Winning an Argument vs. Truth
“What do we mean by “winning”? If the objective is to achieve some quick result—to induce a particular action, or even simply rouse an immediate sense of approbation and identification—then the competent arguer will say and do things that will cause him to be liked by his opponent or the audience, even at the technical expense of his argument. He may omit certain points because they might be offensive to some … he will carefully avoid ridiculing even the patently ridiculous … All this is quite proper. But pulling one’s punches may also have the side effect of letting falsehood off too easily for the audience’s (or even the opponent’s) long-range good. One may win an argument today by exciting personal admiration or gratitude or even sympathy; but arguments “won” in this way tend to get lost retroactively.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse
Party Change and Political Alienation
“What’s a nice guy like you doing in a party like that? … The Democratic party you have fought and bled for is gone.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: elections,identity,social-change
Aging and Public Service
“When a man is in his thirties, the idea of serving in somebody else’s presidential administration can be exciting; in one’s fifties, it merely looks like an introduction to a lot of hassling that nobody needs.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,governance
Media’s Legal Victories
“When the media win a court case, we all hear about the victory; when they lose, “the issue” (in the words of the New York Times upon one such melancholy occasion) “remains unresolved.””
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,law,public-discourse
Media and the Kennedy Administration
“Where, in the case of the Kennedy presidency—the apotheosis of an imperial clan if there ever was one—was the media’s alleged “inherent bias against the establishment”? Where was the media’s famed “appetite for bad news”? (Or did the Kennedy White House simply not generate any bad news?)”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,governance,elections
Correcting Argument Mistakes
“While mistakes ought to be admitted as promptly and economically as possible, care ought to be taken to fill the resulting hole in the line of argumentation. A faulty analogy should be replaced by a valid one, an erroneous quotation by an accurate one.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse
Liberal Media Watchdogs
“There is evidence that liberals … may themselves be preparing to enter the lists of those who monitor the media. According to [an item in the Christian Science Monitor], “Ralph Nader is launching a media newsletter this fall.” If his purpose is to contend that America’s major media aren’t liberal enough, he must be insatiable indeed.”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,culture-wars,public-discourse
Nixon’s Betrayal of Conservatives
“There is no sadder chapter in the whole history of American conservatism than that which describes how Richard Nixon, in whom the majority of Republican conservatives at Miami Beach in 1968 had so incautiously placed their faith, systematically and cynically abandoned, between 1969 and 1972, most of the conservative principles that justify participation in politics … One may regret, on many grounds, the end he came to; but no conservative who trusted him can ever easily forgive, let alone forget, the betrayal he committed.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: remembrance,biography,conservative-leadership
Stoic Response to History
“to resist the inevitable as stoutly as one can … it may not be inevitable after all—my notion of the future may be mistaken. In the second place, as an individual the really important thing for me is not what happens in my particular historical epoch, but how I personally respond to it.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,identity,social-change
Lessons of Watergate
“Watergate teaches us, too, the virtues of having politicians, rather than mere managers and technicians, operating the levers of ultimate power. Men such as Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman were not intrinsically evil, whatever their critics may say; but neither were they “politicians” in the best sense of that word. A municipal bond lawyer, an advertising account executive, and a real estate lawyer, they brought to the service of Richard Nixon impressive administrative skills as well as total personal loyalty; but they never understood the necessity for compromise that lies at the heart of politics, or grasped the great truth that not even the best intentions can justify wronging one’s fellow citizens.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: law,governance,political-strategy
Decline of U.S. Strength Perception
“We labored for at least two decades to persuade the rest of the world that we are a paper tiger. We succeeded, and the world is acting accordingly.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: foreign-affairs,national-security
Leadership and Conviction
“The struggle for survival must not be led, on behalf of the American society, by some doubt-ridden egghead exquisitely poised between Yea and Nay. The world will go—and perhaps rightly—to those who want it most. If it is to go to the defenders of freedom, they must want that freedom not merely in order to doubt, but to believe.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: identity,governance,national-security
Political Conversation vs. Reality
“The talk of politicians when they let their hair down bears very little resemblance to dinner-table chatter in a well-run vicarage, and Mr. Nixon, as revealed in the [White House] transcripts, is no worse in this respect than many of his predecessors … or than most of the members of the House and Senate, who may soon be called upon to judge him.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: public-discourse,biography
Media and Liberal Realignment
