Special Editorial: The Future Is Ours to See
Tyrell, R. Emmett Jr.
SPECIAL EDITORIAL by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. The Future Is Ours to See With the twentieth century at our backs and the first presidential election campaign of the new millennium...
...Consequently Bush occasionally lapsed into becoming "one of them...
...Recent history demonstrates that unless a politician is "one of us" he is in danger of becoming "one of them," at least on one or two important issues...
...He even has his own board of evangelical healers who regularly practice their hocus pocus in the White House—or so he says...
...Liberalism, at some point in the last two decades, became the ideology that dares not speak its name...
...It needs leaders and lacks them, but the future of conservatism is much clearer...
...Ronald Reagan was a libertarian conservative throughout his political life...
...Yet let us assume that Gore and Bradley are telling the truth when they plight their troth to markets and enterprise...
...In fact, there will be no reason to vote...
...The Republicans who have difficulty with the smog are those whom Buckley identifies as being merely conservative, for instance, Bush and McCain...
...Yet once tainted by the Kultursmog, fine ideas such as charity lose all proportion...
...Just the other day that ritualistic Liberal biographer of Roosevelts and Kennedys, James MacGregor Bums, esteemed Reagan as one of the two greatest presidents of the twentieth century...
...Its bogeymen should be the parasitic values of the Democrats' favorite sugar daddies, the trial lawyers...
...This is not to say that American society will be a libertarian's delight, but history is on a libertarian-conservative course, not a collectivist course...
...Patriotism has, for years, roused the wrath of the Kultursmog's victims, but now something loosely called "family values" is one of their bugaboos, as is "being judgmental," which is to say, merely judging something right or wrong, good or bad...
...Thus, though the poor constitute a small and unfortunately intractable number of Americans, the Kultursmog forces candidates and governments to spend unreasonably large amounts of time on the topic, always talking about the poor as though policies for enriching them were instantaneously available...
...With both political parties claiming many of conservatism's ingredients and with the discredited collectivism of the twentieth century now politely forgotten, we can predict that the early twenty-first century will continue to trend towards libertarian conservatism...
...Its inspiration should be the libertarian values of Silicon Valley...
...Now there is a whiff of fresh air for the Kultursmog to contend with...
...And of course the political exemplar for the coming libertarian-conservative future should be Ronald Reagan, whose repute even among scholars grows steadily...
...Why not bring the marginal tax rate back to where it was before Clinton raised it in his first term...
...The party favors growth...
...Well, there are always contradictions in this political culture...
...But the other culture is where the opinion-molders reside...
...He recognizes the Kultursmog and those besmogged by it and avoids all contact...
...Many of the desiderata of the Kultursmog are admittedly fine ideas no more controversial than flossing daily or washing one's hands after eating sushi...
...oops...
...Miraculously, most of the modern world has put the planned society behind it and accepted markets and enterprise as the hinges of prosperity...
...In the Kultursmog almost all issues are boomed as crises, though most never have been and many are being steadily ameliorated, usually by some agency far removed from the Kultursmog's polluting institutions...
...Even the Democratic Party's great leader, swaddled so smugly in the party's progressive mantle, has pronounced that "the era of big government is over...
...Personal privacy is extolled by pols in both parties...
...Remember in 1992 when candidate George Bush idly inquired about the workings of a grocery checkout machine...
...Nonetheless, the words and values continue to accumulate: Diversity takes its place next to environmentalism, and multiculturalism next to feminism, and animal rights next to gay rights, and sexual freedom is set down right there between children's rights and sexual harassment law...
...The first C...
...Its existence explains why they both look so pained on the campaign trail while Gov...
...It looks like a libertarian-conservative decade or two ahead...
...The second political culture is polluted with sonorous words and lofty values that have been accumulating from the Liberal mythmakers since Liberalism went haywire in the 1960's...
...Attending to their obsessions and echoing their buzzwords always endangers a Democratic candidate's repute with everyday Americans...
...He has been acclaimed so by fellow Democrats, most memorably Senator Bob Kerrey who called him "an unusually good liar...
...Today "hate crimes" have become an obsession within the Kultursmog...
...George W. Bush, Sen...
...That Congress represents many of his policies...
...All of which is to say that the policies hammered out in the conservative think tanks and supported by the rank and file of the Republican Party are the policies most likely to lead to the election of a conservative president in the year z000...
...Take Forbes...
...The contradictory pollutants of 0 6 14 December 1999/January z000 • The American Spectator the Kultursmog explain why so many of the sophisticates victimized by it sound so confused and angry...
...That would be following the internationalism of the Cold War, an internationalism that always had reasonable checks on its ambitions...
...In fact, except for the highly charged anomaly of abortion, the Republican conservatives share the goals of everyday Americans and advocate the policies to realize those goals...
...It cost him the White House and brought politics at the national level to the present muddle with a conservative Congress ceaselessly thwarted by a Democratic president...
...Those contaminated by it become indignant when confronted with beliefs not cherished in the smog's densely politicized atmosphere...
...Conservatives' only cause for apprehension is that Bill Clinton may be the role model for future presidential aspirants...
...Simply decide the presidency by the flip of a coin or perhaps whichever candidate survives a trip over the Niagara Falls in a barrel...
