THE CLOSING of the CONSERVATIVE MIND When News Becomes

Silent Trade War Congress Invades Canada Not-So-Special Ops James Bond’s Mission eamonn fingleton ted galen carpenter william s. lind stephen b. tippins jr.

OCTOBER 2012

IDEAS OVER IDEOLOGY • PRINCIPLES OVER PARTY

THE CLOSING OF THE CONSERVATIVE MIND When News Becomes

(Or: What Has the Culture War Done to Our Culture?)

PATRICK DENEEN • DANIEL McCARTHY

theamericanconservative.com

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Fortunately, there is an awakening powerful enough to halt that juggernaut of governmental control. It is a natural law known as the law of right action, calling for rational, honest behavior. Natural laws never play favorites. People obey natural laws or suffer the consequences. That is the awakening information for this generation. Visit The Alpha Publishing House Website (www.alphapub.com) to read our FREE eBooks and Natural-law Essays. Or write to The Alpha Publishing House, PO Box 255, Royersford, PA 19468 to receive our FREE mailing, describing print copies of the books. This Month Vol. 11, No. 10, OCTOBER 2012

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COVER STORIES FRONT LINES ARTS & LETTERS

14 Who Closed the American Mind? 6 Trotskyite America 42 John Randolph of Roanoke Indifference, more than leftism, Martin Sieff by David Johnson Timothy Stanley threatens our culture 7 What special ops can’t do patrick deneen William S. Lind 44 The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist by John A. 19 Modernism & Conservatism 8 A cold look at global warming Jenkins How T.S. Eliot found hope in RON UNZ despair Kevin R.C. Gutzman 9 Tubesteak, king of Malibu daniel mccarthy 46 Words Like Loaded Pistols: Roger D. McGrath Rhetoric From Aristotle To ARTICLES 11 Trains are poetry in motion Obama by Sam Leith 22 Japan’s Bad Trade Micah Mattix John R. Coyne Jr. Tokyo’s unspoken auto Commentary 49 The Victory Lab: The Secret protectionism Science of Winning Campaigns Eamonn Fingleton 5 The other culture war by Sasha Issenberg Lloyd Green 27 Congress Cries War 13 Telling Bibi “No” From invading Canada in 1812 PATRICK J. BUCHANAN 51 No One’s World: The West, the to threatening Iran today Rising Rest, and the Coming TED GALEN CARPENTER 26 Obama’s African wars Global Turn by Charles A. Philip Giraldi 30 Not Amish, but Close Kupchan Leon Hadar Mike Scannell’s agrarianism 41 Third party’s the charm gets tested by fire. Bill Kauffman 53 Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Glenn Arbery 58 Shelf life Treason by Christina Shelton Richard M. Reinsch II 34 007’s Masculine Mystique TAKI The eaningm of James Bond 55 Stratford Shakespeare Festival Stephen B. Tippins Jr. NOAH MILLMAN 38 Return of the Kingsley The riginalo Amis makes a comeback. Matthew Walther Cover illustration: Michael Hogue

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 3 The American Conservative Publisher Letters Ron Unz Editor Daniel McCarthy Senior Editors Rod Dreher CONNED BY OBAMA Daniel Larison conservative. All my life I have placed Mark Nugent Michael Dougherty’s article “Obama’s myself somewhere on the left. But I have Editorial Director, Digital Right Wing” (August 2012) was interest- long recognized that there are legitimate Maisie Allison ing but perplexing. I can understand the issues between a responsible right and a Associate Editor “fear of adventurism in foreign policy” responsible left. I’ve read and appreciat- Jordan Bloom which the Obamacons share, but I scratch ed Burke. I’ve read the Federalist Papers. National Correspondent my head in wonder at how anyone who I’ve also read Marx. My problem lately Michael Brendan Dougherty deems himself conservative, or even cen- is that there’s no one in the Republican Contributing Editors W. James Antle III, Andrew J. Bacevich, trist, could support a president who has Party that I can take seriously. Doug Bandow, Jeremy Beer, James Bovard, essentially shredded the Constitution, I have always found National Review Patrick Deneen, Michael Desch, Richard Gamble, promoted a culture of death at home and to be too much in thrall to the Repub- Philip Giraldi, David Gordon, Paul Gottfried, Freddy Gray, Leon Hadar, Peter Hitchens, abroad, signed into law a takeover of one- lican Party. Too much focused on po- Philip Jenkins, Christopher Layne, sixth of the U. S. economy via the Afford- litical advantage at any price. But a few Chase Madar, Eric Margolis, James Pinkerton, able Care Act, actively undermined the days ago, from the Arts & Letters Daily Justin Raimondo, Fred Reed, Stuart Reid, Sheldon Richman, Steve Sailer, vital institution of marriage, ballooned website, I was led to The American Con- John Schwenkler, Jordan Michael Smith, the national debt, and trampled on re- servative. I’ve spent a couple of hours R.J. Stove, Kelley Vlahos, Thomas E. Woods Jr. ligious freedom. I can appreciate how since then reading articles and essays. I Associate Publisher some of them felt in 2008, but now? I am am really impressed. It’s not, of course, Jon Basil Utley particularly disappointed in Jeffrey Hart, that I agree with everything I read there. Publishing Consultant an elegant writer whose work I have en- But you actually have serious thinkers. Ronald E. Burr joyed in the past, but whose continued Some of them actually challenge the Editorial Assistant Vijay Vikram support for Obama, while stretching the Democratic Party and generally accept- Founding Editors boundaries of conservatism like Silly ed liberal opinion on grounds worth Patrick J. Buchanan, Scott McConnell, Putty, I find utterly baffling. considering. I actually believe that liber- Taki Theodoracopulos I am pleased to hear, however, that als and conservatives have things to dis- some of these folks are having second cuss that transcend the election cycle. The American Ideas Institute thoughts; after all, what harmony has JOHN LEARY President Wick Allison Burke with a 21st-century Jacobin? via email The American Conservative, Vol. 11, No. JEFF McALISTER 10, October 2012 (ISSN 1540-966X). Reg. Longview, Texas U.S. Pat. & Tm. Offic. Published 12 times a BEAT ROOTS year by The American Ideas Institute, 4040 Fairfax Drive, Ste. 140, Arlington, VA 22203. Kerouac was from the French-speaking Periodicals postage paid Arlington, VA and PRINCIPLES OVER PARTY additional mailing offices. Printed in the USA. community of Lowell, Mass. (“Conser- POSTMASTER: Send address changes to The Thank you for being a voice of real vative Kerouac,” Sept. 2012)? I did not American Conservative, P.O. Box 9030, Maple conservative principles—especially as know this. I visited that community in Shade, NJ 08052-9030. Subscription rates: $49.97 per year (12 issues) opposed to Republican principles, 1970. I had the doleful duty of escorting in the U.S., $69.97 in Canada (U.S. funds), and which I find tend to vary depending the body of one of my men home to his $89.97 other foreign via airmail. Back issues: $6.00 (prepaid) per copy in USA, $7.00 in on who is saying what and who’s run- parents. Despite the grim duty, they wel- Canada (U.S. funds). ning for reelection. (I find that goes comed me with such hospitality that 40 For subscription orders, payments, and other for Democratic principles too, but that years later, I still have warm memories subscription inquiries— doesn’t really apply here!) of this wonderful place. In the middle By phone: 800-579-6148 (outside the U.S./Canada 856-380-4131) I don’t always agree with the point of of a rather grimy Northeastern indus- Via Web: www.theamericanconservative.com view, but I always respect it. Thank you trial town (as it then was) there was this By mail: The American Conservative, P.O. Box so much for that. marvelous and largely French speaking 9030, Maple Shade, NJ 08052-9030 KRISTINE GAMMER community that worshiped at St. Jean Please allow 6–8 weeks for delivery of your first issue. via email d’Arc Church. I suddenly have a much Inquiries and letters to the editor should be better understanding of who Kerouac sent to [email protected]. For advertising THE TWAIN SHALL MEET sales call Ronald Burr at 703-893-3632. For was; I have met his people. editorial, call 703-875-7600. Having just discovered The American John Médaille This issue went to press on September 17, 2012. Conservative, I am thrilled. I am not a web comment Copyright 2012 The American Conservative.

4 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 { Vol. 11, No. 10, OCTOBER 2012 }

The Other Culture War

his election is about much more than the political problem in turn into the philosophical who gets what. It is about who we are. problem, and the philosophical problem itself to be “ It is about what we believe. It is about almost indissolubly bound up at last with the reli- what we stand for as Americans. gious problem.” ThereT is a religious war going on in our country for The Republican Party of the past 20 years hasn’t the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical lived up to Buchanan’s challenge—not on culture, to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the not on economics (where Buchanan warned about Cold War itself.” Pat Buchanan was addressing the the erosion of America’s industrial base and middle 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, class), and not in foreign policy (where again he was but he could have delivered the same remarks in prophetic about the costs to the republic of embrac- Tampa this year. Mitt Romney and Barack Obama ing empire abroad). Party politics not only isn’t the may have more than their share of similarities— answer to America’s cultural troubles, but isn’t even starting with the healthcare plans and foreign the answer to its political ones; not in full, at any policy—but culture divides the candidates, their rate. Philosophy, religion, and literature are less im- parties, and their voters. A platform fight at the mediate but in many ways more fundamental. Pro- Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Caro- gressives have invested so much in higher education lina, over referencing God in the document under- and creative fields for a reason—not because they scored the contrast. hope to translate leverage at Harvard or in Holly- But it’s hard to say that two decades of culture war wood into partisan victories but because they intuit have done much for America’s culture—Republican that these things count in their own right, and they congressional takeovers after the 1994 and 2010 add up to something much more than an electoral midterms and GOP presidential victories in 2000 majority. and 2004 did not lead to any kind of moral reawak- Conservatives have understood this, too, or did ening. Differences between the parties on such is- in the age of Babbitt and T.S. Eliot. But lately pure sues as abortion and mandatory coverage of contra- politics has been a greater focus for the right, and ception in health-insurance plans are real enough, even culture—in the sense of film, music, and lit- but they have little, if anything, to do with the coun- erature—has come to be valued more for its pro- try’s overall cultural complexion. Indeed, even more pagandistic value than for its higher ends. The cul- mundane policy matters have roots that go deeper: ture war, and ultimately the culture peace, requires as Irving Babbitt once wrote, “When studied with a recalibration, a reminder—as readers will find in any degree of thoroughness, the economic prob- this issue—that ideas and their authors have conse- lem will be found to run into the political problem, quences even beyond November.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 5 Front Lines

world to seek protection from efforts From Kennan to Trotsky to fan the flames of revolution within How the United States became a superpower of the left them by turning to the United States by Martin Sieff for security on U.S. terms. Today, it is the United States under ussia and China today both great powers have been reversed. Since presidents of both parties that has enjoy the same grand-strategic the advent of Madeleine Albright as embraced the Trotskyite delusion. The advantage against the United secretary of state in 1997, the United bipartisan policy of the United States RStates that the United States enjoyed States has become increasingly ideo- has become Permanent Revolution through the 44 years of the Cold War. logically committed to the spreading until Total and Perfect Democracy is The Soviet Union was then the su- of “instant powdered democracy” in finally achieved. This can only end the perpower of the left, as the left had every nation of the world, as defined way it ended for Maximilien Robespi- been globally understood since the and approved by the United States. erre in the French Revolution and for French Revolution. It was the state Russia and China have become the Trotsky in the Bolshevik one. committed to the promotion of revolu- main “conservative” or “right-wing” It is fitting that so many of the older tionary change across the world. powers committed to preserving the generation of American neoconserva- The United States, by contrast, was status quo. tives started life as communist enthu- the superpower of the right. It was Ironically, the U.S. commitment siasts in the 1930s and ’40s. For today’s committed to the maintenance of sta- to continual revolution around the neocons are really neo-Trotskyites bility and continuity in government world is a revival of the discredited promoting the old, doomed enthusi- systems around the world. concepts of Leon Trotsky. Josef Sta- asms under a new label. lin abandoned Trotsky’s By contrast, Russia and China are ideas in the 1920s when led by pragmatic governments guided he took power in the by the concepts of profit and self-inter- The bipartisan policy of the United Soviet Union. This gave est. They support and want to do busi- States has become Permanent him the ideological flexi- ness with existing governments and bility to create the Grand governing systems around the world. Revolution until Total and Perfect Alliance with the United This has made them the 21st century’s Democracy is finally achieved. States and the British major global powers of the right. Empire that won World This is the strategic and psycho- War II—the Great Patri- logical force behind China’s immense otic War. success in displacing the United States The United States won the Cold War. But Nikita Khrushchev revived and the European Union in Africa. The craving for stability, peace, and con- Trotsky’s disastrous concept: he Chinese investment and aid comes tinuity among governments and popu- and his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, free from the destabilizing, potentially lations alike proved infinitely stronger drained their superpower dry by revolutionary ideological strings that than the fleeting flashes of revolutionary pouring resources into promoting undermine existing systems of gov- fervor. The Soviet Union eventually be- revolution throughout the develop- ernment throughout the region. came physically exhausted and globally ing world, from 1954 in Egypt to Af- The governments of China and isolated by its ideological commitment ghanistan in 1979-87. This led to the Russia hate and fear revolution and to revolutionary change. collapse of the Soviet system. It also see the endless ideological promo- Today, however, the roles of the two prompted governments around the tion of democracy American-style in

6 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 small countries around them and in The efforts of the French Revolu- without which they depend tactically their own homelands as planting the tionaries and Napoleon to export lib- on massive fire support (usually air seeds of chaos and disintegration. erty, equality, and brotherhood across strikes) that in Fourth Generation war Democracy works admirably in Europe by fire and sword instead en- works to the enemy’s advantage. They societies where it is allowed to develop sured the survival of the old tradition- do not even know the basic Third Gen- organically. But when other govern- al empires for another 120 years. The eration maneuver-warfare tactics the ments try to accelerate its growth ar- efforts of Lenin and Trotsky to export German army evolved late in World tificially or hasten its triumph from socialism and communism by similar War I. They use their superior tech- outside, especially when they resort means were even more catastrophic. niques merely to put more fire more to military force to do so, the result is The backlash against them in Germany accurately on more targets in wars of almost always a fierce reaction against propelled Adolf Hitler to power. attrition against enemies who are not the forces of democracy. This reaction It is not in America’s interests to sensitive to losses. often generates extreme fascist, repres- follow in those footsteps—to put it SOF’s tactical obsolescence is dou- sive, and intolerant forces. And these mildly. bly harmful in that they are often em- forces usually win and take power. ployed to train the forces of the weak Then they impose themselves on the Martin Sieff is Chief Global Analyst for The states we are attempting to support. societies in question, delaying any real Globalist and the author of the upcoming Cy- By teaching them Second Generation democratic development for decades cles of Change: The Patterns of U.S. Politics firepower/attrition war, we under- or generations. from Thomas Jefferson to Barack Obama. mine their effectiveness while making them dependent on firepower they are unlikely to have once we depart. Be- yond the level of techniques, we are What’s So Special About Special Ops? too frequently the Typhoid Mary of SEALs and Rangers are no answer to our military woes. military advice. The picture at higher levels of war by william s. lind is also grim. SOF understand operational art no better than the rest n the face of the failure of Ameri- man your enemy than to tell him you of the American military, which is ca’s conventional military forces in are going to remake him in your image to say they can spell it. (This is now Iraq and Afghanistan, the Wash- for his own good. evident in the increasingly desperate Iington establishment seeks a silver Second, while there is wide variance attempts of the American command bullet, a “force of choice” that can within the Special Operations com- in Afghanistan to respond to green- win. It thinks it has found one in Spe- munity, most SOF units share the same on-blue attacks. They are trying to cial Operations Forces, which include problems that afflict our conventional counter an operational move by the most famously the Navy’s SEALs and forces. They, too, are stuck in the Sec- Taliban at the tactical level, which is the Army’s Green Berets. ond Generation of modern war, with doomed to failure.) This is an espe- Experience is the best teacher, as an inward-focused culture of order cially serious failing for Special Op- the old saying goes, but she kills all her that reduces the complex art of war to erations Forces because what makes pupils. Experience is likely to teach us putting firepower on targets. an operation “special” is that it is op- that against Fourth Generation non- SOF are more skilled at techniques erational, not just tactical. The result state enemies Special Operations Forc- than their conventional counterparts, is that most American “special opera- es are no silver bullet. We could learn but techniques are not a typical Ameri- tions” are merely tactical actions with the same lesson beforehand through a can weakness. Our armed forces are fancy techniques, the equivalent of bit of reflection, without expending the technically capable across the board. raids by police SWAT teams. Our Spe- lives of some of our best and most ad- Techniques and tactics are not only cial Operations Forces get dribbled mirable men. different but opposite in nature—the away in minor events that, again, add The first reason is that the strategic first is formulistic and the second up to a war of attrition. Night raids to objectives the foreign-policy establish- should be situational—and like our kill or capture Taliban squad leaders ment sets are unattainable by any mili- conventional forces, SOF are most- are a long way from Otto Skorzeny’s tary. Not even an army of elves and ents ly not tactically competent, at least rescue of Mussolini, which was the could remake Third World hellholes from what I have seen of them. Few model special operation. into Switzerland. And as Russell Kirk American Special Operations units SOF fare no better at the strategic wrote, there is no surer way to make a know light-infantry (“Jaeger”) tactics, level. There, attrition has been and

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 7 Front Lines remains the American way of war, Two Cheers for Heresy on Global Warming and Special Operations Forces are em- ployed accordingly. Climate change is a cycle—of faddish opinions In Fourth Generation war, Special by RON UNZ Operations Forces share yet another weakness with our conventional first encountered the strong case CO2 emissions would fry us to a crisp or forces: they are American. With the for global warming in the early whether solar blockage from particulate important exception of Special Forces 1970s in an Isaac Asimov science emissions would freeze us to an icicle, or (the Green Berets), they take America Icolumn. As an elementary school whether perhaps the two effects would with them wherever they go to war. student, I merely nodded my head, perfectly cancel out. Since debate tour- After an action, they go back to a base assumed that America’s political lead- naments often had four rounds, I might that is “little America,” with air con- ership would address the danger, and alternate my claims of glaciers growing ditioning, steak, and the Internet. The moved on to an explanation of quarks. and glaciers melting every hour or so, locals, whether enemies or allies, look Even in those days, the subject was always backing my position with co- on with envy that soon shades into hardly new. The Asimov column had pious evidence from expert sources. I hatred. originally run in the late 1950s, before reluctantly concluded that climatology This feeds a central problem in I was even born, and the possibility was merely a pseudoscience, at least Fourth Generation war, what Martin that burning fossil fuels might raise the compared to my own field of theoretical van Creveld calls the power of weak- Earth’s temperature via the “Green- physics, and I was glad when the debate ness. With our overwhelming techni- house Effect” had already been around topic switched to foreign policy the fol- cal and equipment advantages, luxu- for many decades, going back to the late lowing year. rious (by local standards) way of life, 19th century. Whether it occurred in I had almost forgotten about both and nice country to go home to after the real world was a different matter. warming and cooling when the unusu- we have wrecked someone else’s, we My next encounter with climate ally hot summer of 1988 stampeded are Goliath. Our opponents, however change came in the mid-1970s. Sud- our media and political elites into sud- repulsive, become David. How many denly all the magazines and newspa- denly declaring that global warming people identify with Goliath? pers were filled with stories that sci- was a proven reality. As I joked to my In the end, Special Operations entists had determined that the world friends, going from Ice Age to oven in Forces differ from the conventional was on the brink of a new Ice Age, with just a dozen years seemed a bit much, armed forces that have failed repeat- global cooling about to devastate our especially since both trends were alleg- edly against Fourth Generation op- civilization. I still recall Newsweek’s edly decades or centuries long. ponents primarily by putting on a famous cover depicting an American But as the years went by and more better show. Their techniques can be street scene blanketed by an arctic and more mainstream voices endorsed dazzling. But few wars are won by su- blizzard. Although I wondered at how global warming, I began to assume it periority in technique. quickly warming had switched to cool- must be true because “everyone said A general rule of warfare is that a ing, I was in junior high and assumed so,” or at least everyone not subsidized higher level trumps a lower, and tech- that our scientists—and the media that by Exxon Mobil. For similar reasons, I nique is the lowest level of all. Our presented them—knew what they were later assumed that Saddam must have SEALs, Rangers, Delta, SF, and all the talking about. Fortunately, no glaciers WMDs—at least of the chemical or rest are vastly superior to the Taliban appeared, and the topic was soon for- biological variety—given the absolutely or al-Qaeda at techniques. But those gotten. uniform proclamations of our main- opponents have sometimes shown By the late 1970s, I had joined high- stream media commentariat. themselves able at tactics, operations, school debate, and one year the topic In that latter case, I eventually dis- and strategy. We can only defeat them was the environment, with climate-re- covered that I—together with the en- by making ourselves superior at those lated issues being the biggest sub-topic. tire American public—had fallen for higher levels of war. There, regrettably, So I diligently gathered vast quantities a massive hoax, and this raised huge Special Operations Forces have noth- of highly credible evidence from noted doubts about the credibility of the es- ing to offer. They are just another lead scientific experts proclaiming the cer- tablishment media. But even so, I was bullet in an obsolete Second Genera- tainty of global warming, global cool- quite shocked in 2007 to read a series tion arsenal. ing, both, or neither, and lugged them of major Counterpunch columns by the around in my evidence boxes to all the late Alexander Cockburn denouncing William S. Lind is director of the American tournaments. Random lot would deter- global warming as the same sort of Conservative Center for Public Transportation. mine whether I persuasively argued that massive hoax, protected and promoted

8 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 by the establishment media just like the Iraqi WMDs. Obviously Cockburn himself was no scientist, but those he quoted seemed to be, and more importantly, Big Oil probably didn’t own one of America’s foremost radical-left Miguel Davilla journalists. So what is one to think? The scientific topic involved is complex and special- ized, requiring years of academic study to properly comprehend. The experts way around? He cited claims that over so totally undermined the credibility seem divided, with nasty accusations the last million or so years, changes in of our official sources in almost every- of dishonesty and corruption flying in CO2 had always tended to lag the cor- thing. Consider that one of the strongest both directions. The mainstream me- responding changes in temperature by private-sector backers of global warm- dia and our political elites seem over- many centuries, implying that CO2 ing had been the Enron Corporation, whelmingly to favor one side, but given was a consequence rather than a cause up until the moment that it collapsed in their recent track record, that almost of the warming. the largest corporate fraud in history. constitutes a negative indicator. Tens of Five minutes spent with Google The tendency to attack dissent as billions of dollars are at stake, so the vol- uncovers a vast wealth of articles de- heresy hardly engenders free and open ume of propaganda is enormous, and I bunking or supporting these simple debate. Just a couple of years after I read would need hundreds of hours just to claims, with endless data and citations those Counterpunch columns, the New dip my toe into the topic. Therefore, my all around. Can I effectively judge these York Times Magazine ran a cover story considered verdict is: I just don’t know. competing arguments? Certainly not, on Freeman Dyson, one of the most But if I were prodded to take some and a dozen or more years ago I would brilliant physicists of his generation. position, I would focus on the simplest, have assumed that establishment opin- He was labeled “The Civil Heretic” for clearest argument, the one least requir- ion was probably correct, with the his strong public skepticism on global ing expertise in complex atmospheric near-unanimous verdict of elite-media warming theories. Given the recent modeling or meteorological theories. sources outweighing a few scattered track record of the Times and its peers, Alex’s original April 28, 2007 column figures mostly drawn from the politi- I’m half inclined to automatically favor did just that. cal fringe. But that was before the Iraqi the heretics. As he explained, the early years of WMDs. And Bernie Madoff. And the the Great Depression had seen world- housing bubble, and so many other re- Ron Unz is publisher of The American wide industrial output drop by about vealed hoaxes and scandals that have Conservative. one quarter, along with carbon emissions from coal, oil, and natural gas, requiring most of a decade to return to previous levels. Yet during these same A Man Called Tubesteak years, there appears no significant change in the trends of rising CO2 or Farewell to the legendary Kahuna who christened Gidget temperature. If enormous changes in by ROGER D. McGRATH human carbon output have negligible impact on the atmospheric trends of started surfing at Malibu in the toenails for me. Resigned to my lowly the global warming hypothesis, how late 1950s. I was only a kid, not status, I had been waiting for a wave can there be a causal connection? yet a teenager. In the vernacular of my own for quite some time when This relates to another point made Iof the surf culture of the day, I was a small two-footer humped up just by Alex and also mentioned in the a gremmie. I had to wait my turn in outside of where I was straddling my original Asimov column. The oceans the lineup out on the point. Good set board. “This is mine,” I thought. Just contain perhaps 50 times more dis- waves were not for me. The older guys then a really old guy, maybe 20, began solved CO2 than is found in the at- had dibs on those. The leftovers from paddling for it—but a powerful voice mosphere, and as our planet warms, the sets or the smaller waves that rolled bellowed, “Let the gremmie have it.” evaporating seawater releases carbon through between the sets were the best The 20-year-old immediately stopped dioxide. Is the increase of CO2 pro- I could hope for. Even then, if an older paddling—as if ordered by a top-kick ducing the warming or is it the other guy wanted one of those, it was tough sergeant—and I stroked into the wave.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 9 Front Lines

beach towels, and posters. Tracy built a new, sturdier shack on a raised platform in 1957 and added to his furnish- ings. Some surfers thought he had sold out and was going upscale. Shortly after Tracy arrived at Malibu, he acquired the nickname Tubesteak. Different versions for the origins of his sobriquet abound. He himself had two or three explanations, including Allan Grant/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images Pictures/Getty Life Grant/Time Allan having worked for a restaurant called Tubesteak’s. The story that had the most currency when I started surfing at Malibu said that Tracy showed up at a barbeque with hotdogs instead of the steaks he had promised. When someone complained, Tracy, without bat- ting an eye and in high dudgeon, said, “There are T-bone steaks, Porterhouse steaks, rib-eye steaks … these are tube steaks.” Everyone collapsed in laughter. From then on Terry Tracy was known Tubesteak, wearing a jacket, sits to the right of Gidget in Malibu in 1957 as Tubesteak. I suspect there were many surfers who never knew his real The voice that bellowed belonged to day on who our leader was at Malibu!” name. Terry Tracy, known to all as Tubesteak. Terry Tracy was born in Los Angeles When the Tube hit the waves it was Although not the best surfer at Malibu, in 1935 and grew up attending Catho- on a 10’6” balsa board. Even when he was indisputably the king of the lic schools, including all-boys Cathe- polyurethane foam boards made their beach. His physical stature, enormous dral High, operated by the Christian appearance in 1958, he stuck to his old strength, booming voice, wit, and age Brothers. He was an outstanding foot- board. He didn’t maneuver his board made him a natural for leadership. No ball player but the siren call of waves with exceptional quickness or agil- one was about to challenge him. More- had begun to interfere with both his in- ity but would drop down the face of a over, he actually lived right on the sand terscholastic sports and his studies by wave, make a sweeping turn, trim up, of the famed surfing point in a shack the time he was 15. He began spending and come roaring down the line. No that he had built without permission of more and more time surfing at San On- one would dare drop in on him. He was any kind. ofre. Upon graduation in 1953 he went Tubesteak, the Kahuna. But also he and Kemp Aaberg, an older brother of to Santa Monica City College, play- his board racing down a wave were like my best friend, Denny, began surfing ing football and occasionally study- a battleship coming at you, and it was at Malibu during the summer of 1956. ing. After a year he called it quits. He up to you to avoid a collision. When Kemp would become one of the stars of went to work for a Los Angeles Spring he got a good wave that broke all the several of Bruce Brown’s surfing mov- Street savings and loan run by an aunt. way from the point into the cove—and ies. Kemp told me that he was “hang- He lasted two years before quitting in occasionally to the pier—he’d strike a ing around the entrance to Tubesteak’s 1956. pose. People on the beach would laugh shack after a good go-out on the waves. Exchanging his suit and tie for a pair and applaud. Everyone was laughing, talking, and of trunks, he headed up to Malibu. He Tubesteak probably would have re- drying out in the sun. Suddenly, the fell in love with the waves that broke mained an obscure figure, known only damp Army blanket that served as the along the rock-reefed point on the west to us local surfers, were it not for an door to the palm-frond shack was swept side of the Malibu Pier. He decided to Austrian immigrant and Hollywood aside and there stood the Tube, observ- stay. Right there on the sand. He built a screenwriter, Frederick Kohner, and ing his flock. Then, in a very loud, deep, shack out of lumber and palm fronds, his daughter, Kathy. The Kohners lived authoritative voice, he proclaimed, ‘I just inland from the high-tide line. in Brentwood but enjoyed the beach at AM THE KAHUNA.’ Everyone had a He furnished the interior with a small Malibu. By the time Kathy was 15 she great laugh, and we all knew from that stove, a couch, a mattress, milk crates, was captivated by the surfers and surf-

