H.P. Lovecraft: A Biography
by S.T. Joshi
West Warwick, Rhode Island:
Necronomicon Press; 704 pp., $20.00

H.P. Lovecraft: Miscellaneous Writings
Edited by S.T. Joshi
Sank City, Wisconsin:
Arkham House; 568 pp., $29.95

S.T. Joshi begins his mammoth biographical study of Howard Phillips Lovecraft by quoting his subject's reaction to a suggestion from a fan that he write his autobiography. With the almost pathological modesty that characterized Lovecraft throughout his life, he snorted in response, "One might as well write the pompously documented biography of a sandwich man or elevator boy in 8 volumes." If there is one theme that runs throughout Lovecraft's voluminous correspondence, it is that he never had any illusions that the obscure life he led was worth writing about or that the supernatural horror fiction he wrote, and on which his fame today rests, was worth reading. It is both fortunate and unfortunate that those who have succeeded in turning H.P. Lovecraft into a cult (in some quarters, almost a religion) as well as an industry have paid no attention.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1890 to a declining high-bourgeois family of New England old stock, Lovecraft lived, or rather endured, a life and writing career that can only be judged failures. His father, a traveling salesman, died in a local insane asylum from what must have been syphilis when Lovecraft was eight. His mother smothered him with possessive and crippling affection and incessantly sought to bind him to her by insisting he was "hideous." She died in the same asylum in 1921, after two years' confinement. Dependent on his grandfather's business for their income, Lovecraft and his family were obliged to leave their home during his childhood and take up far more modest quarters when the business failed. Afflicted from early youth by nightmares, macabre dreams, and a "nervous temperament," Lovecraft was unable to complete high school and entered adulthood a reclusive and even neurotic young man, utterly unprepared to earn his own living and utterly disinclined to try.

Something of a child prodigy who translated Ovid into heroic couplets at the age of 10 or 12, Lovecraft succeeded in inventing his own world as a substitute for the one in which he was unable or unwilling to participate. As a child and adolescent, he not only immersed himself in 18th-century English and ancient Roman literature and history but acquired a genuine expertise in his hobbies of astronomy and chemistry. He was writing newspaper columns on astronomy at an early age and planned a career as a professional astronomer, but his lack of mathematical aptitude and his inability to complete high school made that career impossible. Instead he turned to amateur journalism, to crafting dreadful poetry that was usually little more than clever imitations of the Augustan masters he adored, and eventually to writing short stories based on his nightmares and heavily influenced by the major literary hero of his youth, Edgar Allan Poe.

In the 1920's, there emerged a small national market for the genre of popular literature known as "supernatural horror" or "weird fiction," mainly through a now-famous pulp magazine called Weird Tales. Lovecraft published frequently in Weird Tales and similar pulps in that period, and indeed the principal reason they are remembered today at all is because of him. But even there he did not fit. His stories were often rejected by Weird Tales's eccentric, mercenary, and largely incompetent editor, Farnsworth Wright, and in truth Lovecraft's own highly original and distinctive tales of horror simply did not conform to the formulas on which Wright and similar editors insisted.

In 1924, Lovecraft married a woman named Sonia Greene, but in marriage too he was a failure. Unable to find a job in New York that could support both of them, he lived on her earnings as a fashion designer. He was never comfortable doing so, nor indeed in being married at all, and he insisted on divorcing her in 1929. Reduced to poverty—at times nearly to starvation—Lovecraft returned to his beloved Providence to live with an aunt, his only remaining relative, scratching out less than a livelihood by ghostwriting stories, articles, and an occasional book for other "writers." Wracked by bad health from the days of his boyhood, unable to endure cold temperatures without becoming comatose, and consuming a diet that by his own calculations cost him 30 cents a day, Lovecraft contracted both a kidney infection and intestinal cancer at the age of 46. He died in Providence in 1937. Only seven people attended his funeral, and at the time of his death probably not more than a thousand readers would have recognized his name.

And yet, had he lived for only a few more years, he would probably have become world famous and, eventually, wealthy. His work has been in print almost since his death, and in the late 1960's he began to become something of a cult figure. Not only all his stories and novelettes but five volumes of his letters as well as the substantial collection of his Miscellaneous Writings are in print, and the stories at least continue to sell well. A number of biographical accounts and reminiscences of Lovecraft have been published by his fans and friends; there are at least two magazines devoted to his life and work (one of them seemingly a serious literary journal), and two full-scale biographies (including Mr. Joshi's new one) have appeared.

Several films have been based on his stories, which have influenced some of the major writers of the late 20th century, including Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco, and an entire school of "supernatural horror fiction" has based itself on the "Cthulhu Mythos" that he invented for his own stories. An academic conference on Lovecraft was held at Brown University on the centenary of his birth, and several monographs on him and his work have been published. Lovecraft himself has popped up as a character in several science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as in comic books; a roleplaying game, based on one of his stories, has been created, and in the 1970's there was a rock band called "H.P. Lovecraft." Indeed, in 1996 some Lovecraft fans even mounted a presidential campaign for one of the principal archdemons of his fictitious mythology, using the slogan, "Cthulhu For President: Why Vote For The Lesser Evil?"

Lovecraft has thus evolved into a myth, and much of what has been written about him is no less mythical than the monsters and macabre characters he created. The eccentricity of his personality and the even more bizarre contours of his personal philosophical and political beliefs—he was at once a militant atheist and a "mechanistic materialist" as well as an extreme reactionary and racialist, if not an outright Nazi, who ardently admired Franklin Roosevelt as well as Hitler and Mussolini—simply add to the myth; while the thousands of letters he produced during his lifetime (the published five volumes of letters are heavily edited and abridged and represent only a fraction of the total) render his life and mind difficult to assimilate, especially for an intelligentsia that sneers at both the sort of fiction he wrote and the ideas around which his mind revolved. Some critics have placed his literary work on the same level as that of Poe, while others dismiss his writing as trash. Some regard him as a serious thinker and aesthetic theorist; others, simply as a crackpot and a neurotic malcontent. He has been accepted almost literally as a god—and as the very sandwich man or elevator boy he was convinced he was.

By far the greatest merit of Mr. Joshi's biography is that it takes Lovecraft seriously—perhaps too seriously—but not as a god. While Joshi spends a good deal of time elaborating and explaining Lovecraft's philosophical views and showing their importance to his literary work, he is often quite savage in his assessment of Lovecraft's writing at its worst. At the same time, he readily hails Lovecraft's several major stories as the masterpieces of literary horror that they are and carefully avoids the temptations either to indulge in speculations about the more obscure corners of Lovecraft's life or to envelop his peculiar mind and personality in the psychobabble which detracts from the other major biography of Lovecraft by the science fiction writer L. Sprague de Camp.

Lovecraft's early stories are flawed mainly by verbosity and what critics have called "adjectivitis"—an overreliance on adjectives to describe the horrible, dreadful, frightening, gruesome, mind-chilling, etc. Moreover, throughout his tales character development is weak: indeed, there are precious few characters at all. The protagonists of his stories are usually thinly disguised doppelgangers of Lovecraft himself, scholarly bachelors of good family but dim prospects who encounter events and beings that defy natural explanation and which usually end in the horrible, dreadful, frightening, gruesome, mind-chilling death or dismemberment of the protagonist or other characters, or at least in their insanity. There are virtually no female characters, little story development (Lovecraft's plot devices often consist of diaries, letters, and various documents from which a narrative is reconstructed), less dialogue, and a good deal of heavy message between the lines as to how the cosmos is not really as nice or neat as mere mortals like to imagine.

The centerpiece of his stories, developed at various times throughout his career but intensively in the 1920's, is the aforementioned "Cthulhu Mythos," a term that refers to various fictitiously named locations in New England (Arkham, Miskatonic University), as well as to a series of supernatural or (more accurately) extraterrestrial beings known as the "Old Ones." In Lovecraft's literary cosmology, the Old Ones—with names like Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, et cetera, loosely derived from real mythology and philology—dominated the Earth millions of years ago. Hideous in appearance (they often resemble gigantic polymorphous insects compounded with reptiles and crustaceans) but possessed of vastly superhuman intelligence and powers, they are hostile to human beings and can be revived, resuscitated, or invoked through a kind of black magic known to a few and practiced by none but the degenerate (usually nonwhites). The techniques for invoking them are to be found in various ancient tomes also invented by Lovecraft, chiefly the Necronomicon, written in the eighth century A.D. by "the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred" and existing today in only five known copies (one of which is conveniently located in the Miskatonic University Library). But invokers of the Old Ones are generally destroyed by them, and even those who become aware of their continuing existence and the implications of their existence are usually driven mad.

The stories in which Lovecraft developed the Mythos most seriously are among his best and most mature tales, and while they continued to exhibit the peculiarities of his style in their lack of character development and plot, they are gems of setting and atmosphere, enlivened by Lovecraft's own profound knowledge of New England history, topography, architecture, and antiquities, sparingly written and genuinely effective in communicating what Lovecraft wanted to communicate. Mr. Joshi is right to insist that Lovecraft should not be faulted for avoiding character and plot since both of these would have detracted from the larger effect Lovecraft intended to create. For, as Mr. Joshi shows, in Lovecraft's stories it is neither the human characters nor their actions that are the main interest but the Lovecraftian Cosmos itself and the beings or forces that animate it.

