George Nash's Conservative Intellectual Movement and Communities of Discourse

When I picked up a copy of George H. Nash's indispensable history of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 at the local used book store, I got more than I bargained for.

Sure, I got a pretty good deal on the book itself:  I paid $9.99 for a near-perfect hardback copy of the 1996 edition.  The pages are tight and clean, there is almost no shelf-wear, and the dust jacket is just ever so slightly bumped at the corners.  It's a really nice copy.  This is because I haven't started reading it yet.  I am a tough, tactile reader of the books I own:  I double-dog-ear pages, and I write rapid-fire marginalia like nobody's business.  By the time I am done with George Nash, this book will look like cannon fodder -- or, I suppose, canon fodder, as I bring Nash's text into conversation with the other books on my reading list. 

What I didn't bargain for when I bought Nash's text was the window that this particular copy of the book would give me into a different kind of conversation taking place within and across distinct communities of discourse -- to borrow and use David Hollinger's apt and helpful mode of analysis.  I need to understand the relationship between the ideas Nash discusses and the way that Nash discusses them in the context of these overlapping discourse communities.  Thankfully, Dr. Nash himself was available to offer some insight via email, which I am glad to share with our readers.

Tucked inside the front cover of the copy that I purchased is what appears to be a hand-written note, along with a business card from Brent Tantillo, (erstwhile) Program Director for The Collegiate Network of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (founded, as our readers know, by William F. Buckley, about whom I have written here).  The ISI published the 1996 edition of Nash's text.*

The note is written on 3.5" x 4.5" pre-printed cardstock.  At the top of the card is the ISI logo and name.  At the bottom is a pre-printed generic message -- "This might interest you" -- over Tantillo's name.  The card, it seems, was designed to be inserted in complimentary copies of books.  Sure enough, in the blank space between the ISI logo and the pre-printed signature, Tantillo wrote, "Here is a book that I thought you would enjoy. Merry Christmas! Brent."

The fact that there's no addressee on the card leads me to believe that the diligent Mr. Tantillo probably hand wrote stacks of these cards to be inserted into ISI publications sent out as Christmas gifts.  But how many stacks of cards?  Which publications, besides this one? Which Christmas?  I don't know, and I haven't yet tried to find out.  I do know that Brent Tantillo is no longer with the ISI -- per this profile page, he left that institution to co-found The Democracy Project, to which Wilfred M. McClay is also a contributor.  A simple email to Mr. Tantillo might answer many of my questions, and I may yet send such a message.  So far, everyone to whom I have written regarding my research has been more than happy to assist me, and I doubt Tantillo would react any differently.

However, what I really wanted to know was what George Nash might think about the relationship between his scholarship and the ISI's mission.

So I asked him.

My colleague Andrew Hartman was kind enough to introduce me to Nash via email, and Dr. Nash very graciously agreed to answer my questions.

Here's what I asked:

I'm working on a piece for the USIH blog about how books -- the real, physical objects -- occupy a unique place in the study of intellectual history, because they simultaneously testify to the history of ideas, the social/cultural history of intellectuals, the material conditions of intellectual discourse, and the shifting boundaries of various discourse communities.

The occasion for my post is a felicitous find I made at the local Half Price Books store:  a hardback copy of The Conservative Intellectual Movement (1996 reprint by ISI).  Inside the book was a business card and a hand-written note from an ISI staffer indicating that this particular copy of the book had been sent out as a Christmas gift.  

So I'm interested in thinking about the material history of your crucially important and influential text (which of course is on my exam reading list for US intellectual and cultural history), and the ways that this publishing/circulation history is part of the intellectual history of the very movement whose developments you trace.  

Specifically, here are some things I'm wondering about:  

-your choice to reissue the book with ISI rather than with an academic press.  This is an unconventional move, it seems, and I'd like to understand what kinds of factors you weighed in making that decision.  In what ways was this decision aimed at finding a wider audience, and in what ways was it aimed at finding a different audience?  Did the choice of this press as opposed to a university press or academic publisher come under criticism from the academy?  Should it have?

