Editorials / The Company They Keep/Tit for GATT
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
EDITORIALS The Company They Keep by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. H ow many years has it been since a Republican of high estate publicly denounced an opponent as a "pinko," a "parlour pink," or a...
...and other Democrats claiming that their critics represent the "radical right...
...He had the Wall Street Journal editorial page in mind...
...Admittedly, in the 1950s there was some warrant for resorting to these terms...
...By 1964 the terms "radical right" and "right-wing extremist" had been the subject of sociological studies...
...Richard Gephardt (D-Mo...
...The "radical right" was a concern to polite progressives back in, say, 1953...
...Gore, Secretary of State Warren Christopher, are burdened by the delusion that America's history is an embarrassment...
...and Gerald L.K...
...For instance, some nations are democracies, others are despotisms...
...From 1980 to 1992 the Goldwaterites led by Ronald Reagan and George Bush governed America tolerably well...
...As Reagan's successor campaigned for the presidency in 1988, Rep...
...was no threat to American constitutional values...
...In 1989 when the Chinese sent their tanks to massacre Chinese political dissidents, the United States could peacefully demonstrate its displeasure through sanctions...
...No Reaganite was heard honoring Mussolini, Hitler, or even George Wallace...
...The French make their wines and ship them to us...
...Liberals used them to describe supporters of Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater...
...The judgment on appeal will have to be accepted...
...and ship them wherever there is a market...
...In Tit for GATT 14 The American Spectator September 1994...
...Not much was known about the renascent conservatism then challenging the long-held certitudes of New Deal liberalism...
...Our automobile industry is forced to compete and today, unlike a decade ago, our automobiles are among the best in the world...
...Peter Sutherland, director general of GATT and an exuberant international bureaucrat who sees genuine opportunity for himself with WTO, has said, "The old GATT procedure effectively had no ability to impose sanctions on the guilty"—that is to say, a country answering to its citizens or to its own peculiar foreign policy needs...
...Old Goldwaterite harangues against foreign aid and negotiating with Communism faded...
...GATT was generally a useful instrument for liberalizing trade as it was used to lower tariffs, allowing Americans to purchase foreign products at a better price even as we gained more opportunities to ship our products abroad...
...From 1990 to 1991, he contributed some $5,000 to the Democratic National Committee...
...The Japanese tax their citizens to make good and inexpensive cars that are shipped to us...
...Over at the White House, however, under the rubric of free trade, our president is pondering legislation that would hamper free trade and clip American sovereignty...
...There is not...
...Given their politeness at the polls and no record that they threatened the civil order thereafter, one can conclude that the liberals' alarm was unwarranted and that the sociology was flawed...
...American fishermen ship flounder and tuna to Japan...
...The legislation will be sent to Congress very soon...
...All of which reminds me that one has to be pretty far to the left to see Ronald Reagan, George Bush or Rush Limbaugh as "extreme right...
...Actually, the Goldwaterites under Reagan and Bush had opened their party to wayward liberals such as Secretary of Education Bill Bennett and that erstwhile fan of Hubert Humphrey, United States Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...They also develop their own institutional goals, and they grow according to no discipline other than their own self interest...
...When fifteen Americans died recently from friendly fire in Iraq, Vice President Al Gore condoled families whose sons fought not in the service of the United States but rather according to the Vice President "in the service of the United Nations...
...This critic of conservatism is Aldrich Ames, the highest-ranking CIA official ever convicted of spying for Moscow...
...The World Trade Organization was created from the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT...
...There are many fatuities on which the bureaucrats of the WTO base their calculations...
...One is that bureaucracies are capable of serene, disinterested judgments...
...As Henry Kissinger is at pains to point out, this administration has an abbreviated view of American sovereignty...
...And they complained about a Decade of Greed, again drawing some special distinction between leveraged buyouts and bilking the local savings and loan or allowing dubious figures to fork 12 The American Spectator September 1994 over $100,000 from mysterious futures trades...
...When did you last hear a Republican assail Democrats as the party of "Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion...
...The fastidiously liberal columnist Anthony Lewis accused the Republicans variously of "nativism," "McCarthy tactics," and being susceptible to "the extreme right...
...But these virtuous Democrats still fretted about the "radical right" and "right-wing extremists...
...We would have no such latitude under the WTO...
...The Clintons are really very old-fashioned...
...Smith was a mere crank, arsenious in his prejudices but a crank with no more mass appeal than influenza...
...In the 1980s, when the Communist Sandinistas were brutalizing Nicaraguans and threatening to destabilize Central America, we could cut back Nicaragua's sugar quota as we saw fit...