Lovecraft's juvenile fascination with science alienated him from Christianity and drew him into a lifelong worldview that Mr. Joshi, as far as I know, is the first to recognize as a modern version of Epicureanism—a cosmology that denies the existence of anything but matter and motion and rejects the view that the universe has any purpose or goal. Lovecraft probably derived his Epicureanism from the Roman poet Lucretius, whom he may have read in Latin, but he also adapted that worldview throughout his life, trying to take account of Einsteinian physics and quantum theory as they became known in the 1920's. It was the very purposelessness of the universe that lay at the heart of Lovecraft's almost obsessive conservatism. As he wrote in an essay of 1926, reprinted in Miscellaneous Writings:

The world, life, and universe we know, are only a passing cloud—yesterday in eternity it did not exist, and tomorrow its existence will be forgotten. Nothing matters—all that happens happens through the automatic and inflexible interacting of electrons, atoms, and molecules of infinity according to patterns which are coexistent with basic entity itself . . . . All is illusion, hollowness, and nothingness—but what does that matter? Illusions are all we have, so let us pretend to cling to them; they lend dramatic values and comforting sensations of purpose to things which are really valueless and purposeless. All one can logically do is to jog placidly and cynically on, according to the artificial standards and traditions with which heredity and environment have endowed him. He will get most satisfaction in the end by keeping faithful to these things.

This rather dismal creed, repeatedly developed in his essays and even more in his letters, was indeed something of a crutch for an emotional cripple, but it was also a persuasion to which Lovecraft was seriously and intellectually attached; otherwise, he would not have argued it as carefully as he did or tried to adapt it to recent scientific developments that seemed to contradict it. Given the inherent meaninglessness of life and cosmos, the only way for human beings to extract and preserve meaning is to insist on given social and cultural traditions and the political order that enforces them, and both the given culture as well as the political order are themselves dependent on the race and the ruling class that created them.

Lovecraft's racialism is a persistent problem for his admirers, and most of them spend a good deal of energy trying to hammer it into the proper psychopathological pigeonholes. The bigotries Lovecraft habitually expresses in his letters and often in his stories are supposedly merely reflections of his own wounded psyche and his personal failure to get along like a normal man. For some reason, however, no one seems compelled to attribute his atheism and materialism to any psychological flaw, and Mr. Joshi is refreshingly free of this sort of cant, though he is careful to make it clear that he finds Lovecraft's racial views "the one true black mark on his character."

Lovecraft's racial opinions were indeed strong even for the decade that saw publication of Madison Grant's and Lothrop Stoddard's work. During his life in New York, he wrote to a friend about a walk he and his wife took in the Bronx: "Upon my most solemn oath, I'll be shot if three out of every four persons—nay, full nine out of every ten—wern't [sic] flabby, pungent, grinning, chattering n--gers." Similarly, six years later he remarked, "The population [of New York City] is a mongrel herd with repulsive Mongoloid Jews in the visible majority, and the coarse faces and bad manners eventually come to wear on one so unbearably that one feels like punching every g-- d--- bastard in sight." These are only two more printable expressions of his views that are commonplace in his letters. It must be said, however, that there is no known occasion on which Lovecraft offered insult or injury to those whom he despised; indeed, both his wife Sonia Greene and several of his closer friends were Jewish. Decades after his death, Sonia tried to claim that his anti-Semitism was a major reason for her leaving him, but the fact is that Lovecraft insisted on the divorce, against her wishes. All accounts agree that Lovecraft was a charming, highly courteous, and kindly man, a brilliant conversationalist and companion, with an agile and erudite intelligence. His admiration for Hitler seems to have ceased after he learned of Nazi physical attacks on Jews.

Although Mr. Joshi tries to argue that Lovecraft's racialism was largely irrelevant to his writing, that is not quite true. He is entirely correct in seeing that what he calls Lovecraft's "cosmicism—the depicting of the boundless gulfs of space and time and the risible insignificance of humanity within them" is the core of his philosophical thought as well as his literary work, and he claims that "This is something Lovecraft expressed more powerfully than any writer before or since" (that may not be true either; there seems to be a strong parallel between Lovecraft's cosmology and that of Joseph Conrad). Indeed, Lovecraft's "cosmicism" is the real horror of his stories—not the grotesque appearance of the Old Ones and not the gruesome fate of those who have truck with them, but rather the discovery by the scholarly bachelors who recount the tales that the universe has no meaning at all, that all the conventions and ideas and values on which their lives and those of mankind rest are but shadows in the ceaseless play of impersonal if not actually hostile cosmic forces. As Mr. Joshi summarizes "Lovecraft's vision": "Humanity is not at centre stage in the cosmos, and there is no one to help us against the entities who have from time to time descended upon the earth and wreaked havoc; indeed, the 'gods' of the Mythos are not really gods at all, but merely extraterrestrials who occasionally manipulate their human followers for their own advantage."

Mr. Joshi is correct about the cosmic level of meaning in Lovecraft's stories, but he largely neglects another, social level of meaning. On that level, Lovecraft's stories are dramas of modernity in which the forces of tradition and order in society and in the universe are confronted by modernity itself—in the form of the shapeless beings known (ironically) as the "Old Ones." In fact, they are the "New Ones." Their appearance to earthly beings is often attended by allusions to "Einsteinian physics," "Freudian psychology," "non-Euclidean algebra" (a meaningless but suggestive term), modern art, and the writing of T.S. Eliot and James Joyce. The conflicts in the stories are typically between some representative of traditional order (the New England old stock protagonist) on the one hand, and the "hordes" of Mongoloids, Levantines, Negroes, Caribbeans, and Asians that gibber and prance in worship of the Old Ones and invoke their dark, destructive, and invincible powers.

What Lovecraft does in his stories, then, is not only to develop the logic of his "cosmicism" by exposing the futility of human conventions, but to document the triumph of a formless and monstrous modernity against the civilization to which Lovecraft himself—if almost no one else in his time—was faithful. In the course of his brief existence, he saw the traditions of his class and his people vanishing before his eyes, and with them the civilization they had created, and no one seemed to care or even grasp the nature of the forces that were destroying it. The measures conventionally invoked to preserve it—traditional Christianity, traditional art forms, conventional ethics and political theory—were useless against the ineluctable cosmic sweep of the Old Ones and the new anarchic powers they symbolized.

Lovecraft believed that his order could not be saved, and that in the long run it didn't matter anyway, so be jogged placidly and cynically on, one of America's last free men, living his life as he wanted to live it and as he believed a New England gentleman should live it: thinking what he wanted to think, and writing what he wanted to write, without concern for conventional opinions, worldly success, or immortality. And yet, despite the indifference he affected, Howard Phillips Lovecraft has in the end attained a kind of immortality, for the classic tales of horror he created will be read as long as that genre of literature is read at all. And since man's horror of the alien cosmos into which he has been thrown is perhaps the oldest theme of art, that may be for a very long time to come.

This article first appeared in the May 1997 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

“One day he’s saying that we were shooting civilians, cutting off their ears, cutting off their heads, throwing away his medals or his ribbons,” the once-and-never-again presidential candidate remarked in an interview on CNN’s Late Edition in August.  “The next day he’s standing there, ‘I want to be president because I’m a Vietnam veteran.’  Maybe he should apologize to all the other 2.5 million veterans who served.  He wasn’t the only one in Vietnam.”

The point of the ugly little business about John Kerry’s war record is not whether he did or did not really do some courageous things in Vietnam or did or did not deserve the medals the Navy gave him.  Those who claim he didn’t have not proved their case, despite the bottomless eagerness of the conservative establishment to believe them.  Even if the Swift Boat allegations were settled one way or another, it would have little to do with whether the Massachusetts senator should be president.  Just as predictable as conservatives’ embrace of the allegations against Mr. Kerry, his supporters leapt to resurrect the still-unsettled questions about President Bush’s own military record (or lack thereof).

Such is the level of presidential politics these days, that this sort of trivia is all the contenders and their surrogates can think of to say about each other.  And how can they do otherwise?  On the major issues of the day, the two candidates are barely distinguishable.  Each one simply grunts the appropriate noises that can be anticipated to rally his own legions and avoids violating any of the ever-multiplying constraints on what can be said publicly.  Those constraints apparently do not extend to prohibiting the insinuation of the most vicious charges about each other’s characters.

Nevertheless, the ethics of smearing your opponent is not the point either.  Smears have a long and not especially distinguished history in American politics, reaching back at least as far as Joseph Calender’s lies about Thomas Jefferson and the Hemings woman.  More recently, the liberals who spent a good part of the summer whining and whimpering about Republican demagoguery over the Kerry war record are themselves the first to lob whatever vagaries they can concoct about conservative “links” to “racism,” “extremism,” “Nazism,” etc.  The current crop is only one generation removed from the one that pioneered the modern art of Smearpolitik by defaming every figure on the American right from Robert A. Taft through Barry Goldwater down to Ronald Reagan and Pat Buchanan.  So let’s hear no more sermons from them about “demagoguery.”

What Mr. Dole had to say about the Kerry affair was, at least in the remarks quoted above, distinctly different from smear.  It had nothing to do with what may or may not have “really” happened nearly 40 years ago halfway around the planet but with what Mr. Kerry is known to have said and done.  After he won his medals, Mr. Kerry came back to this country, made a big splash out of throwing them away, and proceeded to denounce his former comrades, his country, and the war in which it was then involved.  Political ads citing his testimony before the U.S. Senate make what he said back then perfectly clear.

“They told the stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,” he testified, speaking of Vietnam veterans who had publicly claimed they had committed these acts.  Apparently, there was never any thought on his part of bringing legal charges or working for an actual investigation of these crimes by the government.  Frankly, most who hurled such charges were just interested in grandstanding, for personal or political reasons.  I have known dozens of guys who made such claims at the time.  Some had actually been in Vietnam, or at least in one military service or another.

Admittedly, Mr. Kerry was a lot younger then, and there is evidence he was by no means as nutty as some of his buddies in Vietnam Veterans Against the War.  He resigned from it after a substantial section began considering committing a few more atrocities against Americans.  But, just as the point is not whether he really deserved his medals, so it is also not that he once said silly things.

