The Living Legacy of Frank S. Meyer
Brudnoy, David
located in school. Once out and on their own, one trusts for them a healthier life. Whether or not this picture is unfair is not important. Actually it is less unfair than oversimplified, the...
...But alone, untouched by the softening graces of traditional conservatism, libertarianism ultimately repels any but ideologues...
...The fancy notions are usually the progressive or liberal ones, the ones which, depending on whether they're addressed to Ray Milland or Walter Brennan, either urge a new way to treat people or bridle mules...
...3 L_____ Letter from a Whig HI I IlL mmllll The Washington Scene (WASHINGTON)--For the sagacious pundit and judicious observer of the Washington scene, 1973 already heralds the truth of that widely sung chorus line-Only in America...
...One glance at Ichabod Crane standing up against Brom Bones in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" says it all...
...Its failure was characterized by overcentralization, and the top-heavy nature of the structure reflected a "'support-the-rich-build-a-bureaucracy" approach to the problem of poverty...
...Those who sit in or have sat in classrooms watching instructors who have divested themselves of all obligation to seek Truth and then declare it, or, alternatively, watching instructors make fools of themselves by their sanguine assumption day in day out ot the mantra of Wisdom, have need of the likes of Frank Meyer...
...Through the peculiarities of the American political process, the demarcation for the battle between the Republican President and the Democrat-controlled Congress has been drawn...
...He lcnew what "idealism" means when the ideals tire wrong...
...When he tried to wed libertarianism, the residue of nineteenth century liberal laissez-faire, with Burkean traditionalism (that's "fusionism"), he realized that although the two needed each other, and, indeed, in America were inextricably intertwined, they would not always live happily-ever-after together...
...He knew what zealotry, of whatever brand, means: absolute subservience to Dogma...
...You tried to solve social problems like a drunken hardware wholesaler trying to snag girls in a Paris nightclub...
...Traditionalist conservatives may charm with their reactionary romanticism, and orthodox libertarians do jolt us with their dogmatism...
...4.00 College [ [] 2 yrs...
...The student similarly doesn't exist without the teacher, who serves either as the authority in the way, the pathfinder out of the slums, the target for a fisffull of chalk, the rival, lover, muse, or sometimes, death...
...The flaccid mind, the mind that dealt in pat phrases and the neatest of categories, all nicely packaged -- that mind could receive little from Frank Meyer, and Frank cared little and offered less to Such minds...
...Neither image was particularly reassuring for the American liberal, and neither image was very pleasing to the American conservative...
...whereas the student, be he inarticulate, insensitive, a lout or buffoon, is, because of his vertical climb, his graduation, going places...
...One character is locked into his role seemingly forever...
...To .Imeri*~t II.~s...
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...And never did he give in to .any such again, from his renunciation of Communism in the mid1940s onward...
...at his best he was also academic in the finest sense, in his insistence on working things out properly, not just expeditiously...
...it is so, so later-day liberal, after all...
...Whether we view the academy in Brother Rat or The Group, we are to associate what we see with the unreal life...
...Whatever one's political or ideological or philosophical "thing," there is enormous worth in Frank Meyer's contribution to the world of ideas, available for the taking...
...yet they have never entirely jelled into a smooth pudding, not even in the hands of Frank Meyer, who stirred the mix longest, and best...
...Assuming that every pop cultural convention supports a genuine cultural idea, what is it in the genre that we find pleasant or reassuring...
...To sit and drink and argue with Frank was real education, and he offered it to philosophical friends and foes alike...
...The fancy notions may eventually win out in the plot (usually some coml~romise measure is hit upon wherein all Ancients and MOderns are reconciled), but they are always judged basically dangerous because they are bred out of inteilection, rather than intuition or convention...
...He found Mill unclear, and not absolute enough in the grounds of his defense of liberty...
...The atteildant supposition is that to stay in school is to go no place, and that having been to school is having been no place, that is, no place real...
...I have set out simply to tell what it is that Frank Meyer believed and then, now, to suggest why this piece is titled the "living legacy" of Frank Meyer...
...The first signs of how Nixon envisions his next four years came when the Administration introduced its Federal Budget for Fiscal Year 1974...
