Traditionalists and Libertarians: A Flippant Chart: Under Construction

Political Operatives: Caught In Their Own Snare

In September 2010, Republican political operatives fell on their faces. They could not make the case for "pragmatism" over "ideology." Defying their wisdom, Delaware voters chose Tea Party candidate Christine O'Donnell over institutional leftist Republican Mike Castle.

Senior Editor Jonathan Chait of The New Republic believes that the operatives were too effective in scaring the voters with anti-Obama propaganda, a message that the operatives do not believe themselves:

"Now, most elite Republicans understand that the red meat fed to the base isn't exactly right. It's useful to scare the daylights out of the activists, but writers for [The Weekly] Standard and [The Wall Street] Journal editorial page understand that 'freedom,' as most people understand the term, is not really at risk. They understand as well that politics is a little more complicated than 'if Republicans stay true to conservatism, they cannot lose.' ... But the conservative base is not in on the joke."

In 1996 Lind wrote:

"American conservatism is dead... The conservative intellectual movement was the first element of mainstream conservatism to fail... [It] fell apart beginning in 1992, as a result of the rise of the far right of Pat Robertson, Patrick Buchanan, and anti-government militias... In the 1990's, televangelist Pat Robertson, in the manner of the demagogic radio priest Father Coughlin in the 1930's, put together a powerful grass-roots political movement, the Christian Coalition, while disseminating the familiar ideology of the far-right: a conspiracy theory blaming wars and revolutions on a secret cabal of Jewish bankers, Freemasons, Illuminati, atheists, and internationalists. Faced with a challenge to the integrity of the conservative movement far greater than that posed by the John Birch Society, the leaders of intellectual conservatism—William F. Buckley, Jr., Irving Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz—chose unilateral surrender. They devised tortured exonerations of the anti-Semitic theories purveyed by Pat Robertson... The result was an exodus of the major young intellectuals..."

This theory of Michael Lind's is as fascinatingly bizarre as anything Pat Robertson believes. It notes correctly the obvious situation that Buckley's movement has somehow turned irrelevant. Yet Lind's notion that Jewish Neoconservatives signed a blood pact with Robertson, however entertaining, is not the part that matters. Notice how the "failure" of intellectual conservatism is attributed to the activity of intellectuals in their relations with political operatives and hence in their rôle as political operatives themselves. There is no attempt to define or understand the theoretical realm of intellectual conservatism or to explore the causes of its downfall on the theoretical level. The premise of his analysis is, of course, that intellectual conservatism has no integrity as a doctrine, none whatsover—that it is only a fantasy in the service of demagoguery. Lind is preaching to a Jewish liberal choir.

And of course Buckley receives no credit for his torturously fair book on antisemitism from 1993, which included the responses of Jewish critics.

John Judis's theory of the great intellectual conservative crack-up, also Judeo-centric, is discussed below. It deals with sentiments of conservative intellectuals themselves, however narrowly.

These young conservative intellectuals who left the sinking ship of intellectual conservatism are unknown to me. Lind has sometimes claimed that he is himself an "intellectual conservative," with the implication, naturally, that anyone to his right is crazy. Is he also claiming to be the Moses of this "exodus"? Apparently he was once a water boy in the offices of National Review.

My analysis of the crack-up appears on this webpage, and doesn't have much to do with who was or was not a Jew, although some people in the story did show bad taste and a great lack of great-souled-ness. The main Straussian-Neoconservative problem is not Jewishness but agnosticism and indifference to civilization's religious core.

How we got the word "Intellectual":

Maurice Barrès (1862-1923), French novelist, critic, nationalist demagogue and antisemite, attacked the literary liberals who defended Captain Alfred Dreyfus against false charges of espionage, calling them "intellectuals." Their entire view of the world, he said, was articulated in abstractions. "I am not an intellectual; I desire, above all, that one should speak in French." Intellectuals were "logicians of the absolute" who persuade themselves "that society ought to be grounded upon logic and that it rests in fact upon necessities that are prior and perhaps foreign to individual reason." Barrès's attack is a good example of the hypocritical attack of an élitist upon the élites, as well as a rehash of Burke's attack on the Jacobin "metaphysicians of politics." The political discourse of France in 1898 was as ridiculous as America's in 2010.

Where we got the term:

Antoine Destutt, Comte de Tracy, was the author of "Elémens d'idéologie" (1801-1815). Ideology, he taught, was the true and ultimate science of man, comprising in itself the sciences of psychology, of ethics, and of politics. It would perfect man and his institutions. Nevertheless, since man was purely an animal, ideology was a branch of zoology. Napoleon called Destutt de Tracy an "ideologue." Adams all but called him an idiot. Marx called him "ein fischblütige Bourgeoisdoktrinär"—a "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire."

Scale of Political Enthusiasm?

My cynical professor, Swift scholar Hugh Ormsby-Lennon, suggested that this detail from Hogarth's 1762 etching, "Credulity, Superstition, and Fanaticism," should accompany my chart, particularly as a comment on the political conversions of the original Neoconservatives from Trotskyism and other leftisms. The images atop the thermometer are of famous 18th-century ghosts. The bulb is a distempered human brain. It rests on a copy of Wesley's "Sermons" and a copy of Glanvil's "On Witches." Glanvil, of course, invented the pluralist concept "climate of opinion."

WHO WAS LEWIS LAPHAM?