-the fact that your book was distributed by ISI not just as a significant work of history but (presumably) as a text that would further the mission/goals of ISI.  I am guessing that your decision to publish with them was taken in large part out of agreement with the basic aims of the organization.  In this sense your scholarship is formally and explicitly a part of the story that your scholarship tells.  This strikes me as an interesting dynamic, and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

-your thoughts more generally on critically engaged history.  If you happen to follow the conversations on the USIH blog, you may have seen much recent discussion about the place of irony in history, the moral commitment of historians, etc.  Is publishing with ISI sufficiently indicative of your larger "moral commitment," and do you see that as promising or problematic or really irrelevant to the larger project of your scholarship? 

Here is George Nash's very helpful and informative reply, which he has granted me permission to share with our readers:

Regarding the publishing history of The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945: as you know, Basic Books published it in hard cover in 1976 and in paperback in 1979. Basic Books kept the volume in print until 1988 or so, when I was informed that the book was no longer selling enough to justify its continuance in print.  I think the publisher and I thought that twelve years was a pretty respectable run.  In any case, in 1988 Basic Books let the book go out of print, and publishing rights (except for Spanish translation) reverted to me. 

In the next few years I gave some thought to reissuing the book with a new publisher, but I was quite busy with my multivolume biography of Herbert Hoover and did not pursue the matter too actively.

Then, in 1994 (as I remember), I was approached by a representative  of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI).  He explained that ISI was establishing a book publishing division and would be honored to reprint my book as its first (or one of its first) offerings. I was already familiar with ISI, of course, since I had written about it in my book and had lectured a few times to academically oriented audiences under its auspices. 

The more I thought about this proposed publishing arrangement, the more fitting it seemed. First, ISI (founded in the 1950s) was an organization of long standing whose tone and clientele were broadly academic. As a prospective book publisher, it resembled my first publisher, Basic Books, in seeking to disseminate serious books aimed not only at a tiny coterie of specialists but at what my first editor at Basic Books called "the intellectually oriented general reader." (In ISI's case, these would mostly be college students.) Second, by the mid-1990s ISI had an expanding national network of thousands of affiliated professors, graduate students, and undergraduates.  It seemed to me that these were precisely the sort of people most likely, in the first instance, to read a new and updated edition of the book, nearly twenty years after its initial publication.  That is, the principal new readership of the book would probably be a rising generation of politically aware and intellectually curious college and graduate students of the kind ISI reached out to in its programs every year.  I suspected that ISI would produce a volume accessible to this emerging demographic (unlike many university presses that might be content to print just a small number of copies at a price well beyond the reach of most undergraduates or college course adoption.) 

I think my judgment proved to be correct.  In 1996 ISI Books published an attractive, reasonably priced, hardcover, new edition with updated material that I wrote for it.  In 1998 the paperback edition appeared.  In 2006 ISI Books published an updated "30th anniversary edition" in paperback.  During these years a growing number of politically minded students (and not just those who self-identified as conservative) discovered the book and found it pertinent to their interests. The book found its way onto reading lists for graduate and undergraduate study in the areas of American political and intellectual history and the rapidly developing field of "conservative studies."  Major political phenomena of recent times ( the "Reagan Revolution," the Tea Party, etc.) obviously have had much to do with the book's continuing relevance and circulation. During this period the book has also appealed to a number of people (Left and Right) in the journalistic/commentary community, as E. J. Dionne, among others, has publicly attested.  I am not aware of any criticism in the academy of my decision to permit ISI to republish the book. 

ISI, as you probably know, has now been existence for sixty years.  Its motto is "To Educate for Liberty," and it conceives its mission as educational and intellectual in nature.  In addition to conducting an energetic program of academic and "public intellectual"--type book publishing (in association, I believe, with the University of Chicago Press), it publishes intellectually focused periodicals (notably Modern Age  and the Intercollegiate Review), awards fellowships to graduate students, facilitates undergraduate study clubs and summer institutes focused on the Great Books and themes of western civilization (among other subjects), and sponsors numerous public lectures a year by its affiliated scholars. It has been called an "alternative university," bringing to campuses ideas and perspectives that it finds too often underrepresented in American academic discourse.  I believe that approximately 60,000 to 80,000 faculty and students are in its network at present.

