Word: atavistic
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Altman the activistic atavist is too in love with the idea of forcing people to be free. He envisions a 'brave government' shaping a "passive people." Get real. Americans are a brave people who want a passive, limited government. The era of American support for centralized activism, whetehr a war on poverty or drugs or whatever, is long past. As Brutus warned us long ago, standing armies are inimical to liberty. Americans are rejecting war as a domestic policy, and with it the centralization of life's most important decisions. All the compulsory programs in the world will not turn...
...journalist he feels he must be painstaking, as an ambitious writer he can't help showing off the only style he knows -- the kind of style that anyone would resort to after writing about baseball games every day for a generation, and as a rather embittered and sentimental atavist there is passion in his every word. A bundle of fresh caricatures, Smitty can sound like a disgruntled Confederate general, or like William Loeb, the publisher of the Manchester Union Leader who expresses his most exquisite right-wing rage in capital letters. A gossip columnist, a backroom politician, a muckraking Galahad...
...aristocratic atavist, Alfonso never questioned his right to be a king, never ducked his regal responsibilities as he saw them. He had courage. In Paris once, when a bomb meant for him killed two of his carriage horses, he remarked that bombings were "only the risks of a king's business." In small things, too, he followed the aristocratic pattern, was a gourmet, a dandy, a lady-killer, with a pretty taste in motor cars-all with impeccable taste...
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