Notes on the State of Thomas Jefferson

On the heels of a vigorous discussion of how best to tell the story of emancipation prompted by the November release of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, an interesting debate on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson erupted online late last week.* While the Spielberg movie had clearly prompted the earlier discussion, the occasion for the Jefferson discussion was a bit more obscure, though all involved knew that Henry Wiencek's Master of the Mountain was somehow the cause of the dispute.

The foundation of this recent discussion about Jefferson seems to have been not Wiencek's book itself (which appeared back in October), nor even the controversies about the book, but rather a November 26 New York Times piece by Jennifer Schuessler about these controversies.

The Schuessler article does a somewhat better job conveying the heat of this dispute than casting light on what exactly is at stake.  Wiencek, an independent scholar, indicts Jefferson for his involvement with the institution of slavery and for his treatment of his slaves. While the book received some positive reviews, most academics have been very critical of it.  Wiencek, at least as portrayed by Schuessler, suggests that these scholars "inside the Jefferson bubble" are reflexively protecting the third president from criticism.  Meanwhile, Schuessler presents academic scholars as dismissive of Wiencek in part because he is not an academic.  What gets a bit buried in the article is that the criticism of Wiencek is largely that little in his book is new, and what is new isn't very convicing. Wiencek apparently argues that, in the middle of his life, Jefferson suddenly realized how profitable slavery was and promptly abandoned his previous objections to the institution (“It was all about the money,” Schuessler quotes Wiencek as saying. “By the 1790s, he saw [slaves] as capital assets and was literally counting the babies.”).  Historians seem to be particularly irked at Wiencek's attempts to cast all of his opponents as reflexive Jefferson defenders. I don't have a view of Master of the Mountain, which I haven't read. But Wiencek's suggestion that Annette Gordon-Reed is "inside the Jefferson bubble" is ridiculous. Gordon-Reed came to Jefferson studies as a complete outsider.  Her pathbreaking first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, was a broadside directed against Jefferson's actual reflexive defenders.  

The nature of the controversy over Wiencek's book and of its coverage in the New York Times is worth noting in part because this week's online discussion of Jefferson, while centering on Wiencek's subject--Jefferson and slavery--has said relatively little about Wiencek and his book. The opening salvo seems to have been fired by Paul Finkelman, an academic legal historian and author of Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson.  Finkelman was quoted by Schuessler as a critic of Wiencek's claims of great originality.  As if to emphasize that his disagreements with Wiencek did not concern the negativity of Master of the Mountain's evaluation of Jefferson (nor, for that matter, the desirability of alliterative titles evoking the third president's home), last Saturday, December 1, Finkelman published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled "The Monster of Monticello," which argued that Jefferson was a "creepy, brutal hypocrite."  The main source of Finkelman's disagreement with Wiencek involves the latter's claim that Jefferson's devotion to slavery dated from the 1790s.  In fact, argues Finkelman, "Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free."

David Post, a blogger at the conservative academic blog The Volokh Conspiracy and a Professor of Law at Temple and adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, responded with hostility to Finkelman, accusing him of purveying "truly outrageous and pernicious and a-historical nonsense."

Much of the rest of the academic blogosphere followed with a series of posts agreeing wholeheartedly with Finkelman's indictment of Jefferson. For example, Corey Robin wrote a long post arguing that Jefferson's thought was a tributary of fascism (though he later emphasized that the connection between Jefferson and fascism was more related to his views on race than on slavery per se).  Scott Lemieux blogged for Finkelman and against Post on Lawyers, Guns and Money.  Yesterday, Kathleen Geier of the Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog noted the controversy.

Geier pointed out that negative views of Jefferson and his relationship to slavery have become much more mainstream than they were even in the very recent past.  I'd agree with this assessment and think that, in general, it reflects progress in scholars' coming to terms with Thomas Jefferson's life, thought, and legacy.

However, to me what stands out about this entire debate is how it violates a lot of our expectations when it comes to academic historians' forays into the public sphere.

Compare it, for example, to what I think is a much more stereotypical example of the form: the debate earlier this year over David Barton's The Jefferson Lies. As most readers of this blog know Barton, an evangelical Christian minister, popular historian, GOP activist, and favorite of the far right, enjoyed his national fifteen minutes of fame last year.  The publication of his Jefferson book, however, was greeted with lots of very effective scholarly pushback, eventually leading his publisher to pull all copies from distribution.

The controversy over Barton's The Jefferson Lies thus fulfilled a lot of what one might expect from a conflict between academic and non-academic history in the public sphere: a popular, ideologically-driven author attempted to pass fabrications off as history in order to defend a peculiar, hagiographical portrait of a Founding Father.  Academic historians effectively fact-checked him and manage to win the war...or at least the battle.

What's interesting about the more recent Jefferson scuffle is that the main divisions between the non-academic historian, Henry Wiencek, and his academic opponents are considerably more subtle.  Though some have tried to defend an idealized vision of Jefferson, the main conflict is between two negative portraits of him.  And the main areas of disagreement involve issues of interpretation (e.g. did Jefferson's attitudes toward slavery change in the 1790s?) and tone, rather than relatively simple issues of fact and honesty.  The result is an opportunity for a more complicated, but still largely negative, portrait of Jefferson-on-race to reach a broader public.  This is a good thing. But my guess is that the underlying debate over Wiencek's book is still rather mysterious for non-historians playing along at home.

________________________________
* I posted on the debates about Lincoln last Monday, which prompted a fascinating discussion in comments that I did not adequately respond to.  Ray then added a fascinating post on Hollywood history later in the week.  I plan to return to the questions raised in that conversation and in Ray's post, though I may not get to it until next Monday.

Hollywood's Gatekeeper

The single greatest day in the history of American film criticism is August 14, 1967--the day that Bosley Crowther slammed Bonnie and Clyde in the New York Times.  You laugh!  That day film criticism became a full-intellectual-contact sport.  Crowther was nearly crucified in letters he received from outraged readers.  The "younger generation," it appeared, did not share Crowther's standards for movie violence nor his distaste for anti-heroes.  Crowther's colleagues excoriated him in print--Pauline Kael famously began her unusually long review of the film, "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?"  Kael's influence rose dramatically, so much so that her friend Joe Morgenstern changed his review in Newsweek from negative to positive.  The upshot of the "Crowther Affair" was that the most influential movie critic in the country who wrote for the most respected newspaper in America's single largest movie market had been taken down.  The decade that followed this moment witnessed a tremendous outpouring of high-level critical debate about movies amidst one of the greatest periods of filmmaking in American history.

And then Steven Spielberg made Jaws.

Based on a best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws hit theaters in the summer of 1975 behind an advertising blitz that culminated in an opening weekend in over 400 theaters.  While such an opening was not totally unprecedented, this single movie has often been regarded as the one that changed an era.  As perhaps the first true blockbuster it recouped production costs in a few weeks and, just as important, it proved that film critics--with their ability to shape popular opinion--were growing irrelevant. The tradition of releasing a movie in New York and Los Angeles to build some buzz before sending the film across the nation, faded in the glow of Universal's success with Jaws.  Basking in that glow was 26-year old Steven Spielberg.

I am writing a long essay on Spielberg and film critics for a volume on the director that will include something on the order of twenty separate essays.  In short, academics find Hollywood's most successful director...interesting. This is so because, without a doubt, Spielberg is not only the most financially successful filmmaker in American history but also widely regarded as a very good filmmaker--not the greatest or the most innovative, but still a filmmaker that many talented people want to work with.  And while not impervious to critiques from film critics, Spielberg is a very good storyteller and excellent technical filmmaker.  In short, critics often don't have much to complain about.

We have confirmation of that last point with the overwhelmingly positive critical reception of his latest film Lincoln.  Generally Spielberg's movies appeal to two sides of the critical community in the United States--he makes both great action/adventure movies and thoughtful period pieces.  When critics sit down to write their review, it is no wonder that they thank the Hollywood gods that every so often Steven Spielberg makes a film that breaks up the schlock that comprises the vast majority of what they must watch.

