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
Arguments from Consequence vs. Analogy
“The argument from consequences … tends on the whole to be somewhat weaker than the argument from analogy … precisely because it lacks the stiffening of plausibility which a reasonably apposite analogy provides. The prediction has to fly on its own, as it were; and it flies, or falls, depending on the target audience’s (often biased) perception of its likelihood.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse
Principle of Defensible Arguments
“The competent arguer won’t adopt a position in the first place unless he is absolutely sure it is defensible.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate
Nixon’s Two-Sidedness
“The discussion lasted an astonishing three hours and ended … only because both Buckley and I had other appointments. I remember being particularly struck by the way in which almost every imaginable subject had, in Nixon’s estimation, two sides. “On the one hand,” he would begin, outlining the case for one view. “On the other hand,” he would then continue, pressing his palms together and flipping them over like pancakes—and go on to state the other side of the question. He seemed fascinated by this dual nature of the universe.”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: biography,debate,governance
Loss of GOP Identity
“No one can effectively lead or even work for the Republican Party today, because no one can possibly say what it stands for.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: governance,political-strategy
Goldwater’s Political Flexibility
“Occasionally … Goldwater shoots from the hip; it is at least possible that he hated himself the morning after that interview. But it is more likely, I am sorry to say, that Goldwater’s grip on conservative principles just isn’t (and perhaps never was) the absolutely dependable thing we believe it to be … he endorsed Nixon for the Republican nomination in 1968 … It is an open secret that Goldwater is in Ford’s camp today, ready to endorse him … when it will do the most good. He said publicly in November 1974 that Rockefeller would be “acceptable” to him as Ford’s choice for Vice President. And now he proclaims that Rockefeller “would be a damn good president”! Every dog is entitled to one bite, they say—but four?”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: biography,campaigns,conservative-leadership
Building a New Coalition
“Of course, nothing worth while is ever achieved without sacrifice, and the formation of the coalition I have described will entail losses as well as gains—though the gains will far outweigh the losses. The principal loss will be among the upper-class WASPs concentrated in the Northeast … These voters, while presently still registering Republican in fair numbers, were largely educated in the liberal-dominated academies, are heavily influenced by the liberal media, and thus are already all but lost to one or another political manifestation of liberalism … They are culturally a world away from the ethos and concerns of social conservatives, and indeed represent much that the latter instinctively oppose. It will be no very wrenching experience to bid them a firm farewell.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: movement-building,social-change,governance
Hidden Motives in Arguing
“People often have other reasons for arguing: unacknowledged or even unconscious reasons that have little or nothing to do with “prevailing” or “winning.” We ourselves are more subject to irrational impulses than we usually realize or care to admit. And even if we personally never argue for any but the most pressing and justifiable of reasons, we assuredly live in a world where plenty of other people do. In order to prevail over our adversary, it is important to understand his real reason for arguing—a reason of which he himself may be wholly unaware.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse,identity
Politicians’ Courteous Self-Interest
“Politicians are characteristically most polite to people whose support they hope some day to get, not to those whose support they already have.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: governance,public-discourse
Low Standards in Politicians
“Politicians are the grease on which society’s wheels turn. And they can’t be better, most of the time, than a sort of low competence and honor.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: governance,public-discourse
Politics as a Serious Profession
“Politics … is a serious business—for its regular practitioners a true profession—and experience acquired in it, in managerial as much as in candidatorial capacities, is a precious asset. What issues should be emphasized; what compromises should be accepted; what needs to be done to mount an effective campaign—these are all questions concerning which the opinion of an expert, or for that matter of anyone having a little practical experience, is usually worth far more than the intuitions of unseasoned amateurs.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: governance,political-strategy,campaigns
Media’s Revolving Door
“Precise what metamorphosis do the Dotty Lynches of contemporary Washington undergo on the short trip from Senator Hart’s headquarters to CBS? And just how did the versatile Wally Chalmers manage to shed his identity as a member of Ted Kennedy’s staff and purify his soul for service at CBS News, then smoothly resume his role as a Democratic apparatchik, fit to become executive director of the Democratic National Committee? Or do such people in fact simply remain, and behave as, liberal Democrats while working for CBS?”
Source: The Coming Battle for the Media: Curbing the Power of the Media Elite (1988).
