Substance, Style, and Cold War Liberalism

Kevin Mattson’s reply to my provocations (I and II) was fantastic. I concede to Mattson on several points. For instance, I agree about the centrality of McCarthyism to postwar conservatism, which is particularly apropos given that Irving Kristol, the “father of neoconservatism,” made a halfhearted defense of McCarthy on the grounds that liberals could not be trusted to wage the Cold War. 

Yet, I stand by many of my original arguments, especially over the centrality of neoconservatism to the culture wars. This argument rests on my belief that the sixties represent a significant break, that the New Left is crucial to understanding the later culture wars, and that neoconservatism took form precisely in opposition to the New Left. In their reaction to the New Left and in their full-throated attack on those intellectuals who comprised, in Lionel Trilling’s words, an “adversary culture,” neoconservatives helped draw up the very terms of the culture wars. But since I have made that argument on this blog several times and would like to save some of my material for my book, I will let this debate go for now.

The one point of contention that I would like to return to, however, is the ongoing discussion about style and substance. Bill Fine’s many comments on this topic, as well as LD Burnett’s posts (here and here), have inspired me to think through where I stand on the style-substance spectrum in relation to Cold War liberalism. Both Mattson and LD claim that the New Left and the New Right evinced similar styles, implying that this fact is more important to our historical understanding of these two ideological trajectories than any political differences they might have had. I disagree.

In Rebels All!, Mattson argues that American conservatives are the true heirs to sixties radicals. Conservatives are the ones who carried on their legacy of anti-establishment utopianism. In this elocution, style matters. Such rebellious sensibilities stood in marked contrast to the political style that Mattson holds dear, the style of Cold War liberalism. Mattson appreciates the insights offered by postwar liberalism: “That irony and humility are necessary guards against self-assured expansion of American power. That style, the way you hold your ideas and worldview, often guide the way you do things in the world.”

Similarly, in her recent post—“Common Ground for the Culture Wars”—LD contends that William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale and Tom Hayden’s "Port Huron Statement" evinced strikingly similar sensibilities, particularly in their notions about the moral and political centrality of the university. Both Buckley and Hayden believed the university was worth fighting for, and in this fight they both saw themselves as doing battle with a corrupt system otherwise known as Cold War liberalism. That their critiques arose from divergent political views is less important than understanding their shared sensibilities.

Mattson points out that perhaps our main difference is over politics. Mattson writes: “He appears much more of a leftist; I’m a liberal. Some of his criticisms seem less about the substance of my own argument and getting things wrong and more with my own political conclusions.” Mattson is half correct here. Indeed, we do disagree about politics. He correctly mentions that we have different takes on historian-activist Howard Zinn, which seems to be a Rorschach test for left-leaning historians these days. Fair enough. (If you want my opinion on this matter, see my reading of Michael Kazin, who is chief among Zinn’s left-leaning critics.)

But I would argue that Mattson and my political differences do not merely lead me to dislike the conclusions he draws from history. I think it leads him to get the history wrong. This is particularly the case with his conflation of the sixties left with the post-sixties right, which seems to stem from his defense of Cold War liberalism. In this, Mattson repeats the Cold War liberal move, made most famously by Schlesinger in The Vital Center: he concludes that political ideas to the left and right of liberalism are non-sensible. Whereas Schlesinger and the consensus thinkers of the 1950s misapplied psychoanalytic theory to argue that non-liberal political views were crazy, Mattson argues that the rebellious style, whether a fashion of the left or the right, is antithetical to the good democratic society.

As far as I can tell, LD’s analysis of postwar sensibilities does not originate from any such political passion. And yet, in her historiographic commitments, she prioritizes the wrong thing. The point that Buckley and Hayden both opposed aspects of the university establishment, and in doing so were part of a larger counter-zeitgeist, is banal. Given that the university was central to the Cold War liberal project, and given that Cold War liberalism was hegemonic (there’s a reason it was called the consensus), all critics, left or right, might seem like “rebels all.” They were rebelling against powerful institutions, undergirded by powerful ideas. But their differences are more important to our historical understanding.