...In Frank Meyer, the conservative movement found a teacher of virtue...
...Although the Nixon Court has also shown indications that it has its own ideas on what it will take to save the country...
...I The following remarks concern Frank Meyer the teacher: what he taught, whiat he meant (and means) both for co~lservatism and for general politic~l15hilosophical thought in America...
...5) No other activities of men, except these three legitimate functions of the state, require the monopoly of force...
...As to the latter: we have, as empirical evidence, only to look around us, to listen carefully to the babblings of the dogmatic libertarians hot to sell the lighthouses and charge users for mini-patches of city greenery and make garbage collection voluntary and the fire department a money-making proposition, and to the quaint but frightening preachments of the ultra-traditionalists who would rest happier if an American Franco could come to power or the Twentieth Century disappear...
...He brushed that nonsense off, that if once they but rightly knew The Good, then the governors would be correct in enforcing it, with reference to Aristotle: "In order to be good one must be in a certain state when one does the several acts,.i.e., one must do them as a result of choice and for the sake of the acts themselves...
...Our classic American leader and model is not the teacher-educated, but the self-educated man...
...To summarize: "'Conservatism unites the 'traditionalist' emphasis upon virtue and 'libertarian' erhphasis upon freedom...
...October 12, 1957...
...and more, they find them incomprehensible...
...I assert," Frank wrote, "the right of individual freedom not on the grounds of utility but on the grounds of the very nature of man and the nature of the drama of his existence...
...1I "While truth and virtue are metaphysical and moral ends," Frank Meyer wrote in Modern Age (Fall, 1960), "the freedom to seek them is the political condition of those ends -- and a social structure which keeps power divided is the indispensable means to this political end...
...National Review, January 16, 1962) And the same year, lus In De]ense o] Freedom elaborated that view...
...7.00 [] 3 yrs...
...Democ/'atic or Republican administration, 1950s "complacency" or 1960s revolutionism or 1970s moral and intellectual bankruptcy: whatever the occasion, or time, or party or president, or for that matter, situation, however significant or infinitesimal, FrankMeyer approached the matter from the perspective of the libertarian-conservative, a term as unwieldy as "fusionist" is mechanistic, but about the best we can do by way of a descriptive catchphrase for him...
...M. Stanton Evans, a first-rate conservative mind himself, said of Frank that "his libertarian conservative writings (will rank) among the principal achievements, not only of modern conservatism, but of political thought in general...
...Or worse: an unholy matrimony . . . an inconsistency . . .a contradiction in terms...
...but rather, and here the met: aphors end, he jogged along a ragged path winding through both gardens, plucking something of enduring value here, something of worth there...
...Only in America could a court declare jurisdiction over the ethical question of abortion and get away with it...
...He lives between good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and error, and he fulfills his destiny in the choices he makes...
...The question is, what feelings in us do these predictable depictions create or sustain...
...All this such idealism, such causes, such zealotry he repudiated...
...Frank knew the meaning of tyranny...
...When the uninformed talk of "conservatlsm/' they tend m list it atong with liberalism, radicalism, Communism, Fascism, and other isms, as if it too were an ideology...
...5.50 [] 2 yrs...
...An area of continuing importance, in which Frank's ideas deserve especially careful attention (and qualification) is that of race relations...
...7 3 yrs...
...We learn from Frank whenever we contemplate the problems he considered - - if we are cognizant of his central beliefs in those matters, are willing to make some of the effot'ts he made to grapple with them, and are determined to allow him to live in us not as captain but as coach...
...Journalists and academicians have long speculated over what a second Nixon term would entail...
...As the years wear on, the danger is everpresent that the glow of recollection will pretty Frank up, will wear off the rough edges that were very much part of him, will reduce him simply to the Godfather Fusionist, thereby trivializing him by an excess of sentimental (and unthinking) hagiolatry...
...Only extended quotation, not possible in this article, can put Frank's case fully, though a summary from that January 1962 article offers enough for our purpose here...
...But two tendencies are already at work now, just one year after his death of cancer at age sixty-two, in April 1972...