The point is that he cannot now believably renounce what he said and did in 1971 concerning his own comrades and his own country and, at the same time, boast of his heroism in the same war and run for president on that record.  But that is precisely what he is trying to do.  The controversy about the war in Iraq, and Mr. Kerry’s criticisms of it, seems to demand that the Democrats wrap themselves in the mantle of patriotism at least as much as the Republicans always do.  In 1971, it was politically convenient for Mr. Kerry to renounce that mantle.  Today, it is politically convenient to don it.

And that is what tells us all we need to know about John Kerry.  It is as good a reason as any why he should not be president.  The real question for voters who agree with that reason is this: Can they come up with a good reason why George W. Bush should be president at all?

This article first appeared in the October 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Wes Pruden, then the managing editor of the paper and the host of the luncheon, hastened to explain to them, accurately but perhaps banally, that, while the Times was certainly anticommunist, that did not mean that we were “against the Russian people.”  The commies hit the lighting fixtures.  The distinction between being anticommunist and being “against the Russian people” was incomprehensible to them.  How could you possibly be against communism and not against the Russian people, they demanded, when it was obvious that communism was indistinguishable from the Russian people?  How Mr. Pruden answered this conundrum, I do not recall.

I remembered this exchange several years later when, in the course of perusing a 1997 article by neoconservative pundits Bill Kristol and David Brooks in the Wall Street Journal, I came across their aperçu that the “national-greatness conservatism” they were espousing that week “isn’t unfriendly to government, properly understood” and their question, “How can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?”  If you think about it, you will see that the latter question is exactly the one the communists asked the editors of the Times some years before.  The distinction (or absence thereof) in the Kristol-Brooks question between the “nation,” on the one hand, and the “government,” on the other, is precisely that between the “Russian people” and the communism to which the Russian people were enslaved.  It ought to be of considerable interest that self-proclaimed neoconservatives find the nondistinction no less incomprehensible than the communists they claim to despise.

I trust I will not be misread as suggesting that neoconservatives are really communists or somehow part of the international conspiracy that used to put fluoride in the drinking water and advocate graduated income taxes, but I am suggesting that they share more with them than either neoconservatives or communists (or paleoconservatives) perhaps know.  One belief that they share is the concept of a “credal nation,” an idea that has now come to permeate the entire American right.

As far as I can tell, the idea that America is or should be a credal nation originated (on the right) with Harry Jaffa and his doctrine that Abraham Lincoln is the defining icon of the nation through his concept of equality.  For Mr. Jaffa, the Declaration of Independence (or, more accurately, the sentence fragment from its second paragraph declaring that “all men are created equal”) is the original definition of the American creed, which Lincoln at Gettysburg was merely articulating.  The historical and philosophical flaws in Mr. Jaffa’s views have been exposed several times, classically by the late Mel Bradford but by several other conservatives as well, so there is little reason to rehearse them here.  Nevertheless, despite its flaws, this credal egalitarianism has metastasized throughout the body (or perhaps the cadaver) of the American right, and especially among neocons.  It is this concept, that America is defined by a creed and the creed is egalitarianism, that puts the neocons and other egalitarian conservatives on the same wavelength as the Bolsheviki.

To be sure, “equality as a conservative principle,” as Mr. Jaffa once called one of his essays, is not the “equality of condition” that Marx and the socialist left have always drooled over.  “Conservative equality,” we are invariably assured, is supposed to be “equality of opportunity” or “equality before the law.”  Not the least of the problems with this distinction is that what Jefferson called the “self-evident” truth of equality always needs such extended explanations, justifications, and qualifications; if it were really self-evident, it would not.  But “equality,” of course, means equality.  Two plus two is equal to four, because two plus two and four are the same, and to say that Joe is equal to John means and can only mean that Joe and John are the same—not just in opportunities, rights, and legal claims but in abilities and in what their abilities gain them.  It is all well and good to spout off about how committed to “equality” you are and how the nation is based on it, but, sooner or later, there will be masses of folks who insist on taking their equality neat—especially when it becomes clear that “opportunity” and the “law” are never any more equal than nature itself and that some people always wind up getting less than what they have decided, on the grounds of the egalitarianism they have been taught, their fair share ought to be.

Equality, whether as a “conservative principle” or the principle of communism that it really is, always leads to communism or something like it, no matter what “conservatives” dim enough to invoke it think they mean by it.  For the same reason, it also leads to the leviathan states that both the communists and the neoconservatives adore.  As Mr. Kristol and Mr. Brooks noted in their Journal article, Lincoln himself argued for a national government

whose leading object is to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders; to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all; to afford men an unfettered start, and a fair chance in the race of life.

It was through constructing and empowering a state powerful enough to demolish “artificial weights”—the intermediary institutions that restrain the state—that the federal megastate that now prevails in Washington came to exist at all, and it was for much the same purpose that the communist states across the globe were created.  The mission of equality is what animates and justifies these monsters.

The egalitarian content of the supposed “creed” is the immediate source of tyranny; the very concept of a credal nation, however, is tyrannical.  I had thought for some years that the insight that the Soviet Union was a real credal state was confined to paleoconservatives, but I was disabused of that delusion when Irving Kristol himself, in the Weekly Standard last year, acknowledged the same thing: “Large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today,” he wrote, “inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns.”  That is why, he argued, the United States should have supported Great Britain and France in World War II and should support Israel today, because, as an “ideological” nation, we “will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces.”  Aside from this non sequitur, what is interesting is that Kristol lumps the Soviet Union in the same category as the United States.  Most conservatives would distinguish them, and the distinction they would draw would largely revolve around the difference between an ideological regime like that of the Marxists and the conservative order that is supposed to prevail in this country.

The whole concept of a nation or state basing itself on a “creed” or “ideology” or abstract doctrine of any kind (including religion) ought to be profoundly offensive to real conservatives, since it means that the whole of the national life as well as its foreign policy must be subordinated to the implementation of the abstraction at the expense of the actual institutions and way of life that really defines the nation and its culture.  A credal or ideological nation is tantamount to totalitarianism, which is why those who advocate such a regime can see no distinction, let alone any antagonism, between its state and the “people” or “nation” the state rules.  In such a system, there is no distinction between state and nation.  If neither Kristol père nor fils grasps this, one who does is Jean Raspail, the once-well-known author of Camp of the Saints, who, last June, published a short article in Le Figaro entitled, “The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic.”

“The Fatherland,” of course is the nation, La Patrie, and the Republic is the government, the state—or, more precisely, the ideology or creed that animates the state.  “The Republic,” M. Raspail wrote,

which is only one shape of government, is synonymous for [the French political class] with ideology, ideology with a capital “I”, the major ideology.  It seems to me, to some extent, that they betray the first for the second.

In France, as indeed in this country and in most other Western societies, the state has become the enemy of the nation.  This brings us to the answer as to how it is that one can love his nation and hate its government.
M. Raspail is especially concerned with the mass immigration from nonwhite, non-Christian, and non-Western cultures that the French political class has allowed to deluge his nation, to the extent that

the situation is moving irreversibly towards the final swing in 2050 which will see French stock amounting to only half the population of the country, the remainder comprising Africans, Moors and Asians of all sorts from the inexhaustible reserve of the Third World, predominantly Islamic, understood to be fundamentalist Jihadists.

It is no accident that the same neoconservatives who peddle the “credal nation” concept in this country are among the most fervent supporters of mass immigration.  Indeed, this ideology is one of the most common arguments that the pro-immigration crowd invokes: How can immigration threaten our culture and identity since all immigrants need do to assimilate is to agree to the propositions of which the creed is composed?  The Soviets used much the same argument in making Soviet citizenship available to anyone who espoused the Marxist-Leninist creed that defined their own ideological state.

Against the domination by ideology, M. Raspail invoked the racial unity of his nation—“France is from the outset a country of common blood.”  So, for that matter, is the United States, as Jefferson, using that very phrase in his draft of the Declaration and similar terminology in the final form (“common kindred,” “consanguinity”), acknowledged, as did John Jay, in Federalist 2, where he wrote of “one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors.”  In fact, every real nation is a “people of a common blood” and “descended from the same ancestors.”  A nation—from the Latin word meaning “to be born”—can have no other meaning.  A nation is a community defined primarily by a common blood, and it is only on the basis of a common blood that its population becomes a people—a community united by a shared language, religion, moral values, social institutions, government, and political and social beliefs (“creeds”).

In France and most of Europe even today, it remains fairly simple to defend the concept of a common blood, but in the United States it is not, in part because of the impact of mass immigration since the 19th century and, in part, because the descendants of some of those very immigrants have been the first to seek to redefine the nation in terms of creed rather than blood.  That is largely why such dubious characters as Harry Jaffa, the two Kristols, and Mr. Brooks are so keen on their own credal definition and their readiness to demonize anyone who insists that there is a good bit more to being an American than the capacity to sneak across the Rio Grande and mumble the appropriate fragments of the Declaration in pidgin English.  To define the nation as a people of a common blood is to establish a boundary, a border that keeps some people in and some people out.  That, indeed, is its whole purpose.

Where the false and dangerous superstition of the “credal nation” ultimately leads is the destruction of the real nation and the construction of what really binds communism and neoconservatism together—what Israeli conservative historian J.L. Talmon called “democratic totalitarianism,” a concept first institutionalized in the French Revolution that really came into its own in the last century but promises to enjoy a renaissance in this century and in this country.  Back when I was at the Washington Times, it looked like a concept that might be dying.  Today, thanks to the triumph of neoconservatism, it thrives.

This article first appeared in the October 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Kirk has survived in the conservative memory as something of a cult figure, and there is now a book-length study of his thought by a friend and former student, Wesley McDonald, whose Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology was ably reviewed by Scott P. Richert in the July issue.  Reading Mr. Richert’s review and, afterward, Dr. McDonald’s book, I was driven to some thoughts about Kirk himself and his legacy.

