The Conservative Alternative
Nash, George
"The Conservative Alternative" regular customers can get on her nerves: they're always complaining it's too hot, too cold, too this too that. But in the trade journals--I read a lot of trade journals they say that's a good...
...If only a "gaggle" of the already converted examine this book (and others like it), Brudnoy's anxiety about "tokenism" will prove wellfounded...
...But little, apparently, has changed in the old beer stube itself...
...Patrons still lay their elbows on the old wooden tables, riddled with the initials of unnumbered students...
...In addition to beer (customers tend to nurse beer, Rose says), cocktails, hot drinks, sandWiches, steaks, knockwurst, and pizza, you can buy a Peabody Book Shop ashtray (50 cents...
...Brudnoy goes on to include several articles which probe the profoundly spiritual and intellectual sources of America's discontents...
...These essays, drawn principally from National Review, Modern Age, and New Guard exemplify the work of a substantial segment of the conservative Establishrnent...
...As everyone knows, Clint Eastwood, the famous character actor, plays Harry Calahan, a fantastically tough cop, in both movies...
...Those who read this book may not become conservative, but they will surely learn that a responsible conservative alternative exists...
...In an unexplained way, Dirty Harry Calahan has rejoined that same force...
...But before Dirty Harry has done his job, the killers leave behind a frightening trail of mayhem...
...In evaluating an anthology one is always tempted to quarrel with a few of the editor's judgments...
...Cut off from decisive political power, isolated from influence in the universities and the media, accused of not belonging to the nation's supposedly liberal "mainstream," denounced for extremism and "authoritarian" personalities, the Right has generally lacked intellectual prestige and broad public confidence...
...No further explanation of the rationale for the crime is given...
...And yet, cautious as Brudnoy rightly is, there is something to celebrate...
...The spirit of H.L...
...And there are more...
...And Brudnoy does not shrink from asking a tough, unsettling question about his own anthology: " . . . is the very existence of this book simply an expression of kindly tokenism on the part of its publisher, a sop to the funny little gaggle of conservatives who quack a lot and fancy themselves a force with which other Americans must contend...
...But in his introduction he does not allow himself the luxury of self-satisfaction or unguarded optimism...
...a PBS 12-oz...
...He has moved from the tormented by Benjamin Stein the lVaterbed persona of Dirty Harry to the robot-like figure of Shaft or Superfly or Slaughter...
...But the anthology does not stop here...
...If someone starts complaining I usually tell him 'I didn't call up and send for you.'" The Peabody sells nearly everything these days...
...rather, they persuasively argue the legitimacy of the conservative case...
...A group of rookie policemen, all veterans of the Special Forces in Nam has joined the San Francisco Police Department...
...There is no doubt whatever that Harry Calahan will emerge relatively unscathed and victorious...
...Conservatives, to be sure, for whom the book will be a convenient collection of significant essays...
...It is still "in the middle of the journey," and who, after the scandals of 1973, would dare to read the crystal ball...
...And then The Conservative Alternative, and much else, would become merely monument~v---imposing but lifeless--to a world that might have been...
...That should be its true market: uncommitted, indifferent, and even critical students whose understanding of conservatism is often inadequate or minimal...
...Such familiar luminaries as William F. Buckley, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Stephen Tonsor, and Ernest van den Haag are all represented, as are such younger writers as R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., George Will, and Brudnoy himself...
...But Harry Calahan does not mind if they look gay: 'TIell, I wouldn't care if the whole force was queer if they could shoot like those boys," he quips to his patrol car partner, a black...
...The next victim is a more understandable target...
...First, there are the obligatory selections which strive to define the nature of conservatism...
...Those who still believe that media bias is a right-wing Hobgoblin should consuit Edith Efron's pungent investigation of television news coverage...
...or a PBS T-shirt ($1.50...
...Emerging from the wilderness, they have suddenly tasted victories: James Buek]ey's election to the Senate, new and congenial appointments to the Supreme Court, and the emphatic repudiation of McGovernism in 1972, to name a few...
...We are the "mainstream" now...
...Those who contend that conservatives are indifferent to the environment should scrutinize Frank and John Mey.er's demonstration of the ways in which the free market mechanism can be used to curb pollution...
...But far more importantly, Brudnoy's work should be read in college and high school courses in politics and related fields...
...Brudnoy is especially to be commended for including outstanding articles by Irving Kristol, editor of the Public Interest, and Professor James Q. Wilson of Harvard--two of the principal spokesmen for what this reviewer likes to call "rightwing liberalism" and what Brudnoy designates "neo-conservatism...
...But in the trade journals--I read a lot of trade journals they say that's a good sign...
...Three kinds of essays comprise this anthology...