And yet, there has been a chorus of discordant voices regarding Lincoln and the choices Spielberg and his team made when creating the film's narrative.  Ben Alpers has provided a great portal into the debate sparked by Lincoln.  We know that other Spielberg films--The Color Purple, Schindler's List, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad--have likewise caused flare-ups over choices of whom to focus on.  Of course, when Spielberg focuses his lens on an event or historical actor, the effect is substantial and significant.  As America's most successful filmmaker, he generates a narrative that exists far beyond those in his films.

So what we often get with a Spielberg film is a general chorus of praise from film critics and a chorus of complaints from scholars.  The critics know that their voices cannot do much to affect the Spielberg aura--and frankly most have no reason to try.  Critics can write for public consumption of the film and for posterity, for people like me who attempt to take stock of what Spielberg has meant over the years to American film history.

For scholars of various stripes, though, Spielberg films create occasions of often intense and revealing debates.  Over the past two weeks, I have thought more about the role of different historical forces, actors, and events in the fall of slavery than I would have if Spielberg's movie hadn't appeared.  As a historian of the United States, I've profited a great deal from reading Eric Foner and James McPherson, David Goldfield and Dorris Kearns Goodwin, Ira Berlin and David Herbert Donald--but outside seminars in graduate school over a decade ago, I haven't been engaged with texts on this subject like I have after reading Corey Robin, Ira Chernus, Aaron Bady, Tim Lacy, etc. on the film.

All this discussion reminds me of how I have pined to be part of the era in which Bonnie and Clyde entered the American debate over movies and culture.  Except this time, rather than an establishment critic thundering on about the historical inaccuracy of a film and his critics screaming to shift his focus to the world revealed by that film, I read scholars thundering about the historical inaccuracy of Lincoln and their critics screaming that they, in effect, don't want their world intruding on the one in the film.  The debate sparked yet again by another Spielberg epic has been about the way we should remember the past as a people who use that past.  Bonnie and Clyde created a similar moment in film history--the point was to argue over what the film meant as a culture signpost; at that time, critics moderated the debate. In our time, the moderators have changed, they are not film critics, but those of us engaged in a vigorous debate over how to represent our collective past.

It seems to me that the gold standard for sparking that kind of debate is Oliver Stone's JFK.  I teach the film every semester I teach a course on historiography.  What better way to talk about and demonstrate the use of historical sources and argument than to witness one of the most manipulative and wrongheaded exercises in the historical method.  Stone's film is an utterly brilliant piece of filmmaking--if you want a good contemporary comparison to D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation, JFK stands ready.  While movies don't "write history with lightening" (no matter what old Woodrow Wilson claimed), they do fire debates about how people can generate a broad, popular debate about our collective memory and the problems left unsettled.  Robert Rosenstone argued: "If it is part of the burden of the historical work to make us rethink how we got to where we are and to make us question values that we and our leaders live by, then whatever its flaws, JFK has to be among the most important works of American history ever to appear on screen."*

Indeed, for all it's faults, Lincoln poses a moment to debate whether this nation, or any nation, ever truly had a "new birth of freedom."  And while we debate that claim, we should pause to affirm that our movies of the people, for the people, and by the people will not perish from vigorous critical--and scholarly--debate.


* Quoted in Robert Brent Toplin's excellent treatment of debates over film and history, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood (University of Kansas Press, 2002), p. 107.

Historians and History-at-the-Movies

As an historian interested in film history, I've often been frustrated with the ways in which historians have tended to use history films in the classroom and to discuss them in the public sphere. 

I tend to use movies in the classroom as primary source materials, e.g., I show films made in the 1930s to teach about the 1930s.  Films can be wonderful when used this way.  Students tend to already be more sophisticated consumers of motion pictures than they are of most other kinds of primary source material.  A well-chosen film can teach us both about its subject and about the way films themselves were made and consumed at the time of its creation. Using films in this way is, of course, a luxury available to those of us who teach courses about the last 120 years or so.

Most historians, however, teach about earlier periods.  And if they use films in the classroom, it's usually as secondary sources, e.g. screening a film like Black Robe to teach about French interactions with Native Americans in the 17th century.  Films used as secondary sources in the classroom share one big feature with films used as primary sources in the classroom: students by and large prefer viewing motion pictures to reading books. But many of the things that recommend primary-source classroom films make secondary-source classroom films problematic.  For example, Black Robe is a pretty complicated and interesting portrait of Native American life, especially for a mainstream narrative film. But as a product of the early 1990s, it no doubt bares the marks both of that era of filmmaking and that era (or possibly earlier eras) of historiography.  And, of course, Black Robe wasn't filmed to be used as a textbook manqué, but rather to be a piece of narrative entertainment. Reading Black Robe in its cultural context is thus necessary, but doing so takes us far away from 17th-century Quebec.

Perhaps this latter use of films in the classroom helps explain the dominant way in which (non film-) historians have tended to write for the general public about history films.  When dealing with films about the past, historians have tended, first and foremost, to fact-check them. Indeed, volumes and websites have been dedicated to separating "reel history" from "real history" (a pun that ought to be retired, btw). 


I have long felt that such an approach to history films was problematic because of its unwillingness to seriously grapple with history films as a filmic genre.  And, especially in the last two decades, historians interested in studying film have taken more sophisticated approaches to studying history films.

But recent discussions of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln and Oliver Stone's Showtime documentary series, Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, have highlighted another weakness of historians' fact-checking approach to movies: it does a terrible job conveying to the public what it means to do history.*

Spielberg and Stone have devoted much of their careers to putting American history on film. And though both have (often ostentatiously) employed professional historians to validate their films' take on the past, they have positioned themselves rather differently in relation to the historical mainstream. By and large, Spielberg's history films have tended to reflect the mainstream scholarly consensus about the past; Stone's have tended to be openly iconoclastic and revisionist. Perhaps unsurprisingly, academic historians have tended to prefer Spielberg's films (at least as works of history) to Stone's.

Lincoln, as far as I can tell from reading about the film, fact-checks well. But as any historian would tell you, getting the facts right, while necessary for doing good history, is not sufficient. It is perfectly possible to construct an historical narrative which is accurate, but misleading.  Historians are responsible not only for getting the facts right, but for selecting which facts are significant and constructing explanations for why things happened as they did.  Non-historians are often unaware of--or even downright hostile to--this aspect of the historical craft.**

While a number of historians have praised Lincoln, which focuses on the passage of the 13th Amendment, others have objected to the way it frames the story of emancipation entirely through the actions of European Americans, while reducing African Americans to the status of onlookers.  Prof. Kate Masur, of Northwestern University, published an editorial in the New York Times on November 12 that made this case.  And academic bloggers (and friends of this blog) Corey Robin and Aaron Bady have launched similar criticisms of the film.  All are well worth reading (as are most other things written by Robin and Bady).  But I was particularly struck by the comment thread on Corey's post on Crooked Timber.

As most readers of this blog know, Crooked Timber is an eclectic academic blog that reaches an audience that extends well beyond the academy.***   What's interesting about the comment thread on Corey's post is how many respondents don't quite get why some historians (and historically-oriented social scientists like Robin) object to Lincoln.

Some examples:

EMS:  "I’m astonished, though, and rather disgusted that any would criticize this film because there weren’t enough blacks in it, or that black agency in their own emancipation seems to have been omitted. This reminds me of a huge fight I had with my wife over “Tell ‘Em Willie Boy was Here” when she accused Polonsky of anti-feminism, despite the fact the film took place way the hell before there was any such thing as Feminism (except in a few small Eastern precincts). It’s about Lincoln and the 13th amendment. Why the hell should any blacks be in it at all? One could, probably with some force, argue that Spielberg and Kushner are guilty of tokenism. I’d argue it’s just bad film-making. Does every film have to be judged by the inclusion or exclusion of blacks? How about The Red Badge of Courage? Ya wanna make that one all black? One can dislike the choices Spielberg makes, but he’s about emotion more than historical accuracy. What he’s not is a profound thinker. What he is, usually, anyway, is a superior craftsman."

Bloix: "I know all about history from the bottom up, but I believe that there are great people whose acts turned the course of history. Lincoln, Gandhi, King, and Mandela. Their stories are great stories that deserve to be told over and over again, in every era, in every form of art."

