President Johnson and the Tides of Ideology

We live, unfortunately for us, in an Age of Ideology. The temptation to ignore this is very great; we would all prefer to be living in an Age of Civility. But understandable though it be to yield to this temptation, doing so only condemns the analyst to skim the surface of reality and fail utterly to penetrate its meaning.

The personal style of a political leader, for example, might have been of decisive importance in 18th-century France before the Revolution, or 19th-century England before World War I, or in the early years of the American Republic before the Civil War; but to talk today of personal political style as a decisive factor in political events is to talk nonsense. When a man arises among us who can seriously affect our present trends by his personal force, it will not be because of his “style,” but because of his devotion to the principles upon which our civilization is founded, and because of the energy and ability he shows in fighting the ideologies and the ideologists. Men lacking these stigmata are certain — however much their style may differ one from another—to be intellectually the prisoners, practically the administrators, of the prevailing ideologies.

FS

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Frank S. Meyer

Frank S. Meyer was a senior editor of National Review.

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Frank Meyer

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We live, unfortunately for us, in an Age of Ideology. The temptation to ignore this is very great; we would all prefer to be living in an Age of Civility. But understandable though it be to yield to this temptation, doing so only condemns the analyst to skim the surface of reality and fail utterly to penetrate its meaning.

The personal style of a political leader, for example, might have been of decisive importance in 18th-century France before the Revolution, or 19th-century England before World War I, or in the early years of the American Republic before the Civil War; but to talk today of personal political style as a decisive factor in political events is to talk nonsense. When a man arises among us who can seriously affect our present trends by his personal force, it will not be because of his “style,” but because of his devotion to the principles upon which our civilization is founded, and because of the energy and ability he shows in fighting the ideologies and the ideologists. Men lacking these stigmata are certain — however much their style may differ one from another—to be intellectually the prisoners, practically the administrators, of the prevailing ideologies.