Tory Socialists and the Second American Revolution
Taggert, Tom
Tom Taggert: Tory Socialists and the Second American Revolution It is widely commented in the eastern press that Richard Nixon will devote considerably more attention during his second term to...
...This is a time for a priest, yet we have opted for a medicine man...
...In that great American tradition, it is the beleagured middle class that gets screwed...
...Moynihan declined to explicate is that the estrangement in American society that Richard Nixon inherited in 1969 was the result of a dissimilarity of moral vision between the elite and the majority that voted for Nixon or Wallace in 1968...
...We have forgotten where we started, we don't understand where we are, and we have no clear idea where we wish to go...
...I for one believe that it depends largely on one man and where he ends up in the ensuing struggle...
...The problem of the sophisticated commentators who write for the Time Essay" and other scholarly publications is that they have failed to recognize that the resentful Americans are really of two types: those who constitute the feeling class and resent the failure of traditional American values to fall before the onslaught of their vulgarity, and those who constitute the working class and resent the presumptuousness as well as the vulgarity of those who seek the destruction of values long cherished, adequately tested, and found perfectly satisfactory...
...Should our conservative leaders be willing to make the necessary tactical concessions and should he be willing to commit himself to the necessary strategic goals, it may be done...
...Peace of mind dictates that we believe foreign affairs will continue to preoccupy him and that the only threat to our life and liberty will come from Congress...
...All it lacks is a label, and the most accurate one is "Tory Socialism...
...he didn't have to embrace the programs of the discredited administration he succeeded...
...A dispenser of herbs, oils, and home remedies, Richard Nixon can be expected to continue in the next four years the hawking of old wares in new packages, and a public politically numbed by an overdose of unkept promises may not mind the affront...
...History will surely not underestimate (as most Republicans have done) the major contribution to this exercise made by the President's resident intellectuals...
...A revolutionist without moral vision is as legitimate as a stripper with falsies...
...Nixon has succeeded to a large extent in immobilizing the conservative movement that emerged from the Goldwater campaign, particularly that part of its leadership which serves in Congress...
...Such recognition, however, will most likely have to be induced by writers, commentators, and political spokesmen who believe that the time is at hand when only a new American Revolution can save us from the fate of earlier republics...
...We are adrift...
...This is unfair to the President...
...Vividly, I trust, the Schlesinger of this administration will portray the charming, witty, and learned Dr...
...Add to this Amtrack, FAP, the bailout of Lockheed, the vigorous advocacy of the SST, and the introduction of wage and price controls, and the conclusion is inevitable: this fellow has made quite a domestic record...
...What the President sensed and what Dr...
...Nixon, the great synthesizer, took these kernels of wisdom and formulated a domestic policy designed to pre-empt the programs of his domestic opposition and buy the flexibility he required to achieve that much heralded "full generation of peace...
...His persistent goal is to make it work, for what end he has no particular idea: he simply knows that machines are made to run and, by damn, his machine is going to run better than the other fellow's...
...Most importantly, they won't sit still for anything that threatens the integrity of a family, whether it be abortion on demand, gay liberation, government expropriation of children in the guise of "child development," or the free flow of drugs and pornography...
...The country has had a difficult enough time surviving the slight notice Nixon has given home affairs during the past four years and, aside from his stumbling upon a burning bush, it is difficult to conceive what chance we would have if he gave serious thought to the subject...
...The first business of America is the restoration of the republican order in America...
...Although the proposals in his 1971 State of the Union Message have failed to materialize into a substantive framework for a Nixon domestic policy, he has nevertheless succeeded in piecing together a patchwork program sufficiently comprehensive to support the assertion that he accomplished more in his first term than to proclaim a revolution to which no revolutionaries came...
...I look to the Vice President with a great measure of hope, but only time will tell how strong is his heart and how deep is his commitment to a republican order rendered operable by a people imbued with a republican morality.ued with a republican morality...
...To solidify this majority for 1972 the President had only to identify his administration with its moral aspirations...
