On the Democratic Idea in America
Tyrell, R. Emmett Jr.
The qualities of Kristors mind are obvious, as also his erudition (who in the hell is Sbeato.v?.), but what makes him so d~aomenailv immrtant it seems to me is a) his cogency; and b) his...
...Happiness...
...These were Publius' apprehensions and they are Kristol's...
...Rather it seems that they have reverted to hissing, spitting, and clawing at one another's purses...
...This fourth man is Richard Nixon...
...The fourth won, but only after an eight-year wait, and even in winning he received three and a half million fewer votes than he received in his first run...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...HIS other essays, especially those on the city, censorship, the university, and _political utopianism, are of proximate value not only for their intelligent treatment of various national disaster zones, but for the nexus Kristol draws between these vexing temporary dilemmas and the enduring diseases of democracy...
...It drifts in search of authority, leadership, and a renewal of principle, both in the way men govern their society and in the way men govern themselves...
...Essentially, The New York Review o] Books plays with itself...
...He is neither shaken by the possibility of popular government nor entranced by its myths...
...America's crisis is the fading of legitinmcy in all those institutions that moderate human orneriness and conflict...
...America has slipped its morrings...
...persons who were not eligible to vote in 1968, when Nixon won by half a million votes out of 73 million votes cast...
...The challenge remains to forfend these mortal diseases without violating the spirit and the form of popular government...
...It is a fine statement even if not all of its particulars can be agreed upon...
...After suffering the recent spate of hightoned gossip on the lives and loves of Jason Epstein and the other precious darlings frolicking in the sand and Imunck~g beach balls over at The New York Revk.w o! Books one gets the notion that intellectuals cultivate "'fine minds" not to enlighten social pOlicy but to satirize enlightenment...
...Kristol goes out of his way to avoid being designated a liberal, or a eomervative, or even -- so far as I know - - a neo-couservative...
...is editor of National Review, a rising New York based conservative magazine...
...Muskie is not...
...Inflamed passions will eventually elicit wrong8 The Alternative June--September 1972 headed legislation...
...It is a sacrament for fourth-rate nobodies pursuing second-rate indentities...
...The reasons why rlumphrey's support is substantial but as yet insufficient are obvious...
...Whether wrought by a mob of dyseptic middle-class students or a mob of colonial yeomen, the problematics" or the "'diseases" are inevitable and they often spring to life as overbearing majorities, inept majorities, foolish majorities, or vulgar majorities...
...They are serious and they are enduring...
...Besides, Humphrey almost won in 1968, in spite of the fact that his campaign was underfinanced.and his badly divided party had just given the country the worst eight consecutive years of government since 18.52-60...
...While The New York Review maunders decortmsly of fantasy and moonshine for a bemused audience of frustrated academics on the cow campuses of America, Norman Podi~oretz's Commentary has led a successful revolt against mindlessness and self-indulgence to reaffirm standards of intellectual achievement and to direct serious inquiry into the conditions of American society...
...Nor can I imagine one that could have or should have been so influenced...
...In addition, this year there will be senate elections in 33 states...
...The word is that these elemplars ~ reason and virtue are...
...Humphrey has been doing political favors for twenty-five years...
...The split has been developing for some time, and a milestone came in 1965 when Manhattan's own Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell began editing The Public Interest 'to help all of us, when we discuss issues of public policy, to know a little better what we are talking about -- and preferably in time to make such knowledge effective...
...and b) his rammer...
...Indeed such a suggestion strikes me as audacious and enlightened...
...The hour has rushed upon us when liberals and conservatives must cooperate to heal the horrid wounds that have been slashed into our society...
...That this is not so could never be inferred from reading their social or political writings...
...In assaying American democracy, Kristol is not tripped up by the conceptual deficiencies of either traditional conservatives or of liberals...
...For reasons still enveloped in mystery, democratic America has actually managed rather well...
...Finally in the American system freedom and equality are in unsurpassed equipoise...
...Often they are profound...
...I can recall not one piece of legislation passed in the last five hundred years that was the least influenced by The New York Review o[ Books...
...William F. Buckley, Jr...
...Their interest is in polity and their thinking is responsive to the conditions of government and society...
...Serious Democrats know that only four men have been renominated after running unsuccessfully for president...
...And there is more happiness in the American village than in any other place on the face of the earth...
...This year the obvious place to look for those votes is among "the kids...
...Perhaps it is not too late to revive that crucial, if unsung, element of democratic society that is commonality...
...Most importantly, their consequences are distinctly undemocratic...
...It is a great performance, an invaluable performance, and I join zestfully the parade, as witness that I leave for another occasion the challenging remarks of Robert Bartley...
...Indeed the book offers fuel for every American who thinks seriously about the mess we are in...
...That America is more congenial toward dissent than any other society on the globe is manifest...
...Serious disagreements have divided them over their old puzzle of how to transform America into a vast, free-admi.~ion Disneyland...
...Effortlessly soaring above the screeches, the squeaks, and the infantile prattle of the Pecksniffs who pant and perspire over The New York Review o[ Books, Kristol apprehends many of the same problems that impressed those who wrote the Constitution...
...It seems to me that the causes for such agony and abomination are a matter of their singular perceptions...
...Lets think about Hubert Humphrey...
...Admittedly the essays are often difficult, yet they unerringly spot, the vectors of our malaise...
...Remembedng the Questions On the Democratic Idea in America 8y h-ring Kristol ilarper and Row, ~.{lO D UI~NG THIS PAST month there has appeared a torrent of amusing~ serious mor~grapo_~ dealing with the trials and triumphs of the inhab/tants of New York's literary jtmgle...
...Irving Kristol is learned, wise, and absolutely his own man...
...All in all, life in the literary jungle is not so sweet as it was back in the glorious days of the l~(is...