A well-educated man of courtly manners, Kirk was undoubtedly the major exponent of what came to be known in conservative-movement circles as “traditionalism,” the principal counterpart and sparring partner of its “libertarian” wing.  Traditionalism was not the best term for this persuasion, but, because Kirk himself invoked the concept of tradition so much, it stuck.  Essentially, traditionalism is identical to what is otherwise called “Burkean” or sometimes “philosophical” conservatism but which I prefer to think of as “classical conservatism,” the conservatism espoused by the enemies of the French Revolution and Enlightenment in England and Europe of the late 18th and 19th centuries and whose major exponent, in England at least, was Edmund Burke.  For Kirk, though not necessarily for other supporters of “traditionalism,” Burke was the icon that defined the persuasion, and, in The Conservative Mind, Burke is the archetypal figure.  The several other thinkers whom Kirk discusses there, none of whom shared Burke’s historical stature, appear as mere avatars of the deified Edmund.

Kirk’s classical conservatism was a welcome relief from the tedious and barren libertarianism that strutted about during and after the New Deal and has since managed to thrive as the dominant ideology in the contemporary conservative mind (as opposed to the neoconservative mind, in which democratic socialism remains the prevailing paradigm).  Recognizing only one problem (“the state”) and only one solution (“individual liberty”), libertarianism offers nothing to those concerned with the impending destruction of their civilization by forces that are largely irrelevant to its twin obsessions.  The tendency, if not the actual argument, of libertarianism in the last 50 years has been to deny that Soviet communism was ever a threat, to embrace mass immigration, to endorse global free trade, to abandon and ridicule both nation and religion, and to welcome the deliberate destruction of traditional culture and morality by whatever forces (in the state or outside it) are waging war against them.  The great value of Kirk’s “traditionalism” was to just say no to the sophomoric and dangerous libertarian poison that soon corroded and corrupted the conservative minds of late-20th-century America, at a time when few others of real conservative disposition possessed either the learning, the powers, or the courage to say it.

Yet Kirk was by no means a profound or even consistent thinker, and one virtue of Dr. McDonald’s short book, which today is probably the best short exposition of classical conservatism that I know of, is that it makes clear that Kirk often declined to pursue certain philosophical issues as deeply as he might or to develop his thought into a larger and more coherent intellectual framework.  Kirk’s thought was invaluable in offering an introduction to concepts of “order,” “authority,” and “tradition” that were alien to the classical liberal-libertarian ideologues of the day.  He laid down (if he did not develop very clearly) a concept of freedom derived from an Aristotelian view of man as a creature of society in contrast to the libertarian idea of freedom derived from a (fictitious) pre-social “state of nature.”  If human beings are naturally social, then freedom in the libertarian sense is necessarily in antagonism to the social bond and its institutional supports, and real freedom can exist only in relationships and actions that are compatible with social order.  “Ordered” or “rooted” freedom and its supports, authority, hierarchy, and community—and not Liberty, Equality, Fraternity—are the defining norms of classical conservatism.

The problem with Kirk’s traditionalism does not lie in its assumptions or even in his sometimes murky exposition of its themes but in his application of its concepts to contemporary American life and the uses that the conservative movement has made of them.  It is a problem that arises from taking Edmund Burke as the central hero of the traditionalist cause.

Burke’s standing as a conservative comes from his important role as an enemy of the French Revolution and a defender of the 18th-century British (and European) dynastic state.  It may be open to question whether that state was really worth conserving, but certainly, in comparison to the tyranny, terrorism, and chaos that Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity unleashed, it was a veritable paradise, and, since Burke himself had spent much of his earlier life as a critic of the dynastic state, he cannot be faulted for defending it against its destroyers.

What Burke offered, however, was a defense.  The order he championed existed and dominated, and his task was to build a case as to why it should be conserved.  That was not the problem that American “conservatives” faced in the period (the late 1940’s and early 50’s or later) when Kirk began to write and when the American conservative movement was formed.

As I argued in this space some months ago, the revolution took place in America well before that time—by some Old Right analyses, in the American Civil War, or, at the latest, in the New Deal-World War II eras, when a new ruling elite, the managerial class, displaced the old bourgeois elites from political and cultural hegemony.  Unlike for Edmund Burke and the defenders of the ancien régime of his time, for the American right, the problem was not defense but offense—not conservation but (at best) restoration.

That, however, was not the strategic goal of the American conservative movement as it began to congeal in the 1950’s.  The essential premise of any movement that is comfortable with the label “conservatism” is that the order it seeks to conserve is healthy and that it ought to be conserved, and that was the premise with which American conservatism started out in the 1950’s (and with which it has finished up in the first decade of the current century).  One of the main influences on it that encouraged it to accept that premise was Russell Kirk.

Reading over parts of The Conservative Mind, Kirk’s major and always his most influential work, that premise leaps out.  “In America,” Kirk wrote in 1953 (and the words remained essentially unchanged through the seventh and last edition of 1985),

the Federal Constitution has endured as the most sagacious conservative document in the history of Western civilization; the balance of interests and powers which John Adams and the Southern statesmen defended still operates, however threatened by centralization in this century; and no one advocates a radical revision of political establishments in America, despite the numerous abuses that shelter themselves behind federal and state constitutions.

Private property, Kirk assured his readers, “remains an influence of vast power in Britain and America” (and presumably, therefore, was secure), while “respect for established usage and longing for continuity are not dead among English-speaking peoples, either,” and,

Of the six premises for conservative belief which are listed in the introductory chapter of this book, then, four at least continue to animate the social impulses of a great many people in America and Britain.

Such passages could be extended indefinitely.

The main thrust of Kirk’s conservatism was to assure Americans that everything was really OK, that the society in which they lived and the government and dominant social and political forces that prevailed in the United States were healthy.  As Old Right journalist Garet Garrett remarked in his 1938 essay, “The Revolution Was,” “There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road,” and Russell Kirk seemed to be among them.  But, as Garrett saw clearly, the truth was that “The revolution is behind them.  It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.”

Kirk and most conservatives seemed never to have heard the songs, though I knew Russell Kirk well enough in his last years to know that he did indeed hear them and understood clearly what they meant.  Still, he shrank, for whatever reasons, from betraying what today has long since ceased to be a secret of empire: The American order is bankrupt; both political parties and the major ideological identities associated with them are part of the problem; and the regime that prevails in the triple metropole of Washington-New York-Hollywood is the enemy of the American people and of its historic social and political order.  The problem today is not how to conserve it, let alone how to persuade Americans that it ought to be conserved.  The problem today is how to persuade more Americans that it ought to be—and can be—changed.

Despite Kirk’s own awareness of the corruption of the contemporary American order and the regime that rules it, the conservative movement with which he soon allied himself (reluctantly, as Dr. McDonald points out) made use of his articulation of “traditionalism” to defuse and emasculate any inclinations to radicalism on the part of the American right.  Headquartering itself in Manhattan and whatever broom closets in Washington it could ferret itself into, the American conservative movement devoted itself to the defense of a political order in which it was already an unwelcome and embarrassing guest, and, as the New Left of the 1960’s launched its assault on the regime constructed by Franklin Roosevelt and his heirs, most conservatives could think of no response other than an angry endorsement of the regime.  The principles of authority, hierarchy, and community that Kirk’s traditionalism had embraced and developed were deployed to explain why liberal or leftist deans who had spent their careers poisoning every young mind with which they had come in contact should not be kicked down the stairs of their own office buildings and why the young Americans whose minds they had poisoned should be drafted to fight an ideological crusade that the ruling class had no intention of winning and no good reason to fight at all.

The irony of Kirk’s position is that, far more than the libertarianism that was its main rival on the right, “traditionalism” offered a full and more persuasive case against both the deracinating regime of liberalism that conservatives began to defend (whence came their alliance with the neoconservatives, who never showed any dissatisfaction with the regime at all) and the savagery of the New Left.  But most conservative writers of the time never made that case.  Instead, they rallied round the flag, defending the war in Vietnam, the draft, and the essential goodness and health of the society and government the counterculture attacked, smug in their satisfaction that everything was really OK.

Today, we know it is not OK, as we know the Supreme Court has waged a continuous war against traditional morals, culture, freedom, and order ever since Kirk assured us the federal Constitution was “enduring”; as the federal leviathan has swollen ever larger and dug itself ever more deeply into the private lives and minds of Americans; and as the institutions, traditions, and the very people of the American nation are systematically discarded and replaced by the powers that conservatism continues to defend.  Perhaps some on the American right did sense that, for all the virtues of Kirk’s classical conservatism as an alternative to libertarianism or the even more pathetic “fusionism,” it simply was not adequate to the mission that serious men of the right in the middle of the 20th-century journey should have taken up.  “If you were a marine in a landing boat,” asked Whittaker Chambers with respect to Kirk’s Conservative Mind, “would you wade up the seabeach at Tarawa for that conservative position?  And neither would I!”

This article first appeared in the September 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

What is involved—or at least what most members always thought was involved—in gaining admission to the society’s august ranks and inner precincts was adherence to something like the philosophical conservatism of the Old Right, the conservative consensus or “conservative mainstream” of the 1950’s and 60’s, a body of thought from which I have come to dissent in several respects in recent years but which did provide the framework for both my own intellectual and political development and that of many other writers and activists of the American right.  Yet, in the last few months, it has become virtually impossible to preserve the illusion that the society takes even that philosophical commitment seriously anymore.  At its meeting in April, it chose as its new president none other than Midge Decter.

Miss Decter, like Elizabeth Taylor and most other female celebrities, is always known by her maiden name, although she would be just as well known if she used her married one—Mrs. Norman Podhoretz.  Both husband and wife are founders of neoconservatism, a body of thought that is just as distinctly not what characterizes the Philadelphia Society as Old Right conservatism once did characterize it.  The appointment of Miss Decter as the society’s president largely eviscerates the pretense that the latter still does.