10 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 ing. Cute and pert, and maybe five feet Tubesteak, although physically Dan was there representing Dewey Weber tall and 95 pounds, she decided she’d Blocker would have been more appro- surfboards. He was standing in front walk down the beach to Tubesteak’s priate. Surfers were not entirely pleased of Dewey’s exhibit, looking larger than shack and see if she could convince one with the movie. It had plenty of hokey life as usual and wearing a Hawaiian of the surfers there to take her out on Hollywood in it and no one liked James shirt that could have covered a bear. I a board. Flat rejection is what she got. Darren, except a million teenage girls. had been saving my paper route money She was told to move on. Not willing to He didn’t look the part of Moondoggie, for six months to buy a new board. The take no for an answer she told one of couldn’t begin to surf, and was appre- Tube made me a deal that later caused the surfers that she couldn’t be bother- hensive about even going in the water. Dewey to blanch. Dewey thought ing him by just sitting there. “Yeah?” he Several of our local guys worked in the about backing out of it—I was but 13 replied. “You’re still breathing.” movie, though. Doug McClure, a bud- and couldn’t have held him to a con- Just then Tubesteak emerged from ding actor, a real surfer, and a friend of tract—but with a little Tubesteak influ- his shack and the Kahuna surveyed my older brother’s, played the part of ence he stuck to it. his domain. What was this little thing Waikiki, and others, including Mickey By 1960 the Tube was married to amongst his surfing novitiates? It’s Munoz, worked as stunt doubles. Small Phyllis, a lovely girl who was devoted a girl, said one of the guys. No it’s a and wiry, Munoz put on a blond wig to the Kahuna. They would soon buy a midget, said another. Tubesteak put and a girl’s bathing suit and surfed for house in San Clemente and settle into an end to the debate, declaring Kathy Sandra Dee, who played Gidget. middle-class life, including filling their a Gidget, half girl and half midget. As Tubesteak didn’t directly profit from home with seven children. Tubesteak with Tubesteak’s own nickname there the movie, but his reputation as the continued to surf, now back at his are other versions to this story but Kahuna of Malibu now spread far and original spot of San Onofre, until he hit from that time on, the Tube became wide. He was asked by different shapers 50. From then on he mostly sat on the Kathy’s protector. Gidget bought her to represent their surfboards and paid beach, regaling all with his wonderful first surfboard from Mike Doyle for to appear at surf expos and in surfing tales of the golden years at Malibu. He $30. Paddling and surfing on it soon movies. In the spring of 1960 Denny died on August 22 at the age of 77. became easier for the Gidge than car- Aaberg and I, and many others from rying it from a parked car on the Coast Pacific Palisades and Malibu, went to Roger D. McGrath is the author of Highway to the water. The balsa boards the Surf-O-Rama expo at the Santa Gunfighters, Highwaymen, and Vigilantes: of that era were double the weight of Monica Civic Auditorium. Tubesteak Violence on the Frontier. boards of a similar size today. Riding waves at Malibu gave Gidget a bad case of surf stoke. She’d come home at night talking excitedly about The Art of Trains nothing but surfing and all the characters at the beach, starting with Rail offers a poetic way to watch the world Tubesteak, the Kahuna. Soon her fa- by MICAH MATTIX ther was taking notes. The daily tales and the characters were too colorful t was a warm autumn day in 1996, wife’s father had offered us. There’d be to pass up. Within six weeks he had and I was sitting on a Swiss train no want of potato soup, potato bread, a completed manuscript. Gidget was with a backpack full of my father- or rösti, and the money we’d save on published in 1957 and quickly became in-law’s potatoes. My wife and I the staple could go towards a little ex- a bestseller. Life was intrigued. Could Ihad been married just a few months, tra fruit or vegetables, or maybe even this lifestyle and these characters be for and we didn’t have much money. She some beer or ice cream. real? The magazine sent a reporter and was finishing her last year of stud- We didn’t have a car, so I walked the a photographer to Malibu. There was ies in social work, and I was teaching six miles to my wife’s parents’ house, Tubesteak, his shack, and all the guys English-language courses in Geneva, picked up the potatoes, and walked the on the beach. Hollywood was also in- making just enough to pay the rent, three remaining miles to the station in trigued. Kohner was paid $50,000 and utilities, and food. I could make a Etoy. It seems strange to take a train 5 percent of the gross for the movie good wage one month, but very little for what turned out to be a little over rights. In 1957, $50,000 bought a house the next, depending on the number of three miles, but those potatoes were on the beach in Malibu. students. This was a particularly diffi- heavy. Shortly after leaving my father- The movie “Gidget” was released cult month, and we were excited about in-law’s, I could feel the weight of them in 1959. Cliff Robertson ably played the 80 pounds of free potatoes my in my knees with each step. As I was

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 11 Front Lines walking, my wife’s grandparents pulled es, school children waiting for the bus, I am not one of those individuals up beside me and offered me a ride, but or businessmen driving to work pass who feels he has to choose between I refused in a vain attempt to maintain in front of it, you see things as they are cars and trains, private and public a sense of self-sufficiency. and as they are not. The window offers transportation. I love cars. They of- When I arrived at the station, I was a true image of everyday life, but one fer a sense of freedom quite distinct exhausted, thirsty, and sore. It was cut from its original context, not by from the sense of freedom trains of- a great relief to step on the régional, the artist but by technology. This lack fer. Driving a car makes you feel in which would arrive in Morges after a of context allows you to provide your control of your life. If you don’t like few local stops. I hadn’t ridden on that own. You can imagine the farmer’s day your destination, you can change it. particular train much, and I became and his preoccupation with milk, the If you’re tired or want a coffee, you confused about where I should get schoolchildren’s vague sense of worry can stop. This is, perhaps, a distinctly off. I grabbed my potatoes and got off and hope each morning, the breakfast American sort of freedom. It is pro- at what I thought was the first stop in table at the château in the distance, you saic, preoccupied as it is with “plot,” Morges. It wasn’t. I had gotten off at the can even become a part of those images whereas the freedom offered by trains stop before, which was at least another yourself, entertaining possibilities sug- is poetic, associative, largely because mile from town. gested by them as they pass. the destination is predetermined. As much as I despised that mile, I remember experiencing some- There is a literary lesson here, too, and the inconvenience of that day, it thing similar as a child, riding in the about the value of formal constraints, did nothing to cool my love of trains. back seat of my parents’ station wagon but that’s another topic. If there were an occasion to regret not as we drove to Spokane in the summer Are trains more convenient than having a car, surely this was it, but I to visit my grandparents. It’s possible cars? I don’t know. Transfers are a didn’t. I had come to love the sound to engage reflectively with the world pain, as is walking to the station in of popping electrical wires and groan- around you as you drive or sit in the the rain. And while I don’t deny that ing metal, the stale smell of cigarettes front passenger seat, but it’s more dif- trains offer at least the possibility of in cabins formerly allotted to smokers, ficult. The concentration required by working and traveling at the same and the rhythm of the wheels on the driving is limiting, as is the view of the time, I didn’t do it as often as I had rail joints. I memorized all the record- road, which is a constant reminder of anticipated. In all my years of riding ed announcements on the line from reality, of your destination, whether trains, it was the exception rather than Morges to Geneva, which I took into it’s the office or a vacation home, the rule to see someone banging out a work each day. These incomprehen- complete with those Puritanical mile letter on a laptop or reading a report. sible words (at least to me) were like markers that remind you how far you Trains can be crowded, which makes magic, conjuring the beautiful Swiss still have to go. them uncomfortable, and come with countryside that seemed to change Trains offer the opportunity to peo- an assortment of smells that can be with the light. ple-watch. There are typically two sorts either intriguing or nauseating. They My love of trains is at least in part of people on a train—professionals are a favorite method of suicide, espe- a love of novelty. My father worked and vacationers—and both are fruitful cially among men, something my wife briefly for the metro in Seattle, but I sources for the imagination. Vacation- and I learned one summer returning rarely used public transportation be- ers offer the most obvious respite from from Bordeaux. fore moving overseas. And while I had reality. With their backpacks, Italian As much as I love trains, I am skep- visited Switzerland before, my first year hiking shoes, maps, and brochures, tical about the recent push to invest of living there was the beginning of a they remind you that there are millions in rail in America. We’ve come too far deeper and more nuanced understand- of people not going to work. For me, with cars, it seems to me, and it’s too ing of the country, and my commute this was always bittersweet, because late to go back. Who knows what new was a daily opportunity to observe the while I could observe their excitement form of public transportation using habits and mannerisms of these people for the day ahead, it made the harsh America’s existing infrastructure might who were both so different and not reality of the workday awaiting me in be invented in the future? But one thing so different from myself. But it’s more Geneva seem that much harsher. I pre- I do know is that there is nothing quite than that. ferred watching professionals. There like finding yourself alone on a régional, To get on a train is like stepping into was something about seeing others go sunlight pouring into the cabin, with a another world, from which the first can someplace, dressed sharply in pressed moment to quietly reflect on life. be viewed almost as a work of art—a shirts and slacks, Le Temps tucked un- transformed image of reality. The train der the shoulder, that made me feel Micah Mattix is assistant professor in window is the frame, and as farm hous- that I too was “going someplace.” literature at Houston Baptist University.

12 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Made in America Patrick j. Buchanan

Calling Bibi’s Bluff

hat is Bibi Netanyahu and terms for a deal with Tehran, is neoconservatives claim that Iran’s mul- up to? only eight weeks off. lahs are such death-wishing fanatics With all his warn- If Obama, no fan of Bibi, wins, he they cannot be deterred even by nu- ings of Iran’s “nuclear can tell Bibi: We oppose any Israeli pre- clear weapons, what is Israel’s awesome Wcapability,” of red lines being crossed, emptive strike. If you attack Iran, we atomic arsenal for? of “breakout,” of the international will not support you. Nor will we fol- What this suggests is that the Israe- community failing in its duty, of an low up an Israeli attack with an Ameri- lis do not believe what they are saying. “existential threat” to Israel, what is the can attack. Their nuclear deterrent is highly cred- prime minister’s game? Bibi’s dilemma: Despite his threats of ible to all their neighbors. Their exis- The answer is apparent. Bibi wants Israeli strikes on Iran, Tehran is taunt- tence is not in imminent peril. And the Iran’s nuclear program shut down, all ing him. His Cabinet is divided. The mullahs are not madmen. enrichment ended, all enriched ura- Shas Party in his coalition opposes a When Ronald Reagan was about to nium removed, and guarantees that war, as do respected retired generals, take the oath, suddenly those mullahs, Iran will never again start up a nuclear former Mossad leaders and President assessing that the new American presi- program. Shimon Peres. dent might be a man of action, not just And if Tehran refuses to surrender its And the Americans have sent emis- words, had all the U.S. hostages wing- right even to a peaceful nuclear program, saries, including Secretary Leon Panet- ing their way home. he wants its nuclear facilities, especially ta, to tell Bibi we oppose an Israeli at- When the USS Vincennes mistakenly the enrichment facility at Fordow, deep tack. The Pentagon does not want war. shot down an Iranian airliner in 1988, inside a mountain, obliterated. Three former U.S. Central Command the Ayatollah Khomeini, founding fa- And he wants us to do it. heads oppose a war. And last week, ther of the Islamic Republic, ended his How has Bibi gone about getting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. war with Iraq on unfavorable terms, America to fight Israel’s war? Martin Dempsey said he does not wish fearing America was about to inter- He is warning, indeed threatening, to be “complicit” in any Israeli attack. vene on the side of Saddam Hussein. that if we do not set a date certain for The Israelis were furious, but sud- Like all rulers, good and evil, Iran’s Iran to end enrichment of uranium, denly the war talk subsided. leaders want to preserve what they and assure Israel that we will attack From the clashes, public and private, have—families, homes, lives, privileg- Iran if it rejects our ultimatum, Israel between these two close allies, it is ap- es, possessions, power. will bomb Iran and start the war itself. parent the United States shares neither Moreover, the latest report of the in- Fail to give us assurances that you Israel’s assessment of the threat nor Is- ternational inspectors reveals that while will attack Iran if Iran refuses to sur- rael’s sense of urgency. Iran increased its supply of uranium render its nuclear “capability,” Bibi is Why not? Why, when Netanyahu enriched to 20 percent since last spring, warning, and we will attack Iran, with says Israel is facing an “existential an even larger share of that 20-percent all the consequences that will have for threat,” do the Americans dismiss it? uranium has been diverted to make fuel you, for us, and for the Middle East. The first reason is the elephant in the plates for Iran’s U.S.-provided research This is diplomatic extortion. room no one mentions: Israel’s own reactor to make medical isotopes. Thus far, Obama has called Bibi’s nuclear arsenal. If Fordow is a difficult If there is no reason to go to war with bluff, assuming it is a bluff. The United target for Israel to destroy with conven- Iran, there is every reason not to go States has refused to set a date certain tional air strikes, it could be annihilat- to war. Notwithstanding the alarmist by which Iran must end all enrichment. ed with a single atom bomb. rhetoric of Bibi and Ehud Barak, Presi- Hillary Clinton said this weekend that And Israel has hundreds. dent Obama should stand his ground. we are “not setting deadlines.” And the Indeed, if Israel has ruled out use of And on this one, Gov. Romney should election, which could give Obama a an atomic weapon, even when it says stand with the president, not the prime free hand to pursue his own timetable its very existence is threatened, and minister.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 13 Cover

Who Closed the American Mind? Allan Bloom was brilliant, but wrong about Burke and multiculturalism

by Patrick j. deneen

ne crisp morning 26 years ago I was set by it and almost unanimously have never heard of walking across the campus of the Uni- it before. And with every re-reading I invariably find versity of Chicago, where I had just en- something new that I hadn’t noticed before, a testimo- rolled as a first-year Ph.D. candidate in ny to the expansiveness of Bloom’s fertile mind. Othe renowned Committee on Social Thought. While While I continue to learn much from Bloom, over I had not yet met him, I had heard much about Allan the years I have arrived at three main judgments about Bloom, a legendary professor, teacher, and lecturer. the book’s relevance, its prescience, and its failings. First, I had read his translation of Plato’s Republic as an Bloom was right to be concerned about the specter of undergraduate and had some notion that I would relativism—though perhaps even he didn’t realize how write my eventual dissertation under his direction. bad it would get, particularly when one considers the re- As I crossed one of the campus quads, I saw a man action to his book compared to its likely reception were sitting on a bench, swaddled under a heavy overcoat it published today. Second, his alarm over the threat and his head topped by a fedora. A photographer was of “multiculturalism” was misplaced and constituted a arranging his equipment across from him, while he be- bad misreading of the zeitgeist, in which he mistook the musedly awaited some kind of publicity shoot. While I left’s tactical use of identity politics for the rise of a new realized only a short time later that the man I had seen kind of communalist and even traditionalist tribalism. was Allan Bloom, it was a year later—a quarter-century And, lastly, most of his readers—even today—remain ago—that I realized that I had witnessed the photo ses- incorrect in considering him to be a representative of sion that led to the headshot inside the hardcover jacket “conservatism,” a label that he eschewed and a world- of Bloom’s blockbuster book The Closing of the American view he rejected. Indeed, Bloom’s argument was one of Mind. By that time, I had left the University of Chicago, the early articulations of “neoconservatism”—a puz- disillusioned by the program and put off by Bloom’s zling locution used to describe a position that is, in fact, circle of students. But I loved the book and credit it, at today more correctly captured by its critics on the left least in part, for my eventual return to the academy and as “neo-liberalism.” a career as a professor of political philosophy. I still assign the book with some regularity, especial- hat should most astonish any reader of Bloom’s ly in a freshman seminar on education that I’ve taught WClosing after 25 years is the fact that this erudite over the last half-decade. As the years have passed, I’ve treatise about the crisis of higher education not only noticed how the book has aged—many of its cultural sat atop the bestseller list for many weeks but was at the references are long dated, while contemporary hot- center of an intense, lengthy, and ferocious debate dur- button issues like gay marriage and religious liberty are ing the late 1980s over education, youth, culture, and altogether absent from Bloom’s confident pronounce- politics. In many ways, it became the most visible and ments on our likely future. Still, the book continues to excite new readers—today’s students find it engaging, Patrick Deneen is David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate even if, unlike their elders, they don’t get especially up- Professor of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame.

14 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Michael Hogue

weightiest salvo in what came to be known as “the culture wars,” and people of a certain generation still hold strong opinions about Bloom and his remarkable, unlikely bestseller. Today there are many books about the crisis of higher education—while the nature of the crisis may change, higher education never seems to be out of the woods—but none before or since Bloom’s book achieved its prominence or made its author as rich and famous as a rock star. It was a book that many people bought but few read, at least not beyond a few titillat- ing passages condemning rock-and-roll and feminism. Yet it was a book about which almost everyone with some engagement in higher education held an opinion—indeed, it was obliga- tory to have considered views on Bloom’s book, whether one had read it or not. Bloom’s book was at the center of a debate— one that had been percolating well before its publica- spoke to anxiety about the loss of a shared literary tion in 1987—over the nature and content of a uni- and cultural inheritance, which today has been largely versity education. That debate intensified with the supplanted by references to a few popular television growing numbers of “diverse” populations seeking shows and sports televised on ESPN. recognition on college campuses—concomitant with Bloom made an altogether different argument: the rise of departments of Women’s Studies, African- American youth were increasingly raised to believe American Studies, and a host of other “Studies” stud- that nothing was True, that every belief was merely ies—leading to demands that the curriculum increas- the expression of an opinion or preference. Americans ingly reflect contributions by non-male, non-white, were raised to be “cultural relativists,” with a default non-European and even non-dead authors. attitude of non-judgmentalism. Not only all other tra- The Closing of the American Mind spawned hun- ditions but even one’s own (whatever that might be) dreds, perhaps even thousands of responses—most of were simply views that happened to be held by some them critiques—including an article entitled “The Phi- people and could not be judged inferior or superior losopher Despot” in Harper’s by political theorist Benja- to any other. He bemoaned particularly the decline min Barber, and the inevitably titled The Opening of the of household and community religious upbringing American Mind by Lawrence Levine. Partly spurred by in which the worldviews of children were shaped by the firestorm initiated by Bloom’s book, perennial presi- a comprehensive vision of the good and the true. In dential candidate Jesse Jackson led a march through the one arresting passage, he waxed nostalgic for the days campus of Stanford University shouting through a bull- when people cared: “It was not necessarily the best of horn, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” Pas- times in America when Catholic and Protestants were sions for campus reform ran high, and an avalanche of suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they words, articles, denunciations, and ad hominem attacks were taking their beliefs seriously…” greeted Bloom’s defense of the Western canon. He lamented the decline of such true belief not be- Yet the nuances of Bloom’s qualified defense of cause he personally held any religious or cultural tra- the Western canon were rarely appreciated by critics dition to be true—while Bloom was raised as a Jew, he or supporters alike. While Bloom was often lumped was at least a skeptic, if not a committed atheist—but together with E.D. Hirsch—whose Cultural Literacy because he believed that such inherited belief was the was published the same year and rose to number source from which a deeper and more profound phil- two on the New York Times bestseller list, just behind osophic longing arose. It wasn’t “cultural literacy” he Closing—Bloom’s argument was fundamentally dif- wanted, but rather the possibility of that liberating ex- ferent and far more philosophically challenging than citement among college-age youth that can come from Hirsch’s more mundane, if nevertheless accurate, realizing that one’s own inherited tradition might not point that educated people increasingly did not have be true. From that harrowing of belief can come the knowledge about their own culture. Hirsch’s book ultimate philosophic quest—the effort to replace mere

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 15 Cover

prejudice with the quest for knowledge of the True. Today we live in a different age, one that so wor- Near the beginning of Closing, Bloom relates one tell- ried Bloom—an age of indifference. Institutions of ing story of a debate with a psychology professor during higher learning have almost completely abandoned his time teaching at Cornell. Bloom’s adversary claimed, even a residual belief that there are some books and “it was his function to get rid of prejudices in his stu- authors that an educated person should encounter. A dents.” Bloom compared that function to the activity rousing defense of a curriculum in which female, Af- of an older sibling who informs the kids that there is rican-American, Latino, and other authors should be no Santa Claus—disillusionment and disappointment. represented has given way to a nearly thoroughgoing Rather than inspiring students to replace “prejudice” indifference to the content of our students’ curricula. with a curiosity for Truth, the mere shattering of illu- Academia is committed to teaching “critical thinking” sion would simply leave students “passive, disconsolate, and willing to allow nearly any avenue in the training indifferent, and subject to authorities like himself.” of that amorphous activity, but eschews any belief that Bloom relates that “I found myself responding to the content of what is taught will or ought to influence the professor of psychology that I personally tried to how a person lives. teach my students prejudices, since nowadays—with Thus, not only is academia indifferent to whether our the general success of his method—they had learned students become virtuous human beings (to use a word to doubt beliefs even before they believed in anything seldom to be found on today’s campuses), but it holds … One has to have the experience of really believing itself to be unconnected to their vices—thus there re- before one can have the thrill of liberation.” Bloom’s mains no self-examination over higher education’s role preferred original title—before being overruled by in producing the kinds of graduates who helped turn Simon and Schuster—was Souls Without Longing. He Wall Street into a high-stakes casino and our nation’s was above all concerned that students, in being de- budget into a giant credit card. Today, in the name of prived of the experience of living in their own version choice, non-judgmentalism, and toleration, institutions of Plato’s cave, would never know or experience the prefer to offer the greatest possible expanse of options, opportunity of philosophic ascent. in the implicit belief that every 18- to 22-year-old can This core of Bloom’s analysis seems to be not only responsibly fashion his or her own character unaided. correct, but, if possible, he may have underestimated its Bloom was so correct about the predictable rise of extent. Consider the intense response to Bloom’s book a society defined by indifference that one is entitled to as evidence against his thesis. The overwhelming re- conclude that were Closing published today, it would sponse by academia and the intelligentsia to his work barely cause a ripple. This is not because most of aca- suggested anything but “indifference” among many demia would be inclined to agree with his arguments who might describe themselves as cultural relativists. any more than they did in 1987. Rather, it is simply Extraordinary debates took place over what books and the case that hardly anyone in academe any longer authors should and should not appear in the “canon,” thinks that curricula are worth fighting over. Jesse and extensive efforts were undertaken to shape new Jackson once thought it at least important to oppose curricula in light of new demands of “multicultural- Western Civilization in the name of an alternative; to- ism.” The opponents of Bloom’s book evinced a deep day, it would be thought untoward and unworkable to concern for the formation of students, if their concern propose any shared curriculum. for what and whom they read was any indication. Those who run institutions of higher learning tell In retrospect, however, we can discern that oppo- themselves that this is because they respect the choices nents to Bloom’s book were not the first generation of of their young adult charges; however, their silence is “souls without longing,” but the last generation raised born precisely of the indifference predicted by Bloom. within households, traditions, and communities of the Today’s academic leaders don’t believe the content of sort that Bloom described, and the last who were edu- those choices has any fundamental influence on the cated in the older belief that a curriculum guided the souls of our students, most likely because it would course of a human life. The ferocity of their reaction be unfashionable to believe that they have souls. As to Bloom was not simply born of a defense of “multi- long as everyone is tolerant of everyone else’s choices, culturalism” (though they thought that to be the case) no one can get hurt. What is today called “tolerance,” but a belief that only a curriculum of the right authors Bloom rightly understood to be more deeply a form and books properly shapes the lives of their students. of indifference, the extreme absence of care, leading to Even in their disagreement with Bloom, they shared a society composed not only of “souls without long- a key premise: the books we ask our students to read ing” but humans treated as utilitarian bodies that are will shape their souls. increasingly incapable of love.

