Lenny explains - Leonard Bernstein on liberalism - column

National Review, Jan 27, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

NEW YORK, OCT 31

WHEE!-just like that. On Sunday mornWing, in the New York Times, Leonard Bernstein called out loud on Mike Dukakis to stop all this silence about the L-word and come right out with it. "I dreamed I heard Michael S. Dukakis say, 'I am proud to be called a liberal.' " And, hours later, Mr. Dukakis said just that. For the very first time, after more than one year's campaigning. Leonard Bernstein is a happy man today.

Now in the course of stamping his foot in protest against Mr. Dukakis's coyness on the subject of liberalism, Mr. Bernstein informed his readers about what liberalism really is and how close we have come in America to losing it. "George Washington was a revolutionary, as were Jefferson and Franklin. . . . All these forefathers were therefore liberals." Well, as a matter of fact, these gentlemen were not really revolutionaries: they were secessionists. And none of them was a liberal in the sense in which the word is currently used. Jefferson is the man who said that that government is best which governs least.

The liberals are mad not only at the failure of Dukakis et al. to use the L-word, they are also mad at the depreciation of the word. "Liberal," says Mr. Bernstein, "is a word soiled by the greedy, reactionary, backward-looking impulse toward tyranny." Gee whiz. That means Ronald Reagan is all those things, a lot more. But one must render this in the florid language of the same man who does so much with a Mahler symphony. He sees himself with 110 players bending to his inspiration, when he writes:

"Tyranny? In our free, beautiful, democratic republic? Yes. It is possible, and even probable, which is why we must constantly guard against it. Tyranny assumes many forms. To tax the factory workers and the outright poor so that the rich can get richer is tyranny. To call for war at the drop of a pipeline, . . . to teach jingoistic slogans about armaments and Star Wars" (etc.-there is much more ornamentation in the original) "-these are all forms of tyranny."

Mr. Bernstein tells us the nearest we ever got to tyranny was in the days of Senator Joe McCarthy. He does not, in his feverish essay, devote one sentence to discussing tyranny under Communism or the efforts of those who have labored to contain that tyranny.

That's their problem, that lack of focus; the kind of thing that led Jimmy Carter to warn against our "inordinate fear of Communism" at about the time genocide was going on in Cambodia.

The most agitated Leonard Bernstein has been throughout his public lifetime was in January 1970. He threw a big cocktail party for the Black Panthers in New York. The Panthers, you will recall, were a group of revolutionaries whose planted axiom was that the United States was racist and unjust, and had to be destroyed. Their leader rejoiced over the assassination of Robert Kennedy, featuring a picture of him lying in a pool of his own blood, his face transformed to the likeness of a pig. At Mr. Bernstein's luxurious apartment, his guests were lectured by Black Panther Donald Cox, who began by announcing that if business didn't provide full employment, then the Panthers would simply take over the means of production and put them in the hands of the people, to which prescription Mr. Bernstein's reply was, "t dig absolutely."

YOU GET THE sinking feeling that Lenny does not realize that one of the reasons the L-word is discredited is that it was handled over the years by such as Leonard Bernstein, with his dislocated perspectives. The liberals were easy prey for the Black Panthers. Tom Wolfe caughtit all definitively when he wrote about "MauMauing the Flak Catchers": "There was one genius in the art of confrontation who had mau-mauing down to what you could term a laboratory science. He had it figured out so he didn't even have to bring his boys downtown in person. He would just show up with a crocus sack full of revolvers, ice picks, fish knives, switchblades, hatchets, blackjacks, gravity knives, straight razors, hand grenades, blow guns, bazookas, Molotov cocktails, tank rippers, unbelievable stuff, and he'd dump it all out on somebody's shiny walnut conference table. He'd say, 'These are some of the things I took off my boys last night . . ."'

And the nubile liberals would do their little shuffle, digging it all, as Lenny digs liberalism. But he will go back to music soon, as Michael Dukakis will go back to the John F. Kennedy School of Government.