...We must keep it, extend it, grow wiser by learning from it...
...He stood always with then of princlpie (not fanatics), rather than with "pragmatic" men...
...It may be cheerful or perplexing, but it is not of this world, not of our sense of it, anyway...
...But, from the same Modern Age piece: "Our task is to overcome the nineteenth century bifurcation of the western tradition in fruitful dialogue, not to perpetuate it by refusing to understand the breadth and complexity of our heritage, out of a narrow historicism that unearths outworn party emblems...
...But precisely because he knew that those simple sentences contained outlines, not detailed formulations, he went on for nearly two decades in National Review and in other journals, exploring the world and pronouncing upon the state of its health...
...government must have as its essential aim the guarantee of the maximum of possible freedom to each individual person...
...We cannot abide in formal education what we cannot yet accept for ourselves: impracticality, the rejection of force, informed innovation, orderly criticism, and most of all, the rational activity which may show that we're available to failure...
...Education suffers i too many teachers are buffoons, too many students are dunderheads, and between the ludicrousness of the professoriate and the slothfulness of the young scrufflies (as Meyer like to call them), what passes for learning in many of America's classrooms approaches low parody more often than high enlightenment...
...Glenn Ford survived The Blackboard Jungle because he was able to punch out the hoods, and when things got too tight for television's Mr...
...They are laughable in western culture generally, but particularly in America where the standard national virtues are antithetical to an educator's attitudes or conduct...
...Baldly stated, it has an old-fashioned ring to it, one mightily unconducive to the "modern" mind...
...There was in him a fierce disdain for those who simply emoted, simply ielt...
...He is not, in a word, a utopian...
...we have only to attend to those forced alternatives to know that something between botfi must be our destiny...
...Truth withers when freedom dies, however righteous the authority that kills it, and free individualism uninformed by moral value rots at its core and soon surrenders to tyranny...
...No social institution, not even the conglomerate of such institutions we call for convenience 'society' can make the least one of these choices . . . . Only the individual person, whose fate it is to choose, can be free, for freedom is no more nor less than the possibility-- and reSponsibility -- to choose...
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...Instead of supporting a cultural representation which seriously criticizes or openly scorns formal education, we support one which makes fun of it...
...Having pulled himself up by his own bootstraps, his manhood has virtually been defined by his self-education, which in turn implies that his manhood would have been threatened or weakened by schooling, and syllogistically, that schooling is an unmanly influence...
...OEO's responsibilities are being shifted to other government agencies, with the exception of the Community Action Agencies...
...There is nothing startling about this notion, nor "anything specifically limited to Frank's legacy as opposed to that of any other significant thinker...
...Movies about the subject consequently take on an aura of fantasy...
...The denial of the claims of virtue leads not to conservatism, but to spiritual aridity and social anarchy...
...He always recognized the difficulty of his position: "What I have been saying can be criticized as eclecticism and attacked as an effort to smother principle...
...eongregants...
...Sometimes his judgements were harsh...
...In such ways do our movie teachers compensate for their intelligence, a compensation deemed necessary both by our association of education with uselessness and unmanliness as well...
...He knew what "devotion to cause" means when the cause is wicked...
...The teacher does not really exist without the student who, depending on the movie, is either the object of his professional function, the source of his rejuvenated aspirations, the redemption of his own biography, the apple of his eye, the thorn in his side, or the eternalizer of his boredom...
...The one goes like this: Well, Frank Meyer wasn't really up on everything, and so, though he was a fine man and all that, he just isn't relevant to us now...
...He had a whole constellation of the disappearing virtues--those of friendly hard argument, odd tolerant nrejudice, and the nonharmful egotism that excites others not merely oneself, a genuine 'ambition' for the careers of all kinds of people...
...But it is the anti-Romantic factor which goes most roughly against our grain, against, the kind of intuitive right thinking we like to think we possess...
...If hatred really is at the center of our feelings about schools, we show it in an interesting way...
...Yet if we are to derive anything of continuing value out of Frank Meyer's thought other than the crucial central perception, we must learn to apply his mode of analysis to contemporary problems, not humbly and meekly to accept his every opinion as Writ...
