Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
Editorial Clod Populism's Man of Change Politics is hard work. Whenever elections are utterly unavoidable politicians have to conjure up new potions, regardless how lucrative their present...
...At one point he agglutinated all the razzle-dazzle change beheld for him into one gorgeous passage: "It is the people who have been passed by in American life and are frustrated that they have not had a voice in bringing about the changes that they think would improve their lives...
...One was John Kennedy...
...The clods might be crude, but they are a savvy lot...
...Realizing that most voters are inherent grumblers, given to the gambler's blind optimism, the clod populists uttered the ritualistic assurances that they would bring change and change would be rosy...
...Whenever elections are utterly unavoidable politicians have to conjure up new potions, regardless how lucrative their present swindles seem to be...
...To hear them tell it, the only real Americans left dwelt out where the pollen blows freely and where all dignitaries wore Oshgosh overalls exuding a fragrance of fresh cow manure...
...He actually believes that these frowzy sonorities about change mean something...
...It is the horse laugh of the century...
...Citizens are a finicky lot who demand from their politicians not only magic but variety...
...Yes he believes all this and more...
...For intelligent thinking persons this would be the ancient sin of hubris, but for a prairie sphinx it is merely presumption refreshed by confusion...
...What Pious George really means when he purrs on about change is that under his administration change will have a special character, ushering us into an era of milk and honey...
...I speak of Pious George from the Praires and the surprisingly potent, if not very original, issue of Change...
...Actually his approaches to technology, ecology, economic growth and democratic process reveal a peculiar timidity toward change...
...Fairy tales that would bounce off little children, and absurdities that would bring waves of glee to a man on his death bed...
...In the last election Mr...
...He believes in the canards his handlers prepare for him to pin on Mr...
...In the past our really superior politicians realized this and deftly stirred up the citizenry with New Deals and New Frontiers...
...George really does believe...
...But for Pious George, Ph.D...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...I doubt this will happen, but their brief reappearance on center stage should be good for a laugh...
...A true masterpiece embraces all three...
...Only a pedant or an ignoramus would overrate his intelligence...
...Harding...
...Now, of course, this is an example of practically unsurpassed campaign spoonery...
...How excrutiatingly he labors to express it in hues of quaint magniloquence, his face a curious surface of muscles and lumps, his big bovine eyes rolling in their sauce...
...He is riding its wave...
...In the last analysis the most ridiculous thing about Pious George's crusade is not that he is a clod or that every sensible politician in the country left his phone off the hook when George thrashed about looking for a running mate or that he is not able to utter a complex sentence without contradicting himself or that he believes that his advocacy of change really means something...
...Pious feels he has a special relationship with history...
...And clod populism's traditional racism and bigotry is even being fitted out in a modern snakeskin called quotas or proportional representation - two tortured readings of democratic theory which commission a handful of scoundrels to dictate the value of every other citizen, both in matters of law and in matters of employment...
...As every clever political orator in America will tell you, that which separates the charismatic man of destiny from the general mob of wheezing tub thumpers is the ability to speak in elevated and even inspirational terms about a nullity, a platitude or an imbecility...
...Once again mean-spiritedness is being raised to the level of political philosophy...
...But for a moderately intelligent fellow it has no more impact than moon spots or television advertising...
...This is a coalition of change, a coalition of conscience, a coalition of progress...
...For he is unique even amongst clod populists...
...He really does believe the windy rhetoric which howels through a presidential campaign...
...Innocently he intones his promise and his covenant - change...and nowhere do we glimpse the vagrant grin, the saucy wink, that would indicate a knowing design...
...After all just possibly there will be a few dullards enfranchised and eager to vote for a candidate who promises to lighten their loads...
...Nevertheless, at this very hour, one clod populist sweats furiously to surpass these great men of the past, and he stakes his sublime ambition on the same contrivance which served him so well in last spring's primaries...
...Naturally the citizenry soon lost interest in such a preposterous act, and the clod populists gave way to sleep-inducing Republicans and unctuous Democrats...
