Four Reforms
"Four Reforms" This problem is in turn, Gilder says, largely the outcome of society's undervaluing what Mead called "the sensuous creative significance of the female role of wife and mother." "The...
...From this Gilder does not argue that women might not abandon family life to replace men in the job market...
...This is a less simple case than the preceding three, less simple, that is, to endorse without qualification, and it requires and brings out the most ingenious argumentation at his disposal to buttress it...
...Count on Mr...
...it is, as The I.~ader in Washington would say, perfectly clear...
...We have here Mr...
...this idea I abhore...
...once more: right now that's the way it is, and everybody hates busing but the social engineers, and nonpublic schools are dropping like stock prices...
...The Buckley proposal would greatly help...
...2) Congress should eliminate the "progressive" feature of the income tax, elimirmte all deductions except those that relate directly to the cost of acquiring money, eliminate all exemptions and the corporate tax, reimburse taxpayers below the poverty line any federal taxes regressive in impact, and levy a uniform tax of 15 percent on all income...
...At this juncture in history, with a Republican Administration using the massive apparatus of what once was the civil rights movement to enforce some of feminism's more pernicious doctrines, Gilder's one-man stand against the sexual revolution is a courageous and civic-minded act reminiscent of Horatio on the bridge...
...too many years, maybe, under the wing of the Constitutional scholar Leonard I~vy, and a sobering brush with the law once, have made me suspicious of doing away with any procedural guarantees...
...As to the single six-year term, space precludes a rebuttal...
...all usually disclose a failure to achieve profound and loving sexuality...
...It is, in short, a version of the statist altruism game: you owe it to your country...
...When a society deliberately affirms these failures--contemplates legislation of homosexual marriage, celebrates the women who denounce the family, and indulges pornography as a manifestation of sexual health and a release from oppression-the culture is promoting a form of erotic suicide...
...Yet proposal four herein is inspired by a desire for more justice not less, and within our fold it should (though it won't) provoke the most debate...
...Freed" from their roles as providers, idle males will have the time to explore their other interests----such as hunting--although in urban areas there is notoriously little but human game...
...Not only does the money slosh down to Washington, get diluted, and then drip back up to the states whence it came...
...Indeed Four Reforms, shorter, even better written, more (somehow) available, is in ways too obvious to belabor a continuation of the position papers sections of Unmaking, leavened by seven years reflection, and tempered, his detractors will say, by his status as kept conservative of the media...
...Surprise...
...This is an entirely sensible, completely workable proposal, and, I'd wager, it would be very popular...
...Ergh...
...Buckiey does not propose that all young people have to spend this year "in public service," only--only...
...It takes no ideological straining to reach this hypothesis: when men are asked why they work, much of the time they will simply pull out a picture of their wife and kids...
...A chapter, for example, explores the craze to be "individualistic'--i.e., not one of the masses--and enlarges the theme into the phenomenon of widespread alienation, and ultimately into social radicalism...
...We have The Alternative April 1974 19 heard something of the sort from Senator Javits, and a recent poll reveals that a majority of Americans favor compelling all young people to spend two years in something like Vista, say...
...The remaining question, and one of faint interest, is whether the book is the prescription for society or just it's autopsy...
...it is practical...
...Buckley's most important book after The Unmaking of a Mayor (1966), which, though a near-perfect exposition of the conservative in politics, and containing a cornucopia of deliciously sound suggestions about how to make things better (or at least work), passed into and out of the book stores with nowhere near the serious evaluation it merited...
...it also comes from the poorer states and goes to the richer...
...over on that shelf is psychology or poetry or self-help...
...I mean, "Castigo te non quod odio habeam, sed quod amem," and all that, rather reduces the audience, not so...
...Four Reforms is good news, and bad...
...If that which is somewhat optimistically called "the conservative movement" has any cohesiveness at all, an iffy proposition, it is a negative glue: we are agin' 'era---the liberals, their gargantuan state, their reflexive dogoodism, their tricky moralisms, their with-it causes, their lapping after this fashionable minority and that...
...count on it as well to rekindle libertarian-traditionalist bonfires...
...if they ignore this one they will have shown themselves impervious to a conservative approach to anything...
...Procedures should adapt to the goal of speedier justice...
...The poorest taxpayers, and the richest...