If there is no merit about the society, neither is there much democracy, which is just as well usually.  Despite my statement that the society “chose” Miss Decter as president, officers are rather mysteriously appointed and are never elected by the whole membership.  Exactly who did choose Miss Decter and how, let alone why, remains as much of a mystery as what happened to Amelia Earhart.  Whatever one thinks of the merits of the neoconservatism she, her husband, and a handful of their cronies invented in the 1970’s, it has little in common with what the Philadelphia Society and the Old Right in general have always professed.

Yet what makes her appointment even more bizarre is her relationship with one of the Philadelphia Society’s leading figures of the recent past, the late Russell Kirk.  Dr. Kirk, perhaps the major and most influential exponent of “Burkean” or classical conservatism in the United States in the late 20th century, was a founding member of the Philadelphia Society and its past president.  If there is any individual who embodied Old Right conservatism of that era, it was he, and all who knew him knew he had as little use for the neoconservatism espoused by Miss Decter and her circle as the neoconservatives do for what he believed.

In 1988, in a speech about neoconservatism at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., Dr. Kirk delivered himself of the playful but mildly critical remark that “not seldom it has seemed as if some eminent neo-conservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.”  We all know what happens to anyone who suggests that neoconservatives (or anyone else) are too pro-Israeli, and it happened to Dr. Kirk immediately—at the hands (or, more properly, the mouth) of Midge Decter.

“A bloody outrage, a piece of anti-Semitism by Kirk that impugns the loyalty of neo-conservatives,” she bellowed to the Washington Times.  “He has defined [us] as a bunch of New Right Jews [and] said people like my husband and me put the interests of Israel before the interests of the United States, that we have a dual loyalty.”  (I was personally present at the Kirk speech on October 6, 1988, and he said nothing of the sort.)

It was not the first time Miss Decter had ranted the ugly smear of antisemitism at Old Right figures.  Two years before, she had taken the lead in lobbing similar accusations against columnist and then-National Review senior editor Joe Sobran, calling him “a crude and naked anti-Semite” in a letter privately circulated to his editors at various conservative magazines and newspapers.  Around the same time, also in 1986, after a vigorous and not terribly friendly debate between neoconservatives and Old Right conservatives (at the Philadelphia Society, as a matter of fact), Miss Decter denounced one speaker in particular and the Old Right of the society in general for their alleged antisemitism and bigotry.  “It’s this notion of a Christian civilization,” she sneered to John Judis of the New Republic.  “You have to be part of it or you’re not really fit to conserve anything.  That’s an old line and it’s very ignorant.”  It also is more or less precisely what almost all Old Right conservatives (excluding a good many libertarians) believed and still believe—not that, in order to be a conservative, you have to be a Christian specifically (though it probably helps) but that you do have to consider yourself to be part of the Christian civilization of the West.  Miss Decter evidently does not.

Miss Decter, of course, is free to dissent from that belief, free to denounce those who adhere to it, and free to snort derision at “this notion of a Christian civilization,” but, in doing so, she ought to forfeit any plausible pretense whatsoever of being a conservative of the Philadelphia Society kidney, let alone its president.  Had it not been for Miss Decter’s habits of smearing Old Right personalities and leaders as Jew-baiters, we might even today pass over her strange elevation to the presidency.  The incoherence of appointing as president someone whose philosophical and political commitments are so in conflict with those of the vast majority of the membership could be ignored or explained, but what cannot be explained is precisely what has always been the major issue of contention between the Old Right and the neoconservatives—namely, the rigid insistence of the latter that they not only be accepted as real conservatives but that they dictate to the right who else is and is not “acceptable.”

Anyone familiar with the history of conservative intellectualism knows that, since the 1950’s at least, there have been debates and controversies between traditionalists and libertarians, Southerners and Lincolnites, Catholics and Protestants, etc.  Almost all these exchanges were conducted with courtesy and respect.  Only when the neocons were let through the door were personal accusations hurled and the demand issued that Old Rightists who were not “acceptable” to them be pushed out.  Miss Decter and her husband have been leaders in developing that particular tactic.

No sooner had Miss Decter ascended to the presidency of the society this spring than she issued yet another, though vaguer, accusation.  Delivering a speech at the meeting on conservatism and foreign policy (an entirely predictable and banal assertion of the need for the current war with Iraq), she started off with what is surely one of the most remarkable statements in the history of American conservatism:

Before I begin there is something I wish to say. . . . And that is: I am not now, nor for something like thirty years have I been, a neoconservative.  Neither are the following people neoconservatives: my husband, my son, my three daughters, and those of my ten grandchildren who are old enough to have serious political views.  Neocons were people who discovered in the course of the 1960’s—or early 70’s—that they could no longer stomach the cultural and political antics of their former liberal friends and associates and discovered that, as Lenin himself once put it, he who says A must say B.  One of our forebears, after all, was no less real a conservative than Ronald Reagan.  He, too, as a grown man discovered his B.  The reason I begin with this declaration, tiresome as it undoubtedly seems, is that the charge of neoconservatism—which has in recent times been leveled and fancifully decorated by a strange alliance of hard-bitten Leftists and certain mysteriously bitter members of the Old Right—this charge is a disingenuous stand-in for a characterization of a different kind, namely, that a neoconservative is a Jew who supports U.S. policy in Iraq not because he thinks it good for the United States but only because he believes it will benefit Israel.  It is, in other words, meant to be a charge of dual loyalty on the part of people like me.  The reason I bring this up is that, one, it will surely not surprise you to hear me assert that I am a Jew, and two, it will probably not surprise you either to hear me announce that I wholeheartedly support the war in Iraq.

There is perhaps no need to explain what exactly is wrong with this statement, let alone take the space to do so.  In the first place, neoconservatism, as both its critics on the right and its own exponents understand the term, does not simply refer to liberals and leftists who become conservatives.  In that sense, such Old Right figures as Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, and even Russell Kirk (a juvenile socialist) would qualify as neoconservatives also.  Neoconservatism refers to a body of thought that purports to be a new kind of conservatism.  It is new (neo) because its ideas are said to be new, not because those who subscribe to them are new to their adherence to old conservatism.  Mr. Midge Decter (Norman Podhoretz) himself acknowledged this in a 1995 speech in which he described those who originally began formulating neoconservatism in the 1960’s as “caught up in the process of shaping a perspective of their own that differed in important respects from the older varieties of American conservatism.”  Miss Decter really ought to read her husband’s speeches sometime.

The other remarkable feature of her remarks this spring is her brazen claim that she and her family are not and for 30 years have not been neoconservatives at all.  As anyone familiar with her and her family’s careers will see at once, that is simply false, and so is her unpleasant and hackneyed regurgitation that the term neoconservative today is simply a code word for “Jews” deployed by crypto-antisemites.  It is essentially the same charge she made against Mr. Sobran, Dr. Kirk, and the speakers at the Philadelphia Society nearly 20 years ago.  Whatever you say about the eggheads who made her their president, Miss Decter herself has not changed in the least.

Most people, even most conservatives of any kind, have probably never heard of the Philadelphia Society and would soon forget about it if they did, so what difference does it make who its president is and what she (or he) thinks or says?  It makes a difference for this simple reason: If there was any group in the United States today that could claim to represent the thinking of the Old Right, it was the Philadelphia Society.  The fact that even these good people are today perfectly happy to tolerate as their president a person who not only dissents from most of what the society purports to think but launched the most harmful and hostile accusations against a man who was the society’s own past president and remains a widely respected, influential, and even beloved figure of the conservative movement tells us all we need to know—not so much about its new queen but about the society itself and those who compose it.  These pathetic people are brain-dead, living corpses who no longer know what they believe or even what they are supposed to believe and who will endure whatever insults are heaped upon them, and their pretenses can no longer be taken seriously.  Nor, perhaps, can the flawed doctrines of the Old Right be taken any more seriously than the zombies who have abandoned them.  Americans who wish to conserve what remains of their civilization will have to find some other assembly in which to fly whatever banners they wish to march under.

This article first appeared in the August 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Pod, as he is not very affectionately known to his critics, is, of course one of several neo-conservative “godfathers,” a term especially resonant when speaking of the mafia of Zionists, Social Democrats, defected Trotskyists, Straussian eggheads, and any number of other apparatchiks of one description or another who compose the “neoconservative movement.”  Mr. Podhoretz, as editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, was one of the movement’s godfathers not only because he presided over its formation in his magazine but through his vast family connections.

The Pod’s ubiquitous hand is evident through his wife Midge Decter, his son John (once of the Washington Times and now of the New York Post), and his son-in-law Elliott Abrams, at one time a heavy in the Iran-Contra affair and more recently (despite a felony conviction that would deny the appropriate security clearances to most applicants) a heavy in the National Security Council (for Middle Eastern affairs, naturally).  Another son-in-law is Steve Munson, who converted to Judaism to wed the beauteous Naomi Podhoretz and who for years (through the Reagan, Bush I, and much of the Clinton administrations), ran the editorial page of the Voice of America, whence he helped spread democracy all over the global barnyard.  La famille Podhoretz, however, is presumably not why the White House chose to knight the Pod with what many people regard as “the nation’s most prestigious civilian honor.”

Nor is it credible that the Pod won the medal because, in a Commentary article of 2002 advocating that the United States wage what he dubbed “World War IV” (against virtually every Arab country in the world), he mewed ingratiatingly that President George W. Bush’s speech to the nation after the September 11 attacks reached “the heights of sublimity.”  Admittedly, Mr. Bush might well be tempted to award the nation’s highest civilian honor to the only human being on the face of the planet who has ever praised his rhetoric.  But neither the Pod’s readiness to prostitute himself and his (largely self-promoted) reputation as “a leading New York intellectual” nor his zealotry in fetching water for the President’s bellicose foreign policy and flaccid oratory quite explains the decision to give him the award.

