Books in Brief: The Parties

The Parties: Republicans and Democrats in This Century, by Henry Fairlie (St. Martin’s, 236 pp., $8.95). Mr. Fairlie’s Richard Nixon was “returned” to the White House in 1968 (though rumor has it that he hadn’t previously resided there) and his Adlai Stevenson selected as his running-mate in 1956 one Senator John Sparkman (which leaves 1952 somehow lacking its rightful Democratic vice presidential candidate), and he is sloppy elsewhere in this sprawling, scattershot dump on both parties. But The New Republic’s resident Britisher makes a few direct hits. He is unkind to the Democratic Party (which can be “such a jackass”); he is vicious toward the Republicans, who are marching blindly to their “elephant graveyard.” Mr. Fairlie seems also to have a particular thing about national review, whose virtue, to Fairlie, is that it indulges in a little enjoyment (not your usual conservative activity, he insists), and whose vices are legion, chief among them that it is conservative and hence out of this world. Aside from Republican Party enthusiasts and conservative zealots, most readers attached to the GOP or the right wing will find something bitterly accurate in Part One—something provoking, challenging, usefully critical. Democrats with no sense of humor will detest Part Two, though any of the old machine Party types who are left will take some rueful satisfaction from the author’s analysis of the Democratic Party’s major folly: abandoning its nuts-and-bolts approach and running off with the “literate liberals,” as it did in 1952, 1956, for a time (with McCarthy) in 1968, and in 1972. Conservatives will have to discount half or more of what Fairlie says about the Right if the book is to be tolerated at all, and the author’s heroes in the GOP are not those likeliest to evoke similar reverence from readers of this magazine. But given the current state of Republicanism, and the tensions still present on the Right—the “New Right” opportunists v. the traditionalists v. the libertarians—it would be folly to ignore Fairlie entirely. Could it be that we on the Right are, as Fairlie says, engaged in one “long grouse against the modern age”? It’s worth reflection.

DB

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David Brudnoy

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The Parties: Republicans and Democrats in This Century, by Henry Fairlie (St. Martin’s, 236 pp., $8.95). Mr. Fairlie’s Richard Nixon was “returned” to the White House in 1968 (though rumor has it that he hadn’t previously resided there) and his Adlai Stevenson selected as his running-mate in 1956 one Senator John Sparkman (which leaves 1952 somehow lacking its rightful Democratic vice presidential candidate), and he is sloppy elsewhere in this sprawling, scattershot dump on both parties. But The New Republic’s resident Britisher makes a few direct hits. He is unkind to the Democratic Party (which can be “such a jackass”); he is vicious toward the Republicans, who are marching blindly to their “elephant graveyard.” Mr. Fairlie seems also to have a particular thing about national review, whose virtue, to Fairlie, is that it indulges in a little enjoyment (not your usual conservative activity, he insists), and whose vices are legion, chief among them that it is conservative and hence out of this world. Aside from Republican Party enthusiasts and conservative zealots, most readers attached to the GOP or the right wing will find something bitterly accurate in Part One—something provoking, challenging, usefully critical. Democrats with no sense of humor will detest Part Two, though any of the old machine Party types who are left will take some rueful satisfaction from the author’s analysis of the Democratic Party’s major folly: abandoning its nuts-and-bolts approach and running off with the “literate liberals,” as it did in 1952, 1956, for a time (with McCarthy) in 1968, and in 1972. Conservatives will have to discount half or more of what Fairlie says about the Right if the book is to be tolerated at all, and the author’s heroes in the GOP are not those likeliest to evoke similar reverence from readers of this magazine. But given the current state of Republicanism, and the tensions still present on the Right—the “New Right” opportunists v. the traditionalists v. the libertarians—it would be folly to ignore Fairlie entirely. Could it be that we on the Right are, as Fairlie says, engaged in one “long grouse against the modern age”? It’s worth reflection.