Dave: "It may not be the constraints of history or genre driving Spielberg’s choices, but presumably culture as it is presently configured and the master-narrative of the period preclude the possibility of Spielberg telling the kind of story Corey would like. At least, it’s as likely as 'Spielberg’s blinkered vision.' There is no pop culture artifact anywhere telling that story; why be outraged at Spielberg for failing to account for an academic history when no one else does?"

Mark Field: "I saw the movie yesterday and thought it was excellent. I’m not much impressed by this criticism. There are thousands of stories that could be told about the war and about emancipation. There are stories of Thaddeus Stevens, of Frederick Douglas, of millions of unidentified slaves, of Union generals, etc. No movie can easily incorporate them all. And it’s not as if Lincoln was peripheral to the story, not then and not in historical memory.
"The fact that Spielberg chose to tell one of these stories — one which fits well the nature of film — doesn’t strike me as anything worth criticizing. It just means there are lots more (good) movies to make."

Harold:  "Masur is silly (not for the first time). Tony Kushner made a decision to restrict the story to a time period of two months in the interest of narrative economy, and it worked."

Two thoughts about these (and many other similar) comments:

One repeated trope among Lincoln's defenders in the CT commentariat is the contrast between the requirements of a movie and the requirements of history (or, more specifically, academic history).   This line of reasoning is correct...so far as it goes. To the extent that historians expect or want historical dramas to look exactly like academic history, we are bound to be disappointed. And, as I've said above, in the past, many of us have not been careful enough about distinguishing the requirements of one from the requirements of the other.  But the fact that a Hollywood historical drama is not a work of academic history does not--and should not--shield it from criticism from the perspective of academic history. Though those of us who seek to criticize a work like Lincoln need to bear in mind what those differences are...and perhaps even foreground them in our criticisms.

This leads to my second thought about these comments: just as, in the past, historians have not always been very sophisticated in the way we treat Hollywood's attempts at telling historical stories, we have also not been very effective at explaining to the public what it is we do and what we expect from works of public history (broadly understood).  The crude role of fact-checker nicely fits the public's conception of us as nothing more or less than fonts of knowledge about what happened in the past.  But it is in our capacity as interpreters of the past that we have the most interesting things to say about Hollywood's historical fictions.  If we don't understand the rather complicated, shifting generic expectations of the historical film, and the various tasks it performs beyond informing its audience about its historical subject, we will not be able to grapple with historical films successfully as interpretations of the past. And if the public doesn't understand what it means to interpret the past, or even that any historical narrative necessarily entails a series of interpretations, our public interventions are likely to be misunderstood or dismissed.


_____________________________________
* I'm not addressing my own opinions on Lincoln or Untold History in this post for a very simple reason: I haven't seen either of them yet.  Most of this post concerns reactions to Lincoln, but for a good example of a take on Untold History that takes an unsubtle approach to Stone's take on history, see this piece from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine.

** Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) at the 1995 Senate hearings into the Smithsonian's proposed Enola Gay exhibit:  "[I]s it really the role to interpret history, rather than just simply to put forward historical facts...? ...I was a history major. In the days when I studied the text... was essentially a recitation of fact, leaving the reader to draw their own analysis..."

*** Like Spinal Tap's, our appeal is more selective.

Odds & Ends

1 (of 3). Check out (some of) Corey Robin's review of Daniel Rodgers' Age of Fracture at Crooked Timber. Robin can only offer passages in the CT post because the review appeared in belongs to the London Review of Books.

2. Over at The Root, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., uses the pioneering black journalist Joel Augustus Rogers as a springboard to ponder the long history and diversity of the black community in the United States. The following two paragraphs, plus a sentence, from Gates' piece impressed me the most:

The more I research the history of African Americans' ancestors in this country, the more astonished I am by two seemingly contradictory things: First, how people from as many as 50 ethnic groups were plucked from West and West-Central Africa and then dispersed as property throughout the American slave community, North and South, and then with noble heroism and courage, determination and pure grit and great collective will, created one of the world's truly great cultures; and second, at the extent of these same people's surprising, often counterintuitive opinions within the race, as well as their widely varied beliefs and disagreements and debates, over just about every aspect of politics, culture, strategy, religion -- you name it. 


It seems as if our people have been arguing with each other about how best to ease their collective burden almost since the day the first group arrived as slaves on these shores! And why should that surprise us? Why should African Americans be any less complex than other groups of human beings? We sometimes tend to romanticize the black past, imagining a time when our people were united, when they "spoke with one voice." Never happened!  

Even at the worst times in African-American history, there seems never to have been one "African-American" opinion or pattern of behavior about much of anything, as far as I can tell. 

3. James Kloppenberg reflects on our recent political conventions at Commonweal. Here's an excerpt from his introduction (bolds mine):

An insatiable craving for the newest news drives commentary on American politics. Dozens of angles have come and gone in recent months, as writers and talking heads have proposed new story lines only to drop them after just a few days. The economy dwarfed every other issue—until it didn’t. Foreign policy didn’t matter—until it did. CEO Romney and policy-wonk Ryan were riding a wave of antigovernment sentiment—until they weren’t. Romney’s wealth and disdain for all but the wealthy would sink him—until it didn’t. Obama the reclusive, bloodless deliberator had to grow a backbone and start giving fiery speeches to inspire Democrats and independents—until he let Bill Clinton handle that chore at the convention.

In the weeks after Obama’s acceptance speech, the media’s interest in the election as horse race has nearly blotted out the substance of the president’s address and its relation to the broader themes of the Republican and Democratic campaigns. As attention ricochets almost hourly with momentum shifts, and as millions of dollars are raised and spent in swing states from New Hampshire and Florida to Colorado and Nevada, trivial scoops crowd out the substantive issues. If pundits are inevitably drawn to the latest gaffe or poll, historians should take a longer view. That’s my goal here. Only by refusing to play the soothsayer can one escape the danger of inaccurate predictions.

Allan Bloom, or Figment of Saul Bellow’s Imagination?

Reflections on the Neoconservative Persuasion

I finally got around to reading Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein, a memoir-style rendering of his friendship with Allan Bloom, the conservative University of Chicago philosopher who specialized in Plato and Rousseau. I’ve been meaning to read it for some time, since Bloom figures large in my research. Bloom, as you all know, was the author of the 1987 mega-hit, The Closing of the American Mind, which signified the culture wars unlike any other book, a surprising event given that the it’s no easy slog. A book with a 70-page chapter titled “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede” is hardly designed to be a bestseller.

One of the recurring themes I’ve come across during my Bloom research is his larger-than-life-ness. Although he was relatively obscure until Closing made him famous, and rich, Bloom’s students were apparently devoted to him with apostle-like fervor. In other words, building off of recent posts from Ben and L.D., he embodied ideas, much like his mentor Leo Strauss. Or, put another way: like pre-mechanically reproduced art, as Walter Benjamin had it, Bloom emitted aura.

But reading Ravelstein compels me to ask: Is the larger-than-life Bloom familiar to us as Bloom? Or as Ravelstein? Where does the real Bloom end and Bellow’s fictional Bloom begin? Of course, given that Bloom was known to be larger than life well before the publication of Bellow’s paean to Bloom’s eclectic form of genius—Ravelstein was published in 2000, 13 years after Closing, and eight years after Bloom died of AIDS—this might seem like a silly question. But Bellow contributed to Bloom’s lore well before he wrote Ravelstein. Bellow wrote the foreword to Closing, where his first sentence told of how “Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things.” Namely, rather than stoop to engage his contemporaries, “Bloom places himself in a larger community, invoking Socrates, Plato, Machiavelli, Rousseau and Kant…”

I’m far from the first person to playfully suggest that the Bloom known to posterity is, in fact, a figment of Saul Bellow’s imagination. As I learned in reading a fantastically scathing review of Ravelstein written by Christopher Hitchens, Robert Paul Wolff, a professor of philosophy at Amherst, reviewed Closing for Academe, where he prophesized the following:

Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counterlife. Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other well-recognized literary gifts is an unsuspected bent for daring satire. What Bellow has done, quite simply, is to write an entire coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades. The ‘author’ of this tirade, one of Bellow’s most fully-realized literary creations, is a mid-fiftyish Professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name ‘Bloom’. Bellow appears in the book only as the author of an eight-page ‘Foreword’, in which he introduces us to his principal and only character.