...October 4, 1966...
...The unreal life, put baldly, is that which is not encumbered by the need for cash...
...What we cannot abide, we set in stereotype...
...Name Address Student and Regular Faculty Members: Subscribers: City [] 1 yr...
...All others can be performed by individual persons and voluntary associations of persons...
...He warned his fellow Republicans against Richard Nixon, and they came to see what he meant...
...National Review, March 28, 1956, emphasis added ) l~rank saw liberty as the political end of man's existence, because liberty is the condition of man's being...
...The dismantlement of the Office of Economic Opportunity, as part of the Nixon Administration's government reorganization plan, has emerged as the focal point for the debate between Congress and the Executive...
...for that, those of his books already mentioned, and The Moulding of Communists, are the best sources...
...His pulse was quick and often sure, and frequently wher~ he swooped down on a "heresy" his aim was perfect, so accurately did he sense the meaning of an event or a movement or a tendency in political or social, life...
...Since by definition a tradition evolves, it can never be complete, at an end, enshrined once for all...
...The action of these movies is almost always guided by the opposition of teacher and student, who are placed in an adversary relationship at the outset, and proceed throughout the plot to delineate themselves in terms of their frictions, eased or increased, with each other...
...And since, in fact, liberty is no solitary thing, definable in brief, its attainment at any given time depends specifically upon those circumstances in which a society finds itself, owing to the tradition's unfolding...
...His principles were sound and unchanging, and of heresies (or delusions, or idiocies, or evils, or whatever one would substitute for "heresies") we have not yet gotten our fill...
...Furthermore, since an increasing tax Imrden, wild spending, and runaway inflation were not producing the utopian results everyone expected, popular resentment has followed in the form of a fiscal and social hangover...
...Frank was a Republican nationally and a Conservative in New York State, but above all, politically, he was a conservative, as grimly conscious of the woeful state of the nation under Dwight the Good as he was enraged by the even more doleful condition of things under Richard the Expedient...
...Funds which should have benefited the poor were used to pay the salaries of the War on Poverty Generals...
...he devoted fourteen years of his life to advancing Communism's cause and then realized what he had done and what that cause meant...
...He was a splendid teacher, not just because of what he taught, but because of his attitude toward learning...
...4) The exercise, however, of these necessary functions requires a dangerous concentration of power -- the monopoly of legally and socially accept.~ force...
...7.00 or Univ...
...Thus it would seem, (if the President can keep his mind on domestic matters for a sustained period, and unforeseen international problems notwithstanding...
...If the principle be plain --the right kind of order and the right kind of freedom, a limited government and a maximized sphere of individual liberty -- the practice is hard...
...Contrary to those who flatulently assert that because Frank had been a zealous Communist, then apostized, he had become a zealous anti-Communist and nothing more...
...He spoke to issues as well...
...The other merely uses part of his life, the youngest and least experienced part, involved with the first...
...i enjoy it and learn from it...
...It is, however, unlikely that these next four years will produce, any definitive interpretation of the Nixon philosophy, instead, it seems more likely that the President will attempt to meet the challenges of his time to secure the base for that so very elusive 'emerging political majority...
...Which is true, and a far cry from the parodied, jejune Meyerphilia mentioned just above...
...Especially in the unswervingly libertarian disposition, this fundamental emphasis on government seems almost embarrassing...
...The Alternative, R.R...
...As a teacher -- and this in the nonformal sense--he held no academic post ever, though his "credentials" were fine: Princeton, Oxford, London School of Economics, Chicago -- his inspiration was always: think, reason it out, comprehend it, and believe what you say...
...Doesn't anybody ever think anymore...
...For example, years ago he noted with restrained irony the ludicrousness of calling Supreme Court Justices Douglas, Black, and Warren "libertarian" when in fact the "intensity and breadth of their devotion to the liberty of the person" is (was) low, except in certain very special question...
...David Brudnoy The Living Legacy of Frank S. Meyer He's been dead a year now, the man William F. Buckley, Jr...
...his legacy is not the every particular in his corpus of writings...
...3) From this necessity are derived the legitimate powers of the the state: defense, the preservation of domestic order, the administration of justice...