...second-hand, PBS greeting cards (5 cents each...
...All well and good...
...All of these superficially irreconcilable elements have been blended together in the sequel to Dirty Harry now packing them in from coast to coast...
...Perhaps, with articulate leadership like that represented here, conservatism will successfully transform itself from an isolated Remnant into the confident voice of a political majority...
...A group of young men and women are loitering by a backyard pool in Marin...
...beer mug ($2.50...
...The men are handsome, the women beautiful...
...Whatever the label we choose, Brudnoy has properly recognized one of the encouraging elements in the intellectual realignments of the seventies...
...Eventually, 'Dirty Harry kills the killers, and their leader, the satanically clever Hal Holbrook, who pretends to loathe killing while secretly glorying in it and recruiting the killers...
...Ralph Waldo Emerson (an unlikely person to quote here) once remarked that a scholar is "man thinking...
...George Nash The Talkies Slaughter on AGNUM FORCE HAS broken new ground n the degeneration of the filmic process...
...Conservatives were intellectual untouchables, and they knew it...
...The next victims however really hit the social revolution jackpot...
...Some of the current uncertainty is reflected in David Brudnoy's new anthology, The Conservative Alternative...
...Unless our message is conveyed outward, particularly to the young, the vaunted "silent majority" may ultimately melt away...
...Whatever the (mis)fortunes of conservatism may eventually be, the indisputable fact is that as an intellectual movement conservatism has arrived...
...Sketches, beer steins, plates, trophies, musical instruments, antlered heads, and photographs line the walls...
...It is always a pleasure to find essays and books that forcefully restate conservative conv~ctions and beckon us, in Robert Frost's words, "to the truths we keep coming back and back to...
...In some of the most gripping moments of movie lore, he struggled by night with a lunatic killer and finally killed him in an authentically exciting finish...
...As a college professor, film critic, and frequent contributor to right-wing journals, Brudnoy has helped to effect the conservative renaissance of recent years...
...Nevertheless, old attitudes and apprehensions die hard...
...Mencken, that scornful critic of the "booboisie," noticeably affected the early issues of National Review...
...He contrasts, for instance, the new political power of conservatives with their continuing intellectual weakness: conservative scholars, he says, are "generally ignored by the intellectual community," and the conservative movement is still "far more often critical than programmatic...
...We viewers know that the killers are policemen, and with the title and the crazed look of the young rookies, well, it does not take long to come up with the shocking truth...
...Finally, Brudnoy has gathered a generally distinguished set of articles which examine specific contemporary public issues from an intelligent right-wing perspective...
...Truth About Attica By An Inmate...
...No further description of the group is given...
...The rhetoric of conservatism has long reflected its forlorn, minority status..In the 1940s and 1950s many conservatives sought solace in Albert Jay Neck's concept of the Remnant: a scattering of reflective and civilized individuals surrounded by mass men...
...The answer must be yes...
...In the very first issue of National Review in 1955, William F. Buckley admitted that his magazine was "out of place": "It stands athwart History, yelling Stop . . . . " These were years in which Buckley challenged the Wisdom of universal suffrage, when conservatives praised Ortega y Gasset's The Revolt of the Masses and helped to popularize de Tocqueville's idea of "the tyranny of the majority...
...Some of the swimming people are bare-breasted...
...On the mantle piece, above a cavernous fireplace, sit busts of Shakespeare and Mendelssohn...
...All these articles are included in Brudnoy's book...
...Despite the tonic of recent successes, conservatism in 1973 is not yet securely entrenched as the uncontested voice of the people...
...He is a black pimp who has just ripped off a rebellious member of his company by forcing Dr~no down her throat...
...It is the first black exploitation film made for television with a white hero, released at theatres...
...All four of the rookies are deadly shots with the .357 magnum pistol (get it, "Magnum Force...
...liberalism is...
...One sign of its maturity is the appearance in recent years of several anthologies of conservative writings, including, now, Brudnoy's contribution---an excellent collection of twenty-nine provocative essays, all published since 1970...
...regular customers can get on her nerves: '~ney're always complaining it's too hot, too cold, too this too that...
...Notable The Alternative March 1974 21 are Jeffrey Hart's "Secession of the Intellectuals," James Burnham's "Notes on Authority, Morality, Power," and Irving Kristol's "A Foolish American Ism--Utopianism": three of the most incisive studies of our malaise written anywhere in this decade...
...Thanks to vigorous criticism of the media's objectivity and balance, conservative commentators have begun to appear more frequently on television and even on the Op-Ed page of the New edited by David Brudnoy W'mston $3.95 York Times...
...But let us not congratulate ourselves too soon...