Buckley saw the university as an anti-traditionalist, anti-religious, secularizing institution. As such, his critique nicely anticipated the Christian Right’s war for the soul of America that took on added valence in the 1970s and after. Hayden, in contrast, saw the university as the soulless representation of a technocratic capitalism. Both critiques were compelling. Both spoke to the various weaknesses of Cold War liberalism. And both had later consequences. But they were substantially different. 

That both left and right offered withering criticisms of Cold War liberalism might say a lot about Cold War liberalism. But only by analyzing the specific substance of the respective criticisms do we learn about left and right and, consequently, about the culture wars that resulted from the crumbling of Cold War liberalism.

Writing About Emotion in USIH: Vidal, Buckley, and Tanenhaus

Sam Tanenhaus reflected yesterday, in The New York Times*, on the unexpected similarities between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr. The piece caught my eye because I just finished a section in my manuscript on Mortimer J. Adler's multiple Firing Line appearances and his interactions with Buckley.

In writing about both figures a prominent theme in Tanenhaus' piece was elitism in U.S. intellectual history---the class solidarity that bound both.  He finds other parallels, which I will point out below. But I'm most interested in larger thing Tanenhaus is trying to do in the article: write about emotion in the context of U.S. intellectual history.

Before going there, let me relay the last third of Tanenhaus' article, particularly these passages on American exceptionalism in the context of the Vietnam War (YouTube link moved here from earlier in the story):


----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Buckley and Mr. Vidal both subscribed, though in very different ways, to the ideal of American exceptionalism — ...[particularly its] susceptib[ility] to foreign infection. Mr. Vidal feared the evils of empire building...and warned against the decline that had overtaken other civilizations brought low by imperial hubris. 

For Buckley the threat came from global communism and “statist” domestic policies that would reduce Americans to servitude and weaken their connection to the moral values of Christianity.

It was this two-sides-of-the-same-coin idealism that led to the heated exchange in 1968. The actual topic that evening was the Vietnam War. Mr. Vidal opposed it. Buckley supported it. Again their reasons were parallel. For Mr. Vidal the war betrayed the tradition he was raised in, which sought to keep America untainted by the temptations of empire. For Buckley, supporting the war meant holding back the tide of communism. 

As their tempers rose, each seemed to be battling not so much the other as the distorted image of himself that his opponent represented. The terms they haughtily flung at each other were those other critics sometimes applied to them, only in reverse — Buckley, whose arch mannerisms were sometimes mocked as effete; Mr. Vidal, whose disdain for American vulgarity was tinged, some said, with anti-Semitism and dislike of the “lower orders.” 

Divided by so much, Mr. Vidal and Buckley were united in their iconoclasm, however uneasily.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Again, I love the Vidal-Buckley parallels in relation to iconoclasm, elitism, American exceptionalism, cavils from critics (e.g. effete), and fears of distorted images. For me this says that the so-called conservative-liberal divide of the post-war period is more, among intellectuals anyway, of an intramural contest within liberalism.  That contest was about shades of American liberalism, not a rejection of the larger project of liberalism.

As a professional historian (but not as a person with feelings of disgust) I very much appreciated (loved?) the visceral dislike and passion in the YouTube clip. It's rare to see that kind of open emotion, on air or otherwise. But it's not surprising given the period. To paraphrase today's cool kids, "That's what Vietnam do."

It's hard to top the source when one is writing about events like that---hence the link to the clip in the NYT article. How are you, dear reader, capturing emotions in your USIH work? How does one write about emotions effectively, and concisely, in age of multimedia? How can a traditional media article (journal, newspaper), with its two-dimensional limitations, convey the essence of an event best remembered for the passion conveyed in three dimensions? It seems that a YouTube clip is worth a thousand words. - TL

------------------------------------------

* Since it's only August 2, I'm going to assume that you can read the piece because you haven't used up your ten free online NYT viewings.

Is the Neoconservative “New Class” New?

