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.

My mother’s funeral was the usual modern farce.  My parents had liked to travel, and, although they still had old friends in Charleston, where she was to be buried, they were old friends, by and large, with whom she had lost touch.  The priest, whom my father had known as a ballplayer, had never met my mother, but that did not keep him from descanting on what a “byudeeful, byudeeful” person she was.

It was an embarrassing moment, one I have had to relive at nearly every subsequent funeral.  People no longer stay in one place, and, if they do, few of them go to church.  American funerals have been liberated from the ugly fact of death, as hypocritical preachers assure the audience that the dead nonbeliever who left his wife and cheated on his business partners “is in a better place.”  At one rich man’s funeral I attended, the Lutheran preacher admitted he had never met the deceased but had learned from his family members what a great guy he really was, and, instead of a eulogy or sermon, he told some of the amusing stories he had heard only that day.  Mourners nowadays, especially if they are of advanced years, wear casual clothes in cheerful colors, and I have heard more than one chipper old lady complain that the sight of black can be depressing.  To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, they would not be bad old ladies, if they had someone to kill them every day.

Living with the reality of death is one of the most necessary moral duties, but we Americans manage to evade that responsibility up until the end.  When I lived in McClellanville, where everyone knew everyone, funerals were a normal part of life, and, when we had our annual church picnic at the old Brick Church, it was comforting to see a man’s great-grandchildren picnicking on top of his tombstone and frolicking among the family graves.  It was not desecration.  “In the midst of life we are in death,” said that church’s old Prayer Book, but the converse should also be true: In the midst of death, we are in life.

Life in a village of 500 souls is life on the human scale.  When we leave the village and move to a city numbering hundreds of thousands, we either create our own little village of friends and neighbors or learn to subsist for ourselves as one of millions of organisms competing for wealth and power.  Treating our fellows as so many ants, we can witness their deaths, as unmoved as we have been untouched by their lives.  When we are young and still climbing the ladder, we can persuade ourselves that only we exist, that there is no other entity entitled to speak in the first person; but, as we fail to become as rich as Gates, as powerful as Perle, our self-confidence may begin to falter, though not far enough to acknowledge other people’s existence.  Other people become the reminder that we are not what we would like to be, and, if we think about death for a moment, we may be resentful that others will walk carefree over our graves.  Better a brass plaque in a memorial garden.  Better cremation.

Luigi Pirandello was overwhelmed by the modern conviction that the world is an illusion each one of us makes up as he goes along.  In his moving story about two black horses, “L’Allegrata,” he grappled with his own death-obsession.  Nero (Blackie) has recently arrived at a new stable.  His previous owner, the princess, has fallen ill, and her son, a motorcar enthusiast, has persuaded her to sell the horses.  Aggravating Blackie’s loneliness is the incessant vulgar chatter of his new stallmate Fofo, who wonders obsessively about what is put into the long boxes that the black horses pull in their dignified wagons.  The two horses are paired for the first job, on which Nero disgraces himself by shying and rearing in front of the house where they are to pick up the cargo.  It is, of course, the house of the princess, who has died, and, to reassure Nero, the mistress’s old coachman tells him how pleased she would be to be taking her last ride in a carriage drawn by her favorite horse.

Pirandello was as obsessed with death as was Fofo, and he requested the plainest funeral for himself—to be carried out naked, wrapped only in a sheet, and be cremated—but since Pirandello was the greatest writer in the Fascist Party, Mussolini insisted on a gaudy state funeral.  The Fascists were right: What advantage would a plain funeral have been to the dead writer compared with the benefits the party and the nation gained from a state funeral?

Like most of us, however, Pirandello was thinking only of himself.  How many of us, I think he wondered, will, by our death, make even a horse disconsolate?  Hemingway observed that the men who bought photographs of a dead bullfighter looked at the picture so often that they forgot what their hero really looked like.  Within days or even hours of our death, we decay into a string of anecdotes, which, as they are repolished with retelling, replace any vivid memories that our friends might retain of us.  People who cannot think about their own death cannot mourn the death of another, and, if we are pagans, the only proof that we have ever lived is the sorrow displayed at our funeral.  Of course, we shall not be there to witness the tears, the cheeks rent by fingernails, the ritual lamentations, but, in our dying, we can be comforted by the awareness that we are leaving a world that will miss us.  That, after all, is what friends and family are for: to encourage the delusion that we have not lived in vain.

Solipsism is more than the philosophical theory that only the self can be proved to exist.  This “theory” stems from the hallucination that the universe depends on me alone.  When I am gone, the screen goes blank.  The ultimate consolation, for the solipsist, is to be joined by his pets, his servants, and his wives in death.  The prospect of suttee must have been a great comfort to a dying Indian prince.  Without wishing to pass judgment on the customs of another civilization, I think the wife might be pardoned for having her own point of view.  I suppose that, if a man and woman were equally solipsistic, equally alone in the world, they might make a suicide pact and simultaneously extinguish each other’s universe.

