[PLEASUREMAN]

I was going to make a long and semi-blowhard post about how shitty conservatism (or pseudo-conservatism) is these days but it ended up as a wall of words and I think I'm going to use parts of it to pave a path in my backyard. But while I was writing it I came across an old interview with Bob Tyrrell about his book, The Conservative Crack-up. I don't remember much about the book and I don't think Tyrrell himself really knows why conservatism cracked up, but his interview made me crack up because he's actually very funny.

Here are some general highlights (not necessarily the funny parts):

Quote

BRIAN LAMB: R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., author of "The Conservative Crack-Up," why the title?

R. EMMETT TYRRELL: Well, in 1984 I published a book called "The Liberal Crack-Up." Now I've published "The Conservative Crack-Up" so as to make it clear that I am America's most impartial political observer.

LAMB: Do you think anybody listening or watching will believe that?

TYRRELL: Well, there are some seven-or eight-year-old kids out there that would believe that. Maybe my mother would believe it. I have an aunt that would believe it. But no, I guess anyone who has observed politics knows that I'm a conservative. However, at the end of this book I hope I give a blueprint for the future of American politics, which I think will be beyond the twin crack-ups of liberalism and conservatism.

Quote

TYRRELL: During the 1980s there was absolutely no image, no reflection, of the Reaganite point of view in American culture, aside from maybe on college campuses -- the junior professors burning a few effigies of Ronald Reagan on campus and maybe some rude play or something like that to Ronald Reagan. The intelligentsia, if anything, became more polluted by left-wing politics throughout the '80s than they had been in the '70s, and that's why I refer to this as culture smog. I mean, it was like the German notion of kultur. It was aloof, it was exclusivist, it was in this case highly politicized and just riven with political fanaticism and a real hatred of the most successful president since Roosevelt.

And so, at any rate, I thought maybe Bill [Buckley] and I ought to talk about this because Bill was, in many ways, a mentor of all young conservatives and a formidable figure, and he was one of the few conservatives who was a figure in our culture. And so I sat down with Bill and the editors of The National Review, and I said, "We've got a problem here," and I talked throughout the evening. We smoked cigars and we drank espresso, and at the end of the evening Bill said, "It's not a problem." He thought everybody was having the same impact on American culture that he'd had for 20 years. Of course, he was wrong, and that's one of the great failings of conservatism is that you can blame, as I have, you can blame liberals for elbowing conservatives out of high culture, out of media, and for misrepresenting the '80s as a time of greed and excess and all that.

You can do that if you want, and there is a lot of truth to it. I mean, liberals are pretty narrow-minded and pretty bigoted, and they really can never hear enough of themselves. They only want to hear different voices if they're further left. In the world today, that's hard to find. There aren't any Communists. Just me -- I'm the last Communist left, and they haven't invited me over. But some of the exclusion of conservatives from the culture smog is because of liberal bigotry. But the conservatives have got to take some responsibility for it, and they've done, in my opinion, a bad job of expanding the great counterculture that they had in the late '70s and the early '80s; a counterculture made up of wonderful magazines like Commentary and The American Spectator, The National Review, The Public Interest, even Human Events, which is strictly more political but it serves a purpose, and Chronicles and things like that; and the wonderful string of think tanks that we have in this town and in California at Stanford at the Hoover Institute and things like that; and a wonderful array of thoughtful writers and policy analysts that we had.

Quote

TYRRELL: Yes. Is that gin? It's delicious.

LAMB: Straight water.

TYRRELL: It's straight water? Gosh, you've got good water in this city. I never have water without a bar of soap, Brian. What was the question?

Quote

LAMB: Norman Mailer is the last endorsement: "For a man I disagree as much with as Emmett Tyrell and his cockamamie notions about Ronald Reagan's virtues, I must say I enjoyed the sheer hell out of this book." Have you ever met Norman Mailer?

TYRRELL: Yes. Mailer and I have a shared interest in boxing, handball.

LAMB: Do you box?

TYRRELL: No, but I play handball, and his friend once said that the only athlete he could take from another sport and transform into a boxer is a handball player, and Norman and I have spent a good bit of time debating in a friendly way over exactly what his friend said when he said he could have turned me into the middle-weight champion of the world.