...f 4 3) An amendment to the Constitution, courtesy of WFB: "No child shall be denied admission to a public s c h o o l . . , on accourtt of race, creed, color, or national origin . . . . Nor shall any relief authorized by any legislature for children attending nonpublic schools be denied by virtue of any provision in the Constitution of the United States or of any State...
...If for no other reason than style alone--and there are those who slide out of considering Buckley's ideas by dwelling on his language and cooing about his syntax--Four Reforms is a gem...
...maybe it is that when on rare occasions such a suggestion is made (I think for instance of Frank and John Meyer's ideas about pollution, as outlined in an ACU pamphlet and as discussed by John Meyer in the May-June 1970 issue of The Alternative), it is universally ignored, by conservatives too...
...Youths acted out in reality what their secular-humanist parents and mentors only dreamed of doing in the distant future...
...Japanese would do as well, and of Bill Buckley's little failing in this splendidly successful book I must sadly declare (and youlook this one up, Bill, as I must look up "Castigo _9 . ."): shikata ga nai...
...it sits no more comfortably coming from our friend Bucldey than from the other side...
...Who pays the highest proportion of income in taxes under the current system...
...And a bit more, but that's the crux of it...
...The Children of Darkness does not readily fit any of these pigeonholes because it uniquely examines public institutions in the light of private character, and explores personal dreams in the context of public ideologies...
...So best to make-it work better...
...it will take time to instruct people in economic truths, but it's time well spent...
...Putnam $4.95 the fold by some segment of the Right...
...As stated Because he does not propose to do away with the Fifth Amendment, only with the provision against self-incrimination (and some will say to that, only.O and such interpretations as the court has inflicted upon this nation, resulting in criminals guilty as sin walking the streets to strike again because of details of procedure...
...One places this newest addition to the growing five-foot shelf of Buckleyana in a spot of honor...
...As with the first reform, the statistics he provides are revealing, and compelling...
...The crucial process of civilization," Gilder writes, "is the subordination of male sexual impulses and psychology to longterm horizons of female biology . . . . Modern society relies increasingly on predictable, regular, long-term human activities, corresponding to the female sexual patterns...
...All of these divers threads are woven into a grander theme., the apocalyptic struggle between secular, agnostic (and usually leftist) people, and the religious (and usually more conservative) people...
...The lesbian advertising must certainly be effective, but Sexual Suicide is a brilliant, witty, and deeply perceptive book--one with perhaps enough merits to stand on its own...
...But the other proposal, arising out of his just and decent and worthy concern for the aged and his belief that young people make better students after a breather between high school and college and would be better people by participating in the tending of the oldest living generation, passes too quickly before us, as if there were no question therein of compulsion...
...Most Americans instinctually recognize, Gilder says, that "all these measures directly impinge on that sensitive psychological terrain, involving sexuality, children, and the family, which underlies the sexual constitution of the society...
...The ultralibertarian is not going to cotton to the idea of preserving the income tax at all, and his opposite number among the traditionalists may not enjoy the hard facts of today's inequitable taxation system...
...I cannot buy it and hope others will resist it actively...
...I can think of only a handful of his recent essays, as for instance that to the Conservatives of New York remarking Agnew's fall, which match it for pure grace...
...The intellectual minority's compulsive discounting of family values leads to its snotty refusal to understand the majority's persistent opposition to gun control, busing, welfare, and the liberalization of abortion, drug, and divorce laws...
...And then: 4) "The Fifth Amendment (as currently interpreted) should be repealed...
...The reforms are these: 1) Congress shall appropriate funds for social welfare only for the benefit of those states whose per capita income is below the national average...
...In English: no forced busing (which has been shown not to work to achieve the good things busing's sponsors hope for), and help to private and parochial schools as to public ones: Once more, Mr...
...With a minimum of statistical charts, in language even an economic simpleton can comprehend, Buckley shows how ridiculous our current governmental policy on welfare is...
...But we rarely come up with serious advocacy of change, enshrining Viscount Falkland's adage: when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change...
...Sure, Mr...
...Chapter one is economic instruction in the brilliant manner of Hazlitt...
...The battle rages on multiple fronts: abort-ion, pornography, egalitarianism, pacifism, socialism---all, along with innumerable other issues, take root in the deeper theological schism...
...that they can't go to college without it...
...For it is destroying the cultural preconditions of profound love and sexuality: the durable heterosexual relationships necessary to a community of emotional investments and continuities in which children can find a secure place...
...That's how amendments sound, ladies and gentlemen...
