes of fiscal responsibility, the environment,and civil rights, but they are not to be found in the polluted atmosphere created by the furtive practitioners of masked politics...
...Do you detect incongruities...
...Eric Breindel, the astute editorial-page editor of the New York Post, observed the other day, "There's nothing remotely healthy about this state of affairs...
...He is a scholar of A. Lincoln and perhaps St...
...Great Britain's conservatives have seen the value of challenging their left's dominance of culture...
...Alas, it is not in the conservative temperament to dramatize one's political ideas or persona...
...Yet this is unquestionably a great political apparatus...
...The enthusiasts were writers, artists, policy makers, for instance, Robert E. Sherwood, Virgil Thomson, and Rexford G. Tug-well...
...Twelve years into Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal the culture of America was alive with New Deal enthusiasms and enthusiasts...
...They could have encouraged books, articles, documentaries...
...When George Bush responded to what he perceived to be a national clamoring for a balanced budget, a clean air act, and quotas, he was caught in the Kultursmog of his political adversaries...
...In this century only one Republican has surpassed his R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr is editor-in-chief of The American Spectator...
...They have done it so many times before...
...The Republicans could have opened their administrations to friendly artists and thinkers...
...Very few of them recognize the need...
...That, he would complain, is "scripting" a life...
...True, the party is at odds with itself—"odd" being the mot juste—but the Democratic party contains the most prodigious collection of political dramatists ever assembled in a party, short of National Socialism's or MarxistLeninism's spellbinders...
...He flays George Bush over the American economy, though the Hon...
...Consider Governor Clinton...
...After much research and meditation, I have come to the conclusion that Republicans (conservatives) and Democrats (liberals) have vastly different temperaments...
...Jesse Jackson and someone by the name of Ann Richards...
...Until they take such action they will be trapped in the Democrats' Kultursmog, responding to the liberals' legends and bugaboos...
...British conservatives now control something like half of British media—and they recently kept control of #10 Downing Street in a squeaker...
...Yet conservatives, with their belief in markets, could have done better than merely cry "liberal bias...
...George Bush resists the suggestion that he transform his private behavior into public virtue...
...They have created a Kultursmog...
...In fact, they still have time...
...He is a tough guy...
...For Republicans to stand steadfastly by their conservative principles they will have to avail themselves of their own dramatists...
...We are now well into the second longest Republican presidential ascendency of this century...
...Democratic adversaries in the art of self-dramatization, and that was Ronald Reagan, an ex-Democrat...
...He thinks he is simply responding to the noble desiderata of America's political culture...
...When the Republican is faced by one of these masked politicians he has not the wit to recognize that he is looking into the face of a Democrat and responding to a Democrat's demands...
...All Americans are victimized by it...
...The corporation that owns ABC is run by Republicans of a distinctly conservative stripe...
...F wally, such information producers as the Washington Times and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal have demonstrated that there are alternatives to the Kultursmog's conception and presentation of news and commentary...
...0 16 The American Spectator September 1992...
...They could have employed their own conservative political dramatists, who have been proliferating at the conservative think tanks and magazines for years...
...The Democratic output for those four years dwarfs the Republican output for the last twelve...
...He is a Republican...
...They turned an artless rube from Plains, Georgia, known for his mean streak, into a loving humanitarian, too good for Washington and too bright for politics (as though being bright and being ignorant are irreconcilable...
...Republicans do not have the guile for masks...
...Adam Meyerson, the gifted editor of the Heritage Foundation's Policy Review, urges that former secretary of education Bill Bennett be set the task of founding a first-rate conservative university...
...Naturally, he is a jogger and widely read...
...He is largesouled...
...That, as the present presidential campaign makes clear, is ruinous for Republicans...
...But let us not remind our Democrats of that unhappy event...
...For half a century the Democrats have given us practically all of our political myths, melodramas, epics, and even our barbaric political superstitions...
...Given this obtuseness, they ought not to complain too loudly about "liberal bias in the media...
...Friendly Democratic writers set out whole bookshelves of hagiography even during the Carter drear...
...He is Georgetown-schooled and Oxford-trimmed...
...He is Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield and almost any Kennedy...
...He can cry in public, but get mad too...
...Surely these executives ought to perceive the profitability of breaking with the conformity of the other networks, the same kind of conformity that led Detroit to lose much of its market to Europe's and Japan's diverse prod= ucts...
...Would not a rich (continued on page 16) 14 The American Spectator September 1992 Yale-bred patrician, heroic in war and seasoned in the rough-and-tumble of Texas business, covet such a team of dramatists...
...n recent years, as the fragmentation and radicalization of the Democratic party has worsened, its idealists and tireless campaigners have actually sharpened their artistic skills, transforming themselves into legendary figures and their ideas into The American Credo...
...And, for that matter, did President Reagan's administration do any better...
...The Democrats in our time have mastered what we shall call "masked politics...
...n part this is because the keepers of the Kultursmog are not the champions of pluralism and diversity that they claim to be...
...He is a modern, progressive cosmopolitan who remains vulnerable to the hallelujah wails of that old-time religion...
...They took a rich Harvard patrician from the 1900s and an equally rich Harvard playboy from the 1940s and turned both into statesmen with an uncommon empathy for poverty, suffering, being black—in sum, things they knew little about...
...have in mind, of course, George Bush, but take my word for it—he is almost wholly oblivious to such artistry...
...He is a policy whiz kid but with a special touch for the poor, the black, theunlettered...
...He is a supra-Catholic, pious but superior to priests, nuns, and his local cardinal, with whom he is in a spectacular metaphysical row...
...The Republicans at their best are the party of scare tactics, mudslinging, and Willie Horton—we have this on the authority of our transcontinental corps of Democratic writers and pundits...
...For them to dispel the Kultursmog they will have to expand the size of the conservative counterculture created in recent decades by a string of conservative think tanks and intellectual magazines...
...A corrupt public discourse promotes an unwillingness to face reality...
...Let us congratulate them on the power of their pens even as we hope they run out of ink this fall...
...The Democrats at their best are the party of Camelot, Sunrise at Campobello, and Give 'em Hell, Harry...
Vol. 25 • September 1992 • No. 9
