StephenKMackSD
Nov 10, 2025
I left scool at 16 and drifted, and watched too much television! But that became part of my education! I watched The Today show with Hugh Downs that featured Aline Saarinen as Arcitecture Critic, Judith Crist as Movie Critic, and Cleveland Amory in his ‘Who Killed Society?’ phase. He even scooped Truman Capote, and his adoration/ degradation of his ‘Swans’ in his La Côte Basque !
I watched Mort Sahl and on KTTV television in Los Angeles, and his revelaitions the Kennedy Assassination, with Mark Lane, and Roger Hilsman book ‘To Move a Nation, The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of John F. Kennedy’
In a trip to visit one of my brothers, who now were in trouble for ditching school, the crime of truency of the time. I saw a copy Gourmet Magazine of Christman 1960. Lucius Beebe and Henri Soulé’ Le Pavillon opened up to me, but of more importance was Edna Lewis writing about Free Town:
Robert M. Hutchins played a major part in my political explorations.
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, nonprofit educational institution established at Santa Barbara, Calif., in 1959 and based in Los Angeles from 1988. The educator Robert M. Hutchins (q.v.) organized the centre and headed it and its parent corporation, the Fund for the Republic (chartered in New York in 1952), for 25 years. The purpose of the centre—to clarify the basic issues confronting a democratic society—was served through discussion and criticism, publications, and public meetings. Scholars, public officials, and leaders of thought and action from many countries often met with a small resident staff to discuss and to try to understand the causes of contemporary problems. Topics included, among others, modern technology, ecological imperatives, responsibilities and control of the mass media, minority and constitutional rights, and world peace.
The centre had experienced financial difficulties off and on during its history, and in 1979 it was reorganized under a new parent organization—the University of California Santa Barbara Foundation—and became a “center of independent thought and criticism” on the university campus. In 1988 the centre was again reorganized when it moved to Los Angeles, where it absorbed the Institute for National Strategy and took over the publishing of New Perspectives Quarterly.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Center-for-the-Study-of-Democratic-Institutions
As did Harry S. Ashmore biography of Hutchins!
Mort Sahl also recomemded The New York Review of Books, which really began my political/intellectual/moral awakening! Yet when Robert Silvers provided space for Neo-Conservative Timothy Snyder, that was the end of my respect for this publication and its once …
Reader note who Snyder now associates with Neo-Con Bill Kristol !
Editor: not forgetting the contirbutions of Anne Applebaum !
Neo-conservatism: The Seductive Lure of Lying About History
Anne Applebaum through her publications in the Atlantic and most recently in her book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, has articulated a perplexed disappointment with Republican politicians and colleagues endorsing Trumpism. She poses a series of questions in her recent Atlantic article History Will Judge the Complicit: why have Republicans abandoned their principle in support of a dangerous and immoral president. How could “Each violation of our Constitution and our civic peace gets absorbed, rationalized, and accepted by people who once upon a time knew better”? How can the fear of a Twitter tirade silence members of once honorable elite, men like John Bolton and Paul Ryan, from intervention against the slide to totalitarianism. Her Atlantic article, Laura Ingraham’s Descent into Despair, begins with puzzlement of how a deeply idealistic iconoclast could evolve into an end-of-days Trumpist, stoked by fatalism over American decline, by liberal deracination, and from Catholic unlapsing. How indeed?
Applebaum begins her article on the transformation of Laura Ingraham, the Fox News professional racist and COVID-19 denier, by describing a celebratory Georgetown cocktail party of the neo-conservative elite in 1995. There the recognition of American exceptionalism and its appropriate distillation throughout the world was seamlessly enunciated. In attendance were David Brock (in his Clinton tormentor phase), David Frum, Danielle Crittendon, David Brooks, John Podhoretz, Roger Kimball, William Kristol, Dinesh D’Souza, and James Atlas, and Laura Ingraham. The reader can best decide whether this group is more aptly characterized as a self-congratulatory rogues gallery or post-Reaganite translators of the language of anti-totalitarianism, personal liberty and property rights, and American exceptionalism. In Anne Applebaum’s astigmatic eyes, focused by Eastern European analogies, the assumptions and simplistic confidences of the American liberal left about labor rights and wealth distribution may have seemed, unserious if not contemptible. The neo-conservative world view was curious. A modest level of irony, if not humility, might have led to pondering how a self-appointed elite became the intellectual center of the modern Republican Party. Here was a new conservative generation of columnists and editorial writers who overnight became public intellectuals and political theoreticians without ever having produced disciplined work on policy, or having achieved formal academic accomplishment or even having had extensive experience with legislation. And yet, William Kristol et al., could later credit themselves with the identification of and selection of Sarah Palin as a potential president. The totalistic adoption of an ideology and its self-appointed spokespersons might have recalled for Applebaum the permutated trans-slavism of the Comminform, given her affinity for analogies to sovietized Eastern Europe. It did not.
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StephenKMackSD
Reader consider that my commetarry can never quite match the unbrideled toxic egotism of Norman Podhoretz ‘Making It’! And his moment of trumph of self-reporting, by telling Jacqueline Kennedy ….
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