Last week, I took issue with Kevin Mattson’s view that neoconservatives didn’t offer anything very new in their critique of intellectuals. Mattson’s argument pivots from his belief that the neoconservative use of the sociological concept of the “new class” was an unoriginal adaptation of conservative anti-intellectualism that had already been well established by William Buckley and his stable of writers at the National Review. Mattson writes the following about the neoconservative version of anti-intellectualism, perhaps best enunciated by Irving Kristol: “their criticism of the ‘new class’ [was not] all that different from the previous [old right] critique of the ‘liberal establishment’… Kristol defined the new class as ‘an intelligentsia which so despises the ethos of bourgeois society, and which is so guilt-ridden at being implicated in the life of this society.’ Nothing new there.”

Perhaps there is “nothing new there,” at least in this particular Kristol quote, or in Mattson’s very brief historical analysis of neoconservative “new class” thought (in his Rebels All!). Certainly Buckley and a host of other conservative thinkers made a career of lambasting liberal intellectuals well before Kristol and his ilk made their fateful turn to the right. As I argue at length in Education and the Cold War, the longstanding conservative critique of John Dewey set the tone of conservative anti-intellectualism during the Cold War. Taking his cues from traditionalists like Richard Weaver, Buckley played a big part in this. His 1950 treatise against Yale professors, God and Man at Yale, was a lamentation that “the teachings of John Dewey have borne fruit, as there is surely not a department at Yale that is uncontaminated with the absolute that there are no absolutes, no intrinsic rights, no ultimate truths.” His mission was to convince the Yale Board of Trustees and alumni to retake the university from the professors who subverted the curriculum to their “secularist and collectivist” ends. Buckley, ever the humorist, peppered his later writings with delightful anti-intellectual ripostes. “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.” (You gotta admit that’s funny.)

So Mattson is correct that neoconservatives were not the first American intellectuals to paradoxically find American intellectual life rotten. That said, neoconservative anti-intellectualism was different. Context matters here. Unlike Old Right thinkers like Weaver and Buckley, most neoconservatives considered themselves left of center in the early sixties. Some, like former Trotskyist Irving Kristol, were garden-variety Cold War liberals. But many others were New Leftists, or at least, fellow travelers of the sixties left. This included Norman Podhoretz, the Commentary editor who published some of the classic expressions of the New Left, most famously, Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd. By turning on the New Left in the late sixties after being so close to it—Podhoretz’s influential Commentarybecame the magazine most critical of the New Left—neoconservatives best articulated the anti-New Left conservative reaction, which was best expressed in neoconservative “new class” thought. This strain of thought also helps us make sense of the culture wars.

“New class” thought, which neoconservatives reformulated out of older left-wing, anti-Stalinist trope (that we have discussed at length at this blog here and here), was premised on the contention that acquisition of knowledge had become more crucial to the workings of power than accumulation of property. But more important to neoconservatives, who took their cues from Lionel Trilling’s famous examination of the avant-garde revolt against bourgeois society—what Trilling termed the “adversary culture”—“new class” theorizing was a way to understand the apparent anti-American turn taken by intellectuals and students during the 1960s. Trilling’s formulation, in turn, also helped neoconservatives explain the culture wars that grew out of that polarizing decade. A private memorandum written by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for his boss President Nixon in 1970 exemplified this framework: “No doubt there is a struggle going on in this country of the kind the Germans used to call a Kulturkampf. The adversary culture which dominates almost all channels of information transfer and opinion formation has never been stronger, and as best I can tell it has come near silencing the representatives of traditional America.”

New Class thought was different from previous strains of conservative anti-intellectualism because it was specifically formulated to understand the New Left; the older right never took such an interest in trying to get inside the mind of the New Left. Take novelist Saul Bellow as an example. Stephen Schryer, author of the excellent Fantasies of the New Class, considers Bellow’s 1970 Mr. Sammler’s Planet the neoconservative novel par excellence. (My thanks to Andrew Seal, who suggested I read Schryer in his comment on my earlier post about Bellow’s Ravelstein.) Having recently read Mr. Sammler’s Planet, I am inclined to agree. Furthermore, the portrait Bellow paints of the “new class” type reveals a new texture of anti-intellectualism.

