defenders of consensus political ethics as the supremenwisdom and virtue to do but call him mindless and wicked,nwhile they seethe with hatred.nIn fact, it was the Democratic Party which first oversteppednthe conditioning of the three C’s—hesitantly under Roosevelt,nTruman and Johnson, and at full speed when theynnamed Senator McGovern and Mr. Carter as standard-bearers.nThe current ideology of the Democratic Party is structurednon the supremacy of social rights over social obligations.nThis ideological principle promulgates the pursuit ofnsocial privilege at any price—moral or rational—unqualifiednby any consideration other than the particular interests ofnthe social segment, ethnic minority, or whatever social groupnthat claims to be underprivileged or shortchanged. Morally,nthis principle is called a concern for the oppressed and needy,nbut dialectically it leads to a neolaissez faireism. Of course,nthat doesn’t mean economic laissez faireism, which has longnsince been suppressed by the now-hoary concept of federalnauthority. It means a social, cultural, behavioral and personalnlaissez faireism of unprecedented magnitude, in which theninterplay of trendy selfishness, self-servingness and the disintegrationnof sociomoral norms has begun to tear at the verynfabric of American reality.nB« ^ut the Republican Party does not share this pattern ofnpolitical thinking: during the Nixon-Ford years, a periodnwhen the party had some deceptive successes in spite of itsnoutright disasters, the party ideologues were speaking aboutnthe American social mosaic and the need to work according tonits political conditioning. No one saw any degenerativenmarks in the rhetoric of the three C’s; no one noticed thencorruptive ineffectiveness of its long-term political objectives.nNo one—except Ronald Reagan. Whether he perceived thenproblem by dint of intuition or cerebral effort or by stubbornlynIJterature in AmericanA “syndicated columnist” from Washington commemoratesnthe recently deceased Henry Miller. “Afternliving in France and Greece for a number of years.nMiller returned to America only to find somethingnhorribly wrong,” writes the columnist. And he invokesna quote from one of IVIiller s essays: “W^hat donI find wrong in America.’ Everything.”nHistory teaches us that Miller did not go back tonlive in Greece or France. He spent the rest of his lifenin America, where everything was so horribly wrong,nas an affluent and inveterately venerated writer. Gratitudenis the most difficult of arts. Or, as Dostoyevskinonce said: “I believe the best definition of man is thenungrateful biped.” Dnnnsticking to long-accepted tenets devised by others is hard tonestablish. He certainly is not a Periclean statesman, a newnDisraeli of charisma; he doesn’t even pretend to be. But henhas generated some kind of impulse for wide, far-reachingnpositiveness of mass thinking rooted in a hearty negativism,nin a fully justified rejection of what the elites—political,nsocial, economic, cultural—have been cramming down thenthroats of the people. Reaganism has become a vehicle forndisgust with the liberal cant, with liberal lies, with the tyrannynof liberal conceptual platitudes, with the liberal culturalntotalitarianism as embodied by the omnipotent media. Fornsome yet-undisclosed and unresearched reasons, he has begunnto communicate with people who see in him their expressionsnof fear and revulsion, that have been so skillfully ignored,nor silenced, by the New York-Washington alliance of governmentnand press bureaucracies (which will do everything theyncan to prevent the people from voicing their undistortednpreferences). Call it conservative populism, but whatevernit is, it has suddenly come to represent everybody among bothnthe enlightened and the simple folks—who may buy thenChicago Tribune or switch on ABC News, but who refusento buy their vitiated worldview and rigged values. Liberalsnlike to think that there is still a clear-cut equation betweennan antiliberal and a redneck in today’s America, but they arendwelling in the past. Antiliberalism now equates with thoughtfulnessnand concern; it may come from reading Burke ornfrom one’s innate common sense. Of course, what the liberalsnwant to see behind Reagan is a cohort of gun maniacs, welfare-baitersnand little old ladies in sneakers. They refusento see behind him the mounting wave of those who knownabout von Mises’s modern economic ethics, Schumpeter’snmerciless social analysis, Wilhelm Ropke’s political studies,nSolzhenitsyn’s descriptions of contemporary evil, and RobertnNisbet’s and Thomas Molnar’s treatises on conservativenhumanism. Ronald Reagan himself may be unaware of thenparentage of his philosophical principles, but then, doesnthe chairman of General Motors realize how much the bodynstyling of his cars owes to Picasso? Liberals prefer to ignorenthe existence of men like von Mises, Molnar and Ropke:nthey banish them from magazine stands and educationalntelevision panels. They forge a monument of their ownnobscurantism, which makes them astonished when someonenlike Reagan appears.nNor will they ever understand that the age of hustling andnjuggling ideas, so profitable for lowbrow, self-serving politiciansnfrom Mark Twain’s time to the big-city political machinenera, is slowly drawing to an end. They still try gimmicksnlike the “fiscal conservative/social liberal” label, oblivious tonthe fact that, sooner or later, this little shell game will benthoroughly discredited in the mind of even the naivest ofnvoters. There is no such thing as a fiscal conservative andnsocial liberal: the root cause of liberal economic profligacyncontinued on page 43nOnJ«ly/ugttstl98()n