16 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 f this core argument of Bloom’s seems prescient, a ing to take seriously professions of “multiculturalism” Isecond major argument not only seems to me incor- and to lament the decline of the American project of rect but in fact is contradicted by this first argument. It universalist natural rights. was because of his criticisms about the rise of “multi- The stronger case would have been to expose the culturalism” that Bloom came to be readily identified claims of multiculturalism as cynical expressions with the right-leaning culture-warriors like William from members of groups that did not, in fact, share Bennett and Dinesh D’Souza and was so vilified on a culture, while showing that such self-righteous the academic left. Yet Bloom’s first argument implicitly claims, more often than not, were merely a thin ve- makes a qualified praise of “multiculturalism,” at least neer masking a lust for status, wealth and power. If as the necessary launching pad for the philosophic the past quarter century has revealed anything, it has quest. In his praise of the belief structures that once consistently shown that those who initially participat- inspired some students to disillusionment, he was ed in calls for multiculturalism have turned out to be singing the praises of a society composed of various among the voices most hostile to actual cultures, par- cultural traditions that exercised a strong influence ticularly ones seeking to maintain coherent religious over the beliefs and worldviews of that culture’s youth. and moral traditions. Such qualified praise led him to wax nostalgic about Bloom was prone to obtuseness about this fact an age when Catholics and Protestants cared enough to because, at base, Bloom himself was not an admirer hate one another. But at his most alarmist—and, frank- or supporter of the multiplicity of cultures. Indeed, ly, either least perceptive or most pandering—Bloom he was suspicious and even hostile to the claims portrays then-regnant calls for “multiculturalism” as a of culture upon the shaping of human character betrayal of the norms of liberal democracy and as the and belief—including religious belief. He was not a introduction of dangerous tribalism into the university, conservative in the Burkean sense; that is, someone as well as the body politic. At times, Bloom painted a apt to respect the inheritances of tradition and cus- portrait in which the once-ascendant claims of Ameri- tom as a repository of past wisdom and experience. can individual rights, enshrined in the Declaration of Rather, he was at his core a liberal: someone who be- Independence, were about to be displaced by the incip- lieves that the only benefit of our cultural formation ient warfare of identity tribalism and groupthink. was that it constituted a “cave” from which ambitious At his best, Bloom sees through the sham of yes- and rebellious youth could be encouraged to pursue a terday’s “multiculturalism” and today’s push for “di- life of philosophy. versity”—little of which had to do with enthusiasm Reflection about Bloom’s distaste for particular cul- for real cultural diversity, but which was then and re- tures suggests that the differences between Bloom and mains today a way for individuals in under-represent- his apparent nemesis, the Cornell professor of psy- ed groups to advance entitlement programs within chology, are rather minimal. Both wanted to disabuse America’s elite institutions. Those individuals, while the youth of their “prejudices” in the name of open- claiming special benefits that should accrue to mem- ness: the psychology professor in the name of nihil- bers in a particular group, had no great devotion to isitic openness, and Bloom for the encouragement of any particular “culture” outside the broader American philosophical inquiry, open to the possibility of Truth anti-culture of liberalism itself. Indeed, the “cultures” as well as the possibility of nihilism. in question were never really cultures at all, if by a culture we mean an identifiable group of people who n fact, Bloom’s critique of the “multicultural” left share a generational, geographical, and distinctive set Iis identical to and drawn from the critique of the of customs aimed at shaping the worldview and prac- “multicultural” right advanced by his teacher, Leo tices of successive generations. Strauss. In his seminal work Natural Right and Histo- By this measure, women, blacks, Hispanics, and so ry, Strauss identified Burke’s criticisms of the French on were people who might once have belonged to a Revolution as one of the lamentable responses to the variety of particular cultures, albeit not specifically as “Crisis of Modern Natural Right,” a crisis that arose women or blacks or Hispanics. These new categorical as a reaction against the social contractarianism of groupings came to be based on claims of victimhood “modern natural right.” Burke’s argument against the rather than any actual shared culture; many cultures revolutionary impulses of social contractarianism have been persecuted, but it does not follow that ev- constituted a form of conservative “historicism”— eryone who has been mistreated constitutes a culture. that is, in Strauss’s view, the rejection of claims of While in passing Bloom acknowledged the paucity of natural right in favor of a preference for the vagaries such claims to cultural status, too often he was will- of History. While today’s Straussians concentrate

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 17 Cover

their criticisms largely on left historicism (i.e., pro- by conservatism as a hindrance to philosophy, and gressivism), Strauss was just as willing to focus his thus rejected it as a political matter as a hindrance to criticisms on right historicism, that is, the tradition- the possibility of perfectibility: alism of Burke and his progeny. Ironically, because the left in the 1980s adopted the Conservatives want young people to know that language (if not the substance) of multiculturalism, this tawdry old world cannot respond to their de- Bloom was able to turn those Straussian critiques of mands for perfection. … But … man is a being Burke against those on the left—though of course they who must take his orientation by his possible per- were no Burkeans, even if they used some Burkean fection. …. Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the language. For this reason, Bloom was assumed by al- outset, the fire with which we must play because it most everyone to be a “conservative,” a label that he is the only way we can find out what we are. not only explicitly rejected, but a worldview that he philosophically and personally abhorred. Bloom here witheringly rejected “realism” as “the Bloom’s argument became a major touchstone in easy way out” of real inquiry; yet, in the wake of the the development of “neoconservatism,” a label that be- Iraq invasion, one of Bloom’s longstanding allies and came associated with many fellow students of Strauss admirers, John Agresto, lamented the overconfidence but which, ironically, explicitly rested on rejection of of the neoconservatives, and especially their neglect the claims of culture, tradition, and custom—the main of the reality of culture, in a post-invasion book en- impulses of Burkean conservatism. Bloom continu- titled Mugged by Reality. ously invoked the natural-rights teachings of the Dec- Bloom’s book remains a kind of liberation, an in- laration and Constitution as necessary correctives to tellectually adventurous work written with a kind of the purported dangers of left multiculturalism: rather boldness and even recklessness rarely to be found in than endorsing the supposed inheritance of various today’s more politically correct and cramped age. But cultures, he commended the universalistic claims of it was, ultimately, more reckless than many of its read- liberal democracy, which ought to trump any iden- ers realized at the time—not because it was conserva- tification with particular culture and creed. The citi- tive, but precisely because it rejected the conservative zen who emerged from the State of Nature, shorn of impulses to modesty, prudence, the genius of place, any specific cultural, religious, or ancestral limitation, and tradition. It opened an era of “culture wars” in was the political analogue for the philosopher who which the only combatant who seemed absent from emerged from the Cave. Not everyone could become the field was a true conservatism. Perhaps it is finally a philosopher, Bloom insisted, but everyone could be time for an opening of the American mind. a liberal citizen, and ought rightly to be liberated from the limitations of place and culture—if for no other reason, to make them more tolerant of the radical phi- losophers in their midst. Bloom’s was thus not only an early salvo in the culture wars, but an incipient articulation of the neoconservative impulse toward universalistic expansion. Burke’s willingness to acknowledge the basic legiti- macy of most cultures—his “multiculturalism”—led him, in the main, to oppose most forms of imperialism. The rejection of multiculturalism, and the valori- zation of a monolithic liberal project, has inclined his- torically to a tendency toward expansionism and even imperialism, and neoconservatism is only the latest iteration of this tendency. While many of the claims about Strauss’s influence on the Iraq invasion and the neoconservative insistence upon spreading democracy throughout the world were confused, there was in fact a direct lineage from Bloom’s arguments against the multicultural left and rise of the neo-liberal or neoconservative imperialistic impulse. Bloom explicitly rejected the cautiousness and prudence endorsed Michael Hogue

18 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Ideas

Modernism & Conservatism Does the culture of “The Waste Land” lead to freedom—or something more?

by Daniel McCarthy

early 30 years before he shocked National concerned to assert his freedom, and that involves Review by endorsing Barack Obama for an adversary relationship to past conventions. … a president, senior editor Jeffery Hart an- modern work creates its own conventions and does nounced a divorce of a different kind from not take them over from previous works,” even if it Nthe American right. With “The Intelligent Woman’s appropriates fragments from the past. This bric-a- Guide to a Modern American Conservatism”—pub- brac approach is part of what it means to be modern: lished in The New Right Papers in 1982 and previewed “Freedom implies an eclectic style.” in NR a few months earlier—Hart split with tradition Hart’s essay seemingly won no converts—a sym- and declared himself on the side of modernism in art, posium of reactions in the December 25, 1981 NR literature, and morals. was entirely negative, including objections from “Despite its recent victories, the conservative Hart’s colleagues Joseph Sobran, Linda Bridges, Rick cause has been creating unnecessary difficulties for Brookhiser, and Charles Kesler. The last, a disciple of itself,” he wrote, and as “a professor of English at Harry Jaffa, couched his critique in terms worthy of Dartmouth, a senior editor of National Review, and a the master: Hart was “going backward … from Burke conservative activist”—he might have added former to Hegel to Marx and Nietzsche. … The language of Reagan speechwriter—Hart knew better than most authenticity belongs to Heidegger, but the politics of what limits the right’s philosophy ran up against. emotion and authenticity belong to Hitler.” “The fact is, a lot of my students are not sold on con- So far, so bad. If “An Intelligent Woman’s Guide” servatism. … They think conservatives are preppies was a dud 30 years ago, why would anyone want to against sex.” give it a second look now? The fact that Hart has be- Was it true? “In some visible cases, the main con- come the most outspoken “Obamacon” of 2012 only tent of ‘conservatism’ seems to be a refusal of expe- heightens suspicion that the Dartmouth don left the rience,” he wrote. Yet Hart was arguing not for he- right long ago and has since been a liberal in conser- donism but for what he called “the ‘proportions’ of vatives’ clothing. orthodoxy.” He had in mind much more than sex. But Hart was right: there is a deep connection be- “The Intelligent Woman’s Guide,” its title adapted tween modernism and conservatism—not, however, from Shaw, made the case that conservatism was because modernism means freedom but because American modernism, at the heart of which lay a modernism shows us what comes after freedom has drive for freedom. “Americans believe in possibil- run to disillusionment. ity, in ‘making it new,’ as Ezra Pound once urged. If Irving Babbitt, the Harvard professor of Romance conservatism is to be truly American,” according to languages who was one of the preeminent conser- Hart, “it must embrace that sense of possibility.” vative minds of the 20th century’s first decades, And with that possibility the culture that ex- provides a definition of modernism that comple- presses it, from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” to Pi- ments Hart’s: “The modern spirit is the positive and casso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Modernism, critical spirit, the spirit that refuses to take things Hart explained, was not a period but a spirit. Works on authority.” Modern man cannot take things on produced in the first decade of the 20th century authority, simply because there are no authorities could be more modern than anything made today, if they partook of the ethos: “The modern artist is Daniel McCarthy is editor of The American Conservative.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 19 Ideas

left. Democracy, religious liberty, scientific inquiry, Then they fell in Europe’s last great conflagra- and free markets have torn down the old hierarchies tion, which ended with Stalin in command of half that once set the standards for art, morals, and philo- the continent but put paid to any delusion that com- sophical truth in the Western world. munism was on the side of progress, let alone art. This transition from classes to the masses largely (The CIA, quick to recognize this, began to subsidize overlapped the 19th century, though it only com- modern art and the modern-minded literary journal pleted itself at the time literary modernism arose— Encounter.) “All the great tyrannies of the twentieth shortly before (and flourishing after) World War I. century are monstrously reactionary,” Hart insisted That conflict was a clarifying moment in art. “The in 1981. “They are rear-guard attempts to hold back war smashed romanticism and sentimentalism, na- the universal human desire for concrete freedom. ïve notions of patriotism and imperial adventure,” Naturally they suppress modern art. They are puri- writes critic Malcolm Bradbury in The Modern Brit- tanical about sex. From Hitler and Stalin through ish Novel, Mao and the Ayatollah they have been desperate attempts to re-establish a lost community.” But, paradoxically, some of the com- But why does modern man feel such a longing for plex aesthetic ideas that had stirred in the years community? between 1910 and 1914—‘hardness,’ ‘abstrac- The answer is that modernism and modernity are tion,’ ‘collage,’ ‘fragmentation,’ ‘dehumaniza- inherently unstable: the hollowing of authority that tion’—and the key themes of chaotic history, elicits modernism in the first place leaves a vacuum Dionysian energy, and the ‘destructive element,’ something will fill. In the immediate postwar West, did help to provide the discourse and forms of that something was a state-resuscitated liberalism. the world to come. The war effort had temporarily reinvigorated authority—that of parents and pastors as well as presidents T.S. Eliot, in a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and generals. The baby-boom generation born into would allude to “the immense panorama of futil- this war-reinforced web of authority rebelled against ity and anarchy which is contemporary history.” In it—but did so with a doomed idealism that echoed a world like that—the one described in Eliot’s own the romanticism (and revolutionary fever) of more masterpiece, “The Waste Land”—everything was than a century before. Again it failed, and modernism came roaring back in the popular culture of the 1970s and early 1980s: in nihilist punk and the alienation and The Eliot who stared into the abyss in ennui of authors such as Bret Easton “The Waste Land” saw something there Ellis. that brought him back to belief. Then—and still now—the ethos of the later 19th century came around again, with money and technology promising to supply what the Age of Aquarius failed to achieve. We’ve ar- possible. But nothing was real; nothing possessed rived at a world that looks a little like the Brave New fixed meaning. World Aldous Huxley described back in 1932, at Literary modernism was a product of this desert of least as far psychopharmaceutical and pornographic meaning, as well as an attempt to transform it. San- substitutes for happiness are concerned. Freedom, guine souls—or manic ones—might follow Pound’s yes—but to do what? To pass the time as painlessly injunction to “make it new.” Yet newness led Pound as possible, through the most intense distractions to enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini and sent others available. down the path of Bolshevism. This was new politics Modernism points a way out of this wasteland— to answer the new art, certainly: an attempt by main but only if it’s carried to its utmost extent, past the force to create value and meaning in a world that had point of all-consuming skepticism. Consider the been stripped of them. Liberalism had failed to pro- case of Eliot, whose unflinching engagement with vide answers, and if it provided bread, it asked men the modern condition brought him back to the un- to live by that alone. And when between the wars derstanding that society is never a mere contract or even bread seemed beyond liberalism’s powers, new the expression of pure will or reason. Modernism modes of authority-politics arose. brought Eliot back to tradition.

20 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 He would come to call himself a “classicist in The true philosopher recognizes that philosophi- literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic cal reflection consistently purged of the authority in religion” after being baptized into the Church of the pre-reflective leads to total skepticism. In of England (and that same year, 1926, renouncing this moment of despair, hubristic reason … be- his American citizenship). If this self-description comes impotent and utterly silent. It is only then sounds too Tory by half, there’s no doubting the sin- that the philosopher can recognize, for the first cerity of his beliefs—they are well attested in such time, the authority of that radiant world of pre- later works as Four Quartets, the play “Murder in the reflective common life in which he has his being Cathedral,” and the essay “The Idea of a Christian and which had always been a guide prior to the Society.” philosophic act. For these Eliot is much admired by cultural conservatives. But too many overlook the role his mod- Once reason has disestablished everything, in- ernist commitments played in making him who he cluding its own authority, what remains? The became. The Eliot who stared into the abyss in “The ground beneath your feet, the social order of which Waste Land” saw something there that brought him you are a part—things predicated not on any theory back to belief. Russell Kirk, writing in Eliot and His but on their immediacy. This is the profound con- Age, perceived how it happened: “In the progress of servatism to be realized from modernism. In Eliot’s a terrifying quest, some wisdom is regained, though case—and those of certain others, including Evelyn no assurance of salvation. We end by knowing our Waugh—the free and critical spirit led to the despair peril, which is better than fatuity: before a man may of “The Waste Land.” It’s the despair of Europe after be healed, he must recognize his sickness.” This di- World War I, the despair of Eliot in the midst of an agnosis is what modernism provides—what perhaps unhappy marriage, and above all a poetic and philo- only modernism can provide. sophical despair over the absence of order. To this Modernism is freedom from all formerly estab- Eliot’s poem supplies an answer in its penultimate lished authority, a critical mindset, as Irving Babbitt line: the Sanskrit datta, dayadhvam, damyata—give, said, that uncovers the shattered foundations of au- sympathize, control. It’s a reasonable paraphrase for thorities old and new. Everything can be juxtaposed, what Livingston calls “the autonomy of custom.” Or recontextualized, and thrown into question. What’s as literary critic Hugh Kenner says of Eliot’s poem, left may seem to be sheer will—the individual free “The past exists in fragments precisely because no- to choose his own direction in an endless sea of pos- body cares what it meant; it will unite itself and sibility. But one cannot even choose a direction with- come alive in the mind of anyone who succeeds in out fixed points of reference by which to navigate. caring…” Those, however, are ready at hand in the civilization Following the spirit of modernism past despair to into which one is born. Modernism, after debunk- a new appreciation for the givens in life meant differ- ing rationalistic and universal pretensions, provides ent things for Eliot and for Hume, to be sure. Both a surer basis for appreciating what we already have— turned toward political conservatism, but while El- presence and familiarity. iot embraced the Christianity embedded in the given What Eliot accomplished through literary mod- culture of his (adopted) country, Hume did not. “No ernism is parallel to what David Hume discovered assurance of salvation,” as Russell Kirk said. through thoroughgoing philosophical inquiry— But modernism, in literature or philosophy, clears another form of modernism. The acids of phi- away a lot of dead wood, including its own detritus. losophy dissolved not only what Hume took to be The rigid rationalisms and aimless will to power— superstition but even reason itself; he wound up the “restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth casting into doubt even as basic a notion as “cause.” only in death”—that characterize today’s culture and Pursued to its end, reason led to Pyrrhonian skepti- politics break down under the solvents of modern- cism. But as Donald Livingston, professor emeritus ism. What does not break down is the social world of philosophy at Emory University, points out, this that pre-exists ideology and individual will. And the is not where Hume ended—he drew a distinction reference points provided by that social world, how- between the true philosopher, who having discov- ever minimal they may seem at first, imply larger ered reason’s limits accepts what is before philoso- constellations of customs—the very stuff of a civili- phy, and the false philosopher, who attempts to ra- zation, including its ideas. Modernism has its risks, tionalize his way beyond the limits. As Livingston but it makes conservatism possible once more in a summarizes: world otherwise blasted to fragments.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 21 Economics

Japan’s Bad Trade Why won’t anyone talk about Tokyo’s auto protectionism?

by Eamonn Fingleton

itt Romney was in his element a few 1. The apaneseJ government has used a plethora of years ago as the Obama administra- constantly evolving regulations to keep the com- tion struggled to rescue the Detroit bined share of all non-Japanese automakers to auto industry. In an eat-your-spinach just 4 percent of the Japanese market. The share Mtone, he ticked off his recommendations for re- never varies, whether the yen is strong or weak. form. Top management should go, executive dining (The yen is up nearly 50 percent against the dollar rooms should be shut, and factory wages slashed. in the last five years.) Then there were the industry’s “legacy costs”: given how drastically Detroit’s market share had shrunk 2. The Detroit corporations, in common with all in the face of rampant imports, retiree entitlements major automakers, make many cars in Europe had come to account for as much as $2,000 per car. configured for Britain’s drive-on-the-left roads, Countless retirees would just have to be thrown and by extension for Japan’s. They also make overboard. countless components and assemblies that have Whatever the merits and demerits of Romney’s been shut out of Japan for no other reason than lengthy list, it contained a notable omission. It made that they are not made there. no mention of international trade. This despite the fact that for decades Detroit has been undermined 3. Even Volkswagen, which sells broadly as many by an egregiously unfair world trade system. As if to cars around the world as Toyota, has been allo- rub salt in Detroit’s wounds, Romney held up Japa- cated—that is the right word—just 1 percent of nese automakers as a model of quality manufactur- the Japanese market; by contrast Toyota’s share ing—the same companies which for two generations is close to 40 percent. (Volkswagen is lucky, in- have been the greatest beneficiaries of rigged mar- cidentally: Hyundai’s share is 0.02 percent and kets. Daewoo’s 0.003 percent, and this in a country As the Michigan-born son of a top auto execu- where close to 1 percent of the people are ethnic tive—and as one of America’s most capable experts Koreans.) on how the global economy really works—Romney certainly knew better. But he is hardly alone in but- As Pat Choate, a former top executive of TRW Cor- toning his lip where trade with Japan is concerned. poration and an expert on the global auto industry, America’s entire globalist elite has long realized that points out, the fact that so little of the truth of the Tokyo no longer tolerates frank discussions and is Japanese market has emerged in public in recent years often devastatingly effective in evening the score is a message in itself. with anyone rash enough to challenge it. The fundamental economic issue here is that by Yet facts are facts. Here are a few which, though pricing high in the protected home market, Japanese they remain hidden from most Americans, are wide- automakers can powerfully subsidize their prices ly known to media commentators, diplomats, Japan scholars, and of course aspiring presidential candi- Eamonn Fingleton is the author of In the Jaws of the Dragon: dates: America’s Fate in the Coming Era of Chinese Dominance.

22 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 abroad. The policy is underpinned both by traditional Japanese cartel dynamics and by governmental “guidance.” Basically, the Japanese consumer unwittingly foots the bill for much of the Japanese industry’s consistently heavy investment in R&D and ever more efficient new production processes. This leaves cartel members free to price abroad at little more than low variable costs (which means they need aim to recover merely the cost of direct labor and immediate inputs such as components). The cartel’s profitability is further bolstered by Japan’s so-called sha-ken system of car inspection. This is so rigorous that most Japa- nese drivers trade in their autos every three years. Choate comments: “Japanese autos, of course, last far longer than three years. But to keep up revenues, the industry has a market of captive customers that keep buying new. Japan is the land

of new cars—virtually all Japanese Hogue Michael made.” Worn down for four decades by such unequal competition, the De- troit companies have been chroni- cally starved of funds to invest in R&D and new pro- This deal was the most recent attempt by any Wash- duction processes. The result is they have gone from ington administration to open the Japanese market leaders to laggards in quality and productivity. and, like all previous such agreements, it was dead on Of course, umpteen times over the years the prob- arrival. If the Clinton administration made the slight- lem of Japan’s closed market has been declared solved. est attempt to enforce it, we were never told. Even A particularly impressive-sounding solution was pre- Detroit never revisited it and has only in the last few sented by President Bill Clinton in the White House months begun to agitate again on Japanese protection- Briefing Room in 1995. With Japanese Trade Minister ism. (Detroit’s return to the issue has been stimulated Ryutaro Hashimoto by his side, Clinton announced by the Obama administration’s effort to push through that Japan had agreed “to truly open its auto and auto the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed parts markets to American companies.” new trade agreement.) He added: “This agreement is specific. It is measur- In the seventeen years since Clinton’s breakthrough, able. It will achieve real, concrete results … we finally the number of actors who have tried to keep the Ja- have an agreement that will move cars and parts both pan trade story alive has dwindled to almost nothing. ways between the United States and Japan. This break- Meanwhile, Tokyo no longer makes even a pretense of through is a major step toward free trade throughout complying with American ideas of fair trade. the world.” Perhaps the most graphic evidence of Tokyo’s true Clinton focused on the Japanese distribution sys- policy has been the story of the Renault-Nissan alli- tem, pointing out that, whereas 80 percent of U.S. car ance. Originally established in 1999 and consolidated dealers sold foreign brands—often, of course, along- in subsequent years, this odd-couple partnership os- side American ones—only 7 percent of dealers in Ja- tensibly gave Paris-based Renault control of Yoko- pan sold anything other than Japanese cars. hama-based Nissan. In a powerful symbol of Japan’s

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 23 Economics

ostensible acquiescence to American-style globaliza- messages sent directly to two successive ambassa- tion, Renault’s Carlos Ghosn was even installed as si- dors and to the deputy head of the French mission multaneous chief executive of both companies. in Tokyo. Given that Renault enjoyed a fundamental ad- What is clear is that Renault’s experiences in Japan vantage in lower French wages and was more than a should be of some significance to Paris. After all, the match for Nissan managerially, many observers ex- company is one of France’s most important “national pected it to make big inroads in the Japanese market. champions” and French officials signed off on its tie- After all, the Nissan distribution chain—Japan’s sec- up with Nissan. ond largest—was now ostensibly Ghosn’s to reshape. French feelings cannot have been soothed by Japan’s As reported by the BBC in 2005, the two companies remarkably more robust performance in overall trade. were “expected to go through a process of rapid inte- Even in the teeth of one of the biggest earthquakes in gration.” In particular they hoped to achieve savings history, Japan last year logged a current account sur- through “jointly owned distribution subsidiaries.” plus of $120 billion. France by comparison incurred a To the extent that the companies have cooperated deficit of $66 billion—almost as poor a performance on distribution, however, this has been confined on a per-capita basis as the United States. entirely to markets beyond Japan. In the Japanese Japan’s unemployment rate, moreover, was recent- home market, Nissan has kept its distribution sys- ly one of the lowest in the developed world, while tem strictly off-limits to Renault. The result is that, France’s was one of the highest. On an apples-to- far from increasing, Renault’s Japanese market share apples basis, as adjusted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor has dropped from a negligible 0.08 percent in 1999 Statistics, the French unemployment rate last year was to a totally insulting 0.04 percent in 2009, the latest 9.4 percent, more than double Japan’s 4.2 percent (and year for which figures are available. Indeed, to the considerably higher even than America’s 8.9 percent). extent that the company’s brand is known at all on Given numbers like these, what explains France’s Japanese roads, it is as a minor brand of Taiwanese- pusillanimity? It might seem uniquely mysterious— made bicycles! except that when I asked similar questions about And this is just the beginning of Renault’s woes. Volkswagen’s virtual exclusion from the Japanese Judged by growth in total global sales, Renault has market I encountered a similar pattern: Volkswagen consistently been a hopeless also-ran, whereas Nis- did not reply and the German Embassy in Tokyo took san has been a star performer. (Renault’s global sales two weeks to respond, and then to say that all ques- are up less than 15 percent since the first full year of tions should be referred to the German government the partnership, whereas Nissan’s have zoomed nearly in Berlin. 78 percent. Nissan’s success has been attributable not As for the United States, a spokesman for John least to increasing inroads in Renault’s home turf of Roos, the Obama administration’s ambassador to Ja- Western Europe.) pan, responded promptly, but only to say the embassy How does Renault feel about all this? Neither had no comment. For good measure I also tried to Ghosn nor any of his executives in Tokyo or Paris has contact Mitt Romney’s campaign staff but never re- responded to numerous telephone and email mes- ceived a response. sages. Even Renault’s major French rival, the Peugeot- What do American Japanologists think of all this? Citroen group, with a recent share of just 0.1 percent Their collective institutional memory is second to in Japan and similarly known there as a minor Tai- none—many of them indeed were already fully cre- wanese bicycle brand, is not commenting. dentialed as far back as the early 1970s, when Japa- Perhaps the French government might be more nese trade issues first surfaced in Washington. Cer- forthcoming, I thought. But when I emailed some tainly few of them need reminding that as early as questions to the French embassy in Tokyo, diplo- 1982 Japanese foreign minister Yoshio Sakurauchi as- mats there could hardly have been less gracious had sured a meeting of the GATT that Japan “is one of the they been stung by bees. In an email response, Jules most open markets in the world.” Many of the them Irrmann, an official spokesman, gratuitously im- are probably aware too that Nobuhiko Ushiba, who plied that any discussion of Japanese protectionism served as Japan’s ambassador to Washington in the amounted to “Japan-bashing.” As for my questions, early 1970s, told reporters: “There is no example in he vaguely directed me to the embassy’s website. recent history of a nation liberalizing trade policy as Given that there appeared to be nothing there of rel- fast as Japan.” evance, I followed up with several requests for clari- To say the least, American Japanologists know fication. They went unanswered, and so did similar the score. Unfortunately, their voices have long been

24 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 silenced. I have not been able to identify a single global car industry. This means their erstwhile formi- American scholar who has published a paper on Ja- dable rivals in the United States and Europe must now pan’s auto-trade barriers in more than a decade. At a humbly stand in line for the latest, most advanced more informal level, a useful indicator is the Japan- Japanese equipment, components, and materials. Not U.S. Discussion Forum. This is a website moderated only are Japanese suppliers organized in solid cartels, by the National Bureau of Asian Research, a think but they are led by authoritarian bureaucrats skilled tank associated with the University of Washington. in maintaining industrial corporations’ focus on long- Japanologists across the United States monitor this term national goals. forum daily, and many of them contribute to it. As for the silence of other actors, in virtually every Though its search facility is dysfunctional and gives case money has clearly played a role. This is most con- inconclusive results, there seems to be no record of sequential in the case of candidates for national office. the remarkable problems Renault has encountered They are beholden to Wall Street investment bankers, in Japan ever having been raised there. Rather the which in turn often function as surrogates for foreign reverse: the Renault story has been presented as a industrial interests. French success and an encouraging example of Japa- Meanwhile, as Hall has extensively documented, nese market-opening. In fact, at least one contribu- the field of Japan studies at American universities tor some years ago went unchallenged in presenting is now heavily dependent on Tokyo-based grant- Japan as opening its auto market to foreign competi- giving authorities. Other money comes from a few tion. globalist-minded U.S. corporations that have en- The only American academic observer I know of tered into a Faustian bargain with the Tokyo estab- who continues fearlessly to uphold the Western truth lishment: in return for receiving “affirmative action” ethic on Japanese trade is Ivan P. Hall, a Harvard-ed- in the Japanese market, they undertake to promote ucated Japan historian and a former cultural diplomat Tokyo’s agenda among American scholars. The most to Japan. Author of Bamboozled, an account of how important such collaborator, until it flamed out a few American views of Japan have been shaped by a pro- years ago, was the disgraced New York-based insur- pagandistic agenda in Tokyo, Hall minces no words ance company AIG. For decades it drew much of its in pronouncing the Japanese car market one of the profits from Japan’s highly regulated—and rigged— world’s most protected. insurance markets. It returned the favor by funding Why is he almost alone in calling a spade a spade? academics willing to portray the Japanese market Hall’s answer is forthright: “We are living in very cow- as proverbially “one of the world’s most open.” Boe- ardly times.” ing, Goldman Sachs, and Coca-Cola have also long Perhaps most surprising of all has been the perfor- played a similar role in steering scholarly inquiry mance of the English-speaking media. Major news or- into acceptable areas. ganizations have long since swept the Japanese trade Money also goes a long way towards explaining story under the carpet. Even Renault’s comeuppance, the timidity of the American media. While American obvious as it is to every Japan-based foreign corre- editors have an honorable tradition of standing up to spondent, has not been reported. Meanwhile the For- American advertisers, the challenge presented by the eign Correspondents Club of Japan has not organized Japanese is of a different order. In advertising mat- a significant discussion on auto trade problems since ters, as in so many other aspects of Japanese life, gov- the mid-1990s. Indeed, it has done the opposite by or- ernment-led Japanese cartels prevail, and they have ganizing several events portraying the Renault-Nissan increasingly used their financial clout to intimidate alliance as evidence of a globalizing Japan. American editors. These latter rarely speak frankly, Why do so many key people duck the issues raised of course, even in private. But one episode that did by Japanese mercantilism? As Hall points out, a key become public some years ago was an effort by about factor is the State Department’s anachronistic Cold a dozen Japanese advertisers to muffle the launch of War mindset. “Diplomats in Tokyo,” he comments, a controversial book on the Nanking massacre. The “typically view their overriding function as political book, by the late Iris Chang, was due to be serialized rather than economic—presiding over a bromidical by Newsweek. The advertisers made clear their dis- ‘broader relationship’ and easily frightened by tough pleasure. For a moment, Newsweek’s editors vacillat- trade questions that might ‘offend’ their Japanese ed, but in the end, to their credit, they went ahead. It is hosts.” clear that they had little choice: their hand was forced Another factor is that the Japanese are now the by Chang, a particularly determined writer with a world’s dominant suppliers of producers’ goods to the reputation for fearlessness, who went public with the

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 25 Economics

story of the advertisers’ intervention. on America’s industrial decline. “The U.S. govern- A knock-on effect of media silence is that politi- ment has simply given up on opening the Japanese cians have an alibi. As Matt Blunt, president of the auto market,” he said. “The United States is just not Washington-based American Automotive Policy going to close its market to Japan. We need Japan Council, points out, efforts to push for market- against China.” opening action in Japan have long been stymied by This does not quite add up. If Japan deserves to be the fact that most American politicians know little considered a U.S. ally, why has it worked so assiduous- about the issues. “They simply assume that because ly, under clear government leadership, to hollow out they are not reading anything in the press, the access one key U.S. industry after another? And why has it, problem has been solved.” contrary to its claims to have embraced Western val- Will the U.S. government ever get serious about ues, resorted to such elaborate measures to suppress Japanese protectionism? I put the question to a prom- Western comment on its policies? These seem like inent Washington-based lawyer who served in the reasonable questions. But in money-minded Wash- Reagan administration and considers himself a hawk ington, they are the wrong questions.

DEEPBACKGROUND by PHILIP GIRALDI

recent intelligence assessment has predicted ops units to conclude ongoing operations as quickly a likely breakup of the Kingdom of Jordan if as possible. Largely unreported in the U.S. media, Aa new war were to erupt in the Middle East. there has been an open war being mostly fought Together with the impending collapse of Baath rule using proxies against al-Shabaab in Somalia and Ke- in Syria, it would mean that three major secular nya, a not-so-secret war in Uganda using special-ops Arab nations, including Iraq, will have vanished in advisers and surveillance drones against the Lord’s the course of ten years. Jordan is an American ally, Resistance Army, and clandestine CIA-led wars cooperating closely with CIA and the Pentagon. It against al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has good relations with Israel, and its intelligence in Mali and Mauritania. In addition, considerable and security services are regarded as the most logistical and technical support is being provided capable among Arab states. The Hashemite King- to the Algerians and Moroccans for use against dom has a major demographic problem because AQIM. The United States Army’s African command, more than half of Jordanians are Palestinian in based in Stuttgart, Germany, was created by the origin. The Palestinians have only token representa- Bush administration but has been enhanced and tion in government, and the security services but given operational status by President Obama, who are now overrepresented in the political opposition. is more than willing to claim it as his own initiative. King Abdullah II, who holds most political power, Recent reports from the field suggest that Obama is being squeezed by his inability to accommodate might be able to claim success on nearly all fronts. those demanding faster democratization and those In Mauritania, government forces have seized the who want a more Islamic form of government. initiative and pushed the rebels back to the border Many traditionally loyal non-Palestinian Jordanians, regions. In Mali, AQIM has piggybacked on a Tuareg referred to as East Bankers because they originated separatist uprising to establish an enclave in the east of the Jordan River, are speaking out and even northern part of the country, but security forces demonstrating over the pervasive corruption of the aided by CIA drones have stabilized the situation, government. As Jordan is resource poor, the king while the Economic Community of West African can do little in the way of improving living standards States is preparing to strike back. Al-Shabaab has to mitigate the criticism. The report concludes that been driven from all but a small corner of Somalia, an “Arab Spring” in Jordan triggered by a new war in and the Lord’s Resistance Army has fallen back the Middle East would be a disaster for U.S. policy in and is under intense pressure from the Ugandan the region. army, again assisted by CIA drones and special-ops advisers. he Obama administration, hoping for a foreign- Tpolicy success in Africa before the November Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive election, has been urging intelligence and special- director of the Council for the National Interest.

26 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Politics

Congress Cries War When hawks roost on Capitol Hill, even Canada isn’t safe.

by Ted Galen Carpenter

ost worries about Washington’s pro- and essentially conscripting them on the spot. That clivity for dubious military adven- would have been irritating enough if those seized tures focus on the imperial presidency. were indisputably British citizens. But citizenship There is certainly good reason to fear was often in question, and it appeared that many of Man unfettered executive in foreign affairs. But there the targets were in fact American citizens are instances in which Congress has been the more In addition, nearly three decades after the treaty warlike branch, and we are currently witnessing two ending the Revolutionary War and recognizing the examples. independence of the United States, British troops One involves the growing pressure for the United still occupied forts in U.S. territory, primarily in States to take action against Bashar al-Assad’s regime what is now Michigan and other portions of the up- in Syria. The other is the congressional campaign for per Midwest. Angry members of Congress accused a more confrontational policy, including the possible those military units of forging alliances with Native use of military force, against Iran’s nuclear program. American tribes, arming them, and encouraging Although the Obama administration has taken a them to attack American settlements. They con- fairly hard line on both issues, it apparently is not tended further that warriors from those tribes often uncompromising enough for Congress. Led by the retreated to sanctuaries in British Canada following Three Amigos in the Senate—John McCain, Lindsey their attacks. Graham, and Joseph Lieberman—and their hawkish Yet the focus on such grievances concealed less sa- counterparts in the House, a crescendo of calls for vory motives for congressional pressure to go to war. new U.S. crusades in the Middle East is rising. Many of the warhawks were motivated by the desire But this is not the first time the legislative branch for U.S. territorial expansion. They coveted Canada has taken the lead in getting the country into armed and recalled that Benedict Arnold’s forces during the conflicts. Consider two fateful historical instances: Revolutionary War had come so tantalizing close to the period before the War of 1812 and the run-up to capturing Quebec, after already taking Montreal. If the Spanish-American War in 1898. Arnold’s army had been victorious, the British gov- The term “warhawk” was in fact coined to describe ernment might well have had to recognize U.S. sov- the militant attitudes of such congressional figures as ereignty over that territory. To Clay, Calhoun, and Henry Clay and John C. Calhoun, who helped push other militant nationalists who displayed early signs the United States into the War of 1812. The stridency of embracing what would later be known as Manifest of that faction put constant pressure on James Madi- Destiny, the “liberation” of Canada was unfinished son’s administration to confront Great Britain. business, and the American republic would not be Warhawks typically stressed alleged British viola- complete until that land was incorporated into the tions of U.S. territorial integrity and maritime rights Union. on the high seas. They had some grounds for their complaints. The British Navy was not shy about Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is resorting to “impressment”—stopping U.S. mer- the author of eight books on international affairs, including chant vessels, removing supposed British citizens, Smart Power: Toward a Prudent Foreign Policy for America.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 27 Politics Michael Hogue

Opponents of war with Britain were furious at the majority of the early actions during the ensuing con- apparent hypocrisy of the hawks. Virginia Congress- flict consisted of U.S. offensives into Canada. It is a man John Randolph of Roanoke issued a blistering in- sobering historical lesson that those offensives large- dictment. If the United States went to war, he charged, ly failed, and the United States came perilously close it “will not be for the protection of, or defense of, to losing the war. A low point in American history maritime rights.” Hunger for Canadian land “urges occurred when British forces captured Washington, the war,” Randolph fumed. “Ever since the report of D.C., burned the White House and other buildings, the Committee on Foreign Relations came into the and forced the president and the rest of the gov- House, we have heard but one word—like the whip- ernment to flee. The United States was fortunate to poor-will, but one eternal monotonous note—Cana- come out of the War of 1812 with essentially a draw. da! Canada! Canada!” Eight decades later, another militant Congress Motivated by national pride pricked by British af- prodded a cautious White House to launch a war. fronts and an insatiable hunger for Canadian territo- This time the target was Spain. Much has been writ- ry, Congress put steadily more pressure on Madison ten about the role of the so-called Yellow Press—the to confront the powerful British Empire. Eventually Hearst and Pulitzer newspaper chains—in producing the warhawks got their wish. Revealingly, the vast highly biased and inflammatory accounts that led the

28 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 United States into war. But influential members of against Syria and Iran. And that is their goal: in the Congress served as willing allies of that effort. Both case of Syria, they and their ideological allies openly President William McKinley and his influential politi- call for arming the so-called Free Syrian Army, despite cal adviser, businessman Mark Hanna, were reluctant evidence that anti-Western Islamic militants may have to take the country into war. Pro-war agitators had a hefty influence in that faction. The Three Amigos more of an impact on congressional opinion. have also urged the administration to establish no- As in the lead up to the War of 1812, there was fly zones to provide safe havens for civilian refugees a major gap between the issues hawks stressed and and rebel fighters. And pro-war members of Congress what appeared to be their real motives. During the have lobbied for air strikes against Syrian government mid-and-late 1890s, the Yellow Press and its con- targets. Air strikes would “break the will of pro-Assad gressional allies focused on the brutal treatment forces,” Lieberman states confidently, and “result in a that Spanish authorities meted out to inhabitants of much sooner end to this terrible waste of life.” Despite Cuba, one of the handful of colonies remaining in Madrid’s once vast empire. That treatment was indeed harsh, but it was no coincidence that the most vocal ad- There are times, such as this one, when the vocates of U.S. support for Cuba’s sentiment for aggression is even stronger on rebel forces were also advocates of U.S. imperialism. Massachusetts Capitol hill than it is in the White House. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge as- serted that the sympathies of the “generous, liberty-loving” Ameri- can people were “with the Cubans in their struggle for freedom.” He added that Ameri- the humanitarian rhetoric, such measures would en- cans would “welcome any action on the part of the tangle the United States in a very murky, dangerous United States to put an end to the terrible state of conflict. things existing there.” Their objectives are equally worrisome with re- But just as the emphasis on the British practice of gard to Iran. One gauge of the shrill, hawkish qual- impressment and the Redcoats’ illegal outposts on ity of congressional sentiment is a U.S. Senate reso- U.S. territory served as a fig leaf for the less noble lution, which has some 32 co-sponsors, that urges goal to seize Canada, the focus on the Spanish au- the administration not even to consider deterrence thorities’ atrocities in Cuba concealed a growing and containment as a response if Tehran acquires desire to seize Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean and a nuclear-weapons capability. Graham argues that elsewhere to increase the reach of U.S. power, espe- containing Iran is simply not an option. “We’re not cially naval power. To the cheers of congressional going to contain people like that, we’re going to warhawks, the main targets once war erupted were stop them,” he stated at a press conference unveil- Spanish installations in the Philippines and Puerto ing the resolution. In addition to pressuring the Rico, neither of which had much relevance to Ma- White House, both houses of Congress have passed drid’s behavior in Cuba. a series of increasingly drastic economic sanctions American forces quickly crushed the decrepit against Iran, measures that only ratchet up tensions Spanish navy and army units, and the United States and strengthen the hand of hardliners in the Islamic acquired the far-flung colonies that Lodge and other Republic itself. imperialists so desired. But the aftermath was not Advocates of a prudent foreign policy like to think exactly pleasant. Not only did the U.S. victory lead that a vigorous congressional role in foreign policy— to a prolonged, bloody insurrection by pro-inde- even beyond the constitutional requirement that war pendence forces in the Philippines, but the new U.S. be declared by Congress—is an important restraint territorial holdings entangled the Republic in an as- on chief executives who are inclined to embrace ag- sortment of headaches over the long term in both gression. That may be true more often than not. But the Caribbean and East Asia. there are times, such as this one, when the sentiment Those experiences should be kept in mind as McCain, for aggression is even stronger on Capitol Hill than Graham, Lieberman, and other congressional hawks it is in the White House. Both branches need to be seek to push the Obama administration into war watched carefully.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 29 Culture

Not Amish, But Close A farmer puts Wendell Berry’s agrarian ideal to the test

by Glenn Arbery

hen it comes to food, chefs get all the purebred Devons, the oldest breed in North Ameri- fame. A few weeks ago, New York ca—graze the acres in a way that benefits both them Times food guru Mark Bittman tried and the land itself. Scannell is as far from the opinions to right the wrong. In an online piece of the New York Times as it’s possible to be, but at the Wcalled “Celebrate the Farmer!” he wrote about the same time he has nothing in common with the porky need to honor the men and women who put the food populists who think everything organic is elitist. on all our tables. Their work raising and butchering The way of life Scannell chose several decades ago cows and pigs requires “weeks, if not months, of daily is a glimpse back into the 19th century, which is just activity and maintenance,” but the chefs, who might as Scannell would have it. He admires the Amish. He spend 20 minutes preparing a dish, get the high-pro- doesn’t like the idea of being on anybody’s big grid— file recognition. electrical, financial, partisan, you name it. Because of Bittman didn’t mean to praise big industrial farm- his principles, he encounters fortune head on, unpro- ers. “We need more real farmers, not businessmen rid- tected by the usual safety nets, including the nets of ing on half-million-dollar combines.” He asks readers community that the Amish and most of the characters to “imagine thousands of 10-, 20- and 100-acre farms in Berry’s Port William novels can count on. Scannell … the vegetables sold regionally, the pigs fed from finds Wendell Berry’s work compelling, and unlike scraps, the compost fertilizing the soil, the cattle at many who admire Berry but support themselves in pasture, the milk making cheese.” Bittman echoes the other ways, he’s built his life around the vision of a idea of a “local economy” advanced by Wendell Berry, sustainable life on the soil. But bad fortune almost whose many books have helped define contemporary broke him. agrarianism. He even sounds like Andrew Lytle in his essay “The Hind Tit,” from the prophetic 1930 South- Vietnam veteran and former rodeo rider, ern manifesto, I’ll Take My Stand. A Scannell attended a conference on holistic On the other hand, Bittman’s policy suggestions to resource management at about the time he paid help farmers—raise the minimum wage (so workers off his 30-year mortgage 17 years early, back in can afford healthier food) and steer recipients of food the 1990s. (He hates usury.) He expected to find stamps toward farmers’ markets—are big-govern- “a bunch of hippies.” Instead, he encountered the ment solutions, if not utopian fantasies. But the vision thought of Allen Savory and a technique of sus- of an America of small farmers is on the mark, and it’s taining the land through proper management of certainly no utopia. cattle first developed by a Frenchman named An- My wife and I met such a farmer, Mike Scannell, dré Voisin. Using this method, Scannell lets his at Logan Airport as he was waiting for a plane and cows graze for a day or less in a “paddock” defined rereading Lytle’s essay in I’ll Take My Stand. Intrigued, by light, moveable electric fences (a single strand we struck up a conversation that has grown into a of wire), then he moves them to another paddock. friendship. The cows leave behind healthy grasses, not over- Mike Scannell and Joan Harris have been raising cattle for years on Harrier Fields Farm, about 20 miles Glenn Arbery is d’Alzon Chair of Liberal Education at east of Albany, New York, and they’ve been doing it Assumption College and the editor of The Southern Critics: the way Wendell Berry would approve. The cattle— An Anthology.

30 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Michael Hogue Michael

grazed by being bitten down to the roots, and their Valley Table, a magazine devoted to “Hudson Valley droppings fertilize the ground naturally. When Farms, Food & Cuisine.” the cows return to the area later, the grass is better Harris and Scannell know the animals intimate- than before. ly—the chickens in the yard, who hop up on the The results have been phenomenal. After being kitchen windowsills; the horses in a distant pen, in danger of depletion when Scannell was growing who whinny as soon as either of them comes out the hay commercially some years ago, the soil at Harrier back door; the heavy Devons who lumber over like Fields has been fully restored. Over the past decade, pets, wanting to be scratched. Harris’s five-year-old the grass-fed Devons raised by Scannell and Harris grandson loves visiting the farm. Once she took him have been widely recognized for their extraordinary to a nearby industrial farm—“Everything is GMOs,” quality. They have been written up on the website of she told us—and he looked around in confusion. the North American Devon Association and in The The cows he had seen grazed in paddocks, but not

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 31 Culture

these penned creatures. “You mean they go and get Before the site was cleared that night, more than 25 the grass and bring it to the cows?” he asked, incredu- fire companies from the area had assisted, and one lously. “Yes, they do,” she admitted. He watched for nearby pond was pumped completely dry. a while and saw something even more astonishing. The effort went for nothing. The barns were a total “And they clean up their mess?” loss, and so was everything in them, including two Both times my wife and I have visited, Harris, who Suffolk punch mares in foal, all the horse gear and is an artist and retired art teacher, has served us a antique horse-drawn equipment, thousands of bales simple lunch. “We don’t have much money, but we of hay, and scores of miscellaneous items from seed eat like kings,” says Scannell. The first time it was su- to tarps, ladders, and ropes. perb Devon beef with mustard; in May, it was a light Once a central symbol, deeply felt in its impor- cheese she had made from that morning’s milk from tance, the barn has become for most people a relic a cow named Princess that Harris marveled at. She from a lost world visible from the Interstate. My didn’t know how to account for the fact that Prin- students have always been mildly perplexed by the cess produces milk containing over 6 percent cream, seriousness Faulkner’s characters bring to the loss of except that both her mother and another cow (who a barn in his short story “Barn Burning.” In this age had just lost a calf) had nursed her. For us, it was a of the insured, the vaccinated, the replaceable, the little startling to be served cheese made from milk outsourced, and the digitized, they have difficulty drawn that very morning, but for Scannell and Har- seeing why it would be more than a temporary in- ris, it was nothing out of the ordinary. It’s the way convenience to lose a barn. Now if it had been a hard they live, even without the three connected barns drive… from 1835 that used to distinguish their property. But for people like Scannell and Harris, as their friend Peter Zander explains, the barn is “the basis ndrew Lytle’s essay “The Hind Tit” is about what of the farm after the ground, after the soil. It makes Ahappens when the blandishments of the market what you do possible.” He tells of going to see them start to erode the integrity of a self-sustaining farm. in their farmhouse, which is as old as the barns were. According to Lytle, the market keeps urging the The roof leaked—he helped keep it from collapsing farmer “to over-produce his money crop, mortgage once—and he thought Scannell was crazy for putting his land, and send his daughters to town to clerk in money into the barn first. “I thought, ‘Put a roof on ten-cent stores, that he may buy the products of the the house!’ He’s spending money to have a guy re- Power Age and keep its machines turning.” build the windows on the barn and build new doors It became evident in the first few minutes after we that would slide nicely. They were beautifully done,” met him in the airport that Scannell’s whole aim has Zander says. “And then I got it! One of those aha! been to reverse this process, at least in his own life. moments. The barn was what made it work.” He has never renounced machines per se—in fact, Two days after the fire, Zander—a professional he served in Vietnam as a helicopter mechanic—but photographer—organized a fund and had his neph- he wanted to free his farm from any reliance on fos- ew put up a website to raise money for his friends. sil fuels. In his barn he had a pair of draft horses and He described them as “two of the finest people I’ve enough painstakingly acquired, animal-powered met and a rare breed of farmer. These are people that equipment to farm without reliance on petroleum. work 14 hours a day, seven days a week to earn a Not too long ago, he was nearing the point when it small, but very honorable living. As is the case with wouldn’t have mattered at Harrier Fields if the power most small-scale organic farmers, they had little in- went off and the oil supply dried up. surance … enough to cover a very small fraction of That’s where bad fortune comes in. the replacement costs.” When I asked Zander what Shortly before noon on a hot Tuesday in late July the day of the fire was like, he said that he was one of 2010, the dispatcher in Columbia County began re- the first people Scannell called. “There was a horrible ceiving 911 calls about a fire on County Route 21. A tone in his voice. All he could say was ‘It’s gone. It’s blaze had broken out in the barns at Harrier Fields all gone.’” Farm. The first company to respond from nearby Schodack Landing needed help, especially pump- ut it wasn’t all gone. It just took awhile to re- er engines. The fire chief from Stuyvesant told the Bcover. After lunch on our second visit, I asked Register-Star, the newspaper serving Columbia and the question that had been on my mind: what had Dutchess counties, that the fire was already “fully fundamentally changed with the fire? Scannell involved” when the first men arrived on the scene. and Harris were silent for a moment, because it is

32 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 obviously a very painful subject. is a great gulf between the bond of personal gratitude “It just humbles you,” said Scannell. and the nature of modern debt. I knew from Zander, and from things that Scan- “The community that we have here,” Harris said, nell had told me already, that the fire had three ter- “really worked hard to help us in the way that they rible ironies. First was that Scannell had bought hay knew how to help us.” for the first time in his farming career instead of “They tried, they really did,” Scannell added. growing it himself, thinking it would be a better use “People that we don’t even know—even people of his time. The man he bought it from baled the hay from other countries—sent money to the barn fund,” before it was properly dried. Wet hay heats up when said Harris. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful.” it’s stacked, and after a certain point, the chemi- But by its very nature, the way of life they have cal reactions produce flammable gases that ignite been trying to live differs so radically from the con- when they’re exposed to air. Spontaneous combus- ventional one that it’s difficult for others to help. tion from wet hay—bought wet hay—caused the fire Who has workable, animal-powered farm equip- that destroyed Scannell’s barn. The second irony was ment on hand, for example? Who knows how to do Scannell’s opposition to insurance, which went along a barn raising? Everyone was willing to help, but no with his hatred of debt, so the barn was disastrously one could give them what they really needed. underinsured. The third irony was that the commu- Crippling as the loss of the barns was, Scannell nity around them, generous as it was, could not be and Harris have humor and patience. They love the community they needed. conversation, especially talk about the farm, about “I think it involves the realization that the impor- books and ideas. They laugh easily. They convey the tant things, God created. What man created can dis- conviction that they’re doing well, even if they don’t appear overnight. It’s pretty humbling. It just set us have the money to get the bathroom repaired, and back so far it made us realize how old we are. There’s some of their hopes have had to be revised. They a lot of soul-searching on it.” still have the animals and the land. Zander praises One of the things he’s done the most soul-search- the simplicity of their lives and their consciousness ing about is what it means to be leading his life in an of “the things that are important—keeping the farm age when very few people see what he sees. free of debt, living without the encumbrances that “I think it’s difficult or impossible to be a sepa- we have all come to expect as being essential, being ratist by yourself. Community is so important.” He the norm.” gave me an example from an Amish friend in Ohio. These are the kinds of farmers conservatives “He told me that somebody in their community lost ought to celebrate. Not only do they raise excellent his barn to lightning. And in three weeks they had a beef, but they have a daily virtue that has noth- barn again. And I asked, ‘How the heck do you do ing to do with “environmentalism” in the abstract. that? I mean is there a fund or something that you They have consciences, not causes. They under- borrow from, and then you pay it back?’ And he said, stand themselves as answerable to the natures of ‘There was no debt.’” the things given into their care. They fear that what Scannell had to stop talking. they have learned will not be passed on, except per- “That was David Kline?” Joan Harris gently inter- haps to Harris’s grandson. To lose the knowledge jected, and he nodded. would be a loss worse than the fire. Scannell thinks Kline, an Amish farmer, edits Farming Magazine. about it all the time. He is the author of three books about the Amish As for the barn, he thinks daily about what to do. farming life, including Great Possessions. What Kline He opposes a cheap temporary shelter, but on the meant by “no debt” was that the community got to- other hand he doesn’t want to have to pay exorbitant gether and did a barn raising. Friends and neigh- taxes on the kind of barn he’d like to build. It’s hard bors contributed the new barn as their gift. In other to know what to do or what their future will be. In words, the farmer had insurance that wasn’t financial the meantime, daily life sustains them. When Harris in nature: the community itself. The misfortune of a took my wife and my daughter outside to look at the neighbor was an occasion for unanimity and gener- Devons, she pointed out the different shades of the osity. animals. No debt: it is difficult to overstate what those words “Aren’t they gorgeous? Sometimes,” she said, mean to a man like Scannell. The idea of the United “Mike and I just look at them and think how fortu- States running up trillions of dollars of debt simply nate we are—that we get to share our lives with these convinces him that he’s taken the right course. There beautiful creatures.”

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 33 Icon

007’s Masculine Mystique James Bond is more than a glamorous womanizer.

by Stephen B. Tippins Jr.

iction sometimes has a way of transcending tion (often quick to quip and far more obsessed with its most ardent limitation, which is that it is sex) exist in the same world, one that shares very fiction. Just ask Eric Holder, who probably little with the world that you or I inhabit. But it’s not never thought he’d be cast as the villain in a the metal-jawed giants, volcanic lairs, and poisonous FVin Diesel flick. gardens that differentiate Bond’s world from ours. Fiction’s most successful transcending phenom- It’s the politics. enon, though, is probably Ian Fleming’s James Bond Bond doesn’t have a political agenda in the 007, haberdasher’s muse and the world’s most fa- usual sense. In fact, much has been written about mous secret agent (never mind the oxymoron). Ever the apolitical context within which Bond is usu- en vogue, Bond this summer made a cameo during ally framed. The Soviets were seldom the primary the opening ceremony of the London Olympics—an antagonists, often giving way to politically nonaf- impressive feat for any actual man, let alone a made- filiated madmen who hate East and West indis- up one. But then transforming from fictional charac- criminately. Domestic issues are rarely evoked: ter to Olympic ambassador is probably an easier task there’s some tangential racism in Fleming’s Live for Bond than his other real-life obligation: defend- and Let Die (attributable to the mores of the time ing the West against itself. and a Tom Wolfe-like attempt at recreating some urban dialect); there’s a nondescript energy crisis that has everybody—even stiff-collared Tories—up Kingsley Amis’s Bond in arms in Guy Hamilton’s underrated “The Man with the Golden Gun;” “Quantum of Solace” por- Two things struck me while recently re-watching trays an ecologically savvy terrorist. But other than “The Spy Who Loved Me,” the tenth James Bond that, and some similar peripherals, the only extent film and the one that the 12 year-old in me still re- to which Bond has ever been accused of being po- members as having starred Caroline Munro. Roger litical has been the occasional complaint from the Moore’s turn as 007 may not have been as literary as enlightened left that the world of espionage entails Timothy Dalton’s or Daniel Craig’s, but he still in- a far greater moral ambiguity than all the girls, gad- terpreted the role as something far edgier than Beau gets and martinis suggest. (Which is fine. But Jason Maverick in a tux, even if he doesn’t get credit for it. Bourne is still a whiny bore.) More importantly: even though I’ve always seen This doesn’t mean that there isn’t any political ap- very little attenuation between Ian Fleming’s novels peal to James Bond. In fact, the more I revisit the and Cubby Broccoli’s screen treatments, I could nev- world of Bond, the more I find that there is a consis- er explain why. Until now. I’ve finally realized that tently recurring political subtext to Fleming’s novels Fleming’s Bond (often brooding, sometimes sadistic and occasionally cruel) and the cinematic incarna- Stephen B. Tippins Jr. is an attorney practicing in Buford, Georgia.

34 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Michael Hogue

and the soon-to-be 23 films. Kingsley Amis thought … Politically, Bond’s England is substantially so, too. In his extended essay The James Bond Dossier right of center. As the title of the eleventh vol- he wrote: ume uninhibitedly proclaims, royalty is at the head of things. … An unwontedly emotional The England for which Bond is prepared to die, passage near the end of Doctor No shows Bond like the reasons why he’s prepared to die for it, … conferring in the office of the Governor of is largely taken for granted. This differentiates Jamaica and thinking of home. … ‘His mind it, to its advantage, from the England of most drifted into a world of tennis courts and lily Englishmen. … Negative virtues are even more pads and kings and queens, of London, of peo- important in escapist than in enlightening lit- ple being photographed with pigeons on their erature, and not the least of the blessings en- heads in Trafalgar Square…’ joyed by Mr. Fleming’s reader is his absolute confidence that whatever any given new Bond The films largely share this trait, portraying Bond may contain, it will not contain bitter protests as “Her Majesty’s loyal terrier, defender of the so- or biting satire or even witty commentary about called faith.” But why is royalty at the head of all the state of the nation. We can get all of that at things? British institutions, after all, don’t matter home. so much to real-life Britons. Consider the Queen’s

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 35 Icon

Jubilee earlier this year. All pomp, but what of the resourceful—the incarnation of little old England circumstance? What the Queen timelessly stands with her quiet ways”? Answer: No. for—empire, class, obligation, responsibility and even Britannia herself—are things today’s British, unlike Bond, reject. A Sexist Dinosaur This—and not the sex, sadism, and snobbery—is the allure for the Bond fantasist. 007’s Britain is an- Britain’s postwar doldrums remolded Englishmen tiquated. It’s not the Britain of Cameron and Clegg. into something less than their former selves. This It’s the one with a penchant for staying tyrants—of was the real-world environment into which James either the mustachioed or the vertically-challenged Bond was born. Bond, Sean Connery told Playboy variety—and the one that gave us pocket calculators, back in 1965, was a refreshing change of pace for steel warships, jet airplanes, and loads of other cool the “predominately grey” Britain of the mid-20th stuff. Bond’s Britain is relevant, wealthy, and influen- century. 007 displayed characteristics that were then tial, still a beacon of Western ingenuity. This as op- rare and appealing, chief among them: his “self-con- posed to the more accurate depiction of the sterile, tainment, his powers of decision, his ability to carry cynical, stymied Britain of, say, George Smiley or on through ‘til the end and to survive. There’s so Harry Palmer. Amis preferred the Fleming mold: much social welfare today that people have forgotten what it is to make their own decisions rather than to I also find a belief, however unreflecting, in the leave them to others. So Bond is a welcome change.” rightness of one’s cause more sympathetic than Yet Bond wasn’t really a change so much as he the anguished cynicism and the torpid cyni- represented an inherited idea of high-minded mas- cism of Messrs le Carré and Deighton. More culinity—inherited, I think, not from Ian nor from useful in an adventure story anyway, and more the commandos and officers the author knew from powerful—so powerful that when the frogman’s Naval Intelligence, but from Ian’s father. suit arrives for Bond in Live and Let Die, I can Major Valentine Fleming was a Tory MP from join with him in blessing the efficiency of M’s Henley and an officer of the Oxfordshire Hussars “Q” Branch, whereas I know full well that giv- during World War I. He died near Picardy, France, in en postwar standards of British workmanship, the trenches, in May 1917, after which he was post- the thing would either choke him or take him humously awarded the Distinguished Service Or- straight to the bottom. der. Incidentally, a fellow named Winston Churchill wrote the major’s obituary: The next time you roll your eyes at the implausi- bility of invisible Aston-Martins, consider this pos- [Major Fleming] had that foundation of sponta- sibility: it’s not that Bond’s adventures are completely neous and almost unconscious self-suppression inauthentic, as opposed to the realistic yarns of le in the discharge of what he conceived to be his Carré—it’s just that in Fleming’s universe, Europeans duty without which happiness, however full … didn’t stop being industrious once they were intro- is imperfect. That these qualities are not singu- duced to paid leave and exuberant pensions. lar in this generation does not lessen the loss of It’s been said that Bond’s Britain is okay with Amer- those in whom they shine. As the war lengthens ican superiority. This is preposterous. We “cousins” and intensifies … it seems as if one watched at are well regarded in the Bond realm, but make no night a well-loved city whose lights, which burn mistake, our purpose in a Bond adventure is to be so bright, which burn so true, are extinguished told what’s what by our former colonial masters. in the distance in the darkness one by one. Bond may well hold “individual Americans with the highest respect,” says Amis, but “in the plural they’re It’s no coincidence that James Bond, like his cre- the neon lit, women-dominated, conspicuous con- ator, is an orphan. And if you read carefully between sumers of popular sociology.” Of course, the mov- the lines—or listen closely to the give-and-take on ies are far more Americanized than the novels. But screen—you’ll notice that Bond’s relationship with even there, Amis has a point: has Felix Leiter, Bond’s his superior “M” always plays much like the relation- CIA ally, ever done anything other than take “orders ship between a headstrong adolescent and a stern, from Bond, the Britisher [while] Bond is constantly hard-of-praise father, as if both Fleming and Bond doing better than he, showing himself not braver are straining for fatherly guidance. (That give-and- or more devoted, but smarter, wilier, tougher, more take, by the way, is something that Bernard Lee and

36 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Robert Brown always get right on-screen and that if all of this were just cover? What if men wanted to Judi Dench, by definition, cannot; in fact, the bril- be Bond because secretly—or maybe not so secret- liance of “GoldenEye” lies in Pierce Brosnan’s dis- ly—they wanted to be less neutered, more decisive, content with having a female chief, while the short- more graceful under pressure, more accountable, coming of subsequent entries lies in his acceptance and less postmodern? of female superiority.) Until now Bond’s been a consistent character. The Ian Fleming always denied that he shared charac- films sometimes have bordered on self-parody, but ter traits with his creation—he said that Bond was he’s always been the same decisive, sometimes cruel, merely a composite of his war colleagues. But it’s hard woman-dominating Briton, believing in duty, obli- to say that he shared no traits whatsoever: Bond’s gation, and the Crown. Daniel Craig’s incumbency penchant for scrambled eggs, short-sleeve Sea Island guarantees us that this will continue (with much less cotton shirts, and liquor, women, and gambling are of the self-parody), but I worry for how long. I de- reflections of Ian. And Bond’s operational prowess tected a hint of Jason Bourne-like cynicism in the is definitely drawn from the commandos Fleming last entry, “Quantum of Solace,” where, in a first for a knew during World War II. James Bond flick, the CIA gets into bed with nefari- But Bond’s intangible virtues are Valentine’s—and, ous types and Her Majesty’s government willingly no, these virtues may not have been singular then, complies. Craig, though, is not only a good Bond, but they are quite un-plural now. Where Valentine’s contemporaries took to the trenches, the young men of today’s Britain riot in the In Ian Fleming’s universe, Europeans didn’t streets. That’s what a half-century stop being industrious once they were introduced of self-entitlement does to a so- to paid leave and exuberant pensions. ciety: it takes the backbone out of people while simultaneously giving them notions of grandeur. This makes them malleable. Make enough people he’s a smart actor. He knows his character. I therefore malleable and you can make them, en masse, believe wonder if he’s ever read Fleming’s original version of in any fancy or whim. Want to know why gay mar- “Quantum,” which bore no relation to the movie. It riage is inevitable? Because today’s man, coerced into was a short story, in the Somerset Maugham mold, believing in his own emasculation, would introduce in which Bond reflects that the dramas of ordinary himself to a lesbian named Pussy Galore by saying: people may be greater and more meaningful than “I respect your lifestyle choice.” When James Bond his own. He’s right, of course. Men like James Bond met a lesbian named Pussy Galore, he slept with her. are expendable for a reason. Take away that reason James Bond: the opposite of self-entitlement. and you take away the nobility—and the purpose— in their expendability. If audiences thought of that, I wonder if they’d see past Bond’s sex and gadgets Pieties, Shaken and Stirred and superficiality, wonderful and fun though they may be, and realize what really makes James Bond The New York Times’s film review of “Live and Let appealing. Die” noted that the Bond movies hold a “certain in- The reality for ordinary men and women is that we solence toward public pieties.” This certainly seems need to reassert some dignity in our ordinary lives. true. But why then are the films—like the books But that reality can’t overcome the pieties of modern before them—so incredibly popular? The answer is discourse: we claim to like our men less assertive and that, like with any good spy, Bond has proven adept less masculine and less accountable, and we claim to at creating a little misdirection here and there. like our governments mired and enabling. Raymond Chandler famously suggested that Bond James Bond may be unflappable. He may bed was “what every man would like to be and what ev- women like Caroline Munro, and he may be MGM’s ery woman would like to have between her sheets.” saving grace. And above all he is durable—come this This is generally perceived to mean that men want to fall his latest big-screen adventure, “Skyfall,” hits the- be Bond because he daringly saves the world from aters almost 50 years to the day after Sean Connery megalomaniacal madmen while bedding women debuted as the suave super spy in “Dr. No.” But the who lust after him because he’s dangerous. But what one thing 007 can’t do is save us from ourselves.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 37 Literature

Return of the Kingsley America gets reintroduced to the original Amis

by Matthew Walther

rayers have been answered: Kingsley Amis’s der (not only because of the embargo, but because novels Lucky Jim and The Old Devils are be- someone might think I was enjoying what was on ing reissued in the United States. The New the page).” York Review of Books Press has printed the Kingsley Amis himself rarely had a kind word to Pnew editions with introductions by Keith Gessen offer about his son’s work. After encountering a char- (n+1 editor and novelist) and John Banville (Irish acter named Martin Amis in Money, he threw the novelist and critic). Eric Hanson has drawn splendid manuscript across the room. (Here he was being a covers for both, but I especially like his Jim Dixon: bit of a hypocrite: the narrator of his 1972 short sto- head down, arms behind his back and hands reach- ry “Who or What Was It?” is Amis himself, more or ing out from his elbow-patched tweed, his weary less reliving the plot of The Green Man.) He accused cigarette sending up a pathetic little smoke signal as Martin of “American cleverness,” shorthand for fac- he approaches the lecture hall’s monstrous redbrick ile experimentation, especially with prose style. “I façade. think,” Kingsley said, “you need more sentences like Why has Amis been out of print in the United ‘He put down his drink, got up and left the room.’” States for so long? Taste enters into the equation: Martin has tried to explain away his father’s decid- strict High Tories as a rule prefer the mandarin prose edly unflashy style by suggesting that, since he also of Evelyn Waugh or Anthony Powell, just as the san- wrote poetry, Kingsley had no reason to quest after guine among us favor P.G. Wodehouse, who never the “terrible compulsive vividness”—another terse left the sunny side of the street. Academic snobbery Kingsley formulation—characteristic of Martin’s must also be inculpated: the Amis oeuvre tenaciously own work. I find this unconvincing: why then did so avoids subsumption into fashionable critical narra- many of Kingsley’s fellow novelist-poets—Nabokov, tives, and Girl, 20 will never appear on an Ameri- Anthony Burgess, John Updike—write prose that is can college syllabus. But finally there is that familiar alternately purple or eggplant? specter haunting Amis père—his son Martin. The vagaries of literary taste and fashionable ma- Wander into the literature section of any large nia for Martin cannot by themselves account for Americans bookstore, and you will see amassed Mar- America’s neglect of Amis senior, however. Kingsley tin’s fleet of Vintage paperbacks, including his flag- himself is to blame for being such a memorable pub- ship Vintage Reader. His appearance in this series, lic figure: these days Amis l’homme is probably more which collects “the twentieth century’s best prose,” famous than any item in his bibliography, thanks to implies that to Americans, or at least to his Ameri- his reactionary quotient and numberless crotchets. can publisher, Martin is the equal of H.L. Mencken, A literary parlor game could be made of finding the Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov, and V.S. Naipaul. most outrageously illiberal Amis quotation. He hat- British critics have been less indulgent. Thus Tibor ed tolerance, diversity, foreign languages, airplanes, Fischer, writing in the Daily Telegraph of Martin’s popular music, all female novelists—save perhaps Yellow Dog: “Yellow Dog isn’t bad as in not very good Dame Agatha Christie—bebop and modal jazz, be- or slightly disappointing. It’s not-knowing-where- ing alone, art cinema, purchasing gifts for his wives, to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoul- Matthew Walther writes from Marquette, Michigan.

38 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 the Arts Council of Great Britain, homosexuals, reaping, threshing, and winnowing its way through America, defenders of communism, gardens, and fields of tedium and mawkishness. His debut novel is the dark. a dexterous middle finger (or bitten thumb) present- Like Nabokov, Waugh, and Ray Bradbury, King- ed to snobs, puritans, sycophants, and fussbudgets— sley Amis never learned to drive an automobile. the literary equivalent of Clement Attlee ordering Like Paul Ryan’s financial guru Ayn Rand he never toast and jam at the Savoy. made a single investment, though by the 1970s he Its eponymous hero, Jim Dixon, is a junior lec- was spending thousands of pounds on drink ev- turer in history at an undistinguished Welsh college. ery month. He bragged that he could not scramble Dixon’s pleasures are simple: he smokes a carefully an egg. He denounced Portnoy’s Complaint, Lolita, allotted number of cigarettes each day and drinks a Ulysses, and Mansfield Park and declared “Beverly rather less measured amount of beer most nights at Hills Cop” “a flawless masterpiece.” In his Memoirs he admits to using Martin as bait while trying to obtain some obscene limericks by W.H. Auden for The New Oxford It’s likely that Amis cultivated his intransigent Book of Light Verse. The Auden public persona in order to drum up publicity and poems were in the possession of a peer of the realm “famous for the get a laugh from friends like Robert Conquest. ferocious vigour and glaring con- spicuousness of his homosexual activities.” Amis got the poems— these turned out to be no good— and Martin, who had gone into a bedroom to call a taxi, was chased five times around pubs. His single goal is to coast successfully through Tom Driberg’s bed before the gasping lord relented his two-year probation period and become a perma- with a terse “Fair enough, youngster.” nent faculty member in the history department. Amis’s loyalty to the Crown was absolute. He even Standing in his way is the departmental supervi- claimed to have had wet dreams about Queen Eliza- sor, Professor Welch. (“No other professor in Great beth II, all of which consisted of him throwing an Britain, Dixon thought, set such store by being called eager hand upon Her Majesty’s royal bosom and her Professor.”) Welch is a dedicated amateur flautist— responding, “No, Kingsley, we mustn’t.” He called or, as he insists, recorder player—and busybody who Margaret Thatcher “one of the best looking women I forces Dixon to attend chamber music recitals dur- had ever met” and compared seeing her in person to ing impossibly dull weekend visits to the professor’s “looking at a science-fiction illustration of the beau- home and perform quotidian tasks such as doing tiful girl who has become President of the Solar Fed- Welch’s research for him and proofing his manu- eration in the year 2220.” scripts. Amusing stuff, but it tends to distract from the In order to remain in good standing with his de- truth: namely, that Amis wrote some of the best fic- partment, Dixon must also publish an article, “The tion of the last century, including at least three clas- Economic Influence of Shipbuilding Techniques, sics (the two present reissues and The Alteration) and 1450 to 1485,” in an scholarly journal. Dixon, despite a handful of novels (Take a Girl Like You; Girl, 20; and his having little knowledge and even less interest in The Green Man) that I would recommend to anyone. the period, is a medievalist. Amis’s description of Anyway, it’s likely that Amis cultivated his intransi- Dixon’s article will ring true for anyone who has ever gent public persona in order to drum up publicity been forced into academic writing: “It was a perfect and get a laugh from friends like Robert Conquest. article, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling This becomes especially clear after reading his letters mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing to Conquest and Philip Larkin, in which he seems facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems. almost obsessed with making chop steak out of as Dixon had read, or begun to read, dozens like it, but many progressive sacred cows as possible. his own seemed worse than most in its air of being In Lucky Jim, Amis writes with unflagging, almost convinced of its own usefulness and significance.” mechanical energy, like a literary combine harvester Many first-time readers of Lucky Jim find them-

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 39 Literature

selves believing that the novel’s title is simply one of sentimental, content, the expected skewerings and Amis’s larger, less subtle ironies. From his drunk- obloquies still present but no longer essential to the en burning of Mrs. Welch’s bed sheets to his, well, proceedings. The novel’s plot, less well known than drunken ribbing of Welch himself during a public that of Lucky Jim, is too good for me to spoil, but it lecture on “Merrie England,” Jim’s, it seems, is just involves the return of Alun Weaver, an over-the-hill another hard-luck story. But Lucky Jim is in fact, as novelist, and his wife Rhiannon to their native Wales. a number of critics have suggested, nothing if not a The titular old devils are a group of married couples kind of postwar English fairy tale in which an undis- whose lives the Weavers’ unanticipated—and almost tinguished but more or less decent youth gets the girl literally short-lived—Welsh retirement disrupts. (Christine, ex-girlfriend of Welch’s exasperating son Amis’s comedy in The Old Devils does not de- Bertrand) and makes his fortune (a secretarial posi- pend not on the usual succession of set pieces and tion with her uncle) through sheer fortuity. grotesques. For once, his characters are almost soft. Lucky Jim was an immediate popular and criti- Here, early in the novel, are the old devils at table: cal success, and Amis, a consummate literary professional who wrote at least 500 words nearly every Alun began to relax. He went on relaxing over morning of his adult life, followed it with a series of the next drink, when they got on to politics comic novels, all of which offer something of his de- and had a lovely time seeing who could say the but’s comedic charm without managing to equal it. most outrageous thing about the national La- The best of these isTake a Girl Like You, his 1960 tale bour Party, the local Labour Party, the Labour- of lost innocence that, among other things, shows us controlled county council, the trade unions, the that Amis was no misogynist. education system, the penal system, the Health Service, the BBC, black people and youth. (Not homosexuals today.) They varied this with eulogies of President Reagan, Enoch Powell, the The Old Devils must have been like a glass of South African government, the Is- raeli hawks and whatever his name champagne after downing six or seven pints of was who ran Singapore? bitter for Amis’s longtime readers. Notice the verb “relax,” which never appears in the relentless Lucky Jim. See also the casual thoroughness of their political discussion. In a later scene, Malcolm (one of the devils) and Rhi- But by the mid-1960s Amis was sick to death of annon enter an abandoned church. Here, instead of farce and melodrama. He began to experiment with the riotous atheism of many earlier essays and public genre—never with style—alternating bitter com- pronouncements, Amis shows himself capable, if not edies like I Want It Now; Girl, 20; and Ending Up of piety, then certainly of respect and even awe when with, among other things, suspense and spy novels faced with its trappings. William H. Pritchard right- (The Riverside Villas Murder, The Anti-Death League, ly compares this episode to Philip Larkin’s poem and the first non-Ian Fleming James Bond novel, “Church-Going.” Colonel Son) and horror and speculative fiction (The The Old Devils is also, despite its dedication to Green Man and The Alteration). During the period Martin’s sons Louis and Jacob, a kind of love letter leading up to end of his second marriage, to novelist to Amis’s first wife, Hillary Bardwell, a typewritten Elizabeth Jane Howard, who in 1983 offered him an apology note to a woman whom he seems sudden- ultimatum: her or booze, Amis’s fiction entered its ly to have realized he loved desperately despite his bleakest phase with Jake’s Thing and Stanley and the many infidelities during the nearly two decades of Women. These barely found American publishers. their marriage. The Old Devils, which Martin Amis has called The reissue of these two novels may not guarantee one of the best half-dozen novels of the 20th cen- an increase in Google Scholar citations of Kingsley tury, must have been like a glass of champagne after Amis’s fiction, but then, of literary reputations he downing six or seven pints of bitter for Amis’s long- once quipped: “Importance is not important; only time readers. Here at last we see Amis at rest: oldish, good writing is.”