...Perhaps it is the conservative temperament (which, not so incidently, William Buckley lays no claim to) that occasions this reluctance to offer workable suggestions...
...Bad sex drives out the good, and the worst of all--philandering and homosexuality-are exalted...
...The temptation to quote in hefty chunks must be resisted...
...Buckley's new book to gain him fewer new friends on the Right than he deserves...
...Whatever, our forte is not programmatic policy-making, our strength is not in outlining useful reforms...
...This reviewer, a conservative of libertarian persuasion, will of course parcel out the gold stars and black marks other than will his brethren further into the traditionalist mold...
...Buckley has mercifully confined to his Introduction, "two proposals, or reforms, which I prescind from the others" for reasons he doesn't care to reveal to us, reasons which I hope are owing to his unsureness about them...
...He's batted 1,000, discounting the two mini-propesals at the start...
...Buckley's book is not utopian...
...Gay liberation, pornographic glut, and one-night trysts are all indices of sexual frustration...
...The youth culture of the sixties was the vanguard of a secularist trend dating back to the Renaissance, Wheeler believes, and he regards it as the first clear-cut emergence of purely secular men unrestrained b y conscience, guilt, or the desire to improve themselves and be productive...
...J. Whitney S t i l l m a n A NOT INCONSEQUENTIAL charge against conservatives is that they are good only at criticizing, not at proposing...
...The body of the book, however, is tremendously wise, modest but bold, daringly simple, yet close to revolutionary...
...I revere Bill Buckley as mentor and love him as a friend...
...Radical lesbians now follow Gilder around and, in the customary fashion of "liberators," try to disrupt his appearances on television talk shows...
...But facts they are, and the income tax will be with us, like death and transfiguration, always...
...Procedures should adapt to the criterion: Did he do it...
...Gilder is similarly skeptical of the sensuous massage school of liberationist thought...
...They can destroy civilized male identity merely by giving up the role...
...Elsewhere, Richard Wheeler explores the youth culture not in terms of the usual by Richard S. Wheeler Arlington House $7.95 contexts, but rather as a weakening of character and a decaying of values...
...But most men seek jobs so that they will be in a position to marry and raise a family...
...A kind of Gresham's law applies...
...It is, moreover, stunning in its simplicity, and we should push for it...
...The liberal elite sees these issues in only abstract and somewhat opportunistic terms, because, instead of perceiving America to be a nation of families, it proceeds under the illusion that there are only independent, undifferentiated "human beings...
...Let us start with the bad, which Mr...
...when we strut out with an idea for an alteration in the way things work, especially if, God forbid, some liberal should have come to a similar conclusion, we are sliced off from Four Reforms A Program for the Seventies by W'flliam F. Buckley, Jr...
...It has little latitude for the pattern of impulsiveness, aggressiveness, and immediacy, arising from male insecurity without women---and further enhanced by hormonal activity...
...He only points out that as well as an expensive daycare system to take care of the young, society will have to support a costly police state to handle the displaced males...
...Buckley's libertarian friends will yelp: why any government involvement in schooling at all...
...So long as we stand negatively, we stand together...
...To the women's liberation movement all jobs have some hitherto unnoticed inner worth...
...David Brudnov P, ev: r The Children of Darkness ~4 A SENSE, we are all victims of the Dewey decimal system: over here is a book on sociology or economics...
...It is an exquisitely fashioned handful of essays, delightsome, as a Puritan said of some Indians, to behold, provocative, and learned, the mature ideas of un homme ser/eu~ Which reminds me, a minor cavil: must the punchlines always be in Latin...
...Blessed are they who do not see yet believe," he writes...
...For it is along this "fault in the bedroek" of the Republic, as Wheeler puts it, that the ultimate values confront each other...
...This is the ultimate and growing source of female power in the modern world...
...All else--partisan politics, liberal and conservative ideologies, the struggles of interest groups---he subsumes to the titanic clash between those who worship God and adhere to the Christian ethic and the New Men who do not...
...Never mind, they are these: he calls for a single, six-year term for the President and proposes a year of service to the aged by youths following high school, as precondition for matriculation at college...
...Probably I am thinking wishfully...
...Women domesticate and civilize male nature...
...I must at this point stand agnostic about the wisdom of the disputed parts of the Fifth Amendment...
...20 The Alternative April 1974...
Vol. 7 • April 1974 • No. 7