...In other essays dealing with specific social problems, he evinces his awareness that these conditions are but Publius' "mortal diseases" reworked for the peculiar tastes of an American liberal audience...
...Kristol is that unique kind of thinker around whom can rally liberals and conservatives who feel, as I personally feel, that ideological spitting matches should be cast overboard during times, such as our own, when the very existence of our democracy is in question...
...Humphrey is a very likeable gentleman...
...His serene awareness deserves emulation...
...For the nation's alienated, and adrift, America has become morally unpersuasive, and in his most suggestive essay, "When Virtue Loses All Her Loveliness," Kristol traces the roots of this sour perception back to modern capitalism itself...
...While remaining sober in his defense and in his aspirations for democracy, Kristol believes that unrestrained majorities, if furious enough, can prevail over separation of powers, checks and balances, amending processes, or any other constiutional insulation of minority rights...
...Let us assume, perhaps rashly, that the Democratic Party does not want to hitch its wagon to a Goldwater...
...Bartley so shrewdly points out, he is there really to rescue empu-icism, to bring it back as a dog might retrieve an abandoned ball, to Leo Strauss, gently reminding the master that there is no true disjunction between empiricism and the values of the great tradition, that it is the ideologizers of the data who are the enemy, not just every social scientist...
...careful (I think it is that, rather than kxsUnctive) way in which he avoids ~ r i l y proyoking the other side, avoids raising his acgument into a taxonomic level flint emam automatic r e s e n ~ t from the reader...
...Middle age leaves them unlovdy and ornery...
...As the book includes only eight of the many essays Kristol has written over the past five years, I take it that these essays traverse contemporary issues the author regards as most important...
...In the book's key essay, "American Historians and the Democratic Idea," Kristol acknowledges democracy's "problematics" (what Publius called its 'mortal diseases") and adumbrates an eminently intelligent conception of popular or democratic government...
...The Democrats could nominate Humphrey if they knew where he could get the winning margin of votes...
...You read him on the educators, or on the press, or on pornography, or on social goals, and it is simply hard to disagree with him because his thrusts are never ideological: indeed as Mr...
...But there comes a point when senti ment collides with historical facts...
...Never mind that by the time you are throqgh reading a half dozen of his essays you reali,e that he has touched on mn~ points, and that there is a concatenation there of positions and attitudes and values that make for a very highly strut'/awed whole...it doesn't happen to the reader in such a way as to ~ him ta guard against ceoption: And then the dazz~ng sensibleness of what he says, so perfectly suited to how he says it...
...There will be 25 million "new voters...
...Democrats think Humphrey would be an anti-Pied Piper, a Republican insurance policy against the youth vote...
...As regards the latter, is the sweet reasonableness I speak of...
...Ultimately, Kristol's concerns are the same as Madison's...
...His book is instructive, not only for what it says about, for instance, censorship, but for what it says about how men govern themselves in the democratic regime...
...In peering through the flatulent rhetoric of our contemporary mountebanks, Kristol grapples with the underlying principles controlling democratic government...
...During times of profound social division, I do not sense anything pedestrian or low about urging a deeply divided people to find something noble to melt into...
...His political commentary is reminiscent of America's grandest period of political discourse, the creation of the Republic...
...I slumld have llmught that the vicious ways of Mr...
...Kristol, like Publius in Federalist 49, Great American Series "What is the great thing in life, my countrymen...
...If Hubert Humphrey could guarantee that Edward Kennedy would accept the Vice Presidental nomination, many Democratic professionals would follow their hearts and give Humphrey another shot at the White House...
...Warren Gamaliel Harding desires a democratic or republican "remedy to (these) diseases most incident to republican government...
...No one cared a fig about Muskie, nor Muskie about anyone, until Humphrey raised him to prominence at Chicago in 1968...
...Theh" wives are becoming restless...
...In 31 of these the number of new voters is larger than the margin by which the incumbent won in his last election...
...And it is not much better for those of us for whom reading thehr drivel has become an occupational hazard...
...It is not certain that new voters will vote in large numbers and predomiThe Alternative June--September 1972 9...
...They are relevant without being pop...
...I endorse this book more eagerly than any book that has been published since The Alternative came off the restroom walls...
...He is worth arguing with...
...I have no doubt but that they are important issues, and for that reason alone they should appear on every college reading list concerned with modern American society...
...Nevertheless life for a great many Americans is - - if we hear them correctly - - unbearable...
...So, too, is it obvious that poverty is more comfortable here than anywhere else...
...That Irving Kristol is a higher form of New York intellectual, that he is one of the most important social thinkers in America, and that his writing is required reading for both liberals and conservatives who ardently care about the direction and health of their country has been confirmed by the publication of On the Democratic Idea in America, a collection of eoolheaded, percipient essays on America's political weaknesses and those social problems that have emphasized the reality of that weakness...
...Three (Bryan, Dewey and Stevenson) lost again...
...HH + EMK = ? B ECAUSE WE may not be able to do so in the future, let us forget George McGovern for a moment...
...Yet there are some expatriates from the literary jungle whose writing does influence legislation and who are more serious...
...N'uam and his cronies down on the Potomac would have inspirited the New York intellectuals to redouble their efforts at uplift and to throttle their violent pa...
...According to Kristol, America's failure has been its inability to nourish the spirit...
...Many now have to take a back seat to Helen Gurley Brown or to Charles Manson...
...again at one another's throats...
...Again and again Kristol returns to the theme that denatured authority is the cause of alienation, anomie, and the dispirited withdrawal of the desengages: "what exists is vulnerable for no ther reason then that it exists and because the citizenry no longer feels any particular responsibility for its existence, any instinctive obligation to sustain or even reform it...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
