Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: While liberalism burned, he partied, says blogger
A curious piece of trivia embedded in the eight-hundred-plus pages of Arthur Schlesinger., Jr.,’s “Journals”: Jimmy Carter so repelled this Democratic fixture that he left his ballot blank in 1976 and voted for the hopeless independent candidacy of John Anderson in 1980, having decided that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be that bad. “Had Ford been reëlected in 1976,” Schlesinger wrote in August, 1980, “we would have had the Panama Canal Treaties without trauma, SALT II would have passed, domestic policy would have been the same as with Carter and the Democratic party would have been liberated to be itself again.”
Schlesinger was right about many things during his long life—his opposition to McCarthyism, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Nixon, identity politics—but he couldn’t see what was in front of his nose. The political creed that he embodied—modern, post-New Deal liberalism—declined and fell during the period covered by the last six hundred pages of the “Journals,” and Schlesinger never seems to understand why, or even that it is happening at all. As a consequence, his political judgment—as opposed to his policy views—fails him again and again. In 1972, he couldn’t believe that McGovern would lose to the hated Nixon in a landslide. In 1976, he imagined that four more years of Ford would restore the Democratic Party to liberalism, when the country was moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Ted Kennedy’s botched attempt to unseat Carter from the left in 1980, supported by Schlesinger, only weakened Kennedy’s causes. And Reagan turned out to be not at all the benign President Schlesinger imagined he would be; 1980 was the conservative equivalent of 1932, marking a tectonic shift to the right.
Throughout the years of liberal eclipse, Schlesinger expresses a kind of irritable surprise that events keep taking the wrong turn, that the public refuses to do the obvious, right thing, and that Presidents fail to live up to the Kennedy standard. He worships the Kennedy memory ever more ardently as years go by. He wonders why new generations of politicians don’t turn to him for advice. And he keeps up an incredible social schedule. New Year’s Eve, 1979:
"We began by hearing Pavarotti sing at Avery Fisher Hall. He was in superb voice, sang with that enchanting hint of vast powers in reserve and concluded with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in Italian. We moved on to a party at I. M. Pei’s Sutton Place house; then, for the rites of passage, to John Chancellor’s; finishing by inspecting the scene at Woody Allen’s mighty party.”
Reading the “Journals,” I began to feel that liberalism declined because Arthur Schlesinger attended three celebrity New Year’s Eve parties that evening. In this long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s, there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. (I wrote a different version of this story in my book “Blood of the Liberals.”) Even L.B.J., who enacted the great domestic program that J.F.K. never did, doesn’t qualify for club membership, because he’s a crude Texan. It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession ever since Roosevelt.
Reviewers have suggested that the Schlesinger “Journals” are a sort of cross between the memoirs of George Kennan and the diaries of Andy Warhol. I would add that this combination is part of the sad story they tell, of a political creed in its decadence.
Read entire article at George Packer at the New Yorker blog
Schlesinger was right about many things during his long life—his opposition to McCarthyism, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Nixon, identity politics—but he couldn’t see what was in front of his nose. The political creed that he embodied—modern, post-New Deal liberalism—declined and fell during the period covered by the last six hundred pages of the “Journals,” and Schlesinger never seems to understand why, or even that it is happening at all. As a consequence, his political judgment—as opposed to his policy views—fails him again and again. In 1972, he couldn’t believe that McGovern would lose to the hated Nixon in a landslide. In 1976, he imagined that four more years of Ford would restore the Democratic Party to liberalism, when the country was moving rapidly in the opposite direction. Ted Kennedy’s botched attempt to unseat Carter from the left in 1980, supported by Schlesinger, only weakened Kennedy’s causes. And Reagan turned out to be not at all the benign President Schlesinger imagined he would be; 1980 was the conservative equivalent of 1932, marking a tectonic shift to the right.
Throughout the years of liberal eclipse, Schlesinger expresses a kind of irritable surprise that events keep taking the wrong turn, that the public refuses to do the obvious, right thing, and that Presidents fail to live up to the Kennedy standard. He worships the Kennedy memory ever more ardently as years go by. He wonders why new generations of politicians don’t turn to him for advice. And he keeps up an incredible social schedule. New Year’s Eve, 1979:
"We began by hearing Pavarotti sing at Avery Fisher Hall. He was in superb voice, sang with that enchanting hint of vast powers in reserve and concluded with ‘Auld Lang Syne’ in Italian. We moved on to a party at I. M. Pei’s Sutton Place house; then, for the rites of passage, to John Chancellor’s; finishing by inspecting the scene at Woody Allen’s mighty party.”
Reading the “Journals,” I began to feel that liberalism declined because Arthur Schlesinger attended three celebrity New Year’s Eve parties that evening. In this long record of speeches, conferences, lunches at the Century, and dinners at Mortimer’s, there’s an unmistakable sense that liberal politics belonged to a small group of the rich and famous who all knew one another and knew what was best for the rest of the country, while knowing less and less about the rest of the country. (I wrote a different version of this story in my book “Blood of the Liberals.”) Even L.B.J., who enacted the great domestic program that J.F.K. never did, doesn’t qualify for club membership, because he’s a crude Texan. It’s possible, even if you agree with almost every position Schlesinger held, to find the smugness and complacency not just annoying but fatal. His crowd made liberalism a fat target for the New Right; Reagan and his heirs seized the language and claims of populism from liberals who believed that they had had permanent possession ever since Roosevelt.
Reviewers have suggested that the Schlesinger “Journals” are a sort of cross between the memoirs of George Kennan and the diaries of Andy Warhol. I would add that this combination is part of the sad story they tell, of a political creed in its decadence.