What does explain it is simply that the Medal of Freedom signals that neoconservatism has now become the official ideology of the Bush administration—not Old Right conservatism, not “compassionate conservatism,” and not any of the 57 other varieties of “conservatism” that still lurk in the politico-intellectiual demimonde, but the neoconservatism of Norman Podhoretz and his fellow godfather Irving Kristol (who has already won the medal).

Back in the happy days of the Reagan Revolution, neocons did not win the medal very much—they just got all the appointments.  In fact, such Old Right figures as James Burnham (after a stroke that impaired his faculties), Whittaker Chambers (posthumously), Milton Friedman, Frederick Hayek, and Barry Goldwater all won the medal, mostly from Reagan.  Other major figures, however, did not—in particular, the late Russell Kirk, who met with both Presidents Nixon and Reagan.

All these individuals did or said or wrote something that does, in fact, merit high recognition.  Other than breeding a vast progeny of perpetual office seekers and professional courtiers, however, it is hard to see exactly what Norman Podhoretz has done, said, or written that anyone anywhere remembers.  There is not a single book or a single major article he has ever produced that is still read today except by the neocon cultists.  There is not a single phrase or idea—other, perhaps, than his unique insight as to the “sublimity” of Mr. Bush’s rhetoric—that lingers in the mind.  All there is, as Mr. Podhoretz himself revealed in one of his earliest books, is Making It, the fine art of ensuring your own success.

Doris Day and Arnold Palmer actually did something, and if their leaf is now faded, no one today has to explain to a bewildered American public who they were or what they did.  The same cannot be said of the Pod.  Those who know who he is and what he represents will understand perfectly well how and why he won the medal.  Those who do not know will stay bewildered.

This article first appeared in the August 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

And why were the photographs taken in the first place?  Are they simply barracks-room pornography for an Army riddled by the same pathologies that eat through the muscle of American society?  Are enlisted men and women really so dim as to think they can take scores of photos of themselves engaging in conduct both grotesque and illegal and not get caught and punished?  Or was there another purpose behind taking the photographs that few have yet grasped?

Pfc. Lynndie England, the new poster girl of the U.S. occupation of Iraq who has replaced Jessica Lynch as the iconic American Amazon, gave an interview to KCNC-TV in Denver soon after being hauled back to this country to face charges.  Pfc. England has every motive to lie her little behind off to get out of those charges, and what she says by itself may be no more than a lie.  But then again, maybe it’s not, and it is worth considering, especially in conjunction with other information.

“I was instructed by persons in higher rank to ‘stand there, hold this leash, look at the camera,’ and they took pictures for PsyOps,” she told the station.  PsyOps?  Psychological Operations, of course.  Well, wasn’t the purpose of the abuse and the photos to twist information out of the prisoners, in accordance with misguided military-intelligence directions?

In part, no doubt it was, and that is insidious enough, as well as stupid.  Assuming that rank-and-file prisoners have any useful information about Iraqi resistance operations and capacities they are unwilling to spill, there are undoubtedly more efficient ways of getting it out of them.  There are the proverbial rack and thumbscrews, which worked well enough for Catholic and Protestant alike for a couple of centuries.  There are drugs that both the CIA and the KGB deployed in years past.  Finally, there are perfectly harmless and nonintrusive and nonviolent interrogation techniques by which skilled examiners can elicit information and cooperation from most subjects at first unwilling to utter an intelligible sound.  But how effective making the subjects crawl around nude on dog leashes with women’s underwear on their heads might be for getting important inside dope is a question that the humane sciences have yet to resolve adequately.

So what was the real purpose, if military intelligence wasn’t it?  As the scandal began to break last May, the Washington Post carried a lengthy report on what the abuses mean in terms of their cultural and social impact on the world’s Newest Democracy on the Euphrates.

“Not only do the photographs up-end traditional gender roles—homosexuality is a strict taboo in Islam, and women, through practices like veiling, are encouraged to take a demure attitude towards sexual matters—but the casual treatment of nudity itself is offensive to many.  In Saudi Arabia, for example, customers in gymnasium locker rooms are admonished not to let others see them as they change,” the Post commented.

The paper quoted anthropologist Donald Cole, at the American University in Cairo, on what may have been the real purpose of the torture.  “The idea is to humiliate people in ways . . . that really affect their manhood, their identity, their notions of shame.  It is playing with people’s minds.”  PsyOps.  Just so.

By this interpretation, the photographs were neither an orgiastic lark for the grunts nor a desperate effort to collect “intelligence” but part of a campaign of psychological and cultural warfare, aimed not just at the prisoners in Abu Ghraib but at Iraqi—and, more broadly, Arabic—culture itself.

Back in February, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz published an article in the Washington Post about the forthcoming “liberation” of women in Iraq that would be one of the main achievements of the American conquest.  “The United States is giving special emphasis to helping Iraqi women achieve greater equality and has allocated $27 million for women’s programs,” he wrote.

“Liberating” women is certainly what we would expect from the crusade to spread “democracy” and its blessings around the globe at the point of our bayonets, but, in traditional societies such as those of Iraq and the Middle East, “liberating” women means psychologically castrating men—the deliberate destruction of the psychic, moral, and cultural spine of the society.  By putting women—especially American infidel women who fight in battle, wear men’s clothes, and bare their faces—in charge of male Arabs and dishing out sexual sadism, the “abuses” aim at the heart of the patriarchal culture and its symbols of masculinity.

What was going on in Abu Ghraib (and other places) seems to have been more than “abuse” and also more than just “torture.”  It was an inherent part of the global imperial system that the architects of the war have already designed, a tactic by which we are systematically devastating a culture and the people that culture defines whom architects of the war like Mr. Wolfowitz hate and wish to eradicate far more than the “global democracy” they purport to love.  Mr. Wolfowitz’s enthusiasm for “liberating” Iraqi women may give us a clue as to just how high the authorization for the abuses went—and who authorized them.

This article first appeared in the July 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

Unlike Franklin D. Roosevelt, Reagan did not deceive and manipulate his country into war through outright and covert aggression against foreign nations.  Unlike Harry S. Truman, Reagan did not cover up for known Soviet agents such as Alger Hiss and then vilify patriots who tried to expose them and bring them to justice.  Unlike Dwight D. Eisenhower, he did not engineer the deliberate starvation of thousands of German civilians after World War II nor contrive to send thousands of Soviet POW’s back to be massacred by Stalin in “Operation Keelhaul.” Unlike John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon, Reagan did not steal the presidential election outright, use the government to spy on and harass his political rivals, or cover up criminal conduct within his own administration.

It may be that Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter did not commit such crimes either, but in the case of these two mediocrities, their innocence may have been simply because of lack of imagination rather than character.  Reagan was by far the most principled man to serve as president in half a century.

And yet, given the expectations of the Reagan presidency that virtually all American conservatives had, he was a disappointment.  It is simply a myth that he won the Cold War or destroyed the Soviet Union, and every serious anticommunist at the time knew that.

In 1987, Rep. Jim Courter, a strong anticommunist congressman of the era, wrote in the Heritage Foundation’s Policy Review that “pronouncements by the administration about ‘having the Soviets on the run’ are totally unwarranted,” and, when Reagan left office in 1989, George Will remarked, “Reagan has accelerated the moral disarmament of the West . . . by elevating wishful thinking to the status of political philosophy.”  The Soviets collapsed shortly afterward mainly because of their own internal economic and political incoherence, not because Reagan defeated them.

Reagan’s most successful policies were economic, which is why the economic determinists who today dominate conservatism gush over him so much, and he did meet the challenges of an eroding economic base misguided by economic illiteracies and political demagoguery.  But the federal leviathan, by the time he left office, was even larger and more powerful than when he entered, with bigger budgets, one more federal department, and unfulfilled promises of abolishing two existing departments.

What the American right of that era wanted from Ronald Reagan more than anything else was a counterrevolution against the cultural domination of liberalism.  In that respect, Reagan was a miserable failure.  Throughout his administration, the poison of “political correctness” and its grim sister of multiculturalism took over the nation’s universities and media, aided by the mass immigration that began to take off in the Reagan years and to which he and his administration were largely oblivious.  (In 1986, administration-backed legislation delivered an amnesty for illegal aliens.)

He did little to stop or push back affirmative action; the Voting Rights Act was extended (with the help of Newt Gingrich), and the Martin Luther King, Jr., federal holiday became law.  The Reagan years were critical to the racial and cultural revolution that has now enthroned itself.

Neoconservatives like to claim Ronald Reagan as one of their own and to wrap themselves in his mantle, but he was never what we today call a “neocon.”  Unlike them, he was a Goldwater conservative who first came to public political attention by his rousing endorsement of Goldwater on the very eve of his 1964 defeat.  From that moment until 1980, the American right defined itself around a Reagan candidacy and the promise of what he would do when he took office.  Reagan was a “neoconservative” only in the sense that he was a liberal who became a conservative.  The conservatism he embraced was not simply a watered-down version of liberalism purporting to be something else.

Therefore, you can’t really blame Reagan’s inadequacies as a conservative on neoconservatism, nor can you blame him as a man.  You probably have to blame the ideology itself—which insisted that it really was “morning in America” when, in fact, it was far closer to the 11th hour.  Only a right willing and able to tell the time correctly and explain it to Americans will be able to perceive and confront the challenges Ronald Reagan missed.  The right he represented and led couldn’t do that.