40 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Home Plate BILL KAUFFMAN

Party Animus

n his memoir If You Don’t Weaken Charles Francis Adams, bolted the finally taking his leave 52 years later (1940), Oscar Ameringer, witty Whigs to serve as Martin Van Buren’s and entering the valetudinarian Hall of and humane radical from the running mate on the 1848 Free Soil Fame.) erstwhile hotbed of American ticket): “Always vote for principle, Why are the men with integrity and Isocialism, Oklahoma (it really was!), though you may vote alone, and you honor and courage so often found at professed a “rule of never voting for may cherish the sweetest reflection the fringes of American political life? I a presidential candidate who had that your vote is never lost.” That might think of Burton K. Wheeler (Progres- the slightest chance of election. The serve as an epitaph to Ron Paul’s con- sive Party VP candidate in 1924) refus- ballot is too precious lightly to be gressional career. ing to hand down a single sedition in- thrown away on candidates select- I was born and bred in the cradle dictment as U.S. attorney for Montana ed and financed by the ‘angels’ and of minor partyism, so I suppose the during the First World War. Or Eugene archangels of the two historic old blood—the ichor? the fever?—of elec- V. Debs, five-time Socialist Party can- parties which have managed my ad- toral rebellion washes through my didate for President, going to prison opted country into the condition it is veins. Besides McGovern in 1972 and in 1919 for telling an audience in Can- in today.” Goldwater in 1964, the last major- ton, Ohio, that “the working class who Oscar’s statute remains sound. We party candidate I might have voted for freely shed their blood and furnish the are facing in 2012 the worst Democrat- would have been Al Smith in 1928. corpses, have never yet had a voice in Republican twosome since, uh, 2008? The nation’s first third party, the either declaring war or making peace. 2004? 2000? I detect a pattern. Anti-Masons, arose in my backyard in It is the ruling class that invariably does A state’s electoral votes have never 1826 after a footloose drunken apos- b ot h .” been decided by a single popular vote, tate Mason, Captain William Morgan, Things sure have changed, huh? so as history is our guide your vote for spilled the secrets of the craft in his Third parties have their share and president does not matter. book Illustrations of Freemasonry and more of frauds and kooks and back- Choose not between two evils: the wound up missing in the Jimmy Hoffa biters (so unlike the Democrats and candidate of crony capitalism and sense. (Some local Masons long con- Republicans) but even at their mean- war with Iran or the candidate of tended that the sot Morgan hightailed est and most outré, a vote cast therefor crony socialism and smug anti-Ca- it to Canada and lived out a bibulous serves as a gesture of protest, however tholicism. Groove instead to the old life. His ghost can be seen staggering ineffectual: an extended middle finger Prohibition Party hit: “I’d rather be about the stripjoints which stipple the to the tank bearing down on you. Aar- right than president/I want my con- Canadian side of the Niagara border.) on Russo, the late Hollywood producer science clear.” The first third party I’d have sup- and manager of Bette Midler, tried and Strategic voting is for Board of Ed- ported without reservation, the anar- failed in the 1990s to launch a popu- ucation or City Council elections in chist-tinged Liberty Party, was born 20 list-libertarian party whose message which you and your franchise actually miles down the road in Warsaw, New to our overlords, in Russo’s words, was matter. As a citizen, you can play a role, York. (Reading a biography of John “F--- YOU! WE’RE NOT GOING TO even an essential role, in the affairs of Greenleaf Whittier, who was forever TAKE THIS SHIT!” your place. But as a subject of the Em- whinging about his ailments as most Much better than “Hope and pire, you count for nothing. You’re not poets do, I was amused to see him tell C h an g e ,” I’d s ay. even a brick in the wall in our quadren- Gerrit Smith in 1840 that he planned to Me, I’m sticking with Oscar Am- nial king-making charades. vote for Liberty Party candidate James eringer. My default party in recent elec- So cast your ballot to satisfy your Birney “if my life is spared” through tions has been the Greens, but this time conscience. Obey the injunction of November of that year. Like most hy- I’ll vote for Gary Johnson, the Libertar- John Quincy Adams (whose son, pochondriacs, Whittier lived forever, ian. I want my conscience clear.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 41 Arts&Letters

Who Was John rians were forced to confront the possi- He was ‘racked with pain and bility that conservatism had flourished never for two hours together free Randolph? because its philosophy is actually older from some affliction’ of his stom- and more popular than liberalism’s. ach and bowels. He suffered from by Timothy Stanley The danger of Buckley’s effort to con- ‘rheumatism and erratic gout’ and struct a tradition is that it slowly became a most distressing and obstinate John Randolph of Roanoke, David a template. Anyone who doesn’t match complaint—chronic diarrhea. … Johnson, LSU Press, 352 pages the specifications of “born again,” “tax- He treated himself with a variety cutting,” and “foreign-policy hawk” of concoctions, including liberal ohn Randolph of Roanoke was ev- can now officially be labeled “uncon- doses of opium, but worried that erything the modern conservative servative.” The result is that men like there ‘is nothing left for the medi- Jmight despise: aristocratic, sexually libertarian Ron Paul, paleoconservative cine to operate on.’ ambiguous, occasionally irreligious, Pat Buchanan, or cosmopolitan Rudy anti-party, and the sworn enemy of Giuliani—all of whom represented le- Randolph tried to distract himself by military adventurism. His personal- gitimate dimensions of conservatism— hunting. On one occasion, he poured ity suggests he might have had more could no longer get an invite to the gunpowder on a still burning charge in common with the late Gore Vidal party. Republican presidential primaries and burned his hand. He observed, than Sarah Palin. Yet Randolph still have evolved from talent contests to the “What so many patriotic personages stands out as one of the most impor- priest-selection ritual of some bizarre have, for years, been labouring to ac- tant conservative thinkers of the gen- and parochial religion. “I swear by al- complish is at last effected, although eration after the Founding Fathers. mighty God never to raise taxes…” not precisely in the way they aimed at David Johnson’s fine new biography of How fascinating it is, then, to read … I have been blown up.” the Virginia gentleman is a timely re- the life of John Randolph, a man who His behavior was more like that of a minder that conservatives come in all defied the official conservative tradi- British Tory gentleman than a revolu- shapes and sizes—and often disagree. tion on several counts. What stands tionary republican. He wisely avoided The contemporary American con- out is his humanity, both common and formal education and excelled in drink- servative tradition is a postwar inven- aristocratic. He was born the scion of ing and socializing instead. In his late tion. Until the 1960s, conservatism rich tobacco planters in 1773. A ge- teens, Johnson reports, our hero lived “a was largely dismissed by historians as netic aberration—Johnson diagnoses life of restless aimlessness. ‘You inquire a psychological defect—an unhealthy it as Klinefelter’s syndrome—left him after my plans,’ he wrote a friend. ‘I have fetish for the certainties of the past. beardless and deprived him of the plea- none. … I exist in an obscurity from That consensus collapsed as brilliant sures and horrors of puberty. He was which I never shall emerge.’” men like William F. Buckley Jr. began to a squeaker, with a high-pitched voice What drew him to the forefront of write intelligently about a “conservative that gave his famous epigrams great American society was the sweetest opi- tradition” that was part of the tapestry camp value. (Randolph said that one ate of them all—politics. In the 1790s, of American thought, while the po- of his enemies was “a man of splendid the young republic was still fighting litical success of Ronald Reagan forced abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines over what it stood for. The Federalist- scholars to rewrite the official narrative and stinks like a rotten mackerel by controlled Congress passed the Alien of unstoppable liberal progress. The moonlight.”) and Sedition Acts in 1798, which were Buckleyite “tradition” and the electoral A significant amount of the book is the authoritarian forerunner of today’s success of the GOP became conflated. given over to Randolph’s physical suf- PATRIOT Act. Jefferson’s Democratic At the dawn of the Millennium, histo- fering. For example, Republicans opposed the acts, and

42 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Randolph was among their number. war—it was instituted for the common But Alston dared not return fire. Sadly, we have no written record of his defense and the general welfare.” The very next paragraph details Ran- speeches on the subject, but they were Randolph was no pacifist. He dolph receiving one duel challenge sufficiently powerful to get him elected warned Congress that war could lead after another, equally violent debate. to Congress at the tender age of 26. to a slave rebellion in the South, a nod It’s difficult not to get the impression When he approached the speaker’s dais to the fact that he himself was involved that our hero was a bully, rhetorically to take his oath, the speaker wondered in one of the greatest, most vilest acts of and physically. Honor was frequently aloud if Randolph was old enough to violence ever perpetrated on a people. invoked as an excuse for a good fight. serve. “Ask my constituent,” the fresh- Johnson stresses that Randolph was Some have suggested that another man replied. opposed to slavery in the abstract and reason for his constant displays of Jefferson was a cousin, so we might provided for the freedom of the men manly combat might have been his have expected the two to form a fa- and women that he owned after his “ambiguous sexuality,” in the words milial and philosophical alliance. But death. But there’s no escaping that the of historian Andrew Burstein. The Randolph quickly proved to be a thorn liberty promised in the hallowed Con- conservative writer Bill Kauffman has in the side of Jefferson and almost stitution did not extend to everyone. In described Randolph as “a bachelor every president who followed. He this matter, Randolph displayed some who seems to have nurtured a crush became, in Johnson’s words, “a party of the least charming characteristics unto himself, a republican purist who of the Old South. would sacrifice no principle for politi- In an interview about his book, cal success or collegial acceptance. He Johnson told Human Events that Ran- was the ‘third something’ of American dolph was “more civil” than many politics—a Tertium Quid.” Randolph politicians today because he always opposed the purchase of Florida and issued his insults “in good English.” the creation of a national bank because I have to disagree. Randolph could he saw these things as going beyond be chivalrous but also quick to take the limits of government as laid out in offense and inclined towards blood- the Constitution. shed. Johnson writes of an incident Crucially, that didn’t make him an when the House adjourned after a de- anti-elitist republican of the Ron Paul bate and an opponent, Willis Alston, variety. His politics were rooted in slandered Randolph on the stairs: European-style snobbery. Randolph believed that, if left alone, a well-or- Randolph brought down his cane dered society could govern itself. “I on Alston’s head, knocking off his am an aristocrat,” he said. “I love lib- hat and drawing blood. Alston erty, I hate equality.” Liberty could not turned and attempted to fight be traded for security or sold off to the back, but he was on lower steps highest bidder for short-term reward. and could not reach Randolph. It guaranteed the space within which Some of the ‘ruffians who men like Randolph could rule. A cynic were with him,’ wrote Ran- might call him feudal. dolph, ‘wrested the cane And yet so radical was his politics, from behind and put it and so carefree his lifestyle, that he in his hands.’ Randolph sometimes jumps off the page like a rev- stared down at Alston olutionary. He lost his seat in Congress and waited for a blow. because he opposed the War of 1812 and the militaristic nationalism that motivated it. Randolph warned the House that it was a “war not of defense but of conquest, of aggrandizement, of ambi- tion; a war foreign to the interests of this country, to the interests of humanity itself.” The Constitution, remember, “was not calculated to wage offensive foreign

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 43 Arts&Letters on Andrew Jackson.” In fact, Johnson reveals that medical evidence proves he was almost a eunuch: “Dr. Francis

West conducted a post-mortem ex- Hogue Michael amination of Randolph and recorded that the ‘scrotum was scarcely at all developed,’ with only a right testicle ‘the size of a small bean.’” Johnson dismisses psychoanalyzing his subject further at this point, but it feels cru- cial. Walking around with generative organs so small is bound to have some impact upon a man’s human and political relations. All this talk of scrotums and tes- ticles emphasizes that the takeaway from this well-researched, judicious biography is the importance of personality to the history of conservatism. There is no straight line leading from the politics of John Randolph to that of Ron Paul, any more than there is a line from Jefferson to Romney. It’s a point that Johnson made in his Hu- man Events interview. Far from trying to cash in on the tantalizing similarities between Randolph and Paul, when asked, “Are there any modern- day comparisons to John Randolph?” Johnson replied, “Absolutely not.” But there are consistent attitudes— rather than policy prescriptions— Misjudging Rehnquist posed the idea that provisions of the spanning the centuries that suggest Constitution had fixed meanings es- the existence of a historical conser- by Kevin R.C. Gutzman tablished at the time of their ratifica- vative archetype: stubbornness, ro- tion. For that, he suffered the slings manticism, a loyalty for the small The Partisan: The Life of William and arrows of outrageously partisan and local that trumps the grand Rehnquist, John A. Jenkins, Public journalists. and national, an affection for cus- Affairs, 320 pages Today, with five conservative justices tom, a suspicion that equality ends on the Supreme Court and originalism after birth, a resistance to modes of illiam Rehnquist was the as the starting point even for liberals’ thought that elevate fine ideas above most Jeffersonian associ- discussion of the Constitution, it may the freedom of the individual. Every ate justice of the Supreme be difficult to conjure the legal world at new generation of conservatives has WCourt in history. Even before Ronald the time of Rehnquist’s appointment to to turn those vague sentiments into Reagan and Edwin Meese made origi- the court by Richard Nixon in 1972. In an agenda—sometimes of resistance, nalism the touchstone of conservative fact, as recently as 1990 old-fashioned sometimes of reform. The challenge constitutionalism, Rehnquist spent a liberal constitutional nihilists still is to be something more than just a decade toiling as an isolated dissenter dominated the bench and bar—just as privileged spoilsport. in the vineyard of the actual Consti- they still dominate academia. When I tution rather than stare decisis. To graduated from the University of Tex- Timothy Stanley is author of The Crusader: Justice William Brennan’s infamous as School of Law in May of that year, The Life and Tumultuous Times of Pat “Rule of Five”—as Brennan explained I did what aspiring lawyers do: I took Buchanan and is a blogger for the Daily to one of his clerks, with five votes, he a bar review course to prepare for the Telegraph. could do anything—Rehnquist op- bar exam. Like most other states, Texas

44 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 then had both essay and multiple- gates Rehnquist for supposedly being and Linda Greenhouse—the latter of choice sections on its exam. When the results-oriented, but the author never whom participated in pro-Roe public bar review course’s instructor began gives his reader any ground for analysis demonstrations even while serving to discuss the multiple-choice section, of Rehnquist’s performance as a justice as New York Times’ Supreme Court she said, “If you are offered ‘The Tenth other than results. correspondent—Jenkins consistently Amendment’ as a potential answer, you What do I mean? To my mind, the equates court decisions in favor of one know that’s wrong. It’s never right.” She paradigmatic opinion by Associate party or another with sympathy for laughed and laughed. Justice Rehnquist was his dissent in that party’s evident moral claims. Here Rehnquist was primarily respon- the 1985 case Wallace v. Jaffree. In that he ignores Rehnquist’s point that due sible for the restoration of the Tenth case, Rehnquist took on one of the process means in the first place neu- Amendment to its position as, well, landmark decisions of the court au- tral application of a neutral statute duly part of the Constitution. Rehnquist’s thored by his least-favorite 20th cen- enacted. Rehnquist, in the vanguard of achievement in this area was part of tury justice, Hugo Black. In Everson v. originalists, believed that republican the greater endeavor of actually trying Board of Education of Ewing Township government meant first of all that the to restore the federal feature that had (1947), Black had “discovered” that the people were entitled to make constitu- been central to the Federalists’ argu- Fourteenth Amendment made Thom- tions of their own choosing and then ment for ratification of the Constitu- as Jefferson’s metaphor of “a wall of legislate within the bounds of the con- tion in the first place. separation between church and state” stitutions they had made. At the time of Reagan’s election in enforceable by federal judges against Jenkins tends to find great brilliance 1980, Rehnquist stood virtually alone state governments. Rehnquist’s Wallace in anyone who agrees with him and to on the Supreme Court in advocat- dissent proved that Black’s opinion was downplay even scintillating intelligence ing the idea that the Constitution had completely unfounded. in those who do not. Thus, for exam- a fixed meaning. Saying so had made Rehnquist’s method was that of origi- ple, Jenkins is the first author whom I him somewhat of a bête noire for legal nalism—the otherwise unexceptionable have ever seen refer to Earl Warren as scholars and journalists, when they notion that a legal document’s meaning anything like “an intellectual lion of the didn’t simply adjudge him goofy. How is to be found in the understanding of Court.” Far closer to the median account could anyone oppose the latest legal the people who adopted it. In the Con- of Warren was a contemporary’s char- innovations of liberals who had abol- stitution’s case, that means the ratifiers. acterization of him as a “dumb Swede.” ished segregation, ordered forced bus- So Rehnquist pointed out that Jefferson This discrepancy between reality and ing, legalized pornography, extended was neither a ratifier nor an author of the author’s take runs through the book: new procedural rights to criminal de- the First Amendment’s Establishment Jenkins repeatedly says that although fendants, abolished the means of ap- Clause, that his formula had nothing to Rehnquist graduated from Stanford portioning legislative bodies that had do with that provision’s crafting or rati- Law School with the highest grade point been used in Anglophone countries for fication, and that in fact it was coined in average he was not first in his class; he more than 700 years, found new sexual a letter written by President Jefferson a repeatedly downplays Antonin Scalia’s rights in “emanations of penumbrae” of decade after the relevant clause’s rati- famous wit; and he often characterizes the Bill of Rights, and in general remade fication. The opinion is a tour de force Rehnquist and other conservatives as constitutional law in their own image? of actual constitutionalism and has ap- rigid or unyielding. Yet Barry Goldwa- John A. Jenkins’s book borrows the peared routinely in popular constitu- ter, famed for his consistent devotion title of a New York Times Magazine tional law casebooks and in accounts of to principle, appears as “erratic.” At one cover story on Rehnquist he published the American solution to the problem point, Rehnquist is a participant in a a quarter-century ago. Pretty witty, he of church-state relations “jihad.” For their part, Warren, William thinks. The Supreme Court that made Jenkins does not mention Wallace. Brennan, William O. Douglas, and oth- the Warren Court revolution was Rather, oddly, he tells us that Rehnquist er liberals, although they are at least as down-the-middle moderate and prin- crafted nary a memorable opinion. predictable as Rehnquist, are never de- cipled. Rehnquist had an agenda. So, This claim is simply untrue. scribed with negative adjectives. Seem- Jenkins tells us, his then-editor averred Can we tell from Rehnquist’s opin- ingly, one cannot be a rigid lefty, even in assigning him the magazine story. ion whether Rehnquist thinks statutes when arguing that trees should have And what kind of agenda? Repeatedly, such as the one at issue in Wallace are standing to sue. Jenkins says that if a party before the a good idea? No—although Jenkins Jenkins makes desirable legal out- Supreme Court was female, a crimi- certainly thinks we can. Quoting par- comes into constitutional legal out- nal defendant, etc., Rehnquist was tisans of Warren-Burger Court judicial comes throughout his account. Since sure to vote against her. Jenkins casti- legislation such as Alan Dershowitz Rehnquist, as an originalist, rejected

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 45 Arts&Letters this alchemy, Jenkins has a choice tion of neighborhood schools in the Swimming in between explaining the grounds for name of statistical balance—is classi- Rehnquist’s disagreement or painting fied by Jenkins as “intolerant or even Rhetoric Rehnquist as a villain. He chooses the racist.” As chief justice, Rehnquist in latter. Thus, for example, in describ- the 1990s and 2000s had the opportu- by John R. Coyne Jr. ing three memoranda written by then- nity to write this distinction into con- clerk Rehnquist for Justice Robert stitutional law, precisely as the presi- Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric Jackson in the 1950s, Jenkins assumes dents who had put him on the court From Aristotle To Obama, Sam Leith, that Rehnquist’s counsel to his boss not and moved him to the chief justice’s Basic Books, 312 pages to vote to strike down segregation rest- middle chair had hoped he would do. ed on an unexpressed support for seg- As a result, the extremely unpopular am Leith, former literary editor regation. Yet one of those memos in- forced-busing experiment that helped of the Daily Telegraph, novel- cluded Rehnquist’s reasoning that not elect Richard Nixon and Ronald Rea- ist, and contributor to the Wall only would such a ruling be contrary gan president is now largely a thing SStreet Journal and other publications, to the court’s precedent, it likely would of the past. One would not know this is cheeky, talented, smart, and a fine also violate “legislative history.” This from reading The Partisan. and easy writer, intoxicated by words latter originalist concern rested not Rehnquist as chief justice also led a and the way we arrange them to sell, on fantasy, but on the research of Al- court majority that moved a long way persuade, praise, explain, attack. In exander Bickel, a clerk for Justice Felix toward abolishing “benign” race dis- Words Like Loaded Pistols, he sets out Frankfurter who had returned from an crimination. In my view, this line of cas- to share his enthusiasm for rhetoric, es reflected a desirable and, with only an occasional misfire, development in policy he succeeds admirably, in large part Rehnquist as chief justice led a court terms but was inconsis- because of his unflagging good nature majority that moved a long way toward tent with originalism. and offbeat sense of humor. But because the constitu- “Explaining rhetoric to a human be- abolishing “benign” race discrimination. tional amendment that is ing,” he writes, “is, or should be, like Brown v. Board of Educa- explaining water to a fish.” In both cas- tion is almost certainly a es, explanations aren’t really necessary. attempt to demonstrate that the court permanent part of constitutional law, it We swim in rhetoric from the moment could justify striking down segregation is perfectly reasonable—one might even we turn on the news until we log off at on the basis of the legislative record say incumbent—to apply its principle in night, and the whole time there’s some- with the unhappy news that it could other cases. Again there is no explana- one making a rhetorical pitch, trying to not. “Its own sociological views” were tion of this from Jenkins, who is simply sell us something. not adequate ground for such a ruling, critical of these developments. Rhetoric “isn’t an academic disci- Rehnquist told Jackson. Readers interested in learning of pline or the preserve of professional Of course, in Brown v. Board of William Rehnquist’s record as associ- orators,” Leith writes. “It’s right here, Education, the court did strike down ate justice and chief justice will be bet- right now, in your argument with the segregation. It did so on the basis of ter advised to start elsewhere. Those insurance company, your plea to the sociological claims, and along the who hope to become acquainted with waitress for a table near the window, or way denied that original understand- Rehnquist the man may find much of your entreaties to your jam-faced kid- ing could be binding. To someone like this book interesting, in a chatty way. I dies to eat their damn veggies.” Rehnquist, the entire exercise was a hope for an account of Rehnquist more True enough, although in the U.S. violation of the justices’ oath to uphold respectful of his jurisprudence and less it would probably be something other the Constitution, whatever their own devoted to the box-score version of than jam. Nor, despite the comfort- policy preferences might be. legal history than the average newspa- able way he eases us into his subject, Determined to paint Rehnquist per account. That account will have to is he really interested in discussing as a villain, Jenkins misses signifi- come from an author less partisan than insurance, kids, or veggies. His inten- cant legal distinctions. For example, John A. Jenkins. tion is to analyze and instruct us in the Rehnquist’s statement in the 1950s way the world’s movers and shakers— that he opposed both segregation and Kevin R.C. Gutzman is professor of history among them Milton’s Satan, Cicero, integration—the former meaning as- at Western Connecticut State University and Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, Martin Lu- signment of children to schools based the author of James Madison and the Mak- ther King, Obama—have used rhetoric on race, and the latter meaning aboli- ing of America. for achieving their ends. Each of these

46 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Michael Hogue

figures is given a chapter-long section (for no good reason, all in italics) as a “Champion of Rhetoric,” within discussions of what he names as the five parts of rhetoric—Invention, Arrange- ment, Style, Memory, and Delivery. Aristotle, he tells us, divided Invention into three lines of argument. “Thanks in part to my constitutional childishness, they have always sounded to me like the names by which the Three Musketeers really should have been known: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos,” Leith writes. “These three fellows are the absolute bedrock of written and spoken persuasion.” Ethos establishes the speaker’s bona fides and connection with the audience. Logos is the attempt to influence them through reason. And Pathos is intended to stir them emotionally. For an address that exemplifies these principles, Leith reaches back to 1952 and Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, given in response to charges that he’d been accepting money and gifts, accusations that endangered his place on the Eisenhower ticket. “Long before Presi- dent Nixon met his Waterloo over the Watergate burglary, he escaped from another tight spot with a magisterial speech, at the heart of which was a na- kedly cheesy pathos appeal.” The star of that appeal was a pup- py—sent as a gift to Nixon’s daughters by a supporter in Texas—“a little cock- er spaniel dog. ... black and white, spot- ted. And our little girl Tricia, the six- loaded and primed, the aim perfect, Nixon will inevitably provoke a Pav- year-old, named it ‘Checkers.’ And you the bullets sent unerringly home. (That lovian reaction among those—many know, the kids, like all kids, love the sentence, incidentally, is a tricolon, one of whom buy, discuss, and review dog, and I just want to say this, right of the author’s favorite rhetorical fig- books—whose Nixon-hatred is em- now, that regardless of what they say ures.) bedded in their DNA. In another place, about it, we’re gonna keep it.” But although Leith cites the speech Leith writes of “dog whistle boo words” “No sooner had these words been as a rhetorical masterpiece, the reader that provoke such responses. “Richard uttered,” writes Leith, “than America might wonder why he’d intersperse Nixon” are two of those words. as one melted into a puddle of love his analysis with jarring words like So are “Satan,” “that silver tongued for Nixon, his wife, his adorable little “cheesy” or a rhetorically out-of-place devil,” and “Adolf Hitler.” Leith’s is the Sa- daughters, and itty-bitty waggy-tailed reference to Nixon’s “creepy smile” or tan created by Milton, who “gave Satan Checkers.” The introduction of the pup- as “Tricky Dick.” Ad hominem? Not the rhetorical chops he deserves,” and py was “a stone cold stroke of brilliance.” quite that. Constitutional childishness? the Satan from a 1967 film, “Bedazzled.” The Checkers speech shows how a Perhaps. It might also be a matter Nothing here to give offense; no dog masterful rhetorician, very much in of literary-world realism. Using words whistle boo words; something for mov- tune with his times, can achieve his like “magisterial,” “masterful,” and iegoers helping to lighten the rhetorical objectives with words. The pistol was “brilliance” when discussing Richard load; and much for those surviving lov-

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 47 Arts&Letters ers of one of the signal achievements in civil rights movement. When Obama Unknown Speechwriter. Every politi- literary history, an extraordinary meld- sounds like the Bible, he doesn’t just cian has one, and a president can have ing of poetry with rhetoric. sound like the Bible. He sounds like a dozen or so. In White House Ghosts, And Hitler? “Applying the praise the Bible channeled through Martin the best book yet about White House word ‘champion’ to Adolf Hitler feels Luther King.” speechwriters, Robert Schlesinger a bit odd, and I don’t wish to be need- Obama, Leith points out, was also writes that LBJ’s speechwriters couldn’t lessly provocative.” But, Leith contin- heavily influenced by his pastor, Jer- write to his speaking strengths. On ues, we have a duty to understand what emiah Wright, from whose sermons he one occasion, LBJ said of their efforts: it was that allowed him to put “his evil took the title of his book, The Audacity of “The goddamn draft they’ve given me intentions … so horribly into effect.” Hope. But that’s an influence the White wouldn’t make chickens cackle if you Historians tell us that it was the right House doesn’t talk about these days. waved it at ’em in the dark.” time, the right place, and luck. But it Leith’s discussion of Obama’s ora- That’s the job of the speechwriter— was also “his brilliance as an orator.” tory centers on his 2008 election-night to make the chickens cackle. That’s not Leith sums it up: “Strive though the- speech in Chicago’s Grant Park and his to say, unless you’re working for a com- orists have since ancient times to natu- inaugural address in Washington. But plete dolt, that you try to put words ralize the connection between oratory since then the big oratorical guns have in the politician’s mouth. As Leith and civic virtue, Hitler is a good in- gone silent. As Leith points out, the says, “the speechwriter aims to write stance of the extent to which they have high rhetoric of politics can produce what the speaker thinks, in the most failed. Rhetoric’s effectiveness is, in the an anti-rhetoric opposition. And it eloquent terms in which the speaker final analysis, independent of its moral may be Obama’s task this time around might plausibly express it.” content or that of its users.” to square the rhetoric with the reality Leith singles out several speechwrit- Fortunately, Churchill was able to of his record, to prove that he’s some- ers who have accomplished just that— infuse his oratory with “moral con- thing more than what Hillary Clinton Ronald Millar for Margaret Thatcher, tent,” and its role in carrying England once called him, a man who just “gives and Peggy Noonan, from whose mem- through World War II has been widely speeches.” oir, What I Saw at the Revolution, he celebrated. Leith reminds us of the Leith’s interest in politics tends to quotes at some length. Noonan knew extraordinary effort he put into mak- overshadow some of the best features how to make the chickens cackle, and ing that rhetoric work, although Leith, of his book, his discussion of the ori- when necessary, to make grown men perhaps like many of his generation gins and formal development of rheto- cry. Her work with Ronald Reagan on (he was born the year Richard Nixon ric as a discipline, for instance, and the the famous “Boys of Pointe du Hoc” resigned), is less than enamored of definitions of rhetorical figures, which speech, delivered at Normandy on the Churchill’s rhetorical “high style.” But he works into his text and includes in 40th anniversary of D-Day, has earned the moral content of his work is some- a glossary. her a permanent spot in the speech- thing else. There’s chiasmus, as in the “Ask not writers’ hall of fame. Lincoln, Martin Luther King, and what your country can do for you, ask To conclude this discussion of Obama are also treated as speakers of what you can do for your country,” the words, here are some of the author’s high moral purpose. Leith praises the Kennedy/Sorenson ABBA pattern. Or last ones, a fine ending for his book: Gettysburg address, calls the “I Have a better, Dr. Johnson’s verdict to an aspir- “People have been talking each other Dream” speech “the pinnacle of twen- ing author: “Your manuscript is both in and out of fights and in and out of tieth-century American rhetoric,” and good and original; but the parts that bed since the first syllable formed on in his section on Obama, nicely titled are good are not original, and the parts the first ape-like prehistoric lip. The “The Audacity of Trope,” he hears in that are original are not good.” total corpus of everything they’ve ever Obama’s speeches an echo of both Lin- Then there’s zeugma, “a tricksy figure said is the object of study: the patterns coln and King. in which several clauses are governed by that obtain across centuries are testa- Obama, he writes, derives much of a single word. … Flanders and Swann, ment to our commonality; the cease- his strength as orator from the Bible. in their song ‘Have Some Madeira, less variation testament to the power “The language of the King James ver- M’Dear,’ really go to town on this figure: and elasticity of invention. Rhetoric is sion of the Bible echoes behind the ‘He had slyly inveigled her up to his flat/ inexhaustible.” strophic structure and parallelisms of To view his collection of stamps/ And Obama’s speeches.” The Bible in Amer- he said as he hastened to put out the cat/ John R. Coyne Jr. is a former White House ican oratory comes down through the The wine, his cigars and the lamps…’” speechwriter and co-author, with Linda Founding Fathers. But it also comes Leith also pays tribute to the person Bridges, of Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. down through “the rhetoric of the standing just behind the curtain—the and the American Conservative Movement.

48 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 Obama’s Nerds Democrat John Kerry. Election Day field operations were not Elections have clearly changed. The a traditional GOP strength. Republi- by Lloyd Green issueless politics of the 1950s, as Issen- can turnout strategy counted more on berg describes it, has given way to the message and mechanics than on ac- The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of politics of cleavage and confrontation. tual human contact. Phone banks and Winning Campaigns, Sasha Issenberg, At the same time, the electorate’s war- door-to-door volunteers armed with Crown, 357 pages ring factions are now at numerical and clipboards and smiles were more the demographic parity. stuff of unions, students, and Demo- ike football, the 2012 election is With these changes afoot, it is not cratic operatives. By contrast, the Re- a game of inches. Heading into surprising that a campaign’s ability to publican field operation was rich in the fall, the presidential election identify supporters, persuade wavering congressional staffers and lobbyists. Lremains close nationally. Every vote voters, and then get both to the polls The 2004 Bush campaign aimed to will count. on Election Day has become ever more change things by putting boots on the Enter Sasha Issenberg’s The Victory important. Issenberg stresses that in- ground early. During the summer of Lab, which posits that GOTV, or get- person outreach, peer pressure, and di- 2004, the Republican National Com- ting out the vote, is where elections are rect mail have emerged as the preferred mittee established a “Test Drive for won or lost. According to Issenberg, vehicles for reaching a targeted voter. W” operation to gear up for the fall “microtargeting” is now the byword of Television no longer delivers the same campaign. Voters identified as Bush successful campaigns. He also observes bang for the buck. supporters received three rounds of that American politics is riven by ideo- For example, The Victory Lab re- contact in person and by phone from logical conflict, that policy preferences counts how on the last do matter (particularly among better- weekend before the 2004 educated voters), and that it was not election, the Bush cam- always that way. But The Victory Lab’s paign sent out a four- subtitle overstates: none of these things page targeted mailer to Successful campaign tactics have a are very secret. select mailboxes across bipartisan life of their own. For example, the last presidential the country that ques- election won by a landslide was three tioned Kerry’s toughness, decades ago, when Ronald Reagan was his ability to lead the re-elected with just under 59 percent of country at a time of war, the vote. Since then, candidates have and his commitment to struggled to take an actual majority of getting Osama bin Laden. The Bush September onward. In the end, George the popular vote and to win by a mar- campaign itself viewed the mailer as W. Bush eked out the re-election that gin that does not look like an accident. over-the-top. But Bush strategist Alex had eluded his father. No candidate since Reagan has en- Gage saw the last-minute flyer as hav- In politics and in war, winning joyed a winning margin of 10 percent ing just the right visceral pitch to woo techniques do not stay secret for long. or more. potential Bush voters who had doubts Mark Halperin and John Harris wrote Putting things into perspective, about both candidates. To Team Bush, in their 2007 book, The Way to Win: Barack Obama was the first successful it was terror and war—and not social Taking the White House in 2008, of candidate since George H. W. Bush in issues—that carried their man past the how the Bush 1988 campaign used 1988 to win an absolute majority of the finish line first. opposition research to come roaring popular vote and a comfortable cush- On the other hand, the Bush cam- back after being down 17 points to ion. Obama beat John McCain by 7.3 paign also had its failures. It mailed Mike Dukakis and then how the 1992 points. George H.W. Bush had bested leaflets highlighting the president’s Clinton campaign further refined op- Mike Dukakis 53.3 to 45.6. Clean Skies Initiative to upscale voters position research with his War Room’s In contrast, Bill Clinton never broke in Pennsylvania’s Main Line suburbs. rapid-response operation. Successful the 50 percent mark in his two presi- Other leaflets went to Minnesota farm- campaign tactics have a bipartisan life dential bids. Al Gore won the popular ers, seeking to assuage their concerns of their own. vote in 2000 with only 48.38 percent of about sugar beets and free trade. Yet Enter the Obama 2008 campaign, all votes cast. In 2004, George W. Bush Bush lost both Pennsylvania and Min- which took microtargeting to a whole crossed the 50 percent threshold, with nesota. Even microtargeting has limits. new level, according to Issenberg. In 50.7 percent of the vote, a meager 2.4 The ground game also looms large for addition to Obama’s much-ballyhooed percent margin over Massachusetts both parties. According to Issenberg, presence in social media, the Obama

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 49 Arts&Letters campaign made a conscious decision swing states. McCain had fewer than mantha Power, now a special assistant to buy advertising on select bus routes 400 field offices nationwide. The re- to the president and a member of the in ten cities located in swing states, insults of the election tell it all. Local National Security Council staff; and cluding buses in Philadelphia, Miami, presence made a real difference. depart the White House for a post at Denver, Flint, and Akron. This way, Issenberg sheds light on the nexus Harvard. Other consortium members Obama’s demographic core would be between academe and the Democratic included Nobel laureate Daniel Kahn- continuously and silently reminded to Party. The fact that university faculty eman of Princeton and Max Bazer- vote for him. and administrators swooned over man of Harvard’s Kennedy School. Per Issenberg’s telling, Team Obama Obama in 2008 is no secret. According Issenberg wrongly attributes the was haunted by their rust-belt prima- to the Open Secrets campaign-contri- political mobilization of these aca- ry losses to Hillary Clinton. For the butions database, Columbia Univer- demics simply to their revulsion most part, she outperformed Obama sity employees donated more than towards Bush 43. The fact is that in the swing states. The Obama cam- $460,000 to the 2008 Obama cam- America’s universities have been mov- paign knew that Pennsylvania and paign. Harvard donated more than ing Democratic since the New Deal. Michigan would be fall battlegrounds $573,000 in the same cycle, including Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential and that Ohio had gone with the win- the $4,600 given by Elena Kagan, who campaign rested on college kids who went on to serve as went clean for Gene. In 1984, Co- Obama’s solicitor gen- lumbia University President Michael eral and now sits on Sovern played Ronald Reagan in Wal- Academic involvement in Democratic the Supreme Court. ter Mondale’s debate prep. Since Bill politics was a matter of personal The story was pretty Clinton’s 1992 campaign, Americans much the same out with graduate degrees have consis- conviction, talent, and culture. west. Stanford donat- tently voted for the Democratic presi- ed nearly $450,000 to dential candidate and academics have Obama. long had a soft spot for Democrats. But academic in- The consortium was really emblemat- ner of every presidential election since volvement in Democratic politics was ic of the New Class and reflected shifts 1960. To help fix things, the Obama more than a matter of money. It was a in American politics and society that campaign opened a hundred field of- matter of personal conviction, talent, had been underway even during the fices in Ohio, including five offices in and culture. According to The Vic- supposedly sleepy 1950s. Cuyahoga County. Enthusiastic Dem- tory Lab, the Obama campaign came Consortium members peppered ocratic voters with a history of reliable to rely on the Consortium of Behav- Democratic leaders with memos that turnout were wooed to become volun- ioral Scientists—in Issenberg’s words, stressed what behavioral science could teer leaders. Volunteer-leader metrics a “Fight Club” of 29 psychologists, do for politics. Issenberg reports on a were continuously monitored. economists, and law professors dedi- meeting between consortium leaders The Ohio volunteer effort was aug- cated to sending Democrats to Con- and Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, mented by phone banks, canvassing, gress and electing a Democrat presi- among others, at which the senators and data coordination. On Election dent. Consortium members dared were advised to stress voters’ sense Day 2008, Ohio and the rest of the not utter the group’s name in front of loss and to avoid speaking to their rust belt went for Obama. He even of strangers. Like the title of Richard aspirations. According to the consor- picked off traditionally Republican Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s 2008 book, tium, gloom and resentment could Indiana. Obama overcame his Mid- Nudge, the consortium’s favored tech- be turned into a winning hand. The west and rust-belt primary losses and niques involved peer pressure and be- Obama campaign came to rely upon won Ohio by four points. havioral modification. The candidate the consortium in shaping its message The scale and success of Obama’s was a product and the electorate was and getting out the vote. ground game becomes apparent when a lab rat. The Victory Lab has its shortcom- compared to the efforts of Team Mc- Thaler and Sunstein, then of the ings. It does not give the reader a Cain, a comparison Issenberg does University of Chicago, were consor- clear sense of what comes next. The not explicitly make. According to an tium members. Tellingly, Sunstein book plunks down in the midst of analysis by Micah Cohen of the New would be tapped by President Obama the 2010 election cycle and immedi- York Times’s FiveThirtyEight blog, to serve as the head of the White ately describes the battle for the U.S. Obama had more than 700 field of- House Office of Information and Senate seat from Colorado. Issen- fices, which were concentrated in the Regulatory Affairs (OIRA); marry Sa- berg narrates how a last-minute blitz

50 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 of nuanced emails and letters sent in We Are Not All yours truly has written about these top- white envelopes delivered a 15,000 ics), they can help us put key questions vote victory to Democrat Michael Westerners Now in context. Such as: is the U.S. losing Bennet. Then, the book jarringly reels global military and economic domi- backwards in time to 1919, the Uni- by Leon Hadar nance and heading towards decline as versity of Chicago, political science, other powers are taking over? and the art of campaigning. All of No One’s World: The West, the Rising The good news is that Kupchan’s this is informative. But the transition Rest, and the Coming Global Turn, book is just the right size—around 200 could have been smoother. Charles A. Kupchan, Oxford University pages—with not too many endnotes Issenberg does not give sufficient Press, 272 pages and a short but valuable bibliography. attention to why candidates lose. He Kupchan is readable without being appears to downplay the diagnosis of n Blind Oracles, his study of the too glib. He is clearly an “insider” (he the late Republican pollster Robert role of intellectuals in formulat- is a former National Security Council Teeter and his colleague Fred Steeper ing and implementing U.S. foreign staffer) but exhibits a healthy level of that George McGovern lost in 1972 Ipolicy during the Cold War, historian detachment. And Kupchan displays a because he struck voters as being un- Bruce Kuklick equated these scholars commendable willingness to adjust his able to “handle” the issues, rather than with the “primitive shaman” who per- grand vision to changing realities. on account of his ideology. forms “feats of ventriloquy.” In a book published ten years ago, One only has to look at the failed We tend to celebrate foreign-pol- The End of the American Era: U.S. For- 2012 presidential candidacy of Rick icy intellectuals as thinkers who try eign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Perry to be reminded that perception to transform grand ideas into actual Twenty-first Century, Kupchan ad- of ability still matters. During the Re- policies. In reality, their function has vanced the thesis that an integrating Eu- publican debates, Perry was unable to usually been to offer members of the ropean Union was rising as a counter- remember the names of the cabinet foreign-policy establishment rational- weight to the United States, with China departments that he had vowed to izations—in the form of “grand strate- secondary to the EU. That was his view abolish and came across as a loutish gies” and “doctrines,” or the occasional then. The thesis has since been over- and charmless caricature of George magazine article or op-ed—for doing taken—let’s say, crushed to death—by W. Bush. Ironically, Perry’s campaign what they were going to do anyway. the crisis in the eurozone and the failure was run was by Dave Carney, and Not unlike marketing experts, suc- of the EU to develop a unified, coherent both Perry and Carney are lauded in cessful foreign-policy intellectuals are foreign policy. But unlike neocons who The Victory Lab for microtargeting quick to detect a new trend, attach a spend much of their time trying to ex- Perry’s message during his campaigns sexy label to it (“Red Menace,” “Islamo- plain why, despite all the evidence to the for Texas governor. Competence still fascism”), and propose to their clients a contrary, they have always been right, matters. brand strategy that answers to the per- Kupchan doesn’t even revisit his now Issenberg concludes by conced- ceived need (“containment,” “détente,” defunct thesis. ing that the 2012 election will be less “counterinsurgency”). While this suggests that we should about persuading swing voters, who In No One’s World, foreign-policy in- treat his current book and its claims have grown disillusioned with Obama tellectual Charles Kupchan—a profes- that the global balance of power is and the economy, and more about sor of international affairs at George- shifting from the United States and changing the demographics of the town University and senior fellow at the “West” and towards the “Rest”— electorate with a particular emphasis the Council on Foreign Relations— non-Western nations like China, India, on minorities and women. Issenberg tackles the trend commonly referred to Brazil, and Turkey—with many grains is right. These days both Democrats as “American decline” or “declinism,” of salt, we should nevertheless give and Republicans are actively engaged against the backdrop of the Iraq War, Kupchan credit for pursuing a non- in voter suppression, according to the financial crisis, and the economic dogmatic, pragmatic, and empiricist Thomas Edsall of Columbia’s Journal- rise of China. approach to international relations. ism School. The culture wars remain While I share Kuklick’s skepticism Kupchan may once have worked on ever with us. about the near zero influence that intel- implementing the liberal-internation- lectuals have on creating foreign policy, alist agenda of the Clinton administra- Lloyd Green was opposition research counsel I’ve enjoyed reading what thinkers like tion, but the views advanced in his lat- to the George H.W. Bush campaign in 1988 Charles Kupchan have to say, and I est book—in particular his pessimism and served in the Department of Justice believe that if we don’t take them too about America’s ability to “manage” the between 1990 and 1992. seriously (this rule applies also to what international system and his emphasis

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 51 Arts&Letters on the role that history and culture ern hegemony must come to an end is just a system that allows govern- play in relationships between nation- at some point. But that won’t matter ments to harness wealth for aggres- states—place him in the intellectual since the Rest will end up being just sive nationalist policies. camp of realist foreign-policy intellec- like us—holding free elections, em- As many conservatives would point tuals like George Kennan and Henry bracing the free markets, committed out, the notion that we are all taking Kissinger, at a time when not many of to a liberal form of nationalism and part in an inexorable march towards them are around in Washington. to the separation of religion of state. enlightenment, prosperity, and lib- Kupchan’s thesis that America and Such values and practices will guaran- erty that culminates in the embrace its Western allies are losing their global tee that rising states like China and In- of liberal democracy, representative military, financial, and economic pow- dia bind themselves to a liberal inter- government, and free markets here, er, and that the rising non-Western national order based on functioning there, and everywhere is only one ver- powers are not going to adopt Wash- multilateral institutions, free interna- sion of history, described sometimes ington’s strategic agenda, may not tional trade, and collective security. as “Whig history.” sound too revolutionary these days, Kupchan doesn’t buy this vision. What is basically the story of the when even the most non-contrarian The “Western Way” is not being uni- emergence of constitutional democ- strategists and economists working for versalized, he argues, and the inter- racy in Britain and America has been the Pentagon and Wall Street recognize national system looks more and more applied broadly to describe the politi- that the dominance of the West is on like a mosaic of nations, each follow- cal and economic development of Eu- the wane. ing its own path towards moderniza- rope and West in general from around But in a chapter titled “The Next tion, a path determined by unique 1500 to 1800—and to explain why the Turn: The Rise of the Rest,” Kupchan historical circumstances and cultural West prospered and rose to global provides the reader with the “hard traditions that may not result in any- prominence while other parts of the cold facts” as he skims through fore- thing like our own liberal and demo- world, like the Ottoman Empire and casts made by government agencies cratic principles. China, stagnated and declined. and financial institutions predicting Hence, China can embrace a form Kupchan himself subscribes to a that China’s economy will pass Amer- of “communal autocracy,” Russia Whiggish narrative, in which decen- ica’s within the current decade. And chooses a system of “paternal autoc- tralized feudal power structures and while America is still overwhelmingly racy,” while the Arab world follows the rise of an enlightened middle class the greatest military power on the the route of “religious and tribal au- that challenged the monarchy, aris- planet, it is only a question of time, tocracy.” Iran remains a theocracy, tocracy, and the church led to Europe according to Kupchan, before China and other non-liberal political orders developing modern liberal states and overtakes the United States in this may flourish in parts of Latin America capitalism, while the Reformation ex- arena as well and contests America’s and Africa. posed religion to rational inquiry and strategic position in East Asia. “The In a way, Kupchan is doing here unleashed bloodshed that ultimately Chinese ship of state will not dock at what foreign-policy intellectuals do caused European societies to accept the Western harbor, obediently taking best, inventing catchy labels to de- religious diversity. The growing costs the berth assigned to it,” he concludes. scribe existing trends in China, Rus- of the modern state forced monarchs What lends Kupchan’s overall sia, and the Arab world that are fa- to share power with ever larger classes theme a certain conservative and miliar to anyone who follows current of citizens, while the rising middle Kennan-like quality is the challenge events. Kupchan argues, however, class provided the economic and intel- he poses to the reigning ideological that these trends are quite endur- lectual foundations for the Industrial axiom shared by U.S. and Western ing and that the United States and Revolution, which in turn improved elites since the end of the Cold War: Europe should deal with this reality education and science and established the notion that the core ideas of the instead of pursuing policies based the military power that allowed the modern West—enlightenment, secu- on wishful thinking—expecting, for West to achieve superiority over the larism, democracy, capitalism—will example, that the Islamists ruling more rigid hierarchical orders of the continue to spread to the rest of the Egypt and the communist-fascists in Ottoman Empire, India, China, and world, including to China and the Beijing will eventually be replaced by elsewhere. Middle East, and the Western order a bunch of liberal democrats. It ain’t Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of as it has evolved since 1945 will thus going to happen, Kupchan predicts. Political Order has argued that this Whig outlast the West’s own primacy. Free elections can in fact lead to the version of history may help explain how Even the most doctrinaire neocon victory of anti-Western and anti- Britain and America developed. But assumes that American and West- American leaders, while capitalism in other parts of Europe, such political

