Word: polemicist
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...Polemicist Philip Wylie has found a subject more forbidding than Mom. It is the possibility of human extinction by nuclear warfare. Triumph is his second novel dedicated to his new cause. In Tomorrow (TIME, Jan. 18, 1954) 20 million Americans were wiped out. Thanks to the progress of science since then, the survivors in Triumph are just twelve men and women and two children (aged 9 and 12) out of the whole U.S. population. Europe, Russia and China are extinct, and only the Southern Hemisphere survives. Offshore cobalt time mines render the blackened U.S. uninhabitable for a long, long time...
...this matter of reality is perplexing. The loathsome, reptilian U.S. seems real enough, but the suspicion arises that Miller is rhapsodizing a Europe that never was. Sense and consistency are not what one asks of a polemicist. If his rotten eggs hit their target often enough, it does not matter what else they hit. And some of Miller's past eruptions have spattered the landscape marvelously, affronting puritans by proving the neglected Rabelaisian theorem that fornication can be funny. But more often, as in the present book, what Miller throws is not rotten eggs but gamy generalities...
Unfortunately, Mr. Evans is a polemicist, not a philosopher, and his discussion of conservatism fails to achieve anything approaching profundity. It is, nonetheless, provocative. According to Evans, most of today's conservatives derive their political and economic beliefs from their more basic ethical commitments. (In fact, the word 'conservatism' comes to mean the retention of an ethical rather than a political tradition.) Their absolutist moral convictions (based either on natural law or on revealed religion) lead them--over several different paths--to an extreme individualism. One student, whom Evans quotes, remarks that the concept of morality assumes...
...impression of scholarly research by expropriating recently published charts and opinions; it even feigns moderation by slipping from time to time into the academic pitter-patter of Harvard's own Russian Research Center. But let there be no mistake; in its heart of hearts Conquest Without War is a polemicist's handbook, motivated by the kind of simple-minded hatred that gave John Birch his distinctive charm and abandon...
Many an editorialist and polemicist was willing to leave the big questions to the Supreme Court last week as the U.S. debated the touchy issue of federal aid to private and religious schools. But here and there thoughtful opinion shaped...