Prophetic Words from 1955

What's better than brilliant, well-reasoned writing? Brilliant, well-reasoned writing that is also unblinkingly, frighteningly prophetic.

Consider the current state of the GOP:

Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by the Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity.

Here's more, also from the happy post-war years, before a radical Supreme Court had had much time to swing its axe at the architecture of the Constitution. This was nine years before the Beatles hit Ed Sullivan and boys discovered bangs, before the Beats and the Hippies and the Yippies, before Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg, before sex, drugs, rock-n-roll. Before a counter-culture generation worked itself into a frenzy of rebellion against bourgeoisie values--which basically meant rebellion without any meaningful cause, or better, rebellion without an object.

And what do rebels without an object object to? Whatever bothers them at the moment. Parents, teachers, rules, society ("The Establishment"), jobs, the boss ("The Man"), lack of jobs, crime, men who fight crime, post-war peace and prosperity, zits, bras, churches that suggest actions have consequences, the consequences themselves, (unplanned pregnancies), people who want to bring down their high, an existence that requires effort, etcetera ad infinitum.

Again--it's 1955. People are as proud of America as they have ever been. They instinctively respect the one nation that was able to save the world from the three evil empires of World War Two, and the only nation standing in the way of the Death Machines of Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao (who some argue were busy killing as many as 60 million of their own people).

The inroads that relativism has made on the American soul are not so easily evident. One must recently have lived on or close to a college campus to have a vivid intimation of what has happened. It is there that we see how a number of energetic social innovators, plugging their grand designs, succeeded over the years in capturing the liberal intellectual imagination. And since ideas rule the world, the ideologues, having won over the intellectual class, simply walked in and started to run things.

Run just about everything. There never was an age of conformity quite like this one, or a camaraderie quite like the Liberals.' Drop a little itching powder in Jimmy Wechler's bath [think George Stephanopoulos] and before he has scratched himself for the third time, Arthur Schlesinger will have denounced you in a dozen books and speeches, Archibald MacLeish [think Norman Lear] will have written ten cantos about our age of terror, Harper's will have published them, and everyone in sight will have been nominated for a Freedom Award [Nobel Prize].

This was National Review's Mission Statement, written by William F. Buckley, Jr., November 19, 1955. May he rest in peace.