Keywords: media,political-strategy,governance
Presidential Unpopularity Cycles
“Presidents wear out their welcome, and each president is denounced as the worst president we have ever had. I heard that about literally every president of the United States, so I don’t take it all that seriously.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: public-discourse,elections,governance
Nixon’s China Policy Skepticism
“Reportedly Nixon … regards the détente with Peking as the principal jewel in the notoriously underdecorated diadem of his administration, but the benefits to the United States are hard to perceive. Certainly those visions of Communist Chinese sugarplums that danced in the heads of many a greedy American businessman gave gone glimmering: Mainland China is so poor and primitive that not even lavish loans can prepare it for all the things American businessmen are eager to sell it … And Peking’s chronic hysterics over our continuing arms trade with Taiwan certainly suggest that we have merely substituted for concern over a flaccid enemy an equal or worse preoccupation with a fat and pouting “friend.””
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: foreign-affairs,policy,governance
Reagan’s Sensitivity
“No doubt he ought to have been made of sterner stuff. But there is simply no denying that President Reagan is extremely sensitive to the human aspects of these grim events … Too much stress on the human element—that must count as a weakness in any president. But if Ronald Reagan has to have a weakness, I’m kind of glad it’s that one.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: biography,conservative-leadership
How to Admit Mistakes
“No matter how competent an arguer may be, the time will inevitably come when he makes a mistake … Back away, quickly and completely. Do it unostentatiously if possible, but above all do it. No matter how disagreeable the immediate effect of such a retreat may be, it is infinitely preferable to trying to defend a position that one knows, deep down, is indefensible against an adversary who usually knows it as well as you do.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: debate,public-discourse
McCarthy’s Relentlessness
“Most politicians will agree with you and not mean a goddamn word of it.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: governance,public-discourse
Discomfort with Religious Right
“My own guess is that what makes the critics of the religious right obscurely uncomfortable about its views is not that it “tries to impose them on others” (it doesn’t, save by the perfectly legitimate processes of evangelism and ordinary political lobbying) but that it harbors moral views at all—i.e., takes morality seriously, as a guide to personal conduct. Many Americans, and not merely liberals by a long shot, tend to deal with morality in very gingerly fashion—keeping it at a comfortable distance, applying it in extremely abstract ways, and taking swift refuge in a pious “refusal to judge” whenever a moral issue is raised in a concrete manner or context.”
Source: The Rise of the Right (1984)
Keywords: culture-wars,identity,public-discourse
UN and Lost Hopes
“Most of the hopes vested in the UN were absurd from the start; virtually all of the rest have been destroyed, one by one, as it has increasingly fallen (with our entire consent and even complicity, by the way) into the hands of the so-called “Third World” bloc of ex-colonial countries, few of which seriously merit the name of “nation.””
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: foreign-affairs,policy,governance
Politicians’ Insincerity
“Most politicians … are pretty adept at sensing when to stop riding an issue … When it stops paying dividends, when on straight pleasure-pain principles it ceases to yield a sufficient return in praise, all but the most exceptional politicians will quietly drop it. McCarthy wouldn’t … [It] was a strange and ultimately fatal innocence.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: campaigns,biography,identity
Damaging Political Personalities
“in theory you had to ask their permission to set foot there, and I didn’t think they had the right to grant permission. So I would just wait until they were thrown out, and then I would go … I remember saying to Buckley, at one point, that I would no more go to the Soviet Union on vacation than I would, if Hitler had permitted it, have skied in the Austrian Alps during World War II.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: foreign-affairs,biography
Nixon’s Political Dilemma
“It is a fact of human psychology that there are types of personalities simply incapable of participating in a collective effort, especially if that effort requires them to subordinate their own preferences in any serious degree. Worse yet, there are individuals who are simply unable to endure the experience, or even the prospect, of victory: people … for whom the thrill of political action lies, not in the possibility of success, but in the struggle itself, or even in defeat. There are large unconscious elements of sadism and masochism in such personalities, and their impact upon healthier forms of political action can be (and historically often has been) catastrophic. The Independence Party should avoid like the proverbial plague their predictable efforts to use it to serve their self-defeating purposes.”
Source: The Making of the New Majority Party (1975)
Keywords: biography,elections,public-discourse
Limitations of Logic in Debate
“It is a rather pathetic thing to see a man of Nixon’s stature … so tangled up in the complexities of his cork-screw course toward the Presidency that he doesn’t dare risk answering a simple question for fear of spilling some of the water he is forever carrying on both shoulders.”
Source: If Not Us, Who? William Rusher, National Review, and the Conservative Movement
Keywords: debate,public-discourse
Refusing Soviet Travel
“It is a waste of time to squander a lot of heavy logic on situations that are simply not designed to respond to purely logical treatment.”
Source: How to Win Arguments (1981)
Keywords: identity,social-change,governance