My own association with ISI consists of my being on its mailing list, writing occasionally for its journals, serving on the editorial advisory board for Modern Age, lecturing from time to time under ISI's auspices (most recently to an undergraduate political philosophy study group at the University of Wisconsin), and publishing two volumes with ISI Books.  My name also appears in the new online ISI Speakers Bureau, which was announced a week or so ago. Here are two links to this:

http://faculty.isi.org/speakers   

and 

http://faculty.isi.org/speakers/index/browse/theme_id/2

As you will see, ISI's affiliated academic lecturers include, besides myself, a number of persons probably familiar to the USIH blog, such as the historians Wilfred McClay and Brian Domitrovic.

Since it might be of interest to you, I also enclose a link to an interview I did for an ISI website a couple of years ago: 

http://faculty.isi.org/blog/post/view/id/303%20http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles.aspx?article=1803&loc=r

As you can infer from the above, I think well of ISI and have been pleased to contribute, when invited, to its educational programs (time permitting).  This has bought me into acquaintance with a number of studious and impressive undergraduates and graduate students throughout the United States--mostly (but not exclusively) conservatives eager to explore their intellectual roots and civilizational heritage in a rigorous way.  As an independent scholar or (as I sometimes put it) an academic without portfolio, I have always been free to say what I want at ISI forums. I am not an ISI employee and in fact lecture widely at non-ISI gatherings as well (such as academic conferences).  I do not know where all this may rank in the scale of "moral commitment," but as a historian of American conservatism (and other subjects) I have always aspired to write works that can be read with profit by people across the ideological spectrum, regardless of their opinion of the subject. In academia I am known as a conservative intellectual, and I willingly accept the designation. But this has not precluded my striving for fairness, balance, and objectivity in my professional work, both written and oral.  This has been part of my moral commitment as a historian. 

I am grateful for this thoughtful and thorough reply, and glad to share it with our readers.  The reply highlights some intersections and interconnections between distinct but overlapping communities of discourse -- critical scholarly inquiry and conservative cultural advocacy -- to which I will do well to pay attention as an American intellectual and cultural historian.  Further, it gives me a most welcome insight into the ethos of a particular, and particularly important, historian of this era in American intellectual history.  Finally, it serves to confirm my sense of the basic generosity and collegiality of the historical profession and of the academy more generally.

Without exception, all those to whom I have written in connection with my work, from the most junior scholars to the most eminent historians in the field, have been unfailingly gracious and generous in answering my questions and providing suggestions for further research.  In this sense, George Nash's specific response to my particular inquiry is broadly, hearteningly typical.  His answer not only says a great deal about his own sense of his subject matter and his own ethos as a historian; it also exemplifies the ethos of the academy as a hospitable home to scholars from distinct yet overlapping communities of discourse.  As communities of discourse go, the field of U.S. intellectual history suits me just fine; I like where I have landed.  And the intellectual generosity of scholars like George Nash in answering the pointed questions of this inquisitive grad student serves as yet another reminder of why I  think I am in such good company.

And just think:  all this insight has come my way before I have so much as turned to the first page of Nash's crucially important book.  There's no telling where that text itself will take me -- but I'll no doubt be able to retrace my steps, one margin-note and double-dog-eared page at a time.

______________

*In a follow-up email, Dr. Nash offered this helpful advice: "The 2006 edition, which I mentioned in my response, contains several new features: a new Preface, a new Conclusion, and a new Bibliographical Postscript.  Also, for the first time in the history of this book, its footnotes are placed at the bottom of the page--a feature I heartily approve. So you may want to take a look at the later edition at some point."  Sold! The footnotes alone would be enough to convince me.  

George Nash: Intellectual Autobiography

Dear Readers: What follows is an excerpt from George Nash's comments on an OAH Panel on conservative intellectuals. He graciously agreed to my request that these comments be published here.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin April 19, 2012

George H. Nash

One of the organizers of this panel has urged me to be autobiographical in my remarks, as a way, perhaps, of providing a context for our discussion, and so, for a few minutes, I will oblige. As most of you know, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945 originated as a doctoral dissertation at Harvard University. What you probably do not know is that this was not the original subject of my dissertation. Casting about for a topic while living on a politically polarized university campus in 1969 and 1970, I became fascinated by the phenomenon of intellectuals in American politics and began to look for a “case study” to focus upon. For a time I considered writing a dissertation about the muckrakers or the Progressives. Moving closer toward the present, I examined leftwing student protest movements in the 1930s. Finally, after several months of searching, I selected my dissertation subject: a history of Americans for Democratic Action (the ADA).