...No, a revolution of the type America needs requires a leader who can inspire confidence, who can spell out the objectives for which the battle is to be fought, who can identify the enemy and persevere in the struggle...
...No doubt Richard Nixon believes that it paid off, although even he must recognize the contribution that George Mc-Govern made to his re-election...
...The Message Senders come not from the farms and backwoods but from the suburbs and small towns, are anti-busing but not necessarily anti-integration, and direct their resentment not against a faceless conspiracy but against a demonstrable reality...
...It's tough on the foreigners, but we pay them generously for the inconvenience...
...Tory Socialism as the President came to understand and implement it was a gamble that a free hand in foreign affairs and a free shot at a second term would result from a generous program of free handouts at home...
...The necessity is demonstrated by the subversion in the 1930s and the abandonment in the 1960s of the republican values for which the struggle against George III was waged, and by the acquiescence of this administration in the counter-revolution...
...One can only hope that this is merely another slur upon our President...
...A second American Revolution must have the same objective as the first: the establishment of a republican regime...
...The message has yet to get through...
...Students of Tory Socialism will recognize it as a uniquely Republican contribution to American political theory...
...Congressional hooliganism is a hazard we can reasonably live with since it is only sporadically menacing...
...All the advantages of being Disraeli failed to accrue to Richard Nixon...
...Any man who could propose to the American people a "Full Employment Budget," and do so...
...My advice is to sack-up your silver-clad coins and unbacked Federal Reserve Notes and bury them in the back yard while there's still time to save something...
...I think it is likely that it will get its second wind in a Second Nixon Administration, but whether it will gain enough momentum to launch a successful revolution against the combined strength of the McGovernites and the Tory Socialists is problematical...
...Henry Kissinger tutoring the widely traveled and experienced Mr...
...The President could have developed a domestic program consistent with the values most Americans continue to believe capable of sustaining the good life, and thereby have laid the foundation for a Republican Era, but instead he chose Tory Socialism...
...A revolutionary leader in America today must understand, as Jefferson, Madison, and Adams did, that republican government is impossible unless accompanied by a republican morality...
...What the McGovernites failed to learn from Scammon and Wat-tenberg is that a Democrat seeking national office today also has to be right on these issues if he wishes to profit from the traditional advantage of his party on bread-and-butter issues...
...the shock would be too great...
...Richard Nixon talks of a New American Revolution, but his is a revolution without articulated values, without strategic objectives, without nobility...
...Programmatic innovations of the type proposed by the Tory Socialists are mere bandaids applied to a nation suffocating from a crisis of the spirit, and for this reason alone Tory Socialism is part of the problem, not the solution...
...It assumes that the Have-A-Lots and the Have-Nothings can both profit at the expense of the Have-A-Littles...
...with a straight face, deserves credit for considerable domestic achievement...
...On the other hand, there is the possibility that after awakening from the slumber induced by the recent campaign, Americans may begin to recognize that this election really settled nothing, that, in fact, being limited to a choice between the Tory Socialists and the McGovernites afforded no viable choice at all on the fundamental issues potentially in dispute...
...The message George Wallace was attempting to send the Tory Socialists is that the working people in this country are sick and tired of picking up the tab for those with access to the seats of power, whether that access is through membership in the Cosmopolitan Club or residency at Tent City...
...Some critics have noted the failure of the President's "New American Revolution" and the stillbirth of his "New Federalism" and concluded that Richard Nixon has not had a domestic program to speak of...
...In a comparative sense he's done all right, but what satisfaction could a man of perspective derive from such an accolade when the standards of comparison consist of the likes of LBJ, JFK, and the General...
...Tom Taggert: Tory Socialists and the Second American Revolution It is widely commented in the eastern press that Richard Nixon will devote considerably more attention during his second term to domestic matters...
...Metter-nich earlier had concluded that it was unfortunately necessary for princes to give their people domestic "reform" if they wished to maintain a free hand in the conduct of foreign affairs...
...Tory Socialism has its origins in the political sagacity of Benjamin Disraeli and Count von Mettemich...