Based on this paragraph alone, Wolff merits a lifetime achievement award for witty book reviewing. So, is the success of Closing predicated on its ideas, or on the aura of a larger-than-life, perhaps even fictional Bloom?

Some ideas in Closing were somewhat original, or at least, were expressed in terms new to most of its popular readership. At its most explicit, it was an angry denunciation of relativism in all its forms: philosophic, moral, cultural—relativism realized in the American university, which Bloom argued had been distorted by a “Nietzscheanized-Heideggerianized Left” that arose from the 1960s.

More implicitly, Closing was a defense of elitism. As Hitchens wrote of Closing in his review of Ravelstein:

This book, which was a late product or blooming of the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, argued that the American mind was closed because it had become so goddamned open—a nice deployment of paradox and a vivid attack on the relativism that has become so OK on campus these days. Bloom’s polemic swiftly became a primer for the right-wing Zeitgeist; a bookend for the shelf or index sternly marked ‘all downhill since 1967.’

Anti-relativism was an important element of neoconservatism, and nobody demonstrated this better than Bloom. Again, Hitchens:

Chaos, most especially the chaos identified with pissed-off African Americans, was the whole motif of The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom had taught at Cornell during the campus upheaval of 1968, and never recovered from the moment when black students produced guns to amplify their demands.

Neoconservatism is the flip side of the New Left, especially insofar as the New Left combined radical political positions on race, gender and war with the antinomian, relativist spirit of the counterculture. As such, the neoconservative persuasion should also be historically situated in relation to what Corey Robin controversially labels “the reactionary mind.” Robin considers conservatism “a meditation on—and theoretical rendition of—the felt experience of having power, seeing it threatened, and trying to win it back.” George H. Nash, in his seminal The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, offers a similar definition of conservatism from a different evaluative perspective. He defines it as “resistance to certain forces perceived to be leftist, revolutionary, and profoundly subversive of what conservatives at the time deemed worth cherishing, defending, and perhaps dying for.”

Many Americans viewed the various movements that arose during the 1960s as “profoundly subversive” of the status quo, as threats to entrenched configurations of power. Neoconservatives like Allan Bloom best articulated this post-1960s conservative reaction, especially insofar as they were able to intuit the connections between political movements like Black Power and antinomian countercultural currents. For Bloom, the relativist culture on display in the academy was brutish and coarse, a pale reflection of the Ancient order of his philosophical imagination, which evinced, as Robin puts it, “the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.” Whether representative of Bloom or of Bellow’s fictional imagination, Closing is a great primary source of neoconservatism in the way it articulates such a combination of elitism and excellence.

Time and Again

In Indiana this week, we went back to the future. Governor Mitch Daniels signed legislation making Indiana the first right-to-work (RTW) state in the midwest. A victory Republicans have been fighting for since the late 1960s. At almost the same moment, the state senate approved a bill that would allow creationism to be taught in science classes. Was the passage of these two measures mere coincidence or is the state of Indiana, my home for the past eleven years, returning to the 1880s?

So what gives? Are the measures linked some how? They are both sponsored by conservative politicians, and yet would seem to have little in common with each other in substance. However, in light of reading an interesting exchange of letters between Corey Robin and Mark Lilla in the February 7, 2012 New York Review of Books there might be a way to explain this convergence.

This blog has brought up the Robin-Lilla debate before and Robin has provided an overview of the basic argument of his book in a blog post as well. What struck me about the recent exchange of letters is the debate over the effects of conservative action. In other words, it seems to me that Lilla argues for a strand of conservatism that seeks to preserve a fundamental sense of liberty against revolutions to recreate society, time and again. Robin rejects that conservatism is preservationist; rather he argues it is reactionary, it seeks to create (radically at times) a world without much concern for justice because the liberty to exercise power is ultimately more important.

In the context of Indiana's recent legislative flurry, the Lilla school of conservatism might see RTW and creationism as moves to return the state to a pre-revolutionary moment, before the revolutions of worker power and scientific elites took the ability to negotiate contracts and teach children (respectively) out of the hands of the people. The Robin school of conservatism might see RTW and creationism as a two-pronged attacked against the establishment of justice for workers and professionals in science education (who had helped make Indiana students more competent in a scientifically-oriented world).

It seems to me that the difference between Lilla and Robin might be illustrated through the relationship between ideas and action. Lilla points to conservatives in the 19th century such as Disraeli and Bismarck who supported legislation that advanced causes of justice--Reform Act of 1867 and the welfare state respectively. In Lilla's view, we can read ideas held by these conservatives backward through the acts and thereby suggest their conservatism finds no place in Robin's categorical analysis. In Robin's view, ideas propounded by conservatives such as Edmund Burke and John C. Calhoun to Sarah Palin and perhaps Mitch Daniels do not need to demonstrate unity through action because their ideas will manifest themselves in different ways given the different movements they are opposing and seeking to overwhelm. Rather, their ideas are joined through a notion (to play on the old H.L. Mencken line) that somebody, somewhere is messing with a social order that I believe is right and good.

For me, Robin's use of conservatism is elastic in the sense the "reactionary mind" acts in a consistent way but not necessarily with results that look alike. And that insight might point to the dilemma of the left--its struggle for justice requires results to be consistent while its tactics vary. The reactionary works against challenges to a concept of order and even though that understanding of order can differ from person to person the instinct remains the same, to put down that which would change an established order.

Such reasoning is on display in Indiana. In a debate held recently at my university between a member of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce and an Untied Steel Workers representative, the spokesman for the chamber stated bluntly (though not intentionally) that corporations want RTW laws because they don't like having to share power in the workplace with unions. Likewise, in an interview regarding the creationist bill, its sponsor told the Indianapolis Star, "Many people believe in creation. Our schools are teaching what many people believe is false."

Indeed, both ideas suggest a period from the past, but that is not the inspiration for their actions--they do not wish to return the state to an earlier time. Both measures seek to transform relationships of power in ways that will make their respective "spaces" less just and less favorable to those who would share in the power to shape those spaces. The fact that RTW and creationism seem to share little in common as legislative measures does not mean that intellectual spirit behind is not the same.

Newt Gingrich's Big Ideas

JOHN KING: Speaker Gingrich, I want to start with you. You're at this for months and you're out there. If there's one thing, just one thing in this campaign you could do over, what would it be?

MR. GINGRICH: I would skip the opening three months, where I hired regular consultants and tried to figure out how to be a normal candidate, and I would just to straight at being a big-ideas, big- solutions, Internet-based campaign from day one, because it just didn't work. I mean, it's not who I am. I'm not capable of being a sort of traditional candidate. I'm a very idea-oriented candidate. And I think the Internet makes it possible to create a momentum of ideas that's very, very exciting.

--South Carolina Republican Debate, January 19, 2012

Newt does not have ideas, he has ideas about ideas. He keeps saying what a good idea it is to have ideas. . . . He is the least substantive major political figure I’ve ever seen.

-- Barney Frank (in a February 1995 interview with Garry Wills)

He's a stupid man's idea of what a smart man sounds like.

-- Paul Krugman on Newt Gingrich, November 2011

Newt Gingrich has apparently always liked "big ideas."  And, just as apparently, critics have felt that his attachment to "big ideas" was largely devoid of content.  Gingrich's "interest in long-range and broad-range planning for the future...is clearly more appropriate to the orientation of our Department of Geography" noted his then employer, West George College President Ward Pafford, in a 1975 letter announcing Gingrich's removal from the History Department.  "Not only is Mr Gingrich not a problem-solver," quipped The Economist's Democracy in American Blog last year,  "he is a problem-aggrandiser."