Barely two months later, I abandoned this topic. I did so for reasons that seemed compelling to a lowly graduate student at the time. I discovered that another graduate student at another university was working on the very same subject and had a substantial head start. And I came to the conclusion from my preliminary research that the ADA—whatever one thought of its principles—was boring. Once it had defeated the “Progressive” liberals in the political civil war on the Left in 1947-48, it quickly settled down into utter predictability and ideological conformity. Its period of greatest historical importance had lasted little more than a year.

And so it came about that my dissertation adviser—himself at the time a liberal Democrat and onetime ADA member—suggested that I look at intellectuals on the other side of the political divide: the conservatives. In truth, the idea of writing about modern conservatism had occurred to me before my adviser, Donald Fleming, made his fateful recommendation, but two obstacles had deterred me up to that point. The first, which may strike you as quaint, was concern that the topic was not “historical” enough—that it was too close in time to the present to be examined in historical perspective. Would there, I also wondered, be enough archival material upon which to base such a study? The second hurdle was in a sense political: conservatism in the early 1970s was not chic among historians, and I knew this. During my undergraduate years at Amherst, one of my professors had dismissed Russell Kirk as a “broken record” and William F. Buckley Jr. as “fancy footwork.” I knew what prominent historians thought of what was frequently then labeled the “Radical Right.” Still, in 1970 I accepted my adviser’s counsel and quickly found, on the intellectual Right, a world in ferment that proved fascinating to explore.

The decision to write about an unfashionable topic, with contemporary ramifications, had an important effect on me, I now believe: it encouraged me to approach the subject as dispassionately as possible. I aspired to write a dissertation (and eventual book) that could be read with profit by people across the ideological spectrum, regardless of their opinion of the subject. In the near term (though I do not recall worrying about this unduly), it would be necessary to submit a dissertation that would pass muster with readers in my own department, none of whom, so far as I knew, was sympathetic to conservatism.

But there was more to my modus operandi than this. In his paper Professor Andrew Hartman quotes a passage from Gertrude Himmelfarb that resonates with me. “Where modernism tolerates relativism,” she says, “postmodernism celebrates it.” “Where modernism, aware of the obstacles in the way of objectivity, regards this as a challenge and makes strenuous efforts to attain as much objectivity and unbiased truth as possible, postmodernism takes the rejection of absolute truth as a deliverance from all truth and from the obligation to maintain any degree of objectivity.”

By this definition of terms, I think it fair to say that Professor [David] Hoeveler [chair of this panel] and I came into the profession at the tail end of the reign of modernism. Somewhere along the line I absorbed the conviction that the fundamental purpose of a historian must be the quest for truth about the past or (in the words of the historian John Lukacs) “the reduction of untruths” about the past. To be sure, we all have our limitations. We are all human and, as Mark Twain once remarked, “There is a little human nature in all of us.” Moreover, as historians we know that perspectives change, new methodologies appear, the world turns, new conditions arise, and new questions about the past become salient. Nevertheless, as Himmelfarb notes, the “modernist” response to these “obstacles in the way of objectivity” is to try to overcome them and reaffirm the ideal, even while knowing that we shall never totally succeed. Some of this impulse, I believe, guided my approach to my subject: I wanted and felt the need to be as nonpartisan about it as possible.

So I plunged in and thereby (without knowing it) set out on a road that has remained less traveled until recently. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had persisted with a dissertation on the ADA. The chances are that I would not be participating in this panel today.

I share these fragments of autobiography partly to emphasize the curious, contingent factors that can shape a career or a field of inquiry--and partly for another reason. Today historians and other scholars often speak about our “projects” and our research agendas. Perhaps this is a subtle reflection of the hold of postmodernism on the academic imagination: If truth is merely a construct derived from the interplay of power relationships, perhaps it must appear to some that whenever we write a book we must have some hidden, long-term purpose. In my own case, I have occasionally noticed in the literature what seem to be intimations that The Conservative Intellectual Movement in American Since 1945 was intended to establish the parameters for the field and to marginalize other approaches to the study of American conservatism. Why, for instance, did the book start with 1945? Why not 1933? Was I attempting thereby to “privilege” the Buckleyite New Right at the expense of the pre-World War II “Old Right”? And so on.

