The Liberal Line

Let’s take up where we left off last week: with the possibility that the Liberal machine is in the process of rethinking its line on civil liberties. And let’s fix attention on a series of articles now running in the New Republic under the general title, “The State of Our Civil Liberties.” Partly because it confirms our guess last week that the machine is about to decide — and not only decide but publicly admit — that things are going its way as far as civil liberties are concerned. And partly because it brings out into the open — as the machine, in general, has not been doing of late — the real bent and meaning of the Liberal line on some other closely related questions. And partly and not least because of the light it throws on the character and inner workings of the machine itself, and how, in spite of itself, it turns up now and then, and cannot decorously conceal, a nugget of something called Truth.

The author of the series, a young scholar who teaches political theory at Haverford College (and who, incidentally, has the machine a good deal deeper in his debt than it has ever got around to acknowledging), is named John P. Roche. And, in connection with the series, as Mr. Roche rather indiscreetly begins by explaining, there is first a tale to tell:

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Willmoore Kendall

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Let’s take up where we left off last week: with the possibility that the Liberal machine is in the process of rethinking its line on civil liberties. And let’s fix attention on a series of articles now running in the New Republic under the general title, “The State of Our Civil Liberties.” Partly because it confirms our guess last week that the machine is about to decide — and not only decide but publicly admit — that things are going its way as far as civil liberties are concerned. And partly because it brings out into the open — as the machine, in general, has not been doing of late — the real bent and meaning of the Liberal line on some other closely related questions. And partly and not least because of the light it throws on the character and inner workings of the machine itself, and how, in spite of itself, it turns up now and then, and cannot decorously conceal, a nugget of something called Truth.

The author of the series, a young scholar who teaches political theory at Haverford College (and who, incidentally, has the machine a good deal deeper in his debt than it has ever got around to acknowledging), is named John P. Roche. And, in connection with the series, as Mr. Roche rather indiscreetly begins by explaining, there is first a tale to tell: