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Jul 21, 2025  |  
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R. Emmett Tyrrell’s short version of American history from the 1960s to the 2020s can essentially be reduced to this: periods of Episodic Chaos followed by periods of Episodic Calm. In his recent book, he asks whether we can finally be free of these alternating historical episodes.

How Do We Get Out of Here? by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. (341 pages, Post Hill Press, 2023)

“How do we get out of here?” In the spring of 1968 that very question was put to a lone University of Indiana student by a latecomer to the presidential election primary season. Having finished his speech, the candidate left the stage in search of a route to his car and driver. At that moment the perplexed candidate suddenly encountered a surprised student; hence his query. The dutiful student responded by escorting the candidate out of the building before accompanying him all the way to his car. At that point he pressed a “Reagan for president” button into the candidate’s hand.

We don’t know whether the candidate was surprised or perplexed by the sudden gift, but apparently he did smile. We also don’t know how things might have turned out had the candidate gone on to win his party’s nomination en route to possibly capturing the presidency in November. We can only wonder about things like that. What we do know is that the querying candidate did not have much longer to live. And the student? Now in his early 80s, he is still wondering.

If “how do we get out of here” was the long-ago question of the moment for Senator Robert Kennedy, it remains the question for R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. Of course, there is at least one not so minor difference. The “here” for Senator Kennedy was a building and its labyrinth of strange hallways. And “here” for Tyrrell is now the country at large. More specifically, his question is this: Can we finally escape and transcend the 1960s and the Tyrrell-defined Kultursmog” that descended during that tumultuous decade and still envelops us to this day? For that matter, can we finally be free of the alternating episodes of chaos and calm that have occurred since then?

Tyrrell’s short version of American history from the 1960s to the 2020s can essentially be reduced to this: periods of Episodic Chaos followed by periods of Episodic Calm. Otherwise, he defines the entire six-plus decades of his adulthood as “one pell-mell flight from authority.” Along the way there have been “no replacements,” save for a “soft tyranny.” One can only wonder, he wonders, “what it all means.”

To be sure, Tyrrell has a few good ideas. Otherwise, why bother sorting through it all. Would a second Kennedy presidency have made a great deal of difference? Would it have made any difference? Tyrrell can only wonder. At the time, the freshman senator was a “moderate” Democrat with a “mixed record,” but one who was already “edging so steadily leftward.” Worse than that, Tyrrell continues, “all Democrats driven by ambition would suffer this weakness for decades to come.”

Still, Tyrrell can’t resist wondering. At the very least a second Kennedy presidency “would almost certainly have been out of the ordinary,” whatever that might mean. In all likelihood, it would not have produced a Reagan “brand of conservatism,” but at the very least it surely would have spared us the “quirky world” of Jimmy Carter. To be sure, another Kennedy presidency might not have been conservative enough “for conservatives,” but RFK’s red-hunting past and his social conservatism, plus his talk of “decentralization” and “local control,” have been curiously intriguing to both the youthful Tyrrell and his current octogenarian self.

Why bother paying attention to either version of the founding father of what would become The American Spectator? A self-deprecating R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., himself gives us reason to wonder and perhaps pause. The young Tyrrell was apparently something other than a wunderkind. By his own account his “exceedingly mediocre” academic career was at once “baffling and boring.” While mum on his life outside the classroom, he readily concedes that he “usually deserved” whatever “trouble I was in.”

If he had a significant father figure, it was not his own father about whom we learn only that he was “probably the most successful man” his son ever knew: “He never wanted to do anything, and he never did.” Instead, that paternal role was admirably filled by James “Doc” Counsilman, the legendary Indiana Hoosier swimming coach, who taught Tyrrell much, but most importantly counseled him to “prepare for every event.”

Whether or not Tyrrell could now be called a legendary editor, he has always been prepared to steer his publication, both ideologically and geographically. How far right and how far east was always his call, whether from Reagan to Trump or whether in Bloomington, Indiana, or to the suburbs of the nation’s capital. In any case, and no matter the issue or the location, “Doc” Counsilman must have taught him well.

A cradle Catholic and a cradle conservative, Tyrrell has long believed that culture is much more important to politics than politics is to politics. As he puts it, “what is to be decided today in politics was decided yesterday in culture.” And the coarsening of the culture, courtesy of the “Kultursmog,” has been a long-standing reality–and a long-standing problem. As Tyrrell peers into this ideological mist, he judges it to be “only pollution” that the left sanctions and “even spreads.”