...In Frank Meyer, moreover, tllinking people today of whatever political or ideological stri~e can find a challenge...
...Where activity is essential, it is funny to be contemplative...
...Realizing our sense, movie-makers, and tv series makers too, often make adjustments in their school characters which will supposedly allay public prejudice...
...Peter Witonski observed that Frank Meyer "recognized that American conservatism was not ideological in character, and it is this discovery of his that caused so much trouble among the ideologized intellectuals of our d a y . . . I t is far easier to come to grips with the well-defined categories of an ideological system, such as Marxism, than with a fluctuating, variable tradition like conservatism...
...And if so, he was right because his understanding of fundamental matters was sounder than most people's...
...And beyond the practical considerations (and the admittedly caricatured alternatives), we have the shining lessons of our own history to attend to: as Frank said for years, we have had a history evolving a tradition of liberty...
...He knew no reason why anyone_with eyes to see could not discern that American conservatism was both its traditional evolution and its enduring emphasis on liberty...
...He was not the classic True Believer, not by a long shot...
...Any additional control over individual persons in any sphere of their lives adds dangerously to this already dangerous concentration of power...
...and to settle the disputes that occur when rights clash with rights...
...the denial of the claims of freedom leads not to conservatism, but to authoritarianism and theocracy.' ' Some will retort that it is all too simple, too pat...
...2) The state is a necessity as an institution to preserve the freedom of man from infringement by other men through domestic or foreign force or fraud...
...January 16, 1968), and he understood exactly the way in which "Liberalism run riot" (National Review, March 26, 1968) perverted the juat cause of civil rights until what emerged was that squalid farce, "black power...
...cultists...
...Yet the long cultural laugh is not simply at teachers, but at the whole shehang, the process of formal education which is slow and deliberate, and the institution itself which is isolated and stratified, an institution which is, in point of fact, structurally and constitutionally undramatic and anti-Romantic...
...Its commentary on the Ameri...
...His bent of mind was dialectical...
...But as to that issue, and others, this is not the place to argue his perceptions with him...
...Nor'would he give more than the back of his hand to the argument that government would be doing right if only the liberal government were not misunderstanding The Good...
...And we might add: they are the twin Consider The Alternative YtLTE Tf Tlw t~tlti,~4 . ~ ) )~otas : fwnttic Trilmlism Cmm...
...Like a Confucian scholar determined to "rectify names" (call things properly, accurately), Frank Meyer inveighed against the cheapening of the language 18 The Alternative April 1973 by the obliteration of all sense...
...He was more, certainly, than just a philosopher, though he was that above all...
...For Frank, it was thesis pricked by antithesis, rarely synthesis arrived at permanently...
...Thus, to some of the over-ideologized, Frank stood for nothing that they could appreciate, nothing rigid enough to save them the trouble of on-going re-evaluation, of -- thought...
...Through special revenue sharing programs, the states and local communities will have opportunity to determine the efficiency of theh" particular programs and the discretion to continue them in a way better 20 The Alternative April 1973...
...One reads through collections of his articles (especially The Conservative Mainstream, 1969), and finds year after year the unchanging principle, albeit with different emphases...
...The Alternative April 1973 17 Frank took John Stuart Mill seriously, and more, he took him as a spiritual ancestor, not uncritically, to be sure...
...his task was the ongoing one of political resolution...
...The insight was there, and the principles, but (and perhaps this is owing in some measure to his weakened physical condition in the last year and a half of his The Alternative April 1973 19 life), Frank's final public view is not entirely adequate as a guide to understanding this matter...
...And only in America could a presidential candidate win with the landslide proportions of Richard Nixon, without enabling his party to capture a majority in either the House or the Senate of the United States Congress...
...The American conservative "cannot posit freedom as an absolute end nor can he, considering the condition of man, deny the role of the state as an institution necessary to protect the freedoms of individual persons from m+olestation, whether through domestic or foreign force...
...Teachers in movies are always funny, clownishly, as in The AbsentMinded Professor, grotesquely as in The Blue Angel...
...Where clothes make the man, it is funny not to care what you Iook like...