In the opening scene of Mr. Sammler’s Planet, the protagonist says the following: “intellectual man has become an explaining creature. Fathers to children, wives to husbands, lecturers to listeners, experts to laymen, colleagues to colleagues, doctors to patients, man to his own soul explained.” But Mr. Artur Sammler, despite being an explainer himself, is uncomfortable with this age of humanity because he believes that most explanations contradict the “natural knowledge” innate to the human soul. Having fun with Hegel’s “Owl of Minerva,” which only takes flight at dusk—an allusion to Hegel’s theory that philosophy is only right after phenomena—Sammler says that the soul rests “unhappily on superstructures of explanation, poor bird, not knowing which way to fly.”

Echoing the neoconservative thought of Kristol, Podhoretz, Midge Dector, John Q. Wilson, and a host of others, Bellow (through Sammler) argued that much of intellectual life was dedicated to intellectualizing, rationalizing, and apologizing for increasingly bad behavior. As Schryer writes: “The history of western thought”—far from the moral apex imagined by Hegel—“has culminated in a cultural nihilism that, Sammler believes, finds expression in the social and political chaos of 1960s New York.” Sammler says, in a not so veiled critique of the sexual revolution, black power, and the sixties ethos in general: “the labor of Puritanism was now ending, the dark satanic mills changing into light satanic mills. The reprobates converted into children of joy, the sexual ways of the seraglio and of the Congo bush adopted by the emancipated masses of New York, Amsterdam, London.”

It’s not as if declension narratives were new. Weaver, for instance, perfected such an approach in Ideas Have Consequences (1948). But whereas old right conservatives believed the sixties were merely more of the same, the logical culmination of modernism, neoconservatives believed that the sixties represented a break: the break that later thinkers would mark between modernism and postmodernism. As neoconservative historian Gertrude Himmefarb (Kristol’s spouse) has written: “Where modernism tolerates relativism, 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.”

Something else new to neoconservative new class thought was the ways in which the critique of the sixties movements became a way to lament the collapse of the Protestant work ethic—to look on with horror at the onset of Charles Reich’s “Consciousness III.” Dector (Podhoretz’s spouse) forcefully articulated such a theory in her two anti-feminist books, The Liberated Woman and Other Americans (1971) and The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation(1972). Decter’s overarching contention was that American women had it better than ever. For example, women had newfound abilities to secure gainful employment and control pregnancy through birth control. And yet, as she sought to show, even with such advances, or perhaps because of them, feminists blindly lurched against patriarchal strictures. Decter argued that women joined the “women’s liberation” movement not out of a desire for new freedoms, but rather out of fear that with brand-new freedoms came brand-new responsibilities. “Women’s Liberation does not embody a new wave of demand for equal rights. Nor does its preoccupation with oppression signal a yearning for freedom,” she complained. Rather, it emerged from “the difficulties women are experiencing with the rights and freedoms they already enjoy.” For instance, if women were going to enter the workplace like men, Decter reasoned, they had to be prepared to compete in the cutthroat capitalist labor market that men had long grown accustomed to. In short, Decter believed that feminists were adversarial to the discipline enshrined in American traditions, such as the Protestant work ethic that the mostly Jewish neoconservatives came to adore.

The notion that feminists revolted against American traditions was consistent with so-called “new class” thought. The new class, as such, rationalized the New Left and countercultural expressions that had settled into the fabric of American culture. This was an innovative approach that came to define the ways conservatives fought the culture wars.

Of course, I am usually willing to admit that I might be wrong. And many of you, dear readers, are usually more than willing to show me where I might be wrong.

On the Origins of the Anti-Elitist Critique of Higher Ed

A couple weeks ago, Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum called President Barack Obama a "snob" for proposing policies that would make college affordable for more Americans. Santorum argued that colleges were "indoctrination mills" in which right-thinking young Americans were turned into godless liberals.

The sociologist Neil Gross had a useful piece in the New York Times yesterday refuting Santorum's claims about American higher education.  Citing actual sociological studies, Gross shows that, although university faculty are certainly more liberal and less pious than other Americans, attending college does not in fact turn students into liberals, agnostics, or atheists [h/t to Tim Lacy for initially calling this piece to my attention over on the S-USIH Facebook page]. This of course should be no surprise to those of us who teach in higher ed.