...Surely not even George believes that the ominous forces opposing him are going to rescind change...
...This year the Barnum and Baileys of political science have had to whip up a new show...
...The clod populists of yesteryear promised to beat the bushes for hyphenates, Jews, Afro-Americans, and agents of the Pope...
...Unlike Mr...
...And "the powerful" seems to mean anyone else who has distinguished himself by attracting the lusts of the yokels and their keepers...
...Now, it is claimed, the New Clod Populists are about to have their day...
...Not only is it a tushery upon a tushery...
...And somehow he will prevail, abreast with and at home with change...
...They would spin fanciful yarns about the mysterious puissance of eastern bankers and insist that there were dark schemes being hatched in the back rooms of Chinese restaurants...
...Propositions so preposterous it would be an impropriety to mention them in this sophisticated journal...
...It became the leitmotif of his crusade...
...They can tolerate only so much of a politician's wizardry before they begin to snore or to play with their toes...
...It was an oratorical hallucinogen, relied upon by every clod populist from Chisholm to Lindsay...
...Still George believes...
...Accordingly, this century has had two titans...
...It is an appalling choice in this Age of Idealism, for populism has never amounted to much more than the politicalization of baseness...
...As with the clod populism of the past, our present prodigies marshal the nation's pent-up envy and greed by bawling about the achievements of superior men, whom they deprecate as "the rich and the powerful...
...Golf caddies have le'arnt to treat such incantations with a snort...
...He believes that America rots without his leadership...
...it is also wrong-headed and deceitful...
...When Pious George kisses a baby he believes that it is because he has fallen in love...
...Nixon even tested the winds with something called a New Federalism, and from time to time he has attempted to rouse his dozing majority with something he calls a New American Revolution...
...William Jennings Bryan would have made it, but for the reassuring fact that our illustrious ancestors in their wisdom boxed his ears every time he stalked the White House...
...Nixon...
...Then it is time for what pundits are given to calling a New Politics...
...Poor George just is not bright enough to be guilty of sin...
...it became something more...
...No president in this century has ever been so gullible, and the only presidential candidate to match his gaping credulity was the remarkable Bryan...
...So they have rummaged through the fossils of American political theory and retrieved that pernicious old species of flimflammery: populism...
...Certain of these changes are bound to be benign, and others will multiply our miseries...
...As this spinning globe of some three billion passengers careens through the vast reaches of space we had all better hold on tightly and we had best expect some changes...
...It is against the status quo, and I think it represents a majority of the American people...
...So also was it a special proclamation, priority, belief, promise and magic wand...
...But no one with a dash of intelligence will seriously question the ceaselessness of change, not even a presidential candidate...
...And it is not even enough to be an adroit quick-change artist...
...He thinks he is on to something wondrous...
...He believes in his "agenda for change" with all of its contradictions...
...His dedication to change may bring blood to the cheeks of the moony-eyed in the press corps, and it may summon goose pimples amongst the intellectualoids now so abundant on college campuses and in suburbia...
...The other was W.G...
...Last spring Change became clod populism's special appeal...
...He will keep America "on course...
...It is rather that he believes...
...According to the populist intelligentsia most Framers of the Constitution spent their lives philosophizing with cows and shedding tears over the arrival of every shipload of "foreign borns...
...When the rest of them declared their allegiance to change one suspects they all knew what they were about...
...Nixon, Mr...
...Of course, he also seems to believe that by bolstering their budget the bureaucrats at HEW will be able to defend Israel and that his New Age economists need not be initiated into the mysteries of addition and subtraction and that the voters are going to elect a presidential nominee whose key argument is that if elected no one will take his proposals seriously, not even Congress...
...By "the rich" they mean those men whose numbers are so trivial that they can easily be ganged up on by a mob - especially a mob of legislative quacks...
...But to be a successful American politician these days, one must be something more than a bigot, a demogogue, a barbarian or a moron...
...God bless George McGovern...
Vol. 6 • October 1972 • No. 1