...As for the paradox that education can be regarded both useless and dangerous at the same time, it is resolved in our general hatred for things invisible, the things schools deal with...
...It is as easy to bury Frank's thoughts by lavishly adoring them in toto as by dismissing them as "irrelevant" to the seventies and beyond...
...rather they form together the twin sign of any viable conservatism...
...Imbued with Frank Myer's thought, his intellectual heirs find either of the extremes repugnant...
...And yet, without engaging in the mental gymnastics by which some tell us that American conservatives and liberals are practically identical, we can say that an important aspect of both American liberalism and American conservatism has been and will continue to be emphasis on good, puissant government...
...From those observations, all else followed...
...He even used to wince at mention of the category into which others tried to stuff him: fusionism...
...It is the answer to the false antithesis pressed upon us by l!beralism...
...and alone, unchallenged by libertar.ianism's irritating radical a priorism, traditionalist conservatism ultimately bores any but the' hermetically sealed...
...that the stage is set for a debate on what the future direction of this country should be...
...Teachers are made to achieve heroic stature in various situations, not by force of their learning or devotion to it, but by other statements of force, such as earning black belts in karate, or having their war records displayed (usually by a wound revealed), or by galloping over the, female staff like the world's last Renaissance lover...
...The limited government established by the Founders of this country aimed at restraining the imposition of "virtue," while simultaneously enhancing its prospects of attainment...
...A fe~ sentences from Garry Wills' remarks about Frank Meyer in a special section about him in National Rev/ew (April 28, 1972) serve us well here, limning the man many of his friends knew so well: "Though Frank wrote widely, he made his real impact as a person, remote yet gregarious, irascible yet affectionate, opinionated yet infinitely likeable...
...can political and cultural scene reminds me of the old American Mercury in its great days under Mere'ken and Nathan...
...The calamitous socialization which has descended upon these United States in the years since 1932 is grounded in the very situation against which the framers of our Constitution sought to guard: the use of government to impose upon men positive rules of action...
...Those who know of Frank Meyer and have debated his merits, have heard that sort of response to his thought...
...You drank so much of the social betterment bubbly the nation woke up with a hangover...
...He believed, and this was his oft-repeated sentiment that gave rise to the concept of "fusion," that in America a "harmonious unity of the tensed poles of western thought was achieved in political theory and practice, as never before or since...
...I know what it is and i've just told you...
...One would serve Frank ill were one simply to eulogize him...
...Nixon was a Hobbesian liberal...
...An essential ingredient in conservative thought, American and European, is respect for a just government, one that, whether divided in powers as in the United States, or unified in sovereignty as in various Old World lands, can seek truth and uphold virtue...
...That was his reading of the Founding Fathers...
...Where absolutism means power, it is funny to think relatively...
...Rock music: an abomination, non-music, junk, he said...
...Where a sense, of direction is admired, it is funny to appear in a daze...
...Various writers had seen signs which indicated that the President was a Tory Socialist at heart, while others had assured us that, in truth, Mr...
...Robert Nisbet To subscribe or renew just complete the form below and mail today...
...He called the counterculture an "anticulture...
...would themselves abandon...
...The two ingredients in the conservative goo require the leavening of each other...
...l~ut like many others, he never sufficiently overcame his loathing for the perversion to return to a wholly judicious view of the plight of Negroes in white America...
...The unreal life is that which is not "useful...
...When he was in the mood simply to pontificate, to lay down absolutes, he came on like a rigidifier, like one who thought he had The Answer...
...But this spend-now-pay-later" philosophy has resulted in an almost uncontrollable federal budget, with mounting deficits and no end it, sight...
...Now that's no longer possible, and only his memory remains for the few, and his writings for the many...
...In other words, he traced the struggle to harmonize tradition and liberty back to the founding experience...
...His 'ambition' for people was, first, foremost, that they think...
...He called Martin Luther King's game before many caught on to it (see his essays in National Review, June ltl, ~m...
...Damn it to Hell, that man is always feeling this and feeling that...
...Every right-living nation ought to go on that kind of drtmk every so often, and even if you went about it the wrong way, you got us thinking about what we should be doing...
