Welcome to the New American Spectator
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Welcome to the New American Spectator BY R. EMMETT TYRRELL JR. American Spectators,how do you like this typographical finery? History trips onward, and at AmSpec it is time for a new design.Yet we...
...it has simply traveled under a different name: Pioneers and trailblazers, sodbusters and homesteaders were all investors...
...Enter Ronald Reagan...
...As Bush II observed in Philadelphia, American politics have become a contest of fear v. hope, and libertarian conservatives compose the party of hope...
...Not simple iconoclasm for us, no, no—with my colleagues George Gilder and Richard Vigilante (he being the editor of my last two books) we are going to identify the looming social, technological, cultural, and political changes of the Twenty-First Century...
...clumsy government regulation more disastrous than ever, but more likely too, as the regulators fall further behind...
...ontinuing mission...
...He lost Congress, and his party's power receded in the provinces while he spent his second term running from the legal consequences of news stories often first reported in our pages...
...What would Dr...
...Thus it is essential that a conservative magazine take the lead in engaging precisely those exciting developments—in technology, in the new economy, in science itself—that the party of fear treats with increasing suspicion...
...His few successes were with policies he filched from his Republican tormentors...
...The transition has overwhelming implications for American politics, for libertarian conservatives, and for The American Spectator...
...When The American Spectator was founded in 1967, it was part of a still tiny insurgent movement...
...And yet the constituency for regulation, for protectionism, and protection from progress itself, is growing...
...By 1992 it was liberal Democrats who looked like history's flukes, slipping in with 43 percent of the vote and a candidate who had spent his past eight years forswearing liberal nostrums...
...8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR ¦ March 2001 In our time this exploration and enterprise have reached a fortissimo and so have the oppositions shrieks...
...Even through the 1970s, libertarian conservatives remained virtually invisible in the media...
...Exploring and exploiting the bounty of creation, pioneering the universe, is neither a violation of that creation, as the Greens would have it, nor a meaningless attempt to create significance out of nothingness, as the still-dominant forces in our country's Kultursmog maintain, but our Divinely intended purpose...
...But the investor class has always been dominant in American life and politics...
...Building on our past (note our new logo's similarity with the logo of the 1980s) AmSpec is facing the post-Clinton future with relish.You will note added features...
...The typographical Michelangelo who art directed my last two best-sellers, Boy Clinton and The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, Marja Walker, came aboard some months back to design this tony new look...
...Marx make of that...
...His economic policies launched a twenty-year boom that continues and, assuming Bush II has his Reaganite way, will go on...
...The bizarre anti-trust initiatives of the Clinton Administration were more than anything a spectacle of cluelessness...
...His hand-picked successor, assisted by a vigorous economy and by a massive get-out-the-vote-fraud campaign in the cities, lost...
...They are our party and in defending their interests, sustaining their success, and enriching their lives we find our continuing mission...
...Over the past several decades the extremely rapid pace of technological innovation has become the dominant force in the economy and the culture...
...With even greater energy than in the past, The American Spectator will expose the phony fears and junk science generated to justify the exactions and ambitions of various legal charlatans and political thugs...
...The economy of mind is global, the pace of innovation everywhere increases, as does the speed at which it is possible to fall behind...
...And because absolute, unchallengeable American military superiority is the sine qua non of peace and security, conservatives must engage intellectually the technology that ensures it...
...The Boy President never gained a majority of the popular vote...
...It is the constituency of fear, represented by the party that believes freedom is just another word for "risky scheme...
...Free markets are more important than ever...
...President Reagan changed the course of American policy at home and won the undeclared world war against Communism abroad...
...More than half of adult Americans now own stocks, making the investor class decisive politically...
...President Reagan's sustaining philosophy was the pioneer ideal: The belief that individual human endeavor can alter the harsh circumstances of life, creating dramatic new abundances rather than merely rearranging scarcities, thus confounding the perpetual pessimism of the fatalists, planners, and politburos...
...The Old Cowboy's election we were told in 1980 was a fluke made possible by a grumpy Ayatollah and by Jimmy Carter's "malaise...
...They have always constituted the party of hope, the party of yes, the entrepreneurial party, the American party...
...Moreover you will note that we are expanding our area of interest...
...Today what we call conservatism is the body of political, social, and economic thought that best represents the American ideal: optimistic, freedom loving, growth oriented, eager for the future, bored by problems, excited by opportunity, resolute in the conviction that America remains the last, best hope of mankind...
...And we are going to be part of the action...
...History trips onward, and at AmSpec it is time for a new design.Yet we are keeping the changes all in the family...
Vol. 34 • March 2001 • No. 2