How to combat it? As far as Tyrrell is concerned, humor is always a crucial weapon. In fact, when it comes to understanding the world “humor” is more important than “sober facts.” It was certainly an important, and effective, weapon for The American Spectator when it came to dealing with Bill Clinton. Accused of editing a Clinton-hating publication, Tyrrell sought to remind his critics that his was actually a “Clinton-ridiculing” operation.

Tyrrell has also had more than his share of cutting fun at the expense of every other post-1968 Democratic president, none of whom turned out to be named Kennedy. Carter was little more than a “flagrant poseur.” Like the “cipher” Obama, he spent all his time running for president, while lacking any understanding of how to be president. For that matter, Carter was a “very poor loser,” who really wasn’t Tyrrell’s idea of a successful ex-president either.

Actually, Tyrrell gives Richard Nixon the best line on Carter. The former president predicted that Carter would fail as president, because he was “too arrogant to learn from his mistakes.” That line was spoken directly to a youthful Tyrrell who would spend a bit of time “helping” Nixon with his “rehabilitation.” And why not? Nixon liked many of the things that Tyrrell liked, “such as America, such as the give and take of ideas, and such as writers.” As an added bonus, while working with the former president Tyrrell learned how to make a “splendid martnii, and on his own, he would also learn that heavy drinking was an “awful waste of fine wine and ardent spirits.”

Humor is often on display in these pages, which is as it should be for Mr. Tyrrell. But so is serious argument, which is also as it should be. After all, as G.K. Chesterton reminds us, the opposite of funny is not serious; the opposite of funny is not funny. This memoir is alternately funny and serious–and often not just on the same page, but in the same paragraph.

But let’s stay with the serious side of things for the time being. If a second Kennedy presidency had its conservative possibilities, every Democratic presidency since the 1960s has been one more step, and often many steps, plus occasional leaps, further and further leftward. As a result, he concludes, the positions of the Democratic party today would be unrecognizable to the leading Democrats of his youth. On the other hand, Barry Goldwater would recognize the Republican party of Donald Trump.

In addition, it is Tyrrell’s summary judgment that the Republican “political libido” has been “no match” for the Democratic “political libido.” Republican libido? Tyrrell must have occasionally had pause to wonder about its very existence. In any case, when it comes to playing hard ball, the Democrats have long been the masters of the game, while for Tyrrell the GOP has almost reflexively taken to playing the political game in the manner of the hapless Washington Generals.

The Reagan presidency might have made a difference here, but in the end Tyrrell regretfully concludes that it didn’t. Reagan, who was at once a “regular guy” and a “great man,” may have been “disturbed” by the coarsening of the culture. Tyrrell surely presumes so. But his main focus was threefold: defeat the Soviets, lower taxes, and restore “American greatness.”

Besides, by the early 1980s the “fumes of the Kultursmog” had already begun to penetrate the White House. That was problem enough, but those whom Tyrrell dubs Reagan’s “assistant presidents” (especially Dick Darman, James Baker, Michael Deaver and David Gergen) presented an additional problem, meaning an unwillingness, even indifference, to confronting the culture.

For Tyrrell, the “feebleness” of the conservative libido was best—or worst—revealed by the Robert Bork hearing of 1987. The failure to secure the confirmation of Bork signaled the blossoming of what Tyrrell terms the “conservative crack-up.” What was especially galling to this Hoosier-turned-Washingtonian was the senatorial lineup that was arrayed against the Republican nominee. That would be a judiciary committee panel that featured a “plagiarist who was to become president of the United States, two campus cheats, various drunks, and a famed womanizer who left a  woman to drown.”

For Tyrrell, the second Reagan term was not what it might have been. In the end, the “serious conservatives,” namely Reagan, Ed Meese and Bill Clark, were not enough to overcome the “assistant presidents.” Reagan did his best to “persevere,” but it is Tyrrell’s judgment that creating a conservative culture to oppose the Kultursmog proved to be “one goal too many for him.”

Clearly, the mid-to-late 1980s was not a good time for either conservatism generally or Tyrrell personally. Distractions aplenty, including a divorce, were the order of too many days. Besides, “we were all avid for fame, and the itch for fame got worse” as the Reagan years ran out of steam.

Tyrrell does his best to be kind, and not cutting, to Bushes 41 and 43. While not among those who have been critical of Reagan’s selection of a running mate in 1980, Tyrrell is nonetheless critical of both Bush presidencies. Here’s an example: His sound advice to conservative presidents has essentially been this: Ignore the official voices of Washington and “remain resolute.” Reagan generally followed that advice, while George H. W. Bush did so “less frequently and lost.” And the result of that defeat was the “near extinction of the Reagan revolution.”