...He Was that, and a man who wrestled with his conscience for decades, who only at the very last came to the Church, though some years before, having abandoned Communism and braved it through his long night of wandermg, he had come to God...
...The student will outlive the teacher, and this fact is central to their relationship...
...Would the counterculture survive and deepen and spread itself broadly across the land...
...But Meyer--like teachers are rare...
...1) There is great danger to human freedom, and thereby to the achievement of virtue, if any more oower than that which is absolutely necessary is lodged in the same set of hands...
...Ever since the New Deal, and particularly with the Great Society programs, the prevalent philosophy had been (in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith) that "all federal spending was automatically good," irrespective of any other considerations...
...The words constitutional crisis" are already synonymous with the ninety-third Congress and rumor here in Washington has it that Ted Kennedy's government in exile stands ready and waiting to offer its leadership to save the country...
...National Review...
...But at his best (fortunately far more frequently than the other), he was childlike in his searching, his wonderment at the magic of discovery...
...As a dramatic situation, leaving realities aside for a moment, all of this makes for an interesting conclusion on the part of the observer...
...Given this conception, our movie schoolteachers always choose to prove their value in brutal terms, a decision which only deepens antagonistic suspicions, and thereby pleases everybody...
...He walked not on a thin tightrope between the "left" abyss of unblinking libertarianism and the "right" abyss of complacent traditionalism...
...And had Frank left it with generalities, with broad-stroke philosophizing, the charge would be fair, almost...
...Carefully, minutely, cautiously, Frank worked through the logical propensities of both ultras...
...National Rev/ew, June 6, 1956) "The love of liberty and the love of truth are not the hostile standards of irreconcilable varties...
...It is the life of June Allison and Peter Lawford vaulting staircases while leading a Hollywood glee club in "Varsity Drag," the life of All McGraw playing the violin, or whatever the hell she played, the life of Tom Courtney running his lungs dry, and the life of Lawrence Olivier feeding poetry to a teeny bopper, but it is not the real life, the life of the pocket...
...4,~+rl~ .Xm...
...Government limited to the preservation of order and the administration of justice, Frank wrote, is that in which virtue is best exercised in a social situation...
...but it is also part of'a more general conception...
...he knew better than many of his fellows what in general was permanent, and what ephemeral, in America...
...That's the creeping mindlessness one hears echoed by so many, especially younger people, who are off hunting another adoration-worthy guru (having foolishly adopted that least guruesque gentleman, Frank S. Meyer, as their guru in the first place...
...Although the President's political insensitivity to those hallowed halls of wisdom, marble, virtue, and hot air would make executivelegislative relations trying under even the best of circumstances, this particular political breakdown does little to help the problem...
...Like any other thinker, he was at times wrong in particulars, but never in principles...
...contrary to that view, the bulk of his writings shows beyond doubt that his anti-Communism was but one part of his whole war against oppression...
...That completely misunderstood Washington commentator, Nicholas von Hoffman, also expressed the character of Great Society philosophy m nls trtbute to former President Johnson: " You (Johnson) were so impulsive...
...And there were many instances in which 75 percent of expenditures for particular programs were administrative in nature...
...We must always be on guard against the damage that retrospectives can do to the thoughts of seminal minds...
...Freedom is the essence o/ the being o/ man, and since all social institutions are subordinate to men, the virtue of political and social institutions should be judged by the degree to which they expand or contract the area of freedom...
...If one chided him for not listening to enough rock music to know, he would respond: "I don't have to listen to 'enough' of it, damn it...
...Like all mortals, Frank Meyer was not perfect, nor were his articles always wise or his voiced opinions always judicious...
...Witonski writes: "Socrates said that virtue can be taught, but, he added, there are no teachers of virtue...
...Never, until death took him from it...
...Some asked him that, incredibly enough...
...T? tr.41o.ml | ill "The Alternative has richly fulfilled its early promise...
...Needless to say, as the Administration has pointed out, the war on poverty has not been eliminated...
...For Frank, it was nothing new...
