Jean Kirkpatrick is dead. Appointed to be United Nations amabssador by Roanld Reagan, her appointment was heralded by the Washington media as evidence of Reagan's bipartisanship because, up until the 1980 election cycle, Kirkpatrick had been part of the Democratic Party intelligentsia. She earned the plaudits of conservatives everywhere for a speech, later essay, on the difference between totalitarian and authoritarian states that could be and was used to justify American support for all sorts of horrid political creatures, including Ferdinand Marcos, the Duvaliers in Haiti, the Somoza crime family in Nicaragua, and the Shah of Iran.
Even as an ignorant and naive but earnest follower of national affairs in the early 1980's, I never quite understood the whole "bipartisan" idea. I also thought Kirkpatrick's diplomatic hair-splitting was a rationalization for the abuses of American power rather than a real distinction. After all, those oppressed by authoritarians are no less oppressed than those oppressed by totalitarians, and the latter are so few and far between - and one could hardly imagine a successful totalitarian, despite Orwell - as to be speaking about something unreal.
When I was an undergraduate, I came across a study Kirkpatrick conducted on the differences between the delegates to the 1968 Chicago National Democratic Convention and the 1972 Miami convention. More than any of the details of the study (and it was this study that Kirkpatrick often cited as the beginning of her disaffection with the party of Roosevelt and Kennedy) what I remembered most was the abject horror on the part of Kirkpatrick and her co-authors that non-white, non-urban ethnics, women, and others would insist on a seat at the political table. The convention, the first under the rules arrived at by the intra-Party McGovern commission after the 1968 disaster, was a harbinger of the future in much the same way 1964 was a harbinger for the Republicans of 1980. McGovern was right at the wrong time, because he was insistent on shifting the balance of power in the party to representatives of the actual constituency of the Party, rather than to urban machine bosses and state party chairs. With the suburban boom and the dispersion of centers of gravity within the Democratic Party among a variety of constituencies (the so-called "special interests" that were only human beings doing what human beings do), McGovern wanted a Party that actually reflected the way the country had changed. When Kirkpatrick, like her fearless leader, claimed the Democratic Party had changed while she had stayed the same, I realized she was correct. I also believe that it had changed for the better, and that such change was and is necessary. Again, McGovern was a horrid candidate, and the wrong person at the wrong time for the Democratic Party. At the same time, he was right in the long run, and Kirkpatrick, and the co-authors of her study, were not so much wrong (it was only a glance at the actual make-up of the delegations) as they were horrified at the possibilities of these great masses of lesser breeds without the law actually controlling the Democratic party.
Kirkpatrick's legacy is almost non-existent, except for a horrendous justification for American foreign policy horrors. I think the fact that the her distinction itself has not survived, any more than have the actual dictators themselves, is wonderful testimony to her intellectual acumen. May she rest in peace.