Following Newt's big win in SC over the weekend, skeptical beltway pundits are having trouble identifying the ideas his campaign is supposedly based on.  Via Gary Johnson, Ezra Klein unearthed the justly defeated Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996, which would have put to death anyone bringing more than two ounces of marijuana into the U.S.*  Ultimately, Klein concludes, when it comes to Newt's ideas, there's no there there:  "Can anyone name some actually big, actually workable, actually new ideas that Gingrich has been associated with during his career? What has he brought to the table that wouldn’t have been there in his absence?"


But although Newt Gingrich's vaunted ideas don't amount to much, I think it would be wrong to dismiss their importance to his political success.  Newt is hardly alone on the right in valuing the idea of ideas.  Indeed, ideas a key part of what one might call the brand identity of modern American conservatism.

One of the founding texts of post-war conservative thought was Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences.  Conservative scholars have most often continued to view their own history in terms of ideas; it's no accident that the first major academic narrative of modern American conservatism understood the movement in fundamentally intellectual terms: George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945.**

Conservatives have made exceedingly long novels of ideas into best-sellers.

The chief organizing strategy of the John Birch Society, the signature organization of the late 1950s and early 1960s far right, involved exceedingly long, detailed and dry seminars by founder Robert Welch:

More recently, we've seen the bizarre infamy of the Frankfurt School among some rightwing groups in the last two decades. Glenn Beck built his fame around weaving complicated conspiratorial histories on his whiteboards.

Whether or not we join Corey Robin in seeing conservatism as fundamentally an "ideas-driven praxis," there's no question that the idea of ideas has great power on the right.

The question is why?

This is, after all, a movement that has also boldly embraced a rhetoric of populist anti-elitism and has often celebrated anti-intellectualism.  In 2005, in the midst of praising George W. Bush in the wake of Katrina, David Frum could conclude that the then President was "sometimes glib, even dogmatic, often uncurious, and as a result ill-informed . . . (but) outweighing the faults are his virtues: decency, honesty, rectitude, courage, and tenacity."

And yet, my guess is the fact that Newt Gingrich has a PhD in history probably does him a lot more electoral good than George McGovern's PhD in history ever did him.  As Ezra Klein and others have noted, Newt's ideas don't much distinguish him from most of the other GOP presidential candidates. But the place of ideas in Newt's self-presentation is one of the distinguishing characteristics of his campaign and indeed his entire career.  That it confounds and infuriates people like Barney Frank, Paul Krugman, and Ezra Klein is, among Gingrich's base, doubtless a feature not a bug.

Although I happen to agree with Corey Robin that it's worth spending time to understand the actual ideas of conservatives, I also think that historians ought to spend time understanding the imaginative place of ideas among movement conservatives and its relationship to the equally powerful strains of anti-intellectualism on the right.  Rather than opposing tendencies, my sense is that they are actually two sides of the same coin.  

_______________________________
* This is all the more amazing since Newt himself admits to having smoked pot in grad school.

** And not just scholars on the right.  Corey Robin, too, argues that conservatism is a movement of ideas and that leftists and liberals have made a terrible mistake not to take those ideas more seriously.

Evangelicals and Santorum Together: the Lure of War

A few days ago, former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum told Frank Luntz, who moderated a forum hosted by the conservative Faith and Freedom Coalition, that evangelicals need a candidate who "can take the bullets." Santorum's reference to violence was not meant literally--he didn't volunteer to fight in Afghanistan...or Iran (for that matter). However, Santorum wants to remind folks that he understands war--if only rhetorically. In fact, it might be the former senator's bluster on military matters that has increased his appeal among conservative evangelicals. After all, his stance on social issues--the family, homosexuals, and abortion--echoes all other GOP candidates. He has been, though, more forthright--perhaps even reckless--when it comes to thinking out loud about war.

Following questions on homosexuals and abortion, the Santorum and his wife answered a question posed by Luntz about military service. The Santorums agreed that they would be proud to have their children enter the military and fight for the United States, though Santorum was quick to correct what he viewed as a prevailing misperception that he hoped for war with Iran. Rather, he clarified, "If Iran is not stopped from developing a nuclear weapon...there will be 'war that we have never seen the likes of in this country, and it is not a matter taking out this regime, it's not a matter of preemptive war, it's a matter of taking out this nuclear ability that would change the face of our country.'" Syntax aside (and perhaps logic as well), why is Santorum speaking about war with Iran changing the face of our country? The face of Iran, the Persian Gulf, perhaps, but our country?

A war, or at least talk of one, can change our country, of course. And speaking to a gathering of conservative evangelicals about such change was probably a sensible idea. As Andrew Bacevich observed in a book on the post-Vietnam romance many evangelicals developed with the military: "In the aftermath of Vietnam, evangelicals came to see the military as an enclave of virtue, a place of refuge where the sacred remnant of patriotic Americans gathered and preserved American principles from extinction." As their neocon allies also cheered in the late 1990s, a martial attitude would correct America's long delusional obsession with the culture wars.

Santorum is Catholic and his endorsement by evangelicals is not as shocking as it once might have been. But among the reasons for this rapprochement between these groups has been the steady development among conservative religious leaders of unified view of war--for more on this see the writing of Catholics George Wiegel and Michael Novak and, yes, Richard John Neuhuas. Of course, liberal religious leaders also found common ground on the issue of war; in the middle of the Vietnam War, groups such as CALCAV spoke out against the dangers of war for the nation. However, for conservatives that war served as an awakening of a different kind, distilling a moral language that would discriminate "patriots" from critics. Conservatives of various religious denominations concluded that the soul of America was worth sacrificing for, even if they would not volunteer to perform that service personally.

What conservatives of the 1970s rediscovered was the sublime nature of war in the abstract. Corey Robin pointed out on his blog recently that conservatism does not, by principle, tend to avoid war and violence, but, by practical necessity, seeks to channel its emotional power into a philosophical rush. War in the abstract--war in the sense of giving oneself over to something greater or, better, of commanding the ultimate sacrifice for something greater--is the conservative's oversoul. The realities of prosecuting a war, of paying for it, cleaning up after it, of dealing with the grief it causes, can be dismissed to the functions of the state. The nation can command sacrifice, the state only manages the paperwork.

So while Mitt Romney prattles on about his business acumen, and Newt Gingrich bellows about his big ideas for big problems (including, apparently, intergalactic empires), Rick Santorum might be the conservative to speak about the meaning of sacrifice in terms that the faithful will understand. And what about Ron Paul...well, I think more than just the GOP could stand to hear his analysis of war and the nation.

Now What? Reflections On Historicizing American "Conservatism"

I spent the better part of my allotted USIH reading time the past few weeks immersed in a round table, published in the December 2011 Journal of American History, titled "Conservatism: A State of the Field." Because the New Right has been an ongoing (to say the least) topic of concern here, since our January 2007 founding, there may be no better place than USIH for reflecting on the JAH round table. As such I expect other USIH contributors will chime in, either here or with additional posts.

My first thought on completing the round table was: now what? What are we going to discuss here, on this topic, now that Kim Phillips-Fein et al have so ably summarized the state of the historiography? It truly is a comprehensive collection. A graduate student could spend her entire education mining the essays, footnotes, and prominent books. And that student would be rewarded well for her effort. Because of its comprehensiveness, I beseech your advance forgiveness for not covering your favorite topics, authors, or passages from the round table.

Since I'm still processing the contents, and hence have neither a complementary nor a counter narrative to offer, I'm going to reflect on the essays as they were presented---beginning and ending with Phillips-Fein.

Phillips-Fein's Introduction


This 20-page essay is clearly the heart of the round table. It's Phillips-Fein's show, and she doesn't disappoint. As such, this piece receives the greatest attention in this post. (Note: I'm going to shorten her name to KPF for the rest of this post.)

