MEMO FROM THE EDITOR
MEMO from the Editor The Wrong Stuff If you subject yourself (as I do) to occasional contact with such right-wing publications as National Review, The American Spectator, or Human Events, or if...
...This is very far from being the case...
...There's little warmth in the reptilian charm of William F. Buckley Jr...
...Bork's opponents, Bethell contended, mounted an effort that was 100 times greater...
...I was tipped off by a grouchy piece in The American Spectator by its regular Washington columnist, Tom Bethell...
...We have our troubles on the Left, God knows, and little reason to feel smug about the Right's discomfort...
...Bethell's plaint reminded me that elsewhere in the right-wing press I've seen similar references to the wicked French Revolution and the mischief it set loose in the world...
...But at least we're not trying to repeal history...
...No wonder they're bitterly disappointed...
...But then he got down to the nub of it: "All the evidence suggests that the great liberal age of apostasy and rebellion against natural law, unleashed at the time of the French Revolution, not only is still with . us but is still gaining strength...
...that's what Bethell means by "apostasy and rebellion against natural law...
...That, apparently, is what conservatives hoped Ronald Reagan would do for them: roll back the centuries, not just the years...
...We have our share and more of rigid, dogmatic thinking, of cheap sloganeering, of petty bickering and self-aggrandizement...
...We make awful mistakes, which we are slow to acknowledge and correct...
...After all, their man sat in the White House, the country had "gone conservative" (as the media unanimously observed), and if all was not yet right with the world, it surely would be by the time a two-term Reagan Administration had run its course...
...The Right's real agenda, it would seem, is not merely to dismantle such relatively recent innovations as the minimum wage, Social Security, and the opportunity to obtain a legal abortion...
...Things have been going wrong for the Right—the defeat of one ultraconservative Supreme Court nomination and the collapse of another, the stock-market crash, the Iran-contra revelations, the President's eagerness to hobnob with the Soviets and sign an arms-| control agreement...
...But these setbacks, however unpalatable to conservatives, hardly account for the deep distress and demoralization that seem to have struck their ranks...
...Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail wizard whom many credit with playing a key role in America's conservative revival, barely conceals his contempt for Ronald Reagan...
...Even in the best of times, of course, the Right tends to come up short when it comes to kindness and compassion...
...But now that the Reagan Presidency is about to enter its final year, the cheering has stopped and the conservatives' back-slapping bonhomie seems to have given way to backbiting recrimination...
...The voices of the Right have turned peevish, surly, downright disagreeable...
...What the Right hopes ultimately to abolish is nothing less than the democratic idea itself...
...Something else, something more profound is troubling them, and I think I know what it is...
...or the ersatz-Mencken flippancy of R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr...
...With the petulance that now seems to suffuse the Right, he wrote: "They say we live in a conservative age...
...MEMO from the Editor The Wrong Stuff If you subject yourself (as I do) to occasional contact with such right-wing publications as National Review, The American Spectator, or Human Events, or if you tune in to such conservative columnists and commentators as Pat Buchanan, William Safire, or James Jackson Kilpatrick, you've probably noticed a pronounced change of tone in recent months...
...We fail miserably when it comes to communicating our concerns and insights to the majority of our fellow citizens so that they will join with us in an effort to build a peaceful, just, and free society...
...They would be delighted to have the Romanoffs ensconced once again in the Winter Palace...
...Some of this nasty infighting is nothing more than the scapegoating to be expected whenever things go wrong...
...In our impatience and frustration, some of us lose our faith in people or in nonviolence...
...But what they really wanted most of all was another Sun King strolling in the gardens at Versailles and, more to the point, lots of the rest of us locked up in the Bastille...
...He started out, conventionally enough, by blaming the Senate's rejection of the Bork nomination on a lack of "activism" on the part of Bork's supporters...
...But in the past these valiant champions of Fourteenth Century values at least managed to display a modicum of good cheer...
...Howard Phillips, who heads the Conservative Caucus, calls Reagan a "useful idiot"—useful, that is, to the Soviet Union...
...They would be pleased, of course, to have the Somozas, or people like them, running the show in Nicaragua...
Vol. 52 • January 1988 • No. 1
