Pleased to reappear in the Washington Examiner Magazine…
As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers, my father a charter member of Missouri’s New Left and my mother a Greenwich Village folkie by way of the bus from Jersey. And so I grew up with endless New Deal and Great Society nostalgia — could it happen again?? — and watching tons of PBS.
Some of that viewing included The McLaughlin Group and occasionally Firing Line and whichever right-of-center guests made it onto Moyers and MacNeil/Lehrer. So, while we typically presumed that most conservatives were simply too callous, greedy, and probably prejudiced to willingly pay enough taxes to end poverty and save the environment, it was undeniable that some of them were pretty smart and made a few valid points here and there.
But in the big picture, if federal government experts had solved the Depression and won World War II and even put a man on the moon, then surely that much more funding and political will and good old American know-how could lift all boats and usher in a better, more centralized social democratic society. It was all ours, if only the bigots and yokels got out of the way.
That sort of hyperconfident postwar zeitgeist, and its gradual crumbling, is viscerally captured in the recent documentary Moynihan, about the iconic intellectual, senator, and New York City train hall namesake, which premiered March 29 on PBS’s American Masters.
With the inauguration of John F. Kennedy, as with that of FDR three decades earlier, had come an influx of ambitious idealists eager to apply their talents to public service. Among the most talented of them all was one Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who rose from humble circumstances in grody precincts of Depression-era Manhattan through various academic and political appointments to become an influential architect of the war on poverty at the White House and proved adept and nuanced enough to bounce back from his years with JFK and LBJ to a senior policy role in the Nixon administration for a spell.
Due to his frankness on delicate social matters (most famously regarding the erosion of black families) and broader willingness not only to critique his own side but to collaborate across the aisle, Moynihan managed to get lumped in among the founding fathers of neoconservatism, back when the label was associated more with domestic than foreign policy, despite many years beginning in the late ’70s as a liberal senator and reliable Democratic vote from New York.
Meanwhile, out a week later, another chockful American Masters documentary, The Incomparable Mr. Buckley, chronicles an equally talented gadfly. The ultra-patrician William F. Buckley went from heckling his alma mater Yale to founding National Review to hosting Firing Line, becoming the bane of the center-left establishment’s existence as the maximally respectable/quotable grand aristocrat of the burgeoning conservative movement. Amid his “stand[ing] athwart history, yelling Stop,” and staunch anticommunism, little sums up his role so much as the famous quote that he’d “rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the telephone directory than by the Harvard University faculty.” The first time I heard that line, I found it absurd and presumed Buckley was just a pandering crank, but after many disillusioning years studying and reporting across the Ivy League, I’ve reluctantly been persuaded that he had a point.
There’s no doubt which side I’d have been on had I been a young idealist kicking around as of the extensive grainy footage from the ’60s and ’70s these twin films present: Moynihan, the ambitious but earthy liberal social engineer with an expansive vision for national policy to lift the downtrodden out of poverty, was by no means a doctrinaire ideologue and might well have struck me as not nearly radical enough. He’d taken extensive fire from his left for many of his frank conclusions, which just made him look that much more reasonable in a lot of people’s eyes. Plus, while Moynihan was undoubtedly grandiose at times, his was an engaging and inclusive pomposity, whereas Buckley’s whole stuck-up yachting Yalie persona can rankle anybody with egalitarian sensibilities.
And yet, in the terrible fullness of time, it’s Buckley who’s been looking better and better. What Moynihan largely failed to anticipate or at least fortify against, for all of his brilliance and best intentions, is that his sort of thoughtfully multifaceted approach to policy as informed by real-life experience, and indeed his fierce organic commitment to uplifting the common citizen, would become less and less relevant as sprawling, self-interested bureaucracies and NGOs metastasized.
Read the rest in the Washington Examiner Magazine.
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Beautiful post. I love your opening lines: "As a measure of how lefty my upbringing was, we had a portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt hanging on the kitchen wall. My parents were ’60s activists-turned-urban pioneer social workers.." I encourage you to do a full post on your upbringing even if just a slice of a few months or years period that you feel meaningful. Thank you for the documentary recommendations.
This is awesome, and describes a lot of us. Thank you.