KPF [right] praises much of the new scholarship on conservatism and, as expected, notes its tendencies. She posits for the reader some of the now-familiar central themes for the growth of the New Right (not to be confused with just conservatism): anti-communism, opposition to the Civil Rights Movement, reactions to labor unions and their power, and "changing sexual norms" (p. 724). KPF recounts the impoverished psychological accounts of conservatism from consensus historians (think Hofstadter and Daniel Bell), to George Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 (which she calls "the most influential synthesis of the subject"---discussed here by Andrew Hartman) and Alan Brinkley's important 1994 AHR article, "The Problem of American Conservatism." Jennifer Burns's recent account of Ayn Rand is covered (also discussed here by Mike O'Connor). Our very own Paul Murphy gets a shout-out for his influential account of the veritable road-not-taken by conservatives as offered by southern agrarians (i.e. criticism of capitalism).* Other topics addressed by KPF include suburban conservatism, the sun belt, Christian conservatism, affluence and middle-class conservatism (not merely backlash or populist varieties). There are so many books covered in KPF's essay that my list above is scanty in comparison.

What of the issues KPF raises? She advocates for more work on "the connections between racial and sexual politics and conservative economic ideas." She also believes that can be written on mass media, local party organizations, "antifeminism and opposition to gay rights," "anti-immigrant and nativist sentiment," "war, nationalism, and patriotism"---the last inclusive of groups like veteran's organizations and the American Legion (p. 735-736). KPF spends a paragraph discussing the need for more work on recent conservative "extremists" (something Wilfred McClay takes issue with in his lead-off response, titled "Less Boilerplate, More Symmetry").

KPF notes the problem of periodization: Does New Right conservatism begin in the 1920s, 1930s (wherein Leo Ribuffo gets a shout out on p. 737), or after World War II? She fairly consistently argues that that 1945 is the legitimate starting point. KPF also reminds readers of the "long exception" argument on liberalism made by Jefferson Cowie and and Nick Salvatore in an essay that first appeared in International Labor and Working-Class History (74, Fall 2008).

The 1970s and 1980s receive special attention at the end of KPF's introductory essay. She notes that recent scholars covering this period are undermining "the 'whiggish' tendency to read conservatism's successes backward through postwar history" (p. 739). KPF argues that recent studies on these decades reveal something of the "fragility" of the conservative movement--that its success may have more to do with the fracturing of liberalism than has been previously discussed. Jefferson Cowie's recent book, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (whose book has come up in four posts here) is mentioned, as well as neoliberalism via David Harvey and---wait...for...it---the much-discussed-at-USIH "instant classic" by Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture.

Near the end KPF acknowledges the need for more work "looking at conservatism from an international perspective...analyzing the ways that the movement drew from intellectual and organizational sources outside the United States" (p. 742-743).

And here's KPF's conclusion: "The real project is to see conservatism with a new perspective---to understand its tenacity through the liberal years, its longstanding relationship to the state and to economic elites, and how its history is intertwined with that of liberalism, as well as the ways its ascendance reflected not only its own political dynamism but also broader changes in American society" (p. 743).

"Less Boilerplate, More Symmetry" by Wilfred M. McClay (pp. 744–47)

I already mentioned one main point from McClay above. I will bring up another below---a useful metaphor. [Aside: For regular USIH commenter Varad Mehta, per your comment on my last post, Herbert Butterfield's The Whig Interpretation of History gets a nod at the end of McClay's piece.]

"Conservatism as a Growing Field of Scholarship" by Alan Brinkley (pp. 748–51)

This piece rehashes and praises many of the points made by KPF. Otherwise, Brinkley meditates on how the post-war movement managed to unify in the face of internal contradictions and paradoxes within (e.g. pro and anti-containment foreign policy). He is also fascinated with how the movement has drawn in new constituencies and used new media. He ends by discussing the problem of neoconservatism within the movement.

"Rethinking American Conservatism: Toward a New Narrative" by Donald T. Critchlow (pp. 752–55)

Critchlow [right] agrees with KPF's assessment of Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition, saying it "remains unchallenged." Critchlow notes problems with the definition of "conservative" and, strange as it may seem, refers to the work of a medieval historian, Robert Stacey, on the concept of limited government. Also, interestingly, Critchlow proposes "a little counterfactual thought experiment" wherein he argues that the notion of "modern liberalism is the ideological anomaly of the twentieth century" (p. 754). Sound familiar? It echoes the Cowie/Salvatore argument mentioned above from 2008. Critchlow concludes as follows: "The story of conservatism in postwar America is one of ideological contradiction, political opportunism, electoral triumph, and of deeply held beliefs about the nature of the individual and the good society."

"On American Conservatism and Kim Phillips-Fein’s Survey of the Field" by Martin Durham (pp. 756–59)

Durham's essay praises KPF's introduction. He argues for closely studying the conservative magazine, National Review, as a unifying force in the history of the New Right. Correspondingly, on the temporal diversity of the movement, he writes that "it would...seem wise to describe conservatism since 1954 as modern conservatism"--acknowledging that libertarianism and anticommunism existed earlier (p. 759).

"Political History beyond the Red-Blue Divide" by Matthew D. Lassiter (pp. 760–64)

Lassiter's thesis seems to be the following: "The new political history has inadvertently replicated some of the blind spots of the liberal consensus school that it supplanted, especially through a linear declension/ascension narrative that has conflated the fate of the New Deal with the political triumph of the New Right. ...The interpretations of political history have tracked too closely to the red-blue binaries of journalism and punditry; ...the literature has taken the contradictions and fragmentation of liberalism as given but smoothed over similar weaknesses and fissures within conservatism" (p. 760).

Lassiter [right] wants us to distinguish between the history of conservatism and broader political history. He also wants us to recognize "the times and places in which liberalism and conservatism have overlapped." And this move "requires a reconsideration of the polarization thesis that has animated the scholarship on the New Right. ...[This] thesis has evolved into a hegemonic framework" (p. 762). Lassiter wants a better periodization of the various conservative elements. He also sees a problem with the lumping of unconnected currents of change with Reagan's election.

Finally, I wondered whether Lassiter had read Rodgers when he wrote (bolds mine): "The phrase 'free market' describes a principled ideological position, if not a concrete reality. It seems more useful to evaluate the rhetoric of 'anti-government' and 'free enterprise' conservatism as a political and cultural construct, a discursive fiction wielded as a form of power in the struggle to shape the nation's political culture and its political economy" (p. 764). It's not an assertion of a "contagion of metaphors," but it goes to Rodgers' point about the changed nature of discourse since the 1970s.

"Now That Historians Know So Much about the Right, How Should We Best Approach the Study of Conservatism?" by Lisa McGirr (pp. 765–70)

The title sort of says it all, or at least articulates something of McGirr's main theme. Like other round table contributors, McGirr admires KPF's "thoughtful survey" (p. 765). While recounting and restating many of KPF's points, she adds several points: (1) We need to study more deeply the "secular shifts in global capitalism" (p. 767). (2) We would do well to study better "the arguably important institutional areanas where conservatives have long held substantial sway," such as in Congress (p. 768). (3) McGirr echoes KPF's call for more study of transnational networks and "the roots of ideas"/origins (pp. 768-769). (4) McGirr is also generally an advocate for looking at conservatism after World War II as a distinct, more cohesive kind of conservatism--an entity "constructed afresh from a new constellation of ideas" (p. 770).

McGirr [right] pushes readers to look again at the demise of Progressivism for some hints at what occurs later. She then makes an artful, relatively concise statement about the stakes of those potential connections: "In no small part due to the traumatic experience of national prohibition in the 1920s, modern liberals drew a thicker line between private behavior and government regulation than had early twentieth-century reformers. Indeed, liberals' increasing emphasis on personal rights and freedoms opened up space after World War II for conservative claims to being the champions of 'moral virtue'" (p. 770).

Finally, McGirr comes out as a proponent of Cowie and Salvatore's "long exception" thesis. The period from the New Deal through the Great Society was unusual---a highpoint for American liberalism as we think of it today.

"A Response" by Kim Phillips-Fein (pp. 771–73)

I have already referenced KPF's final response above, and will do so again below. For now I just want to say that she addressed concerns raised in nearly every round table piece. I found this passage particularly intriguing and enlightening (underlines mine):

While recognizing the divide between ideology and policy, it remains important to think about how economic ideas matter. While conservatives have not limited the growth of the state in the ways that their rhetoric might suggest, their opposition to the welfare state has significantly shaped their approaches to public policy. Alan Brinkley raises the question of how to think about the attraction of conservatism to people who are, as he puts it, perched precariously in the middle class. The recent rise of economic inequality, he suggests, may actually have led to the embrace of an antigovernment, antitax politics by middle-class and working-class people, who, facing stagnation of their incomes and living standards, have grown frustrated with a state that seems increasingly incapable of aiding them. The erosion of government...has not led to a call for more government, but rather to a sense of the impotence of the state and a deep pessimism about the possibilities of government activism, and a feeling of resentment about rising tax burdens that yield few tangible benefits (pp. 772-773).

