The Liberal Crack-Up
R. Emmett Tyrrell When, while lounging in my New York flat, I received 'the call' from Charles Moore to appear in these vener- able pages, I half expected to be asked to take over my pal Taki's 'High life' column, it being the very day that he left for vacation. Would I receive his swell expense account? Unfortunately, I was only being invited to respond to Christopher Hitch- ens's recent torturing ('The Liberal death', 5 January) of my latest scholarly work, The Liberal Crack-Up — and so the question formed, how would our two columns be headed? Perhaps mine would be titled 'Just life', for all I have undertaken is an objective report on the condition of Amer- ica! Liberalism with a few laughs thrown in to leaven the gloom. Perhaps Christopher's would be 'Afterlife', for his American dispatches suggest that he dwells piously in those vaporous realms of the ideological supernatural, there with the conspiracy theorists, the bumper sticker logicians, the quacks.
Christopher is not really down here with us but off somewhere in radical fantasy. This had been confirmed for me two days earlier when we appeared on William F. Buckley's television show. After a stab or two at it I concluded that intelligent discus- sion with him is as impossible as a moment of silence. Christopher would not even accept that President Lyndon Johnson was, in American terms, a Liberal. Why he objects to such commonplace terminology I cannot say, though I shall not rule out stupidity. Possibly he believes that if he is sufficiently importunate in his esotericism American historians will capitulate and describe LBJ thenceforth in their text- books as a warmonger, an imperialist, a capitalist roader, or whatever else Christ- opher deems necessary for the cause.
Christopher is a sempiternal crusader. Why so many intellectuals are wired this way is always somewhat of a mystery. My guess is that they are simply at play, apeing some heroic pest from bygone days, pre- tending his historic struggles are out there still. Their hero's life can be their life. Their lives, then, are acts of imitation rather than lives of thought and individual- ity. Thus far is his cisatlantic career Christopher has displayed an actor's facile mind. Whether it is capable of intelligence remains unknown.
It is however capable of pedantry, and so the schoolmarm begins his discussion of American liberalism with a thoughtful and utterly irrelevant quotation from George Dangerfield about how, some time in 1913, English Liberalism reached room tempera- ture and was handed over to the doctors of mortuary science. Well, so what? Amer- ican Liberalism is quite a different compo- site of principles and bugaboos. Since the Sixties it has 'cracked up into a riot of enthusiams usually contradictory, always extremist, often non compos mends.' That is The Liberal Crack-Up's thesis. Moreover today's Liberalism has very little in com- mon with the much more honourable and sensible Liberalism of the New Deal. To understand American politics it is insuffi- cient to say, with Christopher, that `Ronald Reagan and his entourage have shifted the centre of gravity several degrees to the right'. Equally important, the Liber- als took aboard too much of the radical Left's hooey and staggered too far to the left.
The Liberal Crack-Up is an essay in historical observation. One of its major themes is that over time Liberalism has metamorphosed from the Liberalism of Adlai Stevenson or the New Frontier into the radical and slightly barmy Liberalism of the present. Christopher missed this just as he missed my point about the 'Come on Salome, enough's enough.' Vietnam war, the establishment of welfare, and the extension of civil rights to blacks being Liberalism's great 'botches'. They were only that — 'botches'. I do not argue, Christopher's assertion notwithstanding, that they 'caused' the crack-up. For causes one must look deeper — the Liberal collapsed under 'the burden of personal freedom, rationalism, relativism, and afflu- ence'. Things I have always rather en- joyed.
Ultimately our Liberals were brought to ruin by their own success. By the mid- Seventies they had achieved practically everything on their historic agenda. What were they to do next? They wanted to maintain power and all the romance that they have always associated with it. According to my calculations, their 'timor- ousness, stupidity, inconstancy, and frivol- ity' encouraged them to cast their lot with an assortment of radicals and soon they lost contact with the American main- stream.
Ever the bloodhound for stratagem, Christopher alleges that I 'amalgamate, within one commonplace term every faction and individual' to the left of Amer- ica's political centre. I do this to create a 'matrix', allowing me `to blame Liberalism for everything'. Actually, I am not out to blame but rather to report — and one of the matters I report is Liberalism's meta- morphosis.
The only 'commonplace term' that I have created is the term 'New Age Liber- al', referring to all those pristine American Liberals who over the past 15 or so years gave themselves over to Henry Wallace `progressivism' properly updated and idio- tised. I do not fall on all Liberals, and I actually heave a few bouquets Liberalism's way. In the past Liberalism led America out of isolationism. It encouraged concern for the poor and extended the Bill of Rights to Southern blacks. I do not consid- er these criminal acts. Christopher can believe me or not.
Christopher apparently understands that our Liberals, New Age and otherwise, have lost influence, at least politically. He does not recognise how they have changed. There . is nothing inaccurate or illogical about arguing as I do that Liberals for the most part brought America into the Viet- nam war and, often abruptly, turned against it. The earnest Liberal has cham- pioned other reversals en route to the New Age: once he was for a colour-free society, now he advocates colour-based prefer- ment; once he opposed censorship and was unable even to identify porn, now it is an act of violence against women; once deficits were a piffle, now they are intolerable. On the evidence of such dizzying transforma- tions I posit my claim that the American Liberal's only consistent political value is neither liberty nor virtue but the disturb- ance of his neighbour, and disturbing the peace is a misdemeanour — even a Federal judge understands that much. This is my contribution to modern political phi- losophy. Christopher, of course, shares this poli- tical value and so he laments that for the `three great post-war movements' — civil rights, feminism and resistance to the Vietnam war — 'the energy and commit- ment needed to sustain them all has long since dissipated'. Here again he misses something. The Vietnam war is over, thus no resistance. Blacks have full citizenship, thus no civil rights marches. The feminists have never been able to decide what their goal is. Are they for equality or privilege, womanhood or manliness in a female form? Thus they pother.
Alas, Christopher offers the readers of this illustrious journal, an invaluable one with no equivalent in the English-speaking world, a very inaccurate view of my coun- try. Yes, Conservatism is politically trium- phant here, but our cultural and intellec- tual life is dominated by New Age Liberal- ism to a point just short of hegemony. Compared with the diversity one sees in Britain or France, America resembles Cal- vin's Geneva had there been a few more neurotic artists around.
Of this Christopher seems oblivious. He writes that The Liberal Crack-Up was 'just published to a surprisingly warm recep- tion'. The Wall Street Journal and con- servative intellectual reviews have indeed been generous, but though the book has been out since October it has not even been mentioned in Time, Newsweek, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post (which carries my column), the Daily Times, or the Sunday New York Times book review. All this despite the fact that its subject is Much discussed, and I am a prominent spokesman for the point of view that has just won America's second largest land- slide. Then, too, I am the founder and editor of the American Spectator, a nationally syndicated columnist, the editor of two books and author of two more — in other words one whose achievements in his first 40 years transcend the achievements if not the humility of those faceless func- tionaries who staff the aforementioned cultural redoubts.
No, Christopher cannot get it right. Conservatives are winning politically, but New Age Liberals have made it easy. On the other hand they are America's cultural Mandarins. It is they who fear being `dispossessed' and so they avoid the Eight- ies and pretend the Seventies never ended. They are our new reactionaries, and in- asmuch as Christopher apes their crusading heroes of yesteryear he is at one with them. Yet perhaps not completely — he still has the heart to debate, and for that I salute him.
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