The Liberal Line

It all began, as this columnist sees it, back during World War II, when the Establishment decided it was going to pass up all the logical candidates (MacArthur, especially), and make George Catlett Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower the key military figures in the struggle against Hitler. Why it did so strange a thing we can only guess. Perhaps because it believed that the logical candidates couldn’t be depended upon to work its will (the Establishment was full those days of Veblenites, who knew a thing or two about the “archaic virtues” and how they get in the way of the engineers). Perhaps because it was feeling its oats—had it not just got the United States into the war, despite an adverse public opinion?—and wanted to prove to itself that it could pass up the logical candidates. Perhaps because it thought that the traditional methods for making such appointments did not leave it the “flexibility” it wanted, and set out to create a situation in which it could, for such reasons as might seem good to it, name any man to any post, and cause him to be accepted simply in virtue of his certificate of appointment. Anyhow, the big facts are 1) that neither had the slightest claim, in terms of experience and proven accomplishment, to the high post to which he ended up being named, 2) that in each case the Establishment—from the standpoint of ultimate impact on its program of Liberal reform—turned out to have picked its man wisely, and 3) that the Liberal propaganda machine acquired the new—but continuing-—-function of rationalizing such appointments; that is, at getting public opinion to swallow them without raising inconvenient questions about the judgment, not to say the sanity, of the men who occupy the strategic positions in our society.

This, be it noted, is no easy task. Ordinary people, whose confidence the machine must maintain (lest it endanger its other missions), need to make sense of the society they live in, but can make sense of it only to the extent that posts that carry with them great responsibility and high honor are reserved for those who have demonstrated conspicuous moral and intellectual excellence. To ask people to welcome a man of patently mediocre accomplishments in a position they have hitherto associated in their minds with “big” men—to welcome a man whom they never heard of in a position they had expected togotoa famous man—or to welcome a youth in a position that, on the face of it, calls for the wisdom and experience of the homme fait— is to ask them to deny what they know in their hearts to be the natural order of a decent society. To go further and ask them, by clear implication, to treat such appointments —in the teeth of the clear facts—as perfectly normal, not to say wise, is to overtax their credulity and, at the margin, to assault their sanity. They want their Cinderella, all right—the orphan girl who becomes Marilyn Monroe the great actress and the wife of a great dramatist—but they want her in modest quantities, and in the right places. Not, one supposes, as Chief of Staff of the nation’s army. And not as Supreme Court justices. And not—possibly above all not—as presidents of the nation’s leading universities.

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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It all began, as this columnist sees it, back during World War II, when the Establishment decided it was going to pass up all the logical candidates (MacArthur, especially), and make George Catlett Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower the key military figures in the struggle against Hitler. Why it did so strange a thing we can only guess. Perhaps because it believed that the logical candidates couldn’t be depended upon to work its will (the Establishment was full those days of Veblenites, who knew a thing or two about the “archaic virtues” and how they get in the way of the engineers). Perhaps because it was feeling its oats—had it not just got the United States into the war, despite an adverse public opinion?—and wanted to prove to itself that it could pass up the logical candidates. Perhaps because it thought that the traditional methods for making such appointments did not leave it the “flexibility” it wanted, and set out to create a situation in which it could, for such reasons as might seem good to it, name any man to any post, and cause him to be accepted simply in virtue of his certificate of appointment. Anyhow, the big facts are 1) that neither had the slightest claim, in terms of experience and proven accomplishment, to the high post to which he ended up being named, 2) that in each case the Establishment—from the standpoint of ultimate impact on its program of Liberal reform—turned out to have picked its man wisely, and 3) that the Liberal propaganda machine acquired the new—but continuing-—-function of rationalizing such appointments; that is, at getting public opinion to swallow them without raising inconvenient questions about the judgment, not to say the sanity, of the men who occupy the strategic positions in our society.

This, be it noted, is no easy task. Ordinary people, whose confidence the machine must maintain (lest it endanger its other missions), need to make sense of the society they live in, but can make sense of it only to the extent that posts that carry with them great responsibility and high honor are reserved for those who have demonstrated conspicuous moral and intellectual excellence. To ask people to welcome a man of patently mediocre accomplishments in a position they have hitherto associated in their minds with “big” men—to welcome a man whom they never heard of in a position they had expected togotoa famous man—or to welcome a youth in a position that, on the face of it, calls for the wisdom and experience of the homme fait— is to ask them to deny what they know in their hearts to be the natural order of a decent society. To go further and ask them, by clear implication, to treat such appointments —in the teeth of the clear facts—as perfectly normal, not to say wise, is to overtax their credulity and, at the margin, to assault their sanity. They want their Cinderella, all right—the orphan girl who becomes Marilyn Monroe the great actress and the wife of a great dramatist—but they want her in modest quantities, and in the right places. Not, one supposes, as Chief of Staff of the nation’s army. And not as Supreme Court justices. And not—possibly above all not—as presidents of the nation’s leading universities.