...Any movement that can produce twenty-nine articles of such high quality in three years cannot be moribund...
...From the fantastically popular black exploitation films, the makers of Magnum Force have taken a character which, by itself, blows the whole picture out of the water...
...A picture of Mencken still hangs over the piano...
...But he is wise to raise the question, not because his book is irrelevant (it is not), nor because conservatives are really a "gaggle" of unimportant people (they are not), but because the "prospects" (his word) for conservatism remain so indeterminate...
...Instead of an aristocratic revolt against the masses, there has appeared a frankly "populist" conservatism, extolling Middle America and berating a decadent liberal elite...
...James Grant The Conservative Alternative l ~ i c R MOST OF THE past three decades, Ameran couser-Jatism has been, in Clinton Rossiter's words, a "thankless persuasion...
...Many conservatives have now unabashedljr embraced the once seemingly forbidden and unreachable "silent majority...
...The first victims are a gangster and his two bodyguards...
...Brudnoy has given us not just a sample of Conservative Thought but several fine illustrations of conservatives thinking, of applied conservatism, of practical analysis...
...Those who think in abstractions about prison reform should read Frederick Wiggins' gripping account, '~l~e...
...He has become a legendary tough figure without any depth whatsoever...
...Somehow all of the excitement of the first film has vanished from the second...
...Paralleling this enormous change in status has been an intriguing shift in rhetoric...
...They have formed themselves into a Bay Area equivalent of the Brazilian "Death Squads...
...But after that, the killers shoot a mobster who has been hiding out in an apartment along with his nude boy and girl companions...
...a PBS ballpoint pen (75 cents...
...Stealthily, a member of the "magnum force" creeps up to the bushes by the pool...
...In the first film, Dirty Harry, Eastwood was so disgusted by the pansified way the Supreme Court compelled policemen to behave that he quit the force...
...Six well-chosen pieces by Buckley, Kirk, Meyer, Peter Witonski, M. Stanton Evans, and Tiber Szamuely introduce the reader to the fascinating corn: plexities of this perennial problem...
...Defiant language, yes, but not the language of victory...
...Who, then, should read this anthology...
...The slender web of story which supports various shots of Clint Eastwoed does have a fascinating social content, although it seems incongruous in a film which is obviously bogging the viewer not to think about it at all...
...it is difficult to think of a major conservative viewpoint or concern that is not expressed in these pages...
...Still, its rhetoric remained that of an embattled losing side: '~wenty-seven million Americans can't be wrong," proclaimed bumper stickers after Goldwater's defeat in 1964...
...He first throws a bomb into the pool, then machine guns the people around the pool...
...The Conservative Alternative is another welcome proof of the intellectual ~sophistication of the Right...
...He even strikes an old Nockian note when he observes that his mentor Frank Meyer, who should have served on a university faculty, was instead "lmown to the Remnant, but to few others...
...But also killed is the gangster's lawyer, which might puzzle some...
...Some of the people are swimming...
...For all its achievements, the American Right has as yet only earned the chance to govern...
...Brudnoy leaves the answer to this question to his readers...
...Those who think of conservatives as either quaint romantic reactionaries or ignorant ranters should read such perceptive, fact-laden articles as James Q. Wilson's study of the federal regulatory agencies, George Will's "The Conservative Critique of the Welfare State," or Anthony Harrigan's somber "America's Deteriorating Defense Posture...
...I am the voice of the new politics," Sonator-elect Buckley announced in November 1970 as the votes poured in...
...America is not "sick," conservatives argue...
...All have been frolicking on a huge round waterbed when the killer, dressed in leather from toe to neck, wearing visors, kicks in the door and blows them 22 The Alternative March 1974...
...Above one table hangs a group photograph of the 33rd annual meeting of the American Roentgen Ray Society, taken at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, in Detroit, in September, 1932...
...And these articles do not routinely recite the standard complaints...
...In the early 1960s, with the advent of Barry Goldwater and his appeal to the "forgotten Americans," conservatism's minority consciousness started to fade...
...Libertarians will applaud Henry Hazlitt's concise defense of capitalism and Thomas Szasz's iconoclastic essay, ~The Ethics of Addiction...
...Some group of people have been roaming San Francisco and Marin killing gangsters without benefit of trial...
...In the past five years, however, American conservatism has undergone a fundamental and exhilarating transformation...
...and all hang around together and look like a cross between Jeb Magruder and Andy Warhol...
...I forbear...
...The really important question is: does Brudnoy's anthology adequately encompass contemporary conservative perspectives...
...No longer political pariahs, conservatives have finally found themselves in a position to compete genuinely for national leadership...
Vol. 7 • March 1974 • No. 6