...The everyday American's desire for improved education and health care can be realized by school vouchers and medical savings accounts...
...Kultursmog hovers over all areas of public influence: the media, universities, government...
...The seasoned libertarian conservative recognizes the two cultures and cultivates the first while treating the second like the poisonous cloud that it is...
...As mentioned earlier, one of the curiosities of this second of our two political cultures is that it can transform some minor occasion into a vexed crisis for a candidate...
...But when he took his first swipe at the Congress, he was going a bit far...
...Bush is briefed on the workings of every grocery checkout machine on sale in the land...
...The Liberal activists whom Bradley and Gore must court are grim inhabitants of smog...
...Similarly, those Americans who play identity politics are treated as special persons and their demands as hallowed, though again only a small minority ofAmericans consider themselves gay or feminists or militant people of color...
...Once again a sense of proportion has been banished...
...They should strengthen Social Security by a program of individual investment...
...No conflict or complication is acknowledged...
...T he Kultursmog is a rather serious problem for Bill Bradley and Al Gore...
...He should recognize that the rank and file of his party for the most part fit into Buckley's category of being "a conservative...
...He never became "one of them...
...It is a culture polluted by politics even if it rarely admits its politics...
...The Republicans are even more devoted to markets and to personal freedom...
...Sirens in the night...
...Finally, the Republican candidate should favor a strategic defense initiative and strengthening our military in those areas that have been neglected during the Clinton years...
...It is they who create hot-button issues that can destroy the unwary candidate...
...Former President George Bush, on the other hand, was what Buckley calls merely "conservative...
...They are...
...If his relentless mendacity becomes the model for future electoral politics, there will be no reason to believe any candidate's utterances...
...The culture of everyday reality is where most of the votes are...
...Naturally enough, President Clinton won this distinction by lying in court...
...and by a federal judge who exalted him above all his predecessors...
...The future of the conservative movement is problematic...
...Currently, organized religion rouses their ire, though again there is contradiction...
...political culture is that of everyday ---- -reality...
...The other was FDR...
...The Future Is Ours to See With the twentieth century at our backs and the first presidential election campaign of the new millennium dancing before our eyes, it is about time we consider the future of American politics...
...Is there any contemporary politician who invokes religion more frequently than the smog's political prodigy, President Clinton...
...And when he took off against the title of Judge Robert Bork's book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, as though it were the bumper sticker of the American Know-Nothing Party, he was in dangerous territory...
...Owing to its pervasiveness, its political contaminants, and the way it poisons free and rational discourse, the second political culture has earned the designation "Kultursmog...
...The second cul- (._ ) ture is the Liberal's...
...You can be sure that Gov...
...The criminal justice system already deals with them as well as can be expected, and when it does not the cause is usually some earlier Liberalreform...
...Even after the hubbub he created, Jeff Davis does not have a contempt of courtcitation on his record...
...Yet in the 1980's it became an obsession, notwithstanding the obvious fact that civil-libertarian values contorted by the Kultursmog made resolving the homeless's condition impossible...
...And the buzzwords echo through the culture: "compassion," "understanding," "tolerance," "zero tolerl ance...
...A winning Republican presidential candidate will support growth at home and strength around the world...
...Oft,t 16 December 1-999/ January 2000 • The American Spectator...
...With federal tax revenues at 22 percent of the GDP, the highest level since 1944, the candidate will advocate tax cuts...
...They might be slightly to the right of everyday Americans, but they are closer to everyday Americans than are the gloomy inhabitants of the Kultursmog...
...A conservatively inclined politician such as George Bush is always in danger of becoming "one of them" because there are two political cultures in the Republic...
...What is more, let us consider the future of American libertarian conservative politics or, as we say, the conservative movement...
...Nonetheless, it ceaselessly rants and raves wherever intellect and sophistication are supposedly prized...
...The smog presents almost no threat to the candidate whom Buckley would categorize "a conservative...
...The Republican who would be president must not pander to the Kultursmog...
...He is the most colossal liar in the history of the presidency...
...His notion of "compassionate conservatism" reveals a studious awareness of the Kultursmog's honeyed terms...
...The first culture is thelibertarian conservative's natural constituency of tax-paying, personally responsible citizens...
...It is prosaic, favoring sound schools, a sound health care system, a sound military, a sound economy, and freedom to live in one's community without the wild enthusiasm that steams up the second culture...
...Homelessness is even more infrequent than poverty...
...Republicans should continue their opposition to affirmative action...
...In foreign policy they should stress national security and the defense of American interests around the globe, introducing force into other countries' civil wars solely when our interests are at stake...
...Al Gore and Bill Bradley favor free markets, even "global markets...
...The problem for the future of American politics is electing politicians who believe strongly enough in freedom and markets to stand by them...
...Every scholarly analysis of the words' meanings and of their values has revealed them as vacuous and often perverse...
...She made him the first American president ever to be held in contempt of court...
...Such crimes are rare...
...Inhabitants of the country's political cultures recognized the pandering...
...John McCain, and Steve Forbes seem to be having a relatively good time...
...They court the celebrity that the organs of the Kultursmog can provide, hoping not to get stained by some contaminant or dizzied by the fumes...
...He was, according to William F. Buckley, Jr.'s useful distinction, "a conservative...
Vol. 32 • December 1999 • No. 12