Excellent.

Conclusions

Returning to my original question: What now? Where do we---as a USIH community---go from here? KPF herself, on page one of the round table (p. 723 in JAH) states: "Historians might be forgiven for asking whether there is anything left to study in the history of the Right." I certainly felt that way immediately (but only immediately) after reading the round table.

For her part, KPF synthesized the round table contributions by laying out "three subjects" she believes "will be at the heart of moving the interpretive project forward: [1] the question of origins, [2] the relationship between the radical and moderate parts of the conservative movement, and [3] the role of economic ideas in conservatism" (p. 771). I like [1] and [2], but think that [3] is already well under way---or implicit in many works already done. I like to think that USIH (the field, the society, and this blog) will be integral moving [1] forward.

Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind obviously helps move the project forward in relation to the "question of origins."** Robin's book was not included in the round table, which is a shame, but most likely due to its recent publication date. Robin [right] goes toward what Brinkley suggests in his round table contribution: namely, synthesis. Robin also addresses something KPF calls for in her final "Response": the need for more work on "deep currents" (p. 771). Robin's book also goes toward KPF's call for internationalizing the conservative movement. Finally, both Brinkley and KPF seem to suggest there is a need for more lumping (though not "über-lumping"!) and less splitting. Robin's book does that too.

But other post-hole, or "splitter" if you prefer, studies are open for exploration. Hartman's work on the Culture Wars will be a welcome addition to the historiography (many of these USIH posts are his), as will Ben Alpers's forthcoming book on the Straussians (several Alpers pieces on that topic have been posted here) and Ray Haberski's forthcoming book on the problem of war in the post-war period (latest installment here). I think my work on Adler and "Great Books Liberalism" (and more) will contribute to delineating some of the intellectual boundaries of the liberal-conservative divide. In other words, several USIH blog contributors are, and will be, at the heart of furthering the historiography on conservatism and liberalism in the near future.

Pardon the self promotion that follows, but two problems noted by several round table authors have been broached here before by me. First, to build on KPF's point about "extremists" (p. 736) and McClay's response to that topic, we need emotional histories of American conservatism. I wrote about this in an April 2011 post titled "The Emotional Panoply of American Conservatism, 1964-Present." In that post I argued that "the array of emotional states covered by recent American conservatism suggests a necessary, renewable source of power behind the ideas and ideology of movement." Or, in the words of Alexander Pope via Nicole Eustace, "passion is the gale." Corey Robin's Fear: A History of a Political Idea also goes to this point.

Second, several round table authors argued that we need more and better histories mid-century liberalism (KPF, pp. 727, 773; McClay, pp. 744-745; Brinkley, p. 750; Critchlow, p. 754; Lassiter, ALL; and McGirr, pp. 766, 770). Around this time last year I suggested (here and here) that our discussions of conservatism would be incomplete so long as we didn't understand better the boundaries between it and liberalism---what mid-century liberalism really was. In his round table contribution McClay called this dialectical tension "the reciprocating engine." He implored us to remember that these "ideological dispositions" are "mutable" (p. 745). I agree.

Although I have not discussed this topic explicitly at USIH, I would suggest that anti-globalism is another splitter line of study worthy of exploration. This was not suggested by KPF in her long list of a dozen or so worthies (pp. 735-736). I've studied this only partially in relation to Hutchins's and Adler's advocacy for world federal government, and reactions to their positions---most notably by Birchers in the 1950s and 1960s. But the Birchers' response was more about nativism (maybe?) than recent fears of global markets (think 1999, Seattle, and the WTO), concerns about the value of labor, conspiracy theories about one-world government (think Limbaugh, Beck, etc.), and fiscal austerity (the Ron Paul position). These later formulations of anti-globalism could be better analyzed.

Whatever we do, we need to fight the kind of garbage offered up by pundits-turned-historians, like this piece by Robert Reich blaming our situation on the Civil War and white southerners---not that any USIH folks would ever produce anything that simplistic.

What are your thoughts? What of the round table---overall or by piece? And what do you think is left to do? - TL

--------------------------------------------
* We've covered so much ground on the New Right and conservatism at USIH that I was mildly surprised to see no citations of either our blog posts or book reviews. Perhaps we don't cite enough JAH articles around here? Just kidding, but our work has most certainly contributed to the scholarly conversation. This may be the ultimate argument for creating an S-USIH journal.

** I'm wondering if Robin's book won't also become something of an instant classic. I say this because you don't attract high-profile ire from the likes of Mark Lilla unless you hit a nerve.

Mark Lilla’s Truly Awful Review of Corey Robin’s Book

Mark Lilla’s much-discussed review of Corey Robin’s much-discussed book, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, is truly awful. Not only is Lilla’s tone glib, unsurprisingly, but the review is really bad history, which might come as a surprise, since Lilla has gained renown as the New York Review of Book’s expert on conservatism.

Lilla dismisses Robin’s thesis out of hand, without so much as examining it (a fault expertly dissected by Alex Gourevitch in his brilliant critique of Lilla at the Jacobin blog). Such is common practice in the NYRB, where books serve more as openings for essayists to write about what they would rather write about. Usually I am OK with this standard practice. But the harshness of Lilla’s dismissiveness, seen in the ugly comparison he makes of Robin’s thesis to one of Glen Beck’s maniacal chalkboard conspiracies, demands a higher standard of engagement. His seemingly damning charge—“The Reactionary Mind is a useful book to have—not as an example to follow, but one to avoid”—needs to be supported. It is not.

My goal today is not to review Robin’s book. We will be running a full review of it here at USIH soon. If anyone wants to understand Robin’s thesis, go to his blog, where this post—“Revolutionaries of the Right: The Deep Roots of Conservative Radicalism” (which won third prize in the 3QuarksDaily 2011 Politics and Social Science contest)—summarizes it nicely. Robin seeks to overturn the notion, held by many, including such notables as Sam Tanenhaus, Andrew Sullivan, and, well, Mark Lilla (who indicted the Tea Party as “Jacobins” in an earlier NYRB essay), that conservatism used to be a wise, reasonable, and pragmatic sensibility, but has recently been overtaken by reactionaries who seek to destroy rather than conserve the current order. In contrast, Robin argues that reaction was always-already the key to understanding modern conservatism, dating back to Edmund Burke, who Robin shows, in an important revision, was willing to upend the old aristocratic order to turn back the tides of Jacobinism. In short, Robin theorizes that although conservative rhetoric and argument morph to fit various contexts of space and time, at its core conservatism is about counterrevolution. He writes:

Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument as to why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, why they should not be allowed to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty, agency, the prerogative of the elite.

As most of his critics have pointed out, including our own Ben Alpers (in his excellent recent post, "Lumpers, Splitters, and Essentialists"), Robin is a lumper, not a splitter, or in Lilla’s disdainful eyes, an “über-lumper.” I don’t necessarily have a problem with Robin’s particular style of lumping because, even if I might disregard the term “reactionary,” which is admittedly loaded, I think Robin is correct inasmuch as conservative thought, in its many variations, is usually, if not always (or essentially), an attempt to rationalize or valuate hierarchy. Despite his outwards stance, Lilla is not against lumping, per se, given that, in skewering Robin as an “über-lumper,” Lilla does a breathtaking bit of lumping himself:

[Robin offers] history as WPA mural, and will be familiar to anyone who lived through the Thirties, remembers the Sixties, or was made to read historians like Howard Zinn, Arno Mayer, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, and Christopher Hill at school. In their tableau, history’s damnés de la terre are brought together into a single heroic image of suffering and resistance. Their hats are white, immaculately so. Off in the distance are what appear to be black-hatted villains, though their features are difficult to make out. Sometimes they have little identification tags like those the personified vices wear in medieval frescoes—”capital,” “men,” “whites,” “the state,” “the old regime”—but we get no idea what they are after or what their stories are. Not that it matters. To understand the oppressed and side with them all you need to know is that there are oppressors.