...We make our computers with a minimum of intrusions from our government (affirmative action is an abomination...
...The WTO will differ only in that it will have a lot more power...
...Well I, being one of their devoted critics, find their choice slurs quaint...
...Neither you nor I have to subsidize it...
...A more pernicious fatuity undergirding the WTO is the notion that there is an international commonality embracing all the nations of the world...
...In fact, the conservatism that Buckley championed Adapted from RET's weekly Washington Times column syndicated by Creators Syndicate...
...Vic Fazio (D-Calif...
...Right now the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are top-heavy bureaucracies sorely out of touch with global needs, for instance the need to revive the economies of the former Soviet empire...
...Hurrah for free trade...
...Yet throughout the 1960s and 1970s the terms kept being applied to most Americans who dissented from liberal orthodoxy...
...Such people have over the last two or three decades missed a lot...
...It is "enabling" legislation for tying the American economy to the World Trade Organization...
...Moreover, Reagan Republicans treated much of liberalism's most plausible legislation as settled conditions of American government...
...Smith, a bigot whom time has forgotten and quite justifiably...
...More than they ever admit, they have dwelt in the provincial world of the liberal ideologue...
...Its major figures, the Clintons, Mr...
...Our automobile industry is prosperous...
...He has had American military personnel acting in Bosnia as forces not of the United States but of the United Nations...
...Perhaps Bill Clinton would like to relieve himself of the burden of making foreign policy by signing us up for the WTO, but perhaps Congress is more responsible...
...ri Already he has handed over to the United Nations control of an injudicious amount of American foreign policy...
...We will not be able to operate so freely if Congress passes WTO and yokes us to the 117 and counting other countries that have joined the WTO...
...but casual observers of the political scene might not have recognized this in the 1950s...
...Are the Clintons partisans or ignoramuses...
...The Republican Party, the Clintons lament, is falling into the clutches of the "extreme right...
...Thebureaucrats of GATT did not go into retirement...
...The term was indiscriminately applied to the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr...
...H ow many years has it been since a Republican of high estate publicly denounced an opponent as a "pinko," a "parlour pink," or a "oneworlder...
...Now along come the Clintons, the Hon...
...It has probably been two decades since such epithets were launched...
...Oh yes, they complained of Hollywood sleaze, drawing some esoteric distinction, apparently, between the shocking Claudette Colbert and the sleazeless Thomasons and Miss Streisand...
...Social Security was left unmolested...
...Do Bill and Hillary know the ideological company they keep...
...They are both...
...Over at the United Nations and in such strongholds of international bureaucracy as Brussels and Geneva, there are fat bureaucrats rubbing their palms in delight at the prospect that Bill Clinton is about to hand over to them the American economy...
...Nonetheless, partisan Democrats learned few new rants against conservative Republicans...
...President Clinton will, then, soon be relinquishing the direction of the American economy to the bureaucrats of the World Trade Organization (WTO...
...He is obviously on the Clintons' wavelength...
...Persons of goodwill could with some justification lump a Buckley in with isolationists, reactionaries, and the less savory Smith...
...As every power freak knows, with the control of the money comes all the control one could possibly want...
...The welfare state remained pretty much intact...
...On election day he attracted 27 million such supporters...
...If it is passed it will put international bureaucrats in control of our economy and eventually in control of much else...
...The new system," enthuses Sutherland, "will have an appeals body to rule...
...They set the wheels in motion for the establishment of WTO, and they adjudge it a great improvement on GAIT...
...If reports are adopted but not adequately implemented within a reasonable period, sanctions can be imposed upon the recalcitrant country...
...intoned that "Hitler would have loved these people...
...Rush Limbaugh, with a weekly radio audience of 22 million, is numbered among the "radical right...
...Of course, a growing body of economic scholarship tells us that bureaucracies are forever falling into the hands of those whom they would administer...
...Even T he policy of free trade has been a boon for us all...
...Human rights were not imperiled...
...But GATT blew up when ambitious free traders attempted to widen its scope to cover not only trade in goods but trade in services and agriculture...
...By the end of the 1970s, I think, all fair-minded observers could conclude that these epithets hadbecome slurs used by political partisans and ignoramuses...
...Just a couple of months back another public figure was decrying the Republic's "decades-long shift to the extreme right...
...We did so notwithstanding GATT judgments against us...
...Now we have President Clinton and his lovely wife Hillary—the brightest female public servant since Eve—calling critics of their policies right-wing extremists...
Vol. 27 • September 1994 • No. 9