Quote

TYRRELL: Today there aren't any great expounders, are there? In the '30s, people wrote about the corporate state or the planned society and revealed a vision of what America might be under a liberal regime; kind of a big-picture view of the world. I don't think anyone is writing that way today. Today liberalism is broken down and cracked up, as I put it, into a series of complaints, and so there will be a book that might be interesting on the doom of the environment, or a book like this Mrs. Faludi's book, about how women are once again being put on the rack in America. Are there any books that are published by liberals today talking about the new socialist state? I guess not. Or consumerism, which was kind of socialism.

link to interview

Tyrrell goes on to say that the motivating principle behind his conservatism is freedom, which was not an uncommon thing to say during and immediately after the Cold War, but I think it was over-reliance on that principle to the exclusion of all others which ultimately led to the conservative crack-up, which has been extended and has (I think) dragged the rest of American politics down with it in a way that the liberal crack-up in the 70s had not done. In fact I think the conservative crack-up may have decisively destroyed American politics for the next generation at least. That is why we are in the mess we are in, with a pseudo-conservative movement that has been reduced to a few scions running magazines bequeathed to them as a kind of graduation present. It's a pretty fucked situation if you ask me.

[antistoic]

part of the problem is that conservatism is now identified with the 'conservative movement', a group of free-trade fundamentalists, pseudo-populists (think palin), and israel-firsters with a narrow-mindedly political focus and a tendency to ostracize conservatives who disagree with rush limbaugh

as he points out in the second quote, there is no trace of the conservative intellectualism typical of the early years (i'm talking the 50s here) of national review, nor is there any awareness that conservatism is a habit of culture and society and not simply the ideology of the republican party

[Lookwell!]

this guy sounds awesome; i'll have to find his books

[PLEASUREMAN]

Tyrrell is funny (I just realized I followed C-SPAN's misspelling of his name), he was on C-SPAN a bunch of times in the 90s and was always a riot, I imagine he is still on their talking heads shows from time to time but I haven't watched in over 10 years. His writing is heavily influenced by Mencken (I think The New Republic called his style "McMencken") but he is a breezy writer/speaker and The Conservative Crack-up is (as I recall) a pretty fun read. And he wrote a bio of Clinton that was fun as well although he gives a little too much time to the crackpot theories which were prevalent in the 90s. Mostly he just ridicules Clinton as a "coat-and-tie radical".

His magazine The American Spectator completely melted down in the late 90s, which Byron York chronicled in an Atlantic piece that probably forever exiled him from Tyrrell's good graces (how humiliating to be bought by George Gilder, by the way). I think it has been resurrected but it never recovered it's pre-Clinton panache and mischievousness. It is now just a semi-notable conservative monthly. It is one of those tragic examples of partisanship devouring itself, and Tyrrell himself is a throwback to an age when reading about something in a monthly magazine was a normal thing to do.

But in fairness, the stuff that makes the front pages today would have been considered over-the-top satire 20 years ago.

[antistoic]

just out of curiosity, what exactly is his 'blueprint' for the politics of the future? please don't tell me it involves ayn rand

[PLEASUREMAN]

mlad, 18 September 2009 - 05:12 PM:

just out of curiosity, what exactly is his 'blueprint' for the politics of the future? please don't tell me it involves ayn rand

Who, Tyrrell? He just wants Republicans to win elections. I don't think he's a Randian at all.

[antistoic]

PLEASUREMAN, 18 September 2009 - 02:51 PM:

mlad, 18 September 2009 - 05:12 PM:

just out of curiosity, what exactly is his 'blueprint' for the politics of the future? please don't tell me it involves ayn rand

Who, Tyrrell? He just wants Republicans to win elections. I don't think he's a Randian at all.

i'm referring to this:

Quote

However, at the end of this book I hope I give a blueprint for the future of American politics, which I think will be beyond the twin crack-ups of liberalism and conservatism.

when i hear someone talking about going 'beyond' liberalism and conservatism i assume they're some kind of wacko libertarian since that's the kind of rhetoric you usually hear from the randian crowd, i might be misreading him though

so what's his prescription, then? or maybe you haven't read the book?

[PLEASUREMAN]

I read the book back in the 90s and honestly I can't remember what his blueprint was, but it probably didn't involve melting down about Clinton and losing control of his magazine.