A Texaco heir and son of the American Revolution, who likes to describe ambitious politicians and pundits as "terminal narcissists," Lapham likes also to dine out on old anecdotes of his past. Who can blame him?

"I grew up as an idealist," he says. "I was ten years old in 1945 and my grandfather was the mayor of San Francisco. That year, the United Nations charter was written at the San Francisco opera house, and I was excused from school to attend all the plenary sessions. So at the age of ten I was passing canapés to Jack Kennedy, Molotov and Alger Hiss."

(My goodness, this places me at two degrees of separation from our greatest traitor since Benedict Arnold.)

At age twenty-two in 1957, as a freshly minted product of Hotchkiss, Yale, and Magdalene College Cambridge, Lapham considered becoming a spook.

"When I came back from Cambridge, having given up the idea of being a historian, I stopped in Washington on the way to San Francisco and had an interview with the Agency. Yale was a recruiting outpost during the late forties and the fifties, and a couple of my English professors had sort of mumbled over drinks at Morrie's that if I was ever at a loose end in Washington to call this number. So I called the number and I went. The CIA in those days did not yet have its offices in Langley, Virginia, it was in temporary headquarters which were quonset huts down near the Lincoln Memorial.

"The examinations went on for about a week—physical, mental, and psychological... I got through those and finally I got to the interview ... with some of what the Agency called the 'younger guys' [who] must've been in their late twenties, early thirties. There were three or four of them, all Yale and all George Bush kind of Yale, I mean, from the Defense Club, EKE—it was that preppy tone. They were very pleased with themselves, and it was like being interviewed for the best fraternity in the world, and I was going to get to play the big varsity game of the Cold War.

"I had studied for this exam. I hadn't quite written things on the cuff of my shirt, but I was prepared to tell you how many roads there were through the Ardennes Forest, and where was the Fulda Gap, and the Romanov dynasty, and the tragedy of the Hapsburgs, and Lenin's early life. I was up for that kind of question, and the first question was, 'You are standing on the thirteenth tee at the National Golf Club links in Southampton. What club do you hit?'

"Now, it so happened that I'd played that golf course and knew the hole. It's a short hole, so if you said 'driver,' you'd be wrong. . . . I said 7-iron, and I got it.

"The second question was: You're coming in on the final tack at the Hay Harbor on Fishers Island in the late afternoon. What tack do you take? I don't remember what the answer was, but I got it right because I had sailed at Fishers Island.

"Third question was, 'Does Minxie Haines wear a slip?' Minxie was the great nymphomaniac figure of the Ivy League circuit in the fifties. She was a wild thing, as the expression had it. I didn't know, because I'd never had carnal knowledge of the young lady. So I said, 'I can't answer that question. My information is secondhand, rumors. I heard a rumor of Belgian lace but it's unconfirmed.'

"And then I said, 'Besides that, clearly I have made a mistake. I apologize for wasting your time,' and I got up and walked out.

"I have never been surprised at the blunders of the CIA since that day, because these people were deeply self-absorbed and they were not really going to learn much, so that when they got it wrong about the end of the Cold War and they got it wrong about Vietnam, that didn't shock me."

Delightful anecdote, but do the questions mean that the interviewers were as trivial as he portrays them, or rather that they had indeed marked their man?

In the early 1980's Lapham arranged for the magazine's permanence and for the perpetuity of his editorial tenure by garnering the largest Macarthur Foundation "genius grant" in history.

Clever as he was, would Lapham have been clever enough to infuse the CIA with the perspicacity he felt it lacking? He failed to direct me as his reporter on the impending conservative crack-up in 1984. Failed, that is, to get the article out of me that he wanted, no matter how tight my grasp of the subject—or to get the article that his audience would understand.

I submitted my draft next to The New Republic. Hendrik Hertzberg replied, "This is a fascinating and strange work, but it is not in a million years ... a New Republic piece. Are there no conservative journals imaginative enough to publish it?"

In 1986, TNR published John B. Judis's account of the old conservatives' repudiation of the neoconservatives at The Philadelphia Society. The title on the cover was "The Conservative Mental Breakdown." If TNR editors had been smart enough to keep a copy of my piece, they would have been smart enough to send Judis to the meeting. As it is, he only read Tonsor's tirade when it was published in National Review. Judis, a blinkered leftist, thought it all boiled down to anti-semitism. Lapham missed his chance to scoop TNR, and to do the story right.

Lapham always wanted to be different, or to get someone's goat. in 1980 it seemed that the intellectual conservatives were finally pulling their act together; it seemed that a new journalistic climate might be forming in which a tony magazine could afford to take snide attitudes about overblown reputations on both the left and the right. But it was only a new and more intense polarization that was forming. Although he flirted briefly with conservative writers, he foresaw that the conservative ship would sink very soon and that the liberal liner was leaving momentarily on a fresh voyage. He didn't want to be left on the dock. Perhaps, if anything, I helped him see that the conservative ship was sinking right in the harbor.

In the attempt to strike a clever tone in his political criticism, Lapham only seemed frivolous.

The picture above shows Lapham with his daughter Delphina in 1988 in their New York apartment filled with gilt-gesso furniture. In 2005 she married an Italian prince, and now has the Principessa Rita Jenrette (ex-wife of an Abscam congressman and a former Playboy model) as her mother-in-law.

Traditionalists and Libertarians: A Flippant Chart

Friday, July 16, 2010

Under Construction

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