Loyalties.

THIS BEING election year, politicians are coming forth with books. Loyalties, by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, is 96 short pages long, which ought to be held up as an example to other politicians.

The title puzzles me. The book consists of three short essays, one on nuclear strategy, one on Israel, one on international law. Senator Moynihan explains that the title refers to loyalty to principles and allies, but that seems to me to be stretching a point.

Besides--let me say it up front--Senator Moynihan is inviting easy ridicule. New York's Irish and Catholic voters tend to regard him as short on loyalty to them and their principles. He seems to be campaigning full time for the Jewish vote, supporting Israel with bombastic vigor at every turn. When he justifies his position on nuclear weapons in terms of "loyalty to life," invoking the Catholic bishops' statement for the nonce, one thinks grimly of his stand on abortion. He is not the only New York politician who knows which side his bagel is buttered on, but to dress obvious ploys in the garb of principle is to rouse and bait the sense of irony.

The more so because Moynihan is a brilliant man who has a keen sense of irony himself. He makes fine distinctions and exquisite witticisms when it suits him to do so. As Samuel Johnson said of Rousseau, a man who talks nonsense so well must know he is talking nonsense. His very gifts are a menace to his ambitions: We pay little mind to the boilerplate of the sort of politician who dwells in partisan swamps and swings his brain in his tail, but Moynihan, by his elegant manner, solicits a different quality of attention. He asks to be judged by a higher standard. The danger is that he will be.

There are excellent things in this book. Moynihan argues powerfully and to my mind persuasively against the MX missile; he reasons specifically, and with no illusions about the Soviets or bromides about peace and the danger of nuclear holocaust. In fact he contends that the MX, being the kind of weapon it is, will give the Soviet rulers, being the kind of men they are, incentive to launch a first strike.

This skillful rhetorician is at his best when he analyzes the anti-Israeli and anti-American rhetoric that has become the common coin of the United Nations (and of American intellectuals). The Carter Administration and its UN representatives, Andrew Young and Donald McHenry, either were unable to counter this rhetoric or simply agreed with it. We have been crippled by what Moynihan has elsewhere called "semantic infiltration"; we have accepted the premises of our enemies without debate. American capitulation to the Soviet-driven currents of power has been characterized as joining "the side of history" and "the side of change." And Jimmy Carter congratulated us on having overcome our "inordinate fear of Communism."

Discussing the "obscene" UN resolution calling Zionism a form of racism, Moynihan notes that the very word "racist" (which doesn't appear in the 1933 OED) appears to be of Soviet provenance. This is one hell of a point: The Soviets used the word during the Thirties as a label for ethnic blocks that refused to assimilate to socialism, to subordinate cultural to political identity. That is pretty much how liberals use this all-purpose smear word today. Its function is to label and disgrace recusants, by implying that anyone who resists the most fanatical schemes of racial integration is no different in principle from those who would exterminate whol races.

So yes, Zionism is "racist"--in the Left's sense of the term. Instead of rejecting the label as "obscene," we sould identify and condemn the whole implicit structure of assumptions the word expresses. But for Moynihan this might mean leaving the Democratic Party, which sponsors policies that posit a standing presumption of racism against American as a whole.

The book's third and last essay is a cogent and stimulating reflection on international law. Moynihan thinks America has become too cynical about the whole idea, and he regrets tht we have ceased regarding it as being in our own interest to promote law among nations. Otherwise, he says, we might have taken better care of ourselves when the Soviets violated their Helsinki pledges and when Iranian nuts seized our embassy.

But this chapter concludes by deprecating the American invasion of Grenada. And one notices a melancholy pattern in the book, as in Moynihan's career. He has a knack of dedicating himself to those principles that will do him the most good. His vague principle of "loyalty to life" enables him to align himself with his own party's disarmament crowd on the MX, but doesn't require him to break away on abortion. His chapter on Zionism and racism brings him to a position where he can identify the interests of the U.S. and Israel the way Charles Wilson once identified those of the U.S. and GM, and there he stops. His chapter on international law turns out to justify his joining his party's Left--it has no Right--on Grenada. This is a philosopher who lands on his feet.

Anyone can pick a few convenient principles off the rack: There are so many to choose from. Putting three of them together arbitrarily in a package, though, doesn't take one very far down the road toward a political philosophy. And I groan when I put down the book and remember that this superb detective of "semantic infiltration" will soon be in front of the cameras bawling out partisan gibberish that might as easily come from Tip O'Neill.

When a man talks about "principles," we naturally expect to find a principles behind the principles. For the Democratic Party as a whole the only principle left is one it doesn't want to avow: socialism. This leads Democratic politicians to scramble for ad hoc justifications of policies that always fit the same pattern. They theyn pretend there is no discernible pattern there (identifying the pattern is called "McCarthyism").

And worse, they refuse to discuss the premises they habitually act on, like the notion that the state has an unlimited claim on the nation's wealth. Phrases like "social justice" also represent semantic infiltration. It would be fascinating to see Senator Moynihan analyze his party's rhetoric; but alas, he has hiw own uses for it. Moynihan thinks so well--if only he wouldn't stop. He is by no means the worst of our politicians; just the most disappointing.