...Untainted by the Democrat's heresy of re-allocating wealth from the rich to the poor, Tory Socialism contemplates the doling out of goodies evenhandedly to those at the top and the bottom of the economic heap...
...He co-opted the opposition's programs, added a few of his own to satisfy the special constituency of Peter Flanigan and Maurice Stans, and the effort was for naught...
...America can't afford to come home...
...Who can recall in recent years a serious infringement of our freedom that originated in Congress...
...He is a Fixer, a mechanic who enjoys tinkering with the machinery of government...
...The young, the black, and the poor deserve something because something is required to keep them quiet...
...Patrick Moynihan entreating a Republican President to the role of History's Baby by the mere act of salvaging OEO, Model Cities, and a score of other Great Society programs that Candidate Nixon has promised to scrap, or the swinging, erudite Dr...
...Millions of Democrats watching the proceedings in Miami Beach last July realized that those now in control of their party speak in tongues...
...Will it happen...
...They are willing to put up with the Tory Socialists engaging in political espionage, bailing out incompetent managers of giant corporations, playing footsie with ITT and Continental Grain, sponsoring OEO boondoggles and massive food stamp handouts, but they damn well won't tolerate tinkering with their neighborhood or its schools or the insti-tutionalization of loafing as a nationally subsidized past-time...
...The opposition to the American political establishment (of which Richard Nixon is now a member in spite of the attempts of the New York Times to blackball him) is often characterized as •Populist...
...Nevertheless, in the Nixon White House, where what works is what's right, there is bound to be new confidence in the merits of Tory Socialism as the wave of the future...
...But so are an agrarian origin, racism, and the conviction of victimization by a conspiracy...
...Don't get the idea that the Tory Socialists have any particular grudge against working people...
...Who in his right mind would pledge even his Bank Americard in such an endeavor...
...Against the McGovernites he could have won on a Republican platform...
...Nixon in the subtleties of Big Power politics which make no allowance for domestic diversions...
...Working people have learned to live with the reality of being economically short-changed by government, but they refuse to acquiesce in the destruction of their value system, their neighborhoods, or their families by government edict...
...And this is the key distinction between the so-called "New Populists" and the traditional lot: the politics of resentment emerging in America today is focusing not on bread-and-butter issues but on values...
...they have absolutely nothing to say that is sympathetic to the aspirations of those Americans who work for a living and expect little more than the opportunity to make life more comfortable for their children than it has been for them...
...Richard Nixon, to his political credit, intuitively recognized this and on all but one of these gut issues came down on the right side...
...it's just that they can hardly be expected to pay much attention to folks who aren't stirring up a fuss...
...The Tory Socialists didn't win an election on November 7th, the McGovernites lost one...
...The British Prime Minister concluded that it was electorally expedient for a Conservative Government to provide the electorate with a Liberal program, thus foreclosing any programmatic temptation for the voters to opt for the opposition...
...Most Americans have intuitively come to understand that our democracy is safest when presidents are busy building democracy in some distant land...
...It is only when the Executive gets restless and starts rooting around for new solutions to all those old problems to which we have long since accommodated ourselves that we need lock the doors and take down the shooting piece...
...But I recall the Second Eisenhower Administration: it was then that conservatism as we know it today came to life as a political reality...
...The rich, the well-born, and the successful deserve something because something is required to keep those campaign contributions rolling in...
...This is only superficially accurate...
...Conservatives should be disappointed but not surprised at the President's choice...
...A philosopher he is not, nor, in an ideological sense, a man of principle...
...They are not calling for Free Silver, but for an end to social engineering...
...He must recognize that self interest tempered by a sense of community, liberty restrained by a commitment to order, sentiment untainted by sentimentality, ethics rooted in piety, and authority sanctioned by tradition are indispensible to a society committed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...
...True, the millions of Republicans and Democrats who responded to George Wallace's call for the dispatch of a message to Washington are resentful, and resentment is a defining characteristic of American populsim...
Vol. 6 • December 1972 • No. 3