52 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 and economic changes as the rise of the The Spirit of Treason he was a spy for the Soviet Union, not modern state and notions of citizenship only after he was accused by Whittaker and political accountability were driven by Richard M. Reinsch II Chambers in 1948, but after his federal in large part by the villains of the Whig conviction in 1950, even until his death narrative, including monarchy and the Alger Hiss: Why He Chose Treason, in 1996? Shelton’s verdict on Hiss’s re- Catholic Church. Christina Shelton, Threshold, 352 pages fusal to recant or apologize is that he There have always been different believed as a matter of conscience in the paths towards political and economic n his piercing Harvard Commence- rational constructive project of commu- modernity, not only in contemporary ment Address of 1978, Aleksandr nism. For Hiss, the vindication of man China, India, Iran, and Brazil, but also Solzhenitsyn, the former prisoner rested in communist soulcraft. in Europe and the West between 1500 Iof the Soviet Gulag who found free- There is no new factual informa- and 1800—and later, with the rise of dom and truth within its strictures, of- tion in Shelton’s book, or none that I communism and fascism. Russia is an fered a “measure of bitter truth” to his could detect. Quite simply, the ground example of a nation whose road to- American audience. Solzhenitsyn re- has been trod, plowed, and sifted by so wards economic growth has been very ferred to an “anthropocentric human- many that a book on Hiss must, of ne- different from that taken by the An- ism” that had enveloped the West in cessity, investigate the existential ques- glo-Americans, or for that matter, the the modern period and shaped the un- tions surrounding his life and charac- Germans, the French, or the Chinese. derstanding many Americans had of ter if it is to have value. Shelton retells Kupchan could have provided us science, technology, government, and Hiss’s coming to Washington in 1933 as with a more simplified set of argu- what it means to be a human being. a concealed radical lawyer in the New ments to support his thesis—that Such a “rationalistic humanism” can Deal. He first worked for the Agricul- China and Iran are not “like us”—by be seen, Solzhenitsyn announced, in tural Adjustment Administration, later recognizing that the political and the “practiced autonomy of man from transferring to the Justice Department economic transformation of different any higher force above him.” European states was not based on a Solzhenitsyn strikingly pro- standard model of development. We claimed that the West had actu- Why did Alger Hiss doggedly therefore shouldn’t be surprised that ally joined with its Communist Egypt and Brazil are also choosing foes in affirming a rationalistic maintain his innocence even their own non-Whig paths of change and materialistic humanism, until his death in 1996? and growth. leaving the West incapable of un- Contrary to Kupachan’s narrative, derstanding the true enemy. Both as the historian John Darwin argues East and West saw man “as the in his masterpiece After Tamerlane: center of all.” The West’s late-modern and then to State, where he occupied The Global History of Empire, Europe’s humanism was cut off from its Chris- several different high-level positions. rise to pre-eminence was not a mo- tian heritage, Solzhenitsyn argued, Hiss joined the Ware Group at some ment in the long-term ascent of the and had no principled objection to point in late 1933 while working at the “West” and the triumph of its superior the more extreme forms of material- AAA. The Ware Group consisted of values. “We must set Europe’s age of ism and rationalism that promised the prominent civil servants in New Deal expansion firmly in its Eurasian con- human will the ability to construct a agencies and was ultimately controlled text,” Darwin writes, and recognize perfected political, social, and techno- by the GRU, Soviet military intelli- that there was nothing foreordained logical existence. Thus liberalism loses gence. Although initially something about Europe’s rise—or its current de- to radicalism, radicalism becomes of a communist study group, Ware’s cline. Great powers like the Ottomans, socialism, and socialism gives way to members were willing, as part of their the Safavids, the Mughals, the Man- communism. Solzhenitsyn’s power- commitment to Soviet communism, to chus, the Russians and the Soviets, the fully stated argument about the trajec- engage in espionage on its behalf. Japanese and the Nazis have risen and tory of modern rationalism supplies Whittaker Chambers assumed fallen for reasons all their own. Today much of the answer Christina Shelton control of the Ware Group in 1934, the Rest may be rising. But it has nev- is reaching for in Alger Hiss: Why He his first covert assignment as a Soviet er been anyone’s world. Chose Treason. agent. Here began the ideological and Shelton’s book probes a question personal friendship between Hiss and Leon Hadar, a Washington-based journalist many observers of Alger Hiss have long Chambers that would shatter when and foreign policy analyst, is the author of wondered about: why did Hiss doggedly Chambers left communism and the Sandstorm: Policy Failure in the Middle East. maintain his innocence of charges that Soviet underground in 1938. Most

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 53 Arts&Letters of what Hiss clandestinely provided Communist ideology.” Hiss, Shelton Milshtein, a deputy chief of the GRU’s to Chambers were copies—typed by observes, has been a symbol in the first directorate during Yalta, and who Hiss’s wife, Priscilla, on their infamous “philosophical political struggle within was probably Hiss’s handler at one point Woodstock typewriter—of documents the United States for more than two in the late 1930s, is informed specula- and materials he procured from the centuries … between individuals … tion. So too is a related contention that State Department. Chambers then who believed in statism … and those Hiss was likely holding papers beyond transferred these documents to other who advocate individual liberty and his pay grade at Yalta—on America’s Soviet agents. Shelton provides these limited, decentralized government.” position concerning the postwar status facts not to re-establish Hiss’s guilt but She underscores the informative light of Poland, managing the internal Chi- to frame the depth of his belief and his cast on Hiss’s communist allegiance by nese conflict vis-a-vis Japan, Nazi repa- willingness to aid the Soviet Union. his morally muted reactions to the Bol- rations, and other issues—and that he While Shelton’s book is a philosoph- shevik Revolution, the Nazi-Soviet Pact likely passed these materials to Milsh- ical and psychological investigation of of 1939, Stalin’s purges, and Chairman tein. Shelton admits that these claims Hiss, with sociological observations Mao’s inducement of famine, not to have never been corroborated by “docu- about progressive elites tossed in for mention Hiss’s reaction to Chambers’s mentary evidence.” good measure; her work stands on the defection. Hiss doubted that millions A far-too-short chapter on Whittak- shoulders of historical giants. Allen had died in Mao’s engineered famines er Chambers presents the details of his Weinstein’s Perjury and The Haunted because “the problem of liquidation underground connection and friend- Wood, the latter coauthored with Al- which Mao would have undertaken ship with Hiss but omits Chambers’s exander Vassiliev, are of great signifi- must have been minimized” given the more searing and introspective analy- cance. The latest historical addition vast numbers of supporters of Chiang ses of Hiss and of communist ideology. to understanding Soviet espionage in Kai-Shek who fled the country or died Shelton relies on Chambers’s striking America and one that provides further, in the internal war. Of this, Shelton discernment of why progressive New painstaking confirmation of Hiss’s asks, “Was Hiss really suggesting that Dealers were unable to see traitorous guilt, came in 2009 with John Earl Mao killed fewer people because there communists in their midst: he argued Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander were less available to kill?” that progressives’ ideals were largely Vassiliev’s Spies: The Rise and Fall of Perhaps sensing that something fulfilled by communists and the for- the KGB in America. Based on infor- more must be said about Hiss’s con- mer differed from the latter merely in mation compiled by the ex-KGB agent tribution to America’s foreign policy, the interpretation and implementation Vassiliev during his three years of work Shelton focuses a chapter on Hiss’s role of those ideals within a democracy. The in the KGB archives after the fall of the at the 1945 Yalta Conference. The ar- venom progressives directed at Cham- Soviet Union, the authors make these guments made here at times take us bers for charging their colleagues with concluding remarks on Hiss’s guilt: beyond the facts. This is not to say that betrayal resulted, in part, from the in- what Shelton alleges is wrong, but that ability of these same well-heeled liber- [Hiss] was identified in Soviet in- the evidence, at this moment, does not als to believe that people who shared telligence documents by his real fully corroborate her analysis. their social and educational back- name and three different cover GRU, not the KGB, ran clandestine grounds and broad left-wing humani- names, each of which is clearly and operations in the United States until tarian views could be committed com- demonstrably linked to him. KGB late in the 1940s. The GRU’s influence munists and Soviet spies. officers and CPUSA underground ended with the titanic defections of Chambers’s deeper point, which leaders knew him as a member of Igor Gouzenko and Elizabeth Bentley anticipates Solzhenitsyn’s argument, the Soviet apparatus. Several of his in 1945, which compromised GRU’s is that progressives find it difficult to fellow agents … identified him as underground networks in Canada and differentiate themselves from commu- an agent in confidential commu- America. Incidentally, both Gouzenko nists because both groups have a simi- nications that made their way back and Bentley included Hiss among doz- lar understanding of human action. to Moscow. And its own damage ens of other names they provided to Progressives and communists believe assessments confirm that Soviet the federal government. in man operating with an unbounded intelligence knew that Alger Hiss While KGB archives have been made and liberating reason, if only he can belonged to it. Case closed. at least partially available to research- break free of the historical shackles ers, the GRU archives have not been that have constrained him thus far. Shelton builds on this consensus and subject to similar review. Thus, Shelton’s This is the basis for the oft-heard line explores “Hiss in the strategic context claim that Hiss at the 1945 Yalta Con- “No enemies to the left.” of American political philosophy and ference met with Soviet general Mikhail Shelton, unfortunately, misses the

54 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 opportunity to contrast Chambers and A Stage Is the World ing artistic director, Antoni Cimolino, Hiss in the full extent of their com- announced the 2013 season with a mitments. To have made this contrast by Noah Millman promise to “put the actor and the text would have greatly illuminated why firmly at the centre of what we do. … Hiss remained an inveterate defender Stratford Shakespeare Festival, In a culture that has become so visu- of his innocence. This point was never Stratford, Ontario ally oriented, I think people crave the lost on Whittaker Chambers. He stated kind of storytelling that relies above that the connection both men shared, ach summer for the past 15 all on the uniquely compelling power even in opposition, was the force of their years, my wife and I have of the spoken word.” The comment existential allegiances, which, Chambers trekked to the heart of southern was interpreted by some as a rebuke observed, a bourgeois America could EOntario pork country to attend the to his predecessor, Des McAnuff, who not grasp. Paradoxically, Chambers’ exit largest classical repertory theatre in famously adorned a production of from communism provides the deep- North America, the Stratford Shake- “Twelfth Night” with a flying refrig- est source for understanding why Alger speare Festival. erator and interrupted a scene to have Hiss chose treason. Chambers described It’s a strange place to put a major John Lennon deliver a pizza. his own conversion by evoking language international theater, midway be- I enjoyed that production of from Henri de Lubac’s The Drama of tween Buffalo and Detroit—not the “Twelfth Night”—as I have many of Atheistic Humanism, a work he adored: middle of nowhere, but a good dis- Mr. Cimolino’s as well. From where I tance from anywhere. That isolation sit, what distinguishes our culture is What I had been fell from me like is part of the point. Away from the not its visual emphasis but its restless- dirty rags. The rags that fell from distractions of home, body and mind ness and the mediated nature of our me were not only Communism. can reorient around the theatrical ex- experience. We watch movies we can What fell was the whole web of perience. And that experience isn’t barely see on our iPads, but we are the materialist modern mind— confined to the stage. Most everybody also assaulted by text from our RSS the luminous shroud which it else in town has some connection to and Twitter feeds. What we experi- has spun about the spirit of man, the theatre, and has paralyzing in the name of ratio- seen the same shows nalism the instinct of his soul you have. You see the A jejune Romeo matures into Hamlet, for God, denying in the name of actors around town, knowledge the reality of the soul behaving remarkably then ripens further into Prospero; and its birthright in that mystery like normal people. a beloved Rosalind hardens into on which mere knowledge falters Though you leave the Lady Macbeth, then mellows and shatters at every step. theater at the end of each performance, into Mistress Quickly. Chambers’s conversion was to a the theater never re- world of man under God and of un- ally leaves you. derstanding that man’s vocation was Continuity stretches through time ence too infrequently is inescapable to live and suffer with his freedom and as well as space. Over the years, a je- intimacy with another human being. dignity upon a stage that man did not june Romeo matures into Hamlet, Alone among the narrative arts, live create. To choose communism was to then ripens further into Prospero; a theater can help us achieve that inti- engage in metaphysical revolt. Hiss beloved Rosalind hardens into Lady macy. And everything else in a pro- refused such humility and wedded his Macbeth, then mellows into Mistress duction—striking images or perfect spirit to bringing a new liberated world Quickly. You evolve alongside them. diction or Shakespeare’s poetry it- into existence at the cost of friendships, Shakespeare often analogized life to self—should properly serve to aid that honesty, mercy, even loyalty to one’s stage performance, but seeing familiar achievement. country. Chambers’s self-immolation actors move through these roles and The current season, running in testifying against Hiss, and Hiss’s re- reflecting on how you yourself have through the end of October, provides fusal to admit guilt, is best understood progressed (or declined) through your ample opportunities for a theater-goer in this unforgiving spiritual light. own seven ages, it begins to seem less to achieve that intimacy, with some of an analogy than a literal truth. the greatest characters portrayed by Richard M. Reinsch II is a fellow at Liberty Stratford, celebrating its 60th an- some of the most accomplished clas- Fund and is the author of Whittaker Cham- niversary season this year, is itself sical actors in North America, par- bers: The Spirit of a Counterrevolutionary. moving into a new age. The incom- ticularly in the three Shakespearean

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 55 Arts&Letters

much undercuts the main point of the play’s pro- logue—the call to awake our own imaginations, to come to really feel we are there, in Agincourt. And without the airbrushing, what we get is a parade we can’t quite march to.

David Hou/Stratford Shakespeare Festival Shakespeare Hou/Stratford David Almost lost in the spectacle, Aaron Krohn delivers a subtle and dis- concerting portrait of the warlike king. I found myself thinking of our former president, Krohn’s fellow Texan, who proclaimed himself “the decider” yet was assiduous about dis- claiming responsibility for anything that happened as a consequence of his wars. I noticed how Krohn’s Henry never seemed to get a crease in his uniform, never seemed to get a spot of blood on him (at one point, he wipes his sword fastidiously), seems not so much to be hiding his emotions as never quite feeling them Aaron Krohn in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s “Henry V” in the first place. Even in the famous “upon the offerings: “Henry V,” directed by promise that this tale of long-ago king” speech, where Henry is forced DesMcAnuff; “Cymbeline,” directed war would be brought home by ac- to confront the extent of his respon- by Antoni Cimolino, and “Much Ado tors dressed like us, speaking directly sibility, Krohn seemed to evade that About Nothing,” directed by Christo- to us, asking us to imagine our own recognition. And I could easily imag- pher Newton. kinship with our distant ancestors. ine President Bush teasingly bullying Productions of “Henry V” tend ei- But what it turned out to portend was an inferior the way Krohn’s Henry did ther to present a patriotic pageant or just another pageant, only without Williams, a soldier the disguised king a scathing critique of war. McAnuff the usual airbrushing. So: a parade encountered the night before battle aimed for something different. Before of sails rolls off the stage and down and who expressed a lack of enthusi- the play has properly begun, the cast the aisles to signify the expeditionary asm for fighting, perhaps dying, under makes its way onto the stage in re- crossing of the Channel; a parade of Henry’s banner. hearsal clothes. Finally, Tom Rooney archers launches their arrows upstage Other excellent performances comes out and declares, “O, for a to signify the triumph of the English dotted the production, particu- muse of fire.” Another actor picks up longbow at Agincourt. But Henry also larly among the Eastcheap set, Tom the chorus; the narrator role is passed orders the French prisoners marched Rooney’s passionate Pistol, Randy from hand to hand across the cast. into the traps, to be burned alive. Hughson’s peace-and-mischief-mak- The message: this is the story of our The trouble with this approach is ing Bardolph, and Lucy Peacock’s community and how it came to be. that pageants, by their nature, are underplayed, and hence more-mov- I was excited by this opening, the not terribly dramatic. Showing us so ing, Hostess. (Falstaff even gets a last

56 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 laugh from inside his enormous cof- of the production, Cymbeline stands real bitterness in these lines, suggest- fin.) These marchers to their own spotlighted center stage, suddenly ing they are not merely a pro forma drums naturally never manage to fall surrounded by a cast who look decid- masculine complaint. He thinks he into step with the parade—that’s part edly skeptical that this fairy tale has was the wronged party. of Shakespeare’s point. But McAnuff’s reached its apparently happy end. This makes his turn toward Bea- staging tries to press them into file, What are we to make of this frame? trice, after the famous overhearing and rather than giving them proper Unfortunately for the production, scene, more powerful, but more im- representation, this only leaves them I really don’t know. It appears to be portantly it lends an edge to his rela- looking out of place. When the play an attempt to re-center the play on tionship with Claudio, his reluctance ends, with the descent of the Cana- the titular character, whereas usually to challenge him driven not so much dian flag, the promise of that open- it revolves around his much-more- by fellowship as identification. Clau- ing—that this play will tell us how we dominant daughter (played here by dio, after all, thinks he is the wronged became who we are—remains unful- the finely vulnerable and strong Cara party vis-à-vis Hero. And Tyrone Sav- filled. Ricketts). But though portrayed with age may be the first Claudio I’ve ever “Cymbeline” is another story about a more kingly vigor than usual, Cymbe- seen who made the infamous cad at war between Britain and a continental line remains opaque, which makes it least somewhat sympathetic, because power but set within an absurdly com- difficult for him to anchor the play. sincere, if stupid. He plays him as the plex fairly tale. The play is like a smor- This “Cymbeline” felt to me more young Sean Penn might have, power- gasbord of Shakespearean tropes—the like a collection of powerful mo- ful emotions roiling a shallow pool. cross-dressed heroine; the husband ments—a superlatively tense seduc- Christopher Newton has set his tricked into jealous rage; the father fu- tion, a spectacular battle scene—than a “Much Ado About Nothing” in 19th- rious at his daughter’s choice of mate; fully persuasive play. The performance century Brazil, an appropriate locale we even cross the ancient Britain of that stayed with me longest was Gra- for the persistent themes of honor, “King Lear” with the ancient Rome of ham Abbey’s exceptionally powerful male and female. Others have com- “Antony and Cleopatra” and, simulta- Posthumous Leonatus, a character plained about the giant staircase that neously, the Renaissance Italy of “The who too often comes off as inferior to dominates the stage (and blocks some Merchant of Venice.” his royal mistress. And a play that on sight lines) or have applauded the art- The bewildering array of plots, all the surface sides overwhelmingly with ful weaving of Latin music and dance of which come together in the rec- the notion that blood will true winds through the production. What I val- ognition scene to end all recognition up vindicating the only character not ued most was how these two key per- scenes, can be quite a challenge to a to the manor born. formances enhanced my understand- director. Cimolino’s approach is to My favorite Shakespeare producing of the relationships that drive the play it fairly straight. His ancient Brit- tion of the season was the third be- comedy. ain looks Elizabethan, but he lets his cause it most successfully expanded The Stratford season ranges far be- Italians be first century or 16th as the my understanding of the play. In most yond Shakespeare, including musicals scene demands, and his skin-clad rus- productions of “Much Ado About like “42nd Street” and “The Pirates of tics could be from any age. He doesn’t Nothing,” the Claudio-Hero plot is Penzance.” For my money, the high- distract us with a “concept”; his goal is something of a bore. We want to get lights of the non-Shakespearean por- to let the story tell itself through the back to Beatrice and Benedick’s badi- tion of the program are Thornton poetry, of which there is plenty—and nage. But there’s a back story to their Wilder’s warm and rueful comedy a cast fully capable of making it sing. battle, and this is the first production “The Matchmaker,” Sophocles’s astrin- I’ve seen that tied that back story to gent tragedy “Elektra,” and “Hirsch,” a ut this hodgepodge of a story won’t the plot that dominates the play. one-man tour-de-force portrayal of a Btell itself, and Cimolino knows Beatrice and Benedick were in flawed giant of Canadian theatre his- it. So, as with McAnuff’s “Henry V,” love, once—or, as Beatrice says of tory. But to truly appreciate this con- he’s created a frame to help us inter- Benedick’s heart, “he lent it me awhile; tinental treasure, you have to go back, pret what we see. His play opens on and I gave him use for it.” For some season after season, until you become the king, Cymbeline (Geraint Wyn reason, Benedick broke things off. We a part of it and it of you. Davies), in bed, dreaming he is sur- don’t know why, but Benedick muses, rounded by the other characters, and when explaining why he remains a A complete list of Noah Millman’s reviews crying out his daughter’s name—In- bachelor, about the inevitability of of the 2012 Stratford season can be found at nogen! The bed is whisked off, and the wearing horns—i.e., a fear of cuckold- http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ play proper begins. Then, at the end ry. Ben Carlson’s Benedick exhibits a shakesblog/the-stratford-2012-season/.

OCTOBER 2012 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE 57 Taki

Taki’s Top Shelf

stopped reading novels long ago. obscure poverty, and a fascinating sub- living, easier service, and very easy sex. When those arch-phonies writ- ject to boot. His short stories were top Durrell’s Alexandria is a dream city, ing magic realism became house- of the line, as were his novels 10 North inhabited by pashas, sophisticated for- hold words, I dropped out quicker Frederick, From the Terrace, and The eigners, mysterious women, rich mer- Ithan you can say Raymond Chandler. Lockwood Concern. chants, ragamuffin street vendors, drug Now that’s what I call a novel—the stuff And speaking of underrated writers, dealers, and spies of all colors and na- Chandler churned out about old El Lay, what about the master, W. Somerset tionalities. As he writes, “the flesh com- everyone gulping booze and puffing Maugham? I wouldn’t dare call him that ing alive, trying the bars of its prison.” I away like steam engines, the only ex- to his face, but Willy was a great stylist, used to play tennis with the great Baron ercise taken mostly between the sheets. a wonderful short-story writer, and The von Cramm in the Gezira club every Crime writers have always had an infe- Razor’s Edge is one of the masterpieces morning, gamble in the Mohamed Ali riority complex about their work, but of English prose. Larry Darrell’s mini- club (only foreigners and Egyptian pa- they sure beat some of the clowns pos- mal subsistence—by choice—in order shas permitted) in the afternoon, and ing as novelists nowadays. Chandler to cultivate the life of the spirit is a les- do the outdoor nightclubs at night. I was was a master of style, a serious writer son some of our present masters of the in love with a Justine type who drove me who applied his classical English edu- universe would do well to ponder. crazy despite my youth and lust for life. cation to the task of creating rich slang. Norman Mailer’s An American Those were the days. And nights. He turned detective stories into art, Dream was outrageously provocative Durrell is hardly read nowadays. labeling Los Angeles the city “with the in the existential angst of the hero, Ste- Some of the untalented and illiterate personality of a paper cup.” phen Rojack. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of phonies who write unreadable prose Chandler taught himself to write the Vanities is a modern classic, illus- and pose as writers and critics dismiss by churning out pastiches of Heming- trating exactly what Larry Darrell had many of those I have mentioned as way, the other writer I read when very foreseen as capitalism’s soul-wrenching small fry. It’s like insects calling lions young, a man who along with Fitzger- weakness. Gore Vidal’s Washington weaklings. ald formed my life. After reading The D.C. had me enthralled about the go- No one of my generation can write Sun Also Rises I had to go to Pamplona ings on inside the Beltway, a place I’d about novels without mentioning The and run the bulls, chase hard-drinking choose instead of jail, but only just. Catcher in the Rye, which I read when women like Lady Brett Ashley, and get Which brings me to Lawrence I was 14. The acute observations of a into drunken fights in Paris nightclubs. Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Justine, boy alone in a world of hypocrisy gave Fitzgerald was even worse for me. All Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea. Each me confidence that the images I had of Jay Gatsby did was party, as did Dick novel is meaningless on its own. The certain people weren’t so far off. Salin- Diver and Tommy Barban in Tender Is structure of the quartet works perfect- ger was the opposite of Waugh, whose the Night. All three had character, were ly, but it is the exoticism of the setting Vile Bodies I adored however much inwardly sensitive and decent, and all which, as they say, blew my mind. The I loathed the writer. Salinger wrote three threw their lives away for women. quartet was written between 1957 and about love actually, Waugh, a not-so- John O’Hara was another writer I 1960, the period I had been sent by my closeted queen, about guilt. adored when still a schoolboy. His Ap- father to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, as Graham Greene and George Orwell pointment in Samarra left me shaken it was then called, as punishment for complete this very incomplete list of and fascinated as to how quickly one’s running up debts. He owned the big- my favorites. Greene is our greatest life can collapse. O’Hara was obsessed gest textile mills of the region. I spent Catholic writer, and Orwell predicted with the world of the rich, forgivable every weekend in Alexandria and what our free world would turn into. enough for someone who rose from Cairo, back then magical places of easy Hooray for all of the above.

58 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE OCTOBER 2012 ANYTIME. ANYWHERE.

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