This article first appeared in the July 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The Jewish attacks on The Passion were (no pun intended) catholic in their universality—they included Jews of the political left and Jews of the political right (or the neoconservatism that nowadays is called “right-wing”), devout Jews and secular Jews, religiously liberal Jews and religiously Orthodox Jews.  One of the principal authors of the attacks was Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, which is about as close to Orwell’s Thought Police as anything that currently exists in this country.  Mr. Foxman, to whom a script of the Gibson film was leaked long before it appeared in theaters, and who actually sneaked into a showing under false pretenses, was undoubtedly the movie’s biggest enemy and played a major role in instigating other attacks.  Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, who found the film “fascistic” (as well as “anti-Semitic”; Mr. Cohen may not make the distinction, but Mussolini certainly did), assured his readers that he really did not want to see it at all, but “I went to see it only as part of my job, wishing that the Anti-Defamation League and other critics had simply ignored it.”  Apparently, Mr. Cohen believes his job includes doing what the ADL tells him to do.  He is certainly not the only one.

The level of attacks was such that Sharon Waxman, the New York Times film reporter, ran a piece with the headline, “New Film May Harm Gibson’s Career” on February 26, the day after the movie opened, and she quoted Jewish movie bigs David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg of DreamWorks as telling her (each refused to speak for attribution), “It doesn’t matter what I do.  I will do something.  I won’t hire [Gibson].  I won’t support anything he’s part of.  Personally that’s all I can do.”  In Hollywood, of course, such modest efforts by major producers are more than enough to assist world-famous stars in making quick career transitions to working as pizza delivery boys.

Whatever the threats to Gibson’s future employment by Mr. Geffen and/or Mr. Katzenberg, the debut of the film did not help much.  Mr. Cohen was by no means the only Jewish critic who became what he called “uneasy” when he actually worked up the guts to go see it.  “Dangerous,” an editorial in the New York Daily News shuddered.  “Unambiguously contrived to vilify Jews,” Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times.  Gibson “has chosen to give millions of people the impression that Jews are culpable for the death of Jesus,” Leon Wieseltier concluded in the New Republic, while William Safire moaned about “Gibson’s medieval version of the suffering of Jesus, reveling in savagery to provoke outrage and cast blame.”  Neoconservative Charles Krauthammer shrieked about “Gibson’s Blood Libel” and found proof of the film’s demonization of Jews in the lurking presence of the figure of Satan “merging with, indeed, defining the murderous Jewish crowd.”  Of course, as anyone who has seen the film knows, Satan is also “merging” with Jesus himself in the Garden of Gethsemane during the film’s opening scenes, trying to prevent Him from going through with the crucifixion at all.  The point is that Satan does not want God’s Son to sacrifice Himself for mankind’s sins, and, when Christ dies, Satan screams in rage and agony.  In any case, who exactly would you expect Satan to be lurking among in downtown Jerusalem?  They just didn’t have too many Palestinians back then.

Almost all of the commentary about The Passion of the Christ’s supposed vilification of Jews was on the same sophomoric and transparently false level.  Jami Bernard, film critic for the New York Daily News, opened her review of February 24 with the line, “Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ is the most virulently anti-Semitic movie made since the German propaganda films of World War II” and, a week later, was complaining about the “week of real hatred” she had endured from all the antisemitic Christians who wrote her what she called “nasty and unprintable letters.”

If the nasty and unprintable attacks that critics such as Miss Bernard launched did not muzzle the movie, maybe the cops could do it.  By early March, the New York Post reported, the head of the NYPD’s “Hate Crimes Unit” ordered his squad to go see the film just in case, and, a few days later, a “Jewish advocacy group” calling itself the “Messiah Truth Project” asked the U.S. Department of Justice to “utilize civil, criminal, and federal hate crime laws” against the film.  And you thought I was joking about the Thought Police.

There were, of course, eminent Jewish writers and critics who defended the movie, such as Rabbi Daniel Lapin, founder of Toward Tradition, a politically conservative Jewish organization, and Orthodox Jewish film critic Michael Medved; by far, however, the overwhelming response from Jewish journalists, film critics, Hollywood powerhouses, and the leaders and spokesmen of the organized Jewish community was, to put it mildly, negative.

It is not my purpose here to discuss in any detail the merits or flaws of their attacks.  Not only Lapin and Medved but any number of Christian writers (Pat Buchanan, Joe Sobran, and Cal Thomas, among others) have already done that.  The essence of the Jewish attacks is that Gibson’s movie recapitulates the “blood libel” that “the Jews murdered Christ” and that Jews today are morally culpable, a doctrine most Jewish writers insist has led to Christian persecution of Jews for centuries and helped shaped German National Socialist views of the Jews but which the Catholic Church repudiated in 1965.

In fact, there is nothing in the Gibson movie that states or even suggests that “all Jews” were responsible for the execution of Jesus.  The film does show the Jewish priesthood of the day engineering the execution for their own doctrinal and political reasons and badgering, cajoling, and implicitly threatening Pilate to carry it out.  That is perfectly consistent with the only historical source we have about the events and with Pope Paul VI’s 1965 Nostra aetate, which explicitly stated, “The Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ.”

As for the “blood libel” itself, whatever its historical sources, it was hardly the only reason for medieval antisemitism (let alone any cause at all of the long history of anti-Jewish violence among the Greeks, Romans, and other pre-Christian nations), nor does it find any expression in Gibson’s film, the emphasis of which is explicitly on Christ’s forgiveness of His killers and the responsibility of all humans for His death.  Despite the claims of writers such as Krauthammer that Gibson “openly rejects the Vatican II teaching” that the Jews had nothing to do with the execution, there is nothing in the movie that contradicts the pope’s statement that “what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today.”

That, of course, is the point that Safire (along with most other Jewish critics) missed.  Safire wrote in his column that

The villains at whom the audience’s outrage is directed are the actors playing bloodthirsty rabbis and their rabid Jewish followers.  This is the essence of the medieval “passion play,” preserved in pre-Hitler Germany at Oberammergau, a source of the hatred of all Jews as “Christ killers.”

Aside from the questionable claim that the audience’s “outrage” is “directed” at anyone and the dubious assumption that the Nazis were really influenced by a medieval Christian drama, Mr. Safire’s central boo-boo is his confusion of the historical role of a particular group of Jewish leaders (a role no one really denies and which there is no good reason to deny, assuming we accept even generally the New Testament account) with the supposed theological and ethical guilt that is said to have caused or shaped or influenced antisemitic violence through the ages.  Mr. Safire and most other Jewish critics are arguing that you cannot accept the one without implying or embracing the other, and that is simply false.  It is like saying that, if you note that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and several other communist spies of the 1940’s were Jews, you are accusing Jews today or all Jews of being communist spies.

Fallaciously lumping the historic guilt of specific persons 2,000 years ago with a universal moral culpability today, which is what Safire and most other Jewish critics of the Gibson movie did, leads to a further inference—perfectly logical—that the New Testament account, and therefore the heart of Christianity itself, is antisemitic and must be excised or expurgated.  In this kind of thinking, it is not just Mr. Gibson’s movie that is likely to get a visit from the Hate Crimes Squad but your local Sunday school.

That is precisely the burden of a claim made by a rabbi whom Rabbi Lapin debated over the film:

We have a responsibility as Jews, as thinking Jews, as people of theology, to respond to our Christian brothers and to engage them, be it Protestants, be it Catholics, and say, look, this is not your history, this is not your theology, this does not represent what you believe in.

It is the responsibility of Jews, in other words, to decide what Christians should believe about history and theology, and, if it offends Jews, it has to go.

The arrogance of that claim puts most of the invective heaped on Mel Gibson rather in the shade, but it is not very different from it, and it also points to a further inference about what is going on in the controversy surrounding The Passion of the Christ.  An Orthodox Jewish friend of mine spotted it immediately in a comment he made to me soon after seeing the movie himself and dismissing the charges of antisemitism as preposterous.  “It’s all a put on, isn’t it?” he remarked.  “None of the guys claiming it’s antisemitic really believes that.  It’s really just a question of power.  That’s all.”

It is indeed a question of power because entirely apart from the theological, historical, and aesthetic merits of the Gibson film is the question of controlling the public culture, the way of life that defines American society and establishes public standards by which behavior, discussion, and thought are regulated.  You probably do not have to accept Christopher Dawson’s view that “a living religion always aspires to be the centre round which the whole culture revolves” to grasp that religion is invariably a powerful force in defining a culture and that it is no coincidence that the words cult and culture both derive from the Latin cultus.  The religion a society accepts—publicly, regardless of what its members privately believe—is what defines its morals and its patterns of what is and is not legitimate.

The angry controversy about The Passion is about which cultus will define American culture, and the conflict over the movie is a struggle for cultural power, for what Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony.”  Rabbi Jacob Neusner has remarked that Auschwitz has replaced Sinai in the religious sensibilities of many modern secularized Jews, and the bitter and hysterical war against Mel Gibson represents a further attempted displacement—that Auschwitz replace Calvary, that Christianity itself as Americans understand and accept it be defined and regulated by contemporary Jewish standards and those cultural hegemons who enforce them.

Mel Gibson’s answer to this demand, in effect, was To hell with you.  I’m going to offer this country and the world my own religion, and you have nothing to say about it.

And that is what everybody is angry about.  Gibson is directly challenging the Jewish claim to define—and the Jewish power to define—a Christianity and an American culture informed by it that is acceptable to Jews.

And since, by the time the Hate Crime Squads were about to show up at the theater doors, he had already raked in more than $300 million from the film and some 64 percent of the American public had already seen and very much liked his movie or said they were planning to see it, his answer appears to have been one that an immense number of Americans found compelling.

This article first appeared in the June 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.

The first is Adam Wolfson, editor of the Public Interest and virtually unknown outside of it.  In the Winter 2004 issue, Mr. Wolfson, himself a neoconservative, published an article entitled “Conservatives and Neoconservatives.”  Much of what he says about conservatism, its history, and the various subspecies included in it is simply wrong, and, in general, the article is not worth reading.  What he has to say about paleoconservatism, however, is of some interest, because it reveals what the average neocon mind thinks.