But, at least for readers of this blog, the more interesting aspect of Gross's op-ed may have been the intellectual history of conservative attacks on higher ed with which he concluded.*



Explaining the nature of these conservative attacks on higher ed, writes Gross,

...requires some historical perspective. Conservatives have been criticizing academia for many decades. Yet only once the McCarthy era passed did this criticism begin to be cast primarily in anti-elitist tones: charges of Communist subversion gave way to charges of liberal elitism in the writings of William F. Buckley Jr. and others. The idea that professors are snobs looking down their noses at ordinary Americans, trying to push the country in directions it does not wish to go, soon became an established conservative trope, taking its place alongside criticism of the liberal press and the liberal judiciary.  

The main reason for this development is that attacking liberal professors as elitists serves a vital purpose. It helps position the conservative movement as a populist enterprise by identifying a predatory elite to which conservatism stands opposed — an otherwise difficult task for a movement strongly backed by holders of economic power.

Gross is entirely correct about the populist (or pseudo-populist) function of the anti-elitist right-wing critique of higher education, but I believe he's wrong that this explains its timing.**

After all, the populist critique of elites had long been put to conservative ends. For example, the generation of white Southern politicians that included Pitchfork Ben Tillman had used such appeals to reconstitute white supremacy in the post-Reconstruction South.

And especially after FDR--a member of the cultural, social, and economic elite if there ever was one--became the leader of, and symbol for, a reconstituted American liberalism in the 1930s, conservatives frequently framed their criticisms of the New Deal in anti-elitist terms.  To many on the right, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a "country squire in the White House," as ex-New Dealer-turned-libertarian-conservative John T. Flynn titled his 1940 screed against the President.

But if conservative deployment of populist rhetoric was nothing new in the McCarthy period, what was new were the demographics of higher education.  In 1940, only 6 per cent of U.S. men and 4 per cent of U.S. women had completed four years of college.  Over the course of the next two decades, boosted at first by the GI Bill and post-war prosperity, those numbers began to increase. By 1960, 10 per cent of American men and 6 per cent of American women had completed four years of college. And starting in the 1960s, these numbers exploded.  By 1980, 21 per cent of US men and 14 per cent of US women had completed four years of college.***

In short, what was really new in the McCarthy era wasn't the value of populist rhetoric for the right, but rather the changing political importance of higher education in America.  It was precisely when higher education slowly began becoming available to people not in a tiny elite, that charges of elitism and snobbery in the academy began to become popular.  And at least at first, I suspect these politics were most potentially effective in their ability to exploit generational divides between an older, largely not college educated middle class and younger Americans much more likely to have attended college.

_______________________________________________

* I realize that I am stepping into the professional territory of my USIH co-blogger Andrew Hartman here. I trust he will improve upon any points I make in comments!

** I do question his notion that anti-elitist attacks on academia from the right were a wholly new thing in the McCarthy era. To begin with, charges of Communist subversion leveled against the academy had, themselves, an anti-elitist aspect to them.

*** Source:  Thomas D. Snyder (ed.), "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait" (U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement, 1993) (.pdf here)

The Death of Conservatism... and Other Vital Center Illusions (Cross-post)

Over at the on-line magazine Washington Decoded, check out my review of Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism. It should be of interest to USIH readers, as I put the book in the context of intellectual history, discussing Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William Buckley, Jr., Whitakker Chambers, Russell Kirk, Albert Jay Nock, and James Burnham, among others.

A little tease: I introduce the essay with a Hofstadter passage from 1964:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.

The Death of Conservatism... and Other Vital Center Illusions (Cross-post)

Over at the on-line magazine Washington Decoded, check out my review of Sam Tanenhaus, The Death of Conservatism. It should be of interest to USIH readers, as I put the book in the context of intellectual history, discussing Richard Hofstadter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., William Buckley, Jr., Whitakker Chambers, Russell Kirk, Albert Jay Nock, and James Burnham, among others.

A little tease: I introduce the essay with a Hofstadter passage from 1964:

American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.