Fair Game

...The way to correct these conspicuous defects of liberal programs, they are bound to propose, is to take all that money from Washington and spread it around...

...The moderates among them would permit an arm of the municipality to keep traffic lights working, but that about limits their tolerance for social engineering...

...It is precisely at this point, argue the New Right schismatics, that the Buckleyites have gone astray, allowing their Cold War passions to overwhelm their finer sensibilities...

...A state constructed on the principles of anarcho-conservatism would be a comfortable place to live for people who can afford to live comfortably...

...Let neighborhoods and communities spend it as their residents sec fit, be they led by humanitarians or bigots, solid citizens or maniacs...

...Not for the first time, our ideologues are off target...

...The competition over who can express more outrage about big government, while possible to sympathize with, gets to the root of very little...

...The patient reader who has borne with this exposition will have noticed that the anarcon argument against an older generation of conservatives is remarkably like the New Left argument against an older generation of liberals, who are also being assailed for contributing to the build-up of an oppressive state structure in the service of the anti-Communist mystique...

...it is shallow romanticism, as well as a wasteful diversion, to pretend that the drive of a century can be mastered by neighborhood solidarity...

...In combining the two traditions, today's anarcons manage to eschew both the deeper understanding of men which they might have learned from their conservative forbears and the high dreams of what men might become which inspired the anarchists...

...After many years of muttering offstage while the spotlights of Journals of Opinion, like The New Leader, played upon the Left's internecine clashes--between Stalinists and Trotskyists, between Old Left and New Left, between Weathermen and Progressive Laborites--the Right has at last come up with a battle of its own that has already taken the New York Times by storm...

...The anarcon solution would indubitably do the job, just as eliminating the police force would for once and all stamp out police corruption...

...The true anarcon, though not critically offended by the thought of wealth accruing to the wealthy, is invincibly nostalgic and would right government inadequacies by eliminating social welfare programs altogether...

...Unfortunately, we can be pretty confident on the basis of much disheartening experience that such a transfer will diminish the efficiency and increase the crookedness of any social program...

...On the other hand, anarchists have tended to resist facing up to the less agreeable truths about the creatures whose liberation they have championed...

...Yet for half a century this bumbling giant has been the nation's best defense against the forces of privilege and bigotry...

...The Young Left, however, is somewhat less coherent on this matter than the Young Right...

...subject to all manner of special interests...

...The first and perhaps only commandment of the anarcons is this: Thou Shalt Knock Big Government...

...Power To Who...

...It is part of the ongoing game of radical one-upmanship, in which real problems are taken as opportunities for rhetorical bravado...

...Herbert Hoover has been getting a good press lately, and we can expect a pro-McKinley upsurge any time now...

...And we know how much compassion they will find there...

...It is a peculiarly knotty problem, because the bigness which seems stifling has also been liberating...

...If government undertakes a campaign against grass-roots poverty, we can be certain the funds will be siphoned off by local politicos and hustlers...

...The issue between His Eminence William F. Buckley Jr...

...If government at last adopts a plan to cover the greater part of the medical costs of the old and the indigent, we can be certain that doctors, private hospitals and drug firms will grow fat on it...

...There it is agreed that government intervention in behalf of those who did not have the foresight to be born rich and white is likely to be invidious, but it is also recognized that there are certain worthwhile activities that only the state is equipped to carry forward--for instance, the obliteration of Southeast Asia to save it from the Communists...

...Having thus wedded the quirkiness of anarchism to the more callous spirit of conservatism, the anarcons must live in a household that has neither the nobility of the one nor the common sense of the other...

...These two goals are lightly reconciled in New Left councils by that edifying phrase, Power to the People...

...I should be pained if the foregoing sentence were to be quoted as evidence of my servility to either big technology or big government...

...and the New Protestants has to do with the power of the state...

...Even the present Administration, though far from exemplary in this regard, is several cuts above most state and local governments...

...The doctrines of the National Review are somewhat different...

...But if there is a reasonable solution, we may rest assured that it will not satisfy the latest dogmas of the latest dogmatists...

...For example, big government in this country has proved exasperatingly unable to give help to the most needful among us without putting money into the pockets of the least needful: . If well-intentioned government sets up an extensive program to guarantee home loans for young families, we can be certain that investors with pull at the courthouse will make windfall profits...

...The strength of the conservative position has traditionally been its stern recognition of the fallibility and perversity of humankind...

...Now, nobody likes big government, and it is not difficult--even from a mildly liberal point of view, and even setting aside Vietnam--to fault the monster on many counts...

...dependent upon mediocrities, careerists and operators...

...Intoxicated on anti-Communism, they have fallen to Babylon...

...The poor would be left to enjoy the bounty of a Free Market--that is to say, a market controlled by existing power centers...

...If government accepts responsibility for housing the homeless, we can be certain the proprietors of rundown hotels will come out ahead...

...Anyone can build up his own indictment of our huge Federal establishment: unresponsive to the citizenry...

...Young anarchist-conservatives--let's say anarcons--have broken away from the Vatican of the American Right, the National Review, and are professing their revisionist faith all over the place...

...Whereas the anarcons propose to dismantle the state machinery (except, perhaps, for its traffic lights) and leave it at that, the Left radicals want government to become less overbearing and intrusive, but also want it to supply a much more generous variety of benefits to many more citizens than it does now...

...both drip with guilt--but neither is about to be blown away by gusts of polemic...

...The need is to turn our giant institutions toward human purposes, not to bemuse ourselves with scenarios for taking them apart...

...unable to master the military machine it has created...

...To this complaint the Power-to-the-People people will chorus "Right On...

...Taken all in all, it seems that lurking within our hybrid political arrangements is an unquenchable impulse to ease life for the rich...

...For better and for worse, our era's technology invites and rewards bigness...

...The fact is that power abhors vacuums, and if the Federal bureaucracy were dismantled tomorrow, its place would at once be taken by some alliance of big business, big labor, big racketeers--not by poor people...