Beyond that, both Bushes failed to realize how “dangerous the spendthrift Democrats” could be. That danger should have been especially obvious to Bush 41, since it is Tyrrell’s judgment that the deficits of the 1980s were caused by spending increases demanded by Democrats, and not by the tax cuts secured by the Reagan administration. Maybe if the first President Bush had read his own lips—and Tyrrell’s—the result of the 1992 election might have been different.

It was the result of that election that brought to power someone whom Tyrrell declares to have been “probably the most flawed candidate for president in American history.” It also opened the way for a field day for the Clinton-ridiculing American Spectator, not to mention a number of fat years for the magazine and its editor.

Were they perhaps too fat? Tyrrell doesn’t say so, but he seems to suggest as much. In any case, that Reagan era “itch for fame” did not subside. Instead it was aggravated by the comforts of wealth. Still, Tyrrell did not and would not lose his conservative disposition, which he defines as a “delight in what is present rather than in what is not or what may not even be.”

For that matter, he would not lose—and has not lost—his sense of humor. Witness this book. Nor has he lost either his sense of gratitude for what this country is or his sense of patriotism for it.

What he has lost is any confidence he might have had in American universities. By his own account, that was lost as long ago as the mid-1980s. As a result, “life is more pleasant, ”at least for him, if not for those who continue to be subjected to it.

Returning to his non-losses, Tyrrell occasionally reminds us ever so gently that he has not lost his Catholic faith. While remarking on his friend and fellow journalist Robert Novak’s conversion to Catholicism, Tyrrell recalls a “mysterious exchange” that Novak had had with a Syracuse University student. While talking briefly about their religious commitments, “hers apparently fervent, Bob’s apparently lax,” she brought him up short with these few words: “Mr. Novak, life is short, but eternity is forever.” Tyrrell concludes the paragraph with a few carefully chosen words of his own: “Bob concluded that the Holy Spirit was speaking to him through the Syracuse student. I do too.”

Before concluding, one more non-loss must be reported, namely that R. Emmett Tyrrell has also not lost his mind. In other words, that itch for fame and, possibly, a small measure of fortune has not led, or in any way contributed, to a case of Trump Derangement Syndrome. More to the point, this ex-collegiate swimmer has managed to avoid this condition without abandoning political writing for sports writing.

And just what is that point? It is R. Emmett Tyrrell’s well-considered opinion that sports writers operate on the basis of a built-in awareness that they could never do what great athletes routinely do. That awareness serves as their reality check. Political writers have no such awareness and no such check on their own delusions of greatness and importance. In other words, it has always been easy for them to imagine that they could do what politicians do, whether routinely or otherwise. And then along came Donald Trump.

By winning the presidential election of 2016, Trump “punctured their fantasies and encroached on their vast self-importance. He showed them that they were not necessary. It drove them mad.” That explanation for the Never-Trumpism of, say, baseball aficionado George Will or one-time Tyrrell intern Bill Kristol makes solid sense, especially since R. Emmett Tyrrell is anything but mad. How could he be? His sense of humor is too intact, and too much on display in this memoir, for anything like that. And along the way, as well as in the end, a sense of humor doesn’t just help explain the world; it also helps keep one sane when it comes to dealing with it

Just as important, Tyrrell has been waiting for a strong Republican “libido” to materialize and actualize for a very long time. While this counter-libido was on display in the first Trump term, it was hampered by Trump’s own set of assistant presidents. And while this memoir was written between the two Trump terms, it seems safe to assume that Mr. Tyrrell might be excused for being encouraged by what he has witnessed since the onset of the second Trump Administration. Maybe, just maybe, we might finally be bringing an end to the recurring cycles of chaos and calm, as well as finding our way out of the very Kultursmog that ironically helped produce the likes of a Donald Trump in the first place.

And if not? What then? One can only wonder, as R. Emmett Tyrrell must continue to wonder. But at least the “sourpusses” might finally come to realize that they aren’t dealing with the Washington Generals any more. Sourpusses? That’s Tyrrell’s catch-all term for liberal Democrats.  Whether and how they come to terms with that realization is another matter entirely, but their lack of a sense of humor remains a serious handicap. That’s especially so when it comes to dealing with a president who, like R. Emmett Tyrrell, can be funny and serious at virtually the same time.


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