Perhaps the funniest hint that the book had some grandiose ambition was probably a case of a typographical error. In the 1980s someone in a bibliography mistakenly cited my book as The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1492!

Let me assure all present that I had no such grand design when I began. In 1970 I was a twenty-five-year-old graduate student anxious to do my best on a manageable subject that seemed worth studying and then, with my degree in hand, to enter Academia. If I had done so in the conventional manner, I have no idea what my second book would have been about.

What's next in the intellectual history of conservatives?

My OAH experience this year was short but sweet. My panel, "Advise and Dissent: Intellectuals, Values, and Postwar Conservative Trajectories," which took place on Thursday, was a huge success by my account. Chaired by J. David Hoeveler (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee), it included excellent papers by Gregory Schneider (Emporia State University), who talked about Stephen Tonsor, and Lisa Szefel (Pacific University, the next S-USIH treasurer), who presented on Peter Viereck. I gave a paper on Gertrude Himmelfarb. The highlight of the session was provided by George H. Nash, author of the groundbreaking The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (which we debated last year at length here).

Nash opened with a fascinating autobiographical discussion about his peculiar career trajectory--which is of historiographic significance given that his seminal book on conservative intellectuals was written way, way before the topic became trendy. He then spoke some about the incredible surge of historiography on conservatism since Alan Brinkley offered the topic his imprimatur. After that, Nash concluded with some suggestions about what still needs to be done on the history of conservatism. Here they are:

Nash contends that we need biographies of the following three conservative intellectuals:

1) Irving Kristol. (It's amazing nobody has written this yet.)

2) Richard John Neuhaus. (I think our own Ray Haberski is the perfect candidate to write this book.)

3) Peter Viereck. (As Nash noted, luckily Lisa Szefel is on the case.)

Nash also argued that we need more historical exploration of the following three spheres of conservative intellectual history:

1) Neoconservatism. (I couldn't agree more.)

2) The changing place of Europe in the conservative imagination. (This is intriguing--I wanted to ask Nash more about this but forgot to.)

3) Conservative religious ecumenicalism and interfaith alliances. (Speaking as someone writing on the culture wars, for which the breakdown of religious barriers in favor of new political alliances was a major cause and consequence, I second this notion.)

What do you all think? How about an open thread on what still needs to be done on the history of conservatism, conservative intellectuals, or even intellectual history more broadly.

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.

Gore Vidal, Master Polemicist

I have always loved a good polemic. Perhaps this is one of the reasons I selected the culture wars as the topic of my current research. The polemic is the genre of choice for culture warriors. Unfortunately, most of the culture wars polemics I read are bad; they are mostly, to phrase it generously, “inartful.” So much so that I have almost grown immune to the polemic. But every now and then I come across a master polemicist, someone like Gore Vidal. For anyone interested in learning the art of the polemic, his 1981 essay “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” should be compulsory reading. (The essay was originally published by The Nation [Nov. 14, 1981] but is perhaps easier located in The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, 339-356.)

“Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” is a 17-page review of an article of about the same length, which might seem strange minus some context. Vidal’s essay was a scathing critique of Midge Decter’s infamous “Boys on the Beach” article—a vicious, anecdotal attack on the gay right’s movement—published in Commentary (Sept. 1980). “Boys on the Beach” was widely read and discussed in literary circles. In other words, Decter’s article merited the Vidal treatment.

Decter opposed the gay right’s movement in general, just as she opposed women’s liberation, and all the other movements associated with the Sixties. In this she was the typical, even prototypical neoconservative. But specific to her 1980 Commentary article, she framed her opposition to gay rights, and to homosexuality more generally, by way of her observations of the gays who populated Fire Island, a Long Island beach resort where Decter and her family spent their summers in the early 1960s. Among other slanders, Decter interpreted the homosexuality she observed on Fire Island as a flight from the responsibilities of women and children. She accused the Fire Island gays of flaunting their narcissistic behavior in the face of the straight men who duly went about their unexciting but meaningful lives but who nonetheless felt that the gays were flaunting their irresponsibility. The straight men Decter defended—men like her husband, Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz—“feel mocked most of all for having become, in style as well as in substance, family men, caught up in getting and begetting, thinking of mortgages, schools, and the affordable, marking the passage of years in obedience to all the grubby imperatives that heterosexual manhood seems to impose. In assuming such burdens they believe themselves entitled to respect, but homosexuality paints them with the color of sheer entrapment.” The upshot is that Decter believed the gays of Fire Island already had everything they wanted, so what need was there for a gay right’s movement?


