Walter Lippmann Not the Anti-Christ

My heading I borrow from a nineteenth-century tract, of several hundred pages, entitled “Louis Napoleon Not the Anti-Christ,” which is the finest left-handed compliment I know. Now Mr. Lippmann has been denounced from Right and Left, over the years, by persons who seem to confound him with the Beast of Revelation; so I observe that for my part, I consider Mr. Lippmann more or less on the side of the angels. I merely happen to disagree with certain of his present opinions.

When Mr. Lippmann published his sound and influential book, The Public Philosophy, he was assailed by all sorts of twentieth-century—but archaic—Jacobins and Marxists. Mr. Archibald MacLeish, perhaps the silliest man in these United States, declared in the Yale Review that scoundrelly Lippmann was worse than Joseph McCarthy: true, Mr. MacLeish was compelled to admit, Mr, Lippmann had declared publicly that he disapproved of Senator McCarthy; but this was only a blind, to veil Lippmann designs yet more insidious. Professor Oscar Handlin, of the Department of History at Harvard, was no less vehement in his denunciation in the pages of Commentary—and unintentionally exposed himself as an historical ignoramus by the side of Mr. Lippmann. So one ought to love Mr. Lippmann for the enemies he has made.

RK

About the Author

Russell Kirk

Featured Tags

My heading I borrow from a nineteenth-century tract, of several hundred pages, entitled “Louis Napoleon Not the Anti-Christ,” which is the finest left-handed compliment I know. Now Mr. Lippmann has been denounced from Right and Left, over the years, by persons who seem to confound him with the Beast of Revelation; so I observe that for my part, I consider Mr. Lippmann more or less on the side of the angels. I merely happen to disagree with certain of his present opinions.

When Mr. Lippmann published his sound and influential book, The Public Philosophy, he was assailed by all sorts of twentieth-century—but archaic—Jacobins and Marxists. Mr. Archibald MacLeish, perhaps the silliest man in these United States, declared in the Yale Review that scoundrelly Lippmann was worse than Joseph McCarthy: true, Mr. MacLeish was compelled to admit, Mr, Lippmann had declared publicly that he disapproved of Senator McCarthy; but this was only a blind, to veil Lippmann designs yet more insidious. Professor Oscar Handlin, of the Department of History at Harvard, was no less vehement in his denunciation in the pages of Commentary—and unintentionally exposed himself as an historical ignoramus by the side of Mr. Lippmann. So one ought to love Mr. Lippmann for the enemies he has made.