“The truth … is that American liberals lost effective control of the Johnson administration and its agenda in or about 1966, when Johnson’s Great Society programs … began to be overshadowed by his increasing commitment to the war in Vietnam … It is no coincidence whatever that the liberal media elite’s “inherent bias against the establishment,” and therefore against the presidency, dates from precisely the same period. Since then, there has not been a president in the White House, Republican or Democrat, of whom liberals wholeheartedly approved, and the fact that the media have in general attacked all of them does not … disprove, but in fact demonstrates, their knee-jerk liberalism.”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,culture-wars,policy
The Gamble of Mass Democracy
“The untested assumption required us to suppose that such an electorate, or at least a majority of its members, would be capable of exercising the discrimination, the self-restraint, and where necessary the self-denial, that characterized previous successful examples of democracy. One of Athens’ ten thousand citizens, after discussions with his peers, might plausibly be able … to resist the blandishments of some demagogue who was trying to persuade the voters that he could make silk purses out of sows’ ears. A property-owner in early 19th-century England or America was certainly no easy mark for such a proposition. But in America, as the 20th century nears its end, we are relying for similar skepticism and restraint on a potential electorate of at least 140 million voters, ranging in age from 18 to senility, large numbers of whom have no identifiable vested interest whatever in the prevailing social system (quite the contrary), and many of whom are functional illiterates as well. There is nothing wrong with the heart of a society that takes such a gamble; we may even borrow Herbert Hoover’s description of Prohibition and call it “an experiment noble in purpose.” But it is nonetheless an experiment, and there is no blinking at the mounting evidence that the experiment isn’t going very well—either here, or in the Western European democracies that have tried it too.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: governance,social-change,public-discourse
From Stubbornness to Religiosity
“There are certain qualities inherent in the man—in a way, almost the most appealing things about him, since they are the most authentic—which make him an unlikely winner in the long run: an idiosyncratic stubbornness, a noisy religiosity and a businessman’s contempt for politics and politicians.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,identity
Goldwater’s 1964 Campaign Impact
“The importance of the 1964 campaign as a recruiting device … must not be overlooked. Most presidential campaigns are mechanical affairs, their demonstrations of popular support staged and phony. Goldwater’s campaign, in terms of human beings recruited and despite his subsequent heavy defeat, was a political tsunami.”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: campaigns,movement-building,elections
Renewal of National Will
“The masters of the Kremlin are not ten feet tall, and there is no objective reason why they must prevail. America’s resources are as vast as theirs, or vaster, our population at least as clever, our cultural tradition one of the world’s richest, our technology (for which they yearn) the finest on the planet. What we are suffering from is simply a decay of self-discipline and national will common in advanced and prosperous societies. If that decay could be reversed, the Soviet Union would cower in its Eurasian caves indefinitely.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: foreign-affairs,national-security,social-change
Belief as National Imperative
“The one sin for which nature exacts the supreme penalty of national extinction is a failure on the part of the members of a society to believe [in] its inherent worth.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: national-security,identity,governance
NYT Op-Ed Liberalism
“The Op-Ed page of the New York Times … is allegedly intended to afford space for the expression of a large variety of views on public questions, including views at variance with the opinions of the Times itself. In practice … it has tended to become increasingly a sort of Hyde Park Corner for various leftish and liberal opinions for which the Times doesn’t care to take responsibility.”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,public-discourse,culture-wars
Reflections on Nixon
“Richard Nixon will break your heart.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,remembrance
Conservative in San Francisco
“San Francisco has a dreadful reputation among conservatives, and New Yorkers are forever raising the subject … I just dismiss it. I’m not in the least interested in what the majority of people in San Francisco think. I like the weather, I like the food, I like the ambiance. It’s where I want to live. If they want to live there too—good luck.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: identity,biography
Limits of Social Conservatism
“Social conservatism, like economic conservatism, can at times become an offensive caricature of its best self. Cultural pride can freeze into bigotry; a forgivable hostility to “big guys” can degenerate into a mere envious hatred of rich or otherwise successful individuals. The all too human desire for better material circumstances can be warped, by a really artful demagogue, into such dangerous claptrap as Huey Long’s famous slogan, “Every man a king.” But social conservatism can also serve to moderate the near-Puritan severity of traditional conservative economics without undermining its basic structure. And that is a contribution almost beyond price.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: culture-wars,policy,social-change
Soviet System’s Unsustainability
“Soviet society is simply too incongruent with the realities of human nature and the laws of economics to survive indefinitely … As the noose of necessity draws tighter, the sounds of dissension within the Politburo will grow louder.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: foreign-affairs,national-security,policy