Vidal cut Decter down to size on the merits of her argument, to be sure. As Vidal makes clear, Decter described the Fire Island gays as if they represented all gays, ignoring that plenty hid in plain sight due to social prejudices. And on the notion that gay men lived to torment the straight men around them, Vidal had this retort: “Although Decter’s blood was always at the boil when contemplating these unnatural and immature half-men, they were, I would suspect, serenely unaware of her and her new-class cronies, solemnly worshiping at the shrine of The Family.”

Vidal also went after Decter’s style, since, for the master polemicist, there is no strict division between style and substance. A small sample: “[Decter] writes with the authority and easy confidence of someone who knows that she is very well known to those few who know her.”

Even more damning, Vidal questions Decter’s basic understanding of homosexuality, in response to her remark, a mix of wonder and disgust, that the bodies of the gays on the beach were seemingly always hairless. “It is startling that Decter has not yet learned that there is no hormonal difference between men who like sex with other men and those who like sex with women.”

But the icing on the polemical cake is the way Vidal framed his overarching argument. By titling his article “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star,” Vidal called attention to Decter as a Jew, and to Commentary as a Jewish publication. “In the German concentration camps, Jews wore yellow stars while homosexualists wore pink triangles.” In the context of Reagan’s election and with the newfound political visibility of evangelicals, Vidal reasoned that Jews and homosexuals, once again, had common enemies and should unite. And yet, to the contrary, “Mrs. Norman Podhoretz… has managed not only to come up with every known prejudice and superstition about same-sexers but also to make up some brand-new ones. For sheer vim and vigor, ‘The Boys on the Beach’ outdoes its implicit model, The Protocol of the Elders of Zion.”

This latter element of Vidal’s argument is the most suspect, at least, in terms of accurately judging the Jewish position in the United States. That many Jews have found common cause with evangelicals, and not just regarding Israel, has not constrained their freedom as Jews in the United States. Quite to the contrary, as George Nash convincingly demonstrates in “Joining Ranks: Commentary and American Conservatism,” a chapter from his latest book, Reappraising the Right, the conservative turn taken by the Jews at Commentary demonstrated that Jews were more mainstream than ever, and thus less threatened as a minority than ever. Nash writes: “In 1945, Commentary had been born into a marginal, impoverished, immigrant-based subculture and an intellectual milieu that touted ‘alienation’ and ‘critical nonconformity’ as the true marks of the intellectual vis-à-vis his own culture. Two generations later, Commentary stood in the mainstream of American culture, and even of American conservatism, as a celebrant of the fundamental goodness of the American regime, and Norman Podhoretz, an immigrant’s milkman, was its advocate.” Of course, perspicuity is not always a prerequisite for a powerful polemic, nor for a proper ethical stance.

Allow me to conclude by asking two questions of you, dear reader: What makes a good polemic? And who are some of your favorite polemicists?

Do You Still Read George Nash?

For my weekly post, I planned a substantial essay connecting the last three books I read--Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, and David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom--but I didn't have enough hours in my week to do it justice. So stay tuned for that next week. In the meantime, I offer a short post on a topic that is also substantial. Do intellectual historians still read George Nash, author of the classic The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (1976)?

This topic is my way of sending regrets to the ongoing OAH, which I am unfortunately missing this year. Next year, I hope to be a participant when the OAH makes it way to Milwaukee (next year is the year of the Midwest history conference--in addition to the OAH hitting Wisconsin, both the AHA and the History of Education Society annual meetings will be in Chicago). You see, Lisa Szefel and I organized a panel proposal for next year's OAH on conservative intellectuals, and George Nash agreed to serve as our commentator should we be accepted to the program. We styled the panel as a chance to review conservative intellectual historiography in the wake of Nash's monumental work, which has been described as the Bible of Conservative Intellectual History. (Jennifer Burns reviewed the Nash book's legacy in a 2004 Reviews in American History essay here.)