Like I said, breathtaking.

No, Lilla’s real complaint with Robin is not for lumping, but rather, that Robin’s particular version does not allow for the celebration of a distinct branch of conservatism that Lilla wishes to celebrate: you know, the wise, reasonable, and pragmatic type. In this sense, Lilla’s essay, like all his NYRB essays on the topic of conservatism, comes across as a more sophisticated version of the argument put forward by Sam Tanenhaus in his thin 2010 book, The Death of Conservatism. Tanenhaus divides conservatives into two categories: real and pseudo, or, in his terminology, “realist” and “revanchist.” He argues that realistic conservatism is dead at the hands of revanchists, and that the nation is the worse for it. Similarly, Lilla draws a bizarrely arbitrary line between conservatives and reactionaries, arguing that, until recently, Americans who went by the conservative label were decidedly un-reactionary.

As I asked in a critical review of the Tanenhaus book, on what proof does this “golden age” of responsible conservatism rest? On the way William Buckley, Jr. reframed his worldview when he ran for mayor of New York, even though so-called revanchists continued to consider him a hero? On California Governor Reagan’s response to campus unrest, which was wildly popular among John Birchers, the quintessential revanchists? On Nixon’s contradictory presidency, Watergate paranoia and all? Tanenhaus’s (and Lilla’s) version of Burkean conservatism did not die; it was never alive (and as Robin makes clear, the very notion of Burkean conservatism—as wise, reasonable, and pragmatic—is a mythical construction).

It’s facile but wrong to divide conservatism as Tanenhaus and Lilla do. Yes, there have been plenty of conservatives who have been more moderate in their temper than Robert Welch, the conspiracy-driven founder of the John Birch Society. But they tended to have a great deal in common with Welch, in terms of political ideals. The lauded conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, who touted Burke and Disraeli as his heroes in his philosophical work, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Santayana, was as anti-statist as they came in many of his actual policy positions. For instance, Kirk called federally subsidized school lunch programs “a vehicle for totalitarianism,” the Hayekian slippery slope otherwise known as the “road to serfdom.”

What Tanenhaus and Lilla seek to do above all else is cordon off the reputable, what used to be called the “Vital Center,” from the disreputable to their left and right. But Vital Centrism, as analysis, and as prescription, is no better now than it was in 1949, when Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. made a less facile case for it. In fact, it’s a whole lot worse.

In a footnote to his recent post on the Lilla review, Ben writes: “Though I think Lilla is correct to see an apocalyptic streak on the contemporary U.S. right, the idea that apocalypticism is a new phenomenon in American politics seems very problematic to me.” Agreed, though I would take this a step further: Lilla’s problematic history undermines his argument time and again. For instance, the following sentence is one of the least historically informed I have ever read: “In the 1970s, if you thought that public schools were being used for social indoctrination, that power over them should be decentralized, and that children would be better off learning at home, that put you on the far left. Today those views put you on the right.” Huh? Yes, there might have been a few hundred left-leaning holdouts from the free school movement around in the 1970s, who sent their children to private, progressive schools, if they could afford such schools, out of a desire to evade the capitalist reproduction machine. But compare this to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who joined the Christian day school movement in the 1970s. Someone familiar with the history of American conservatism ought to know something about how resistance to public schools was part and parcel of the rising Christian Right in the 1970s.

Some of the most influential evangelical writers of the 1970s—Francis Schaeffer, Rousas John Rushdoony, and Tim LaHaye—placed education at the center of their plans to redeem American culture. They contended that the schools had been taken over by an elite who sought to spread an anti-Christian ideology they termed “secular humanism.” LaHaye, who later gained fame as the best-selling author of the premillennial dispensationalist Left Behind series, founded a network of Christian schools in San Diego in the 1960s and wrote a number of popular books in the 1970s and 1980s that provided readers with a framework for understanding secular humanism. More than an ideology, LaHaye described secular humanism as a religion in its own right. LaHaye dedicated his 1983 book, The Battle for the Public Schools: Humanism’s Threat to Our Children, to “the growing army” of parents “who realize that secular humanism, the religious doctrine of our public schools,” is to blame for “the origin of rampant drugs, sex, violence, and self-indulgence in our schools, which are not conducive to the learning process.” LaHaye aimed his rhetorical onslaught against an educational establishment that he believed was “determined to jam atheistic, amoral humanism, with its socialist world view, into the minds of our nation’s children and youth, kindergarten through college.” LaHaye listed all of the traits that he thought defined a religion, and argued that secular humanism evinced all of them, including “a stated doctrine or dogma,” “a priesthood,” “seminaries,” and “open acknowledgement of its position.”

No doubt Lilla considers LaHaye and his sort beyond the pale of his wise, reasonable, and pragmatic conservatism. But if anything, conservative intellectuals of the type that Lilla might celebrate have learned from Christian Right activists like LaHaye that the way to political victory is through this combustible mix of anti-statism and traditionalism, what I have elsewhere called the “culture wars dialectic.”

Lilla implies such a dialectic is at work in his analysis of the neoconservative trajectory:

The real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism. This has been brewing among intellectuals since the Nineties, but in the past four years, thanks to the right-wing media establishment and economic collapse, it has reached a wider public and transformed the Republican Party. How that happened would be a long story to tell, and central to it would be the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology. The first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer, who saw the failures of a large number of Great Society programs to deliver on the unrealistic expectations of its architects, and consequently began to appreciate the wisdom of certain conservative assumptions about human nature and politics. Kristol’s famous quip that neoconservatives were liberals who’d been mugged by reality captured the original temperament.
……..
Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue. The big question was no longer how to adapt liberal aspirations to the limits of politics, but how to undo the cultural revolution of the Sixties that, in their eyes, had destabilized the family, popularized drug use, made pornography widely available, and encouraged public incivility. In other words, how to undo history. At first, neoconservatives writing in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest (which I once helped to edit) portrayed themselves as standing with “ordinary Americans” against the “adversary culture of intellectuals,” and to that end promoted “family values” and religious beliefs they did not necessarily share, but thought socially useful. Yet by the Nineties, when it became apparent that lots of ordinary Americans had adjusted to the cultural changes, neoconservatives began predicting the End Times, and once-sober writers like Gertrude Himmelfarb and Robert Bork started publishing books with titles like On Looking into the Abyss and Slouching Towards Gomorrah.

Although Lilla is correct in that Himmelfarb and Bork raised the stakes of their culture war rhetoric—particularly Bork, who singled out the signing of the Declaration of Independence as the beginning of all that went dangerously wrong—Lilla is incorrect in his assertion that neoconservatism underwent dramatic changes. It changed in focus, from domestic to foreign policy, but I do not think it dramatically changed in tone. The neoconservative reaction to the cultural revolution of the 1960s began in the, wait for it, 1960s.

In the wake of the 1960s, neoconservatives did not merely interpret liberal or New Left movements such as “women’s liberation” as hostile to traditional family values. They also understood these movements as dangerously anti-capitalist, dangerously anti-American. Midge Decter captured this argument in her harsh 1972 rebuke of feminism, The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation. Decter contended that modern American women had it better than ever, for example, in their newfound abilities to secure gainful employment and control pregnancy through birth control. And yet, she pointed out, even with such advances, or perhaps because of them, the “women’s liberation” movement protested in increasingly fevered tones that women were subjected to patriarchal strictures. Decter countered that, far from wanting more freedom, feminists feared their newfound freedoms, because with them came new responsibilities. For instance, if women were going to enter the workplace like men, then they had to be prepared to compete alongside men in the dog-eat-dog world that men had long grown accustomed to. In short, Decter believed that feminists wanted to shirk the responsibilities of living in capitalist America. Her cultural critique of feminism doubled as a defense of capitalism. Decter was of Robin’s “reactionary mind.” So what is Lilla's complaint again?