...He championed Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1968: had h~ lived through to the election of 1972, he might have voted for the President, because of the alternative, or not have voted, because of what this President became, hut he would not have deluded himself or allowed anyone in earshot to be so deluded into thinking that the "choice" was other than painful...
...The other sentiment, voiced by fewer people, of course, because fewer bothered to invest the time and energy in contemplating his thoughts in the first place, content merely to know that he was a Great Person, is this: Frank Meyer was the greatest mind conservatism in America has produced, and he was always correct, so we had best take to heart everything he ever said, and believe it...
...Useless, unmanly, even anarchic...
...Frank did not and would not approve the inane notion that government should enforce The Good...
...This latter association is most blatant in westerns where the beige sterility of the schoolhouse (and schoolmarm) is always played against the glitter of life in the local saloon...
...Frank said it was a barbarism that would either take over and destroy civilization or, more likely, a barbarism -- but always a barbarism -- that would repel the people, who would in due course expunge it, or one which its practitioners (devotees...
...I doubt if there has ever been a movie about the academy where someone hasn't complained in exasperation about the "fancy notions" some child has picked up in school...
...American Conservative Union Chairman M. Stanton Evans hit the target: Frank Meyer was the "most versatile intelligence yet to emerge from the American conservative movement...
...Frank recognized this, and though railing continually against the gargantuan, abysmal growth of meddlesome government in America, nonetheless did not abandon his belief in the wisdom of the Federalist Papers' authors, that which he abbreviated in the sentence beginning this paragraph...
...itation of the state to these functions...
...Would his National Review column, "Principles and Heresies," ever run out of steam...
...But a man who totally accepted Marxism, and worked actively on Communism's behalf for years, then realized its wickedness and left it totally, and went on at last to an enlightened conservatism -- such a man would and did retain the characteristic of wholehearted commitment...
...IH This essay has set out not to trace Frank Meyer's thought in a hundred areas...
...On this, perhaps, he was more right than wrong, if unflinchingly acidic...
...He always wanted people around him, wine and talk flowing, incessant sharp arg16 The Alternative April 1973 uments that uever ruptl~_red friendship =....(H)e was younger than students, staying up later, drinking more, shouting louder, giving 'lively debate' (that polite dead term) its rare real sense -- debate that does not kill and divide, but unites even in difference, and throws off sparks of light instead of conflagration...
...No matter what the particulars of the adversary relationship are, the audience must suppose that the teacher, be he majestically complicated, introspective, generous, even heroic, is, because of the nature of his work, moving in circles...
...If schools were only undramatic, we wouldn't mind so much--~r focusing on fraternity rites and love affairs would simply be an expression of theatrical preference...
...A_prll 20, 1965...
...His legacy is his cardinal insight, and his mode of analyzing events in light of that crucial tension which he perceived in fundamental American political and philosophic thought...
...It is for this reason that conservatism, which in preserving the tradition preserves this truth, is only constant to itself when it is libertarian...
...Novak, he could always toss some student-gangster through a transom...
...To which some would reply: sophistic...
...he could discern hope only in the amalgam of the best of both, and honesty especially in denigration of the worst of either...
...The balanced society is our heritage, Frank wrote (National Revww,January 16, 1960...
...10.00 State Zip __ Year Studies end- I I sign of any viable philosophy applicable in the United States of America as we know it, or should hope to know it...
...once called the "principal living American theorist of freedom...
...Synonymous with the war on poverty_, OEO has not had a successful history...
...Like any truly civilized man, he was repelled by the late sixties and early seventies extremism of the Negro "revolution...
...6) Since the power of the state is dangerous to begin with, and since all other functions beyond its essential three can be performed by men otherwise, the preservation of a truly free political order demands the lira...
...To which we might rejoin: is not the recrudescence of an authoritarian status society or, alternatively, the frenzied glorification of political and economic ultra-individualism -- are-not either of these, snares and delusions...
...It is a society neither 'open' nor 'closed,' (but) a society open to the truth and freedom, closed to positivist nihilism and statist tyranny...
...Actually it is less unfair than oversimplified, the greenery and bafflement which characterize movies about schools being largely true to the models...
Vol. 6 • April 1973 • No. 7