What Mr. Wolfson thinks is that paleoconservatives are just plain oddwads who are “not conservatives so much as reactionaries or pseudo-radicals” and who “can fairly be said to despise much of contemporary American life and would like somehow to move beyond the modern American political debate.”  In itself, that is probably not a bad description of most paleos and what they think, but, to Mr. Wolfson, it is simply inconceivable that any sane person would think it at all, let alone frame it in the body of ideas that some paleos seem to invoke.  Thus, Chronicles editor Thomas Fleming “has looked to sociobiology, evolutionary theory, and anthropology—hardly traditional conservative guides—for a new beginning,” while paleo historian Paul Gottfried has “sought solutions in the philosophy of Carl Schmitt as well as varieties of historicist ideology,” and “Samuel Francis . . . has called for ‘radical opposition to the regime.’”  Clearly, the idea that someone could mount a serious critique of contemporary American life, want to move beyond the “modern American political debate,” demand “radical opposition” to the dominant forces in national life, and then frame such “pseudo-radicalism” in ideas drawn from sociobiology and anthropology, Carl Schmitt, and historicism is just too weird.  Like most neocons, Mr. Wolfson is deeply frightened by unconventional thought of any species and has trouble assimilating it within the conventions that comfort him.  Supposing that his brief and grotesquely simplified account of paleoconservatism has sufficiently exposed its absurdities, he passes on in the bulk of his essay to expounding the brilliance of neoconservatism.  There is no need to follow him there.

Mr. Wolfson and his fellow neocons like America the way it is and the way it promises to become in the future—the First Universal Nation, a vast plastic palace of shopping malls, canned sitcoms, fast food, elevator music, two mass political parties that say and do the same thing, and Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace—and anyone who dislikes this or sees a problem with it is a “reactionary or pseudo-radical.”  In this sense, the neoconservatives really are “conservatives” who wish to conserve the “regime”—the system of domination by which the First Universal Nation is constructed, ruled, and enforced.

It is not very surprising that neocons such as Mr. Wolfson do not like paleo-conservatism, but the other critic who popped up recently was perhaps less predictable.  Donald J. Devine, vice chairman of the American Conservative Union, launched a critique of the paleos on the ACU Foundation website last December.  More precisely, Mr. Devine launched a critique of me.

The criticism was mainly a reply to my column in this space in the December 2003 issue, in which I discussed the recent admissions of failure of the “conservative movement” by various of its elders and concluded that the movement was dead.  Mr. Devine apparently did not care for that conclusion, but then, to judge from what he wrote, he did not quite grasp what I was talking about.

In the first place, Mr. Devine writes that I concluded that “fusionism ‘died childless.’”  In fact, I said nothing whatsoever about “fusionism”—the label for a 1960’s makeshift conservative ideology to which Mr. Devine seems to adhere religiously—but addressed the “conservative movement” as a whole.  Fusionism was mainly the brainchild of National Review editor Frank S. Meyer, an ostensible attempt to wed the ideas of the “traditionalist” wing of the movement (e.g., Russell Kirk et al.) with the libertarian wing (e.g., Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, et al.).  Meyer more or less defined “fusionism” (I don’t believe he actually used the term) by the mantra that the American tradition was “a tradition of liberty,” so that the True Conservative did affirm the importance of “tradition” so long as the tradition he supported was the one that affirmed “liberty.”  In fact, Meyer’s fusionism amounted to little more than an effort to swallow “traditionalism” and conservatism itself by libertarianism and to read out of the movement anyone who disagreed—including Russell Kirk himself.  When Kirk was founding the journal Modern Age, a traditionalist organ, Meyer’s ally, Frank Chodorov, sent Kirk’s founding editors copies of Meyer’s attack on Kirk’s The Conservative Mind in The Freeman to try to strangle the new journal in its cradle.  The art of the backstab was not invented by neoconservatives.  A former Communist Party apparatchik, Meyer quickly set himself up as the pope of postwar conservatism through his column in National Review (Principles and Heresies—Meyer was the Principle; everyone else, the Heresy) and his indefatigable work as a conservative activist.  Meyer was, in fact, a sound conservative on most political issues, but his command of political theory seems to have been confined to a textbook knowledge, and his dogmatism helped drive from the “movement” just about anyone with an independent mind, including some of the best ones.

His manifesto of fusionism, In Defense of Freedom, was pounded with criticism by almost every major thinker associated with conservatism—not only Kirk, in a devastating review in the Sewanee Review, but Fr. Stanley Parry, Willmoore Kendall, Richard M. Weaver, and Whittaker Chambers, among others.  The value of fusionism, however, was that it offered an ideology, a quick and dirty formula by which wet-nosed conservative activists could crib a few slogans from John Stuart Mill or John Locke when they needed to craft a fundraising letter or debate with the campus communists.  As such, Meyer’s book and the simplicities it offered were a smashing success among the Teen Age Republican set and helped to shape the “conservative mind” of the ensuing generation of the right.  Baptized in the ideological kiddie pool of fusionism, the “movement” was ripe for takeover by neoconservatives who despised it but recognized its usefulness for their own purposes.

Fusionism, however, was never identical with the conservative movement, nor did it serve as its chief ideological vehicle, which is what Mr. Devine seems to think, and my criticism of the “movement” had little to do with Meyer or fusionism per se.  Mr. Devine lurches from one bald inaccuracy and distortion of what I actually wrote to another, the most serious of which is that I denounced “fusionist conservatism” for its preoccupations with “‘pet abstractions’ of liberty, national security, and the Judeo-Christian tradition.”  Of course, my point was not to denounce or reject these concepts in themselves but to criticize conservatives for having turned them into little more than convenient slogans and catchphrases.  I have been writing columns and articles for literally decades defending all these concepts, but apparently Mr. Devine has missed them.

What seems really to have hurt Mr. Devine’s feelings, however, is my claim that conservatism (he says “fusionism”) “died childless,” and so hurt by this was he that he “sent a memo challenging fusionists to show themselves if, in fact, they still existed.”

Happily, “they poured out in hundreds of e-mail responses,” although “Of course most were unfamiliar with the term fusionist . . . but as good conservatives, they knew it when they saw it.”  Well, that’s terrific, but, if the “hundreds” who responded did not know the term fusionism, in what sense can it be said that they were fusionists at all?  Moreover, “hundreds” do not constitute a serious social and political force.  You can get “hundreds” to show up at conventions about the existence of Bigfoot and the Roswell Incident, and, if you have to send out e-mail memos to locate the “hundreds,” they are probably not exactly a rising tide.  My larger point, however, was that the ideology of conservatism as it came to be understood in the 1950’s and 60’s is now defunct because the social framework—the class and cultural institutions that allowed the abstractions to flourish—has now largely vanished.  The counter-attack of the fusionists—all the “hundreds” of them—cannot revive that.

As a fairly typical representative of the moribund “conservative movement,” Mr. Devine exhibits most of its weaknesses, many of which his hero Frank Meyer helped to import and lock into conservative psychology in the first place: a narrow and arid dogmatism; an impatience with ideas that deviate from the “principles” of conservatism; and an unseemly eagerness to ferret out “heresies” and deviant thoughts.  In these respects, he is not very different from Mr. Wolfson, who is so upset at the prospect of a conservatism that knows about sociobiology and Carl Schmitt.  Frank Meyer certainly would not have approved of them either, but, of course, Mr. Devine’s conservatism and Mr. Wolfson’s are quite different—I think.

I know what Mr. Wolfson wants to conserve—the regime of the First Universal Nation—but exactly what it is that Mr. Devine wants to conserve, I cannot tell you, other than the high orthodoxies of fusionism and the pet abstractions of “liberty, national security, and the Judeo-Christian tradition,” and I have no idea what any of that means.  Does he think that the incumbent ruling class of the United States in the federal and state governments, corporations, media conglomerates, and universities and think tanks supports something like fusionism and the catchphrases of which he is so proud?  Does the leadership of any major religious denomination preach them and reflect them in their theology and social beliefs?  Do the schools enforce the ethics of the “Judeo-Christian tradition” or the universities teach and explore it with their students and professors?  The answer, at least for most paleoconservatives, is obvious enough, which means that the regime, the apparatus by which those who have power in this country maintain it, is not something to be “conserved” but is alien and hostile to the concrete meaning of these concepts; that it is not a “conservative” regime but a regime destructive of tradition, community, order, and liberty; and that those who really do believe in the pet abstractions (which means that they wish them to cease being abstractions and to become animating values and forces in American society) need to work seriously on behalf of “radical opposition to the regime.”

I get absolutely nothing from Mr. Devine or his colleagues at the ACU or from any of the other fossils of fusionism that still flop about inside the Beltway that they have any disposition to think or do any of that.  What I see among the remnants of “movement conservatism” today is an obsessive devotion to electing Republicans, to denouncing Bill and Hillary, to applauding any and every war the ruling class decides to drag the country into, to carrying water for Big Business whenever and wherever possible, to deluding voters and donors with constant jabber about “family values” and “free enterprise,” and to denouncing and “turning away” any “heretic” who seems not to be totally on board with their vaunted “principles.”

What paleoconservatism tries to tell Americans is that the dominant forces in their society are no longer committed to conserving the traditions, institutions, and values that created and formed it, and, therefore, that those who are really conservative in any serious sense and wish to live under those traditions, institutions, and values need to oppose the dominant forces and form new ones.  I do not expect that Mr. Wolfson and his neocon buddies will agree with or like this position, because they like precisely the forces paleoconservatives oppose.  As for Mr. Devine and his hundreds of fusionists, I do not know.  Maybe there is still hope that they will see what has happened to the country that they say they want to conserve.  But, quite frankly, so irrelevant has the “conservative movement” become that I do not think it makes an awful lot of difference whether they do or not.

This article first appeared in the March 2004 issue of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.