Here's a small sample of the panel proposal that Lisa and I wrote:

George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, first published in 1976, stands as the most influential book in the historiography of conservative intellectuals. To this day, it is rare for historians to challenge Nash’s thesis that the conservative intellectual movement was a big tent, under which traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommunists all gathered amicably. Nash, in other words, added historical description to the fusionist prescriptions of Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley, Jr. at the National Review, which probably explains why that famous little magazine pre-published The Conservative Intellectual Movement as a 47-page inset.

Although Nash’s big tent argument seems like conventional wisdom in retrospect, at the time it was an important revision in at least two ways. First, Nash helped explode pluralist notions of conservatism, laid out in that notorious 1962 collection of essays, The Radical Right, that psychoanalyzed conservatism as a symptom of status anxiety. For pluralists like Richard Hofstadter, conservatism was an irrational, borderline pathological response to the swirls of modernity. Nash’s conservatives, on the other hand, hardly evinced Hofstadter’s infamous “paranoid style.” They were serious intellectuals who thought deeply about and responded creatively to the challenges of modernity. Second, Nash's emphasis on the autonomy of ideas, especially those regarding history and tradition that conservative intellectuals imported from Europe, challenged materialist assumptions about conservative thought as a mere mask for the business class.
---------------------
So my question to readers: Do you still read George Nash? I still use his 1976 classic work as a sort of encyclopedia that sits on my desk whenever I'm writing about conservative intellectuals. But a review of a recent collection of his writings made me think I need to get caught up with some of his more recent work.

Do You Still Read George Nash?

For my weekly post, I planned a substantial essay connecting the last three books I read--Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture, David Hollinger, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity, and David Sehat, The Myth of American Religious Freedom--but I didn't have enough hours in my week to do it justice. So stay tuned for that next week. In the meantime, I offer a short post on a topic that is also substantial. Do intellectual historians still read George Nash, author of the classic The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America (1976)?

This topic is my way of sending regrets to the ongoing OAH, which I am unfortunately missing this year. Next year, I hope to be a participant when the OAH makes it way to Milwaukee (next year is the year of the Midwest history conference--in addition to the OAH hitting Wisconsin, both the AHA and the History of Education Society annual meetings will be in Chicago). You see, Lisa Szefel and I organized a panel proposal for next year's OAH on conservative intellectuals, and George Nash agreed to serve as our commentator should we be accepted to the program. We styled the panel as a chance to review conservative intellectual historiography in the wake of Nash's monumental work, which has been described as the Bible of Conservative Intellectual History. (Jennifer Burns reviewed the Nash book's legacy in a 2004 Reviews in American History essay here.)

Here's a small sample of the panel proposal that Lisa and I wrote:

George H. Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945, first published in 1976, stands as the most influential book in the historiography of conservative intellectuals. To this day, it is rare for historians to challenge Nash’s thesis that the conservative intellectual movement was a big tent, under which traditionalists, libertarians, and anticommunists all gathered amicably. Nash, in other words, added historical description to the fusionist prescriptions of Frank Meyer and William F. Buckley, Jr. at the National Review, which probably explains why that famous little magazine pre-published The Conservative Intellectual Movement as a 47-page inset.

Although Nash’s big tent argument seems like conventional wisdom in retrospect, at the time it was an important revision in at least two ways. First, Nash helped explode pluralist notions of conservatism, laid out in that notorious 1962 collection of essays, The Radical Right, that psychoanalyzed conservatism as a symptom of status anxiety. For pluralists like Richard Hofstadter, conservatism was an irrational, borderline pathological response to the swirls of modernity. Nash’s conservatives, on the other hand, hardly evinced Hofstadter’s infamous “paranoid style.” They were serious intellectuals who thought deeply about and responded creatively to the challenges of modernity. Second, Nash's emphasis on the autonomy of ideas, especially those regarding history and tradition that conservative intellectuals imported from Europe, challenged materialist assumptions about conservative thought as a mere mask for the business class.
---------------------
So my question to readers: Do you still read George Nash? I still use his 1976 classic work as a sort of encyclopedia that sits on my desk whenever I'm writing about conservative intellectuals. But a review of a recent collection of his writings made me think I need to get caught up with some of his more recent work.