Christians used to be taught to contemplate their own mortality.  In Palermo, where Pirandello attended university for a time, there is a Capuchin cemetery where the dead, dressed and posed as they were in life, were put on display.  When my good Catholic friends went off to see the grotesque spectacle, I preferred to go off to lunch.  I do not need skeletons to remind me of my mortality.  Another fictional Sicilian, the hero of Lampedusa’s The Leopard, imagined what an impressive figure he would make, when he joined the other stiffs on display, but the prince was, after all, a pagan, who hoped to be greeted by the goddess of the evening star.

Like Huck Finn, I take no stock in dead people.  The corpse of a friend or relative is to me worse than inert, especially if it has been improved by the undertaker’s art.  I know I am wrong in this.  It must be a good thing for the bereaved to take one last look, to acknowledge that a mother or wife was not mere spirit but also flesh and blood.  The Church has always opposed cremation, not out of a superstitious concern about the resurrection of the body, but because disrespect to the body of the dead might impair our respect for human dignity.  A man who spends his days dissecting corpses for science might understandably view the living body with something less than reverence.

Nonetheless, I have difficulty in connecting the prettified corpse with the person I once knew.  In his journal, Walter Scott records his reaction to the sight of his wife’s corpse:

I have seen her.  The figure I beheld is, and is not, my Charlotte—my thirty years’ companion.  There is the same symmetry of form, though those limbs are rigid, which were once so gracefully elastic—but that yellow masque, with pinched features, which seems to be life rather than emulate it, can it be the face that was once so full of lively expression?

I find Scott’s controlled mourning more terrifying than any catacombs.  I am tempted to say that it is the difference between northern reserve and Latin exuberance, but, although Latin countries today are franker about death, it was Northern European artists (such as Mathias Grünewald) who carried the obsession with death to the extreme: deathbed scenes filled with devils; Last Judgments portraying the most imaginative tortures; sculpted effigies whose noble images of beautiful ladies and heroic knights do not quite conceal the rotting flesh underneath the surface.

Italian art (including Signorelli’s great Last Judgment in the Orvieto cathedral) is typically more austere.  I used to go to Pisa almost every year and would stare, uncomprehending, at the Last Judgment depicted in the Campo Santo—or rather, in the parts of the Campo Santo that Allied bombers chose to spare.  (I do not know why they did not shoot up the Cathedral, Baptistery, and Leaning Tower while they were at it.)  One particularly brilliant detail, which I never understood, shows three young men in hunting costumes, staring at three coffins with corpses.  This is, apparently, a portrayal of a “Dance of Death” theme: The young men are staring at their own corpses.  It is something to think about.

Christians are not the only people who have sought the meaning of life in the fact of death.  In Latin love elegy—the poems of Propertius and Tibullus—the persistent awareness of death adds spice to the pursuit of love.  There is, we are reminded, “una nox dormienda”—one night that must be slept for good.  For Greek and Roman pagans, death gave to life a sense of urgency and seriousness.  Who would squander today on television programs and football games if he knew he was to die tomorrow?  To this pagan sensibility, Christianity adds a spiritual and moral dimension.  Go ahead, cheat your partner and seduce his wife, but you are wasting your life on vice and will pay a terrible penalty.  If you will not contemplate your own mortality, then read Dante’s Commedia, and not just for the beauty of the poetry or the philosophical insights.

Post-Christians do not want to hear about this—least of all from Dante.  They embalm their corpses and paint them up, as if for a stage performance.  Tonight only.  Their interments are like reality TV: Everything is made to look “so lifelike,” but nothing could be less real.  They wear cheerful spring colors to funerals, and, at the viewing, they chatter merrily about sports and shopping.  If, in the dead of night, the ancient fear of death sneaks into a conscience numbed by Friends, there is a medicine cabinet filled with prescriptions to take away the sting of death and the fear of the Devil.  If old Dunbar had been given mood elevators, he might have died happy unshriven, and we should not have heard his “Timor mortis conturbat me.”

We embalm our corpses in order to embalm our minds.  Propertius and Horace knew that we can only be fully alive if we are conscious of our mortality and of the brevity of life.  That is the point.  Post-Christians do not want life, either in the pagan sense of living and fighting and rearing children or in the deeper Christian sense that culminates in the love of God that is immortality.  They want only the appearance of life, as Colonel Sellers might say (that archetypal American projector in Twain and Warner’s The Gilded Age), not life itself.  On drugs—whether heroin or Prozac—life and death are replaced by the appearance of life and the disappearance of death.  They flush their babies down the drain and tell themselves they have a sacred right to “fulfill themselves,” and, when they discover that, no matter how much stuff they cram into the vacuum, those selves are emptier and emptier, they have to fill the spreading void with smoke and fantasy.  In a real sense, they cannot die, because to die, really and truly, they would first have to live.

There is no drug problem in America; there is only a soul problem.  So long as we are willing to give our souls away to the lowest bidder, so long as we continue to cheat life with TV games, video poker, and “safe” sex (what a quaint expression for an act that denies life), we shall have to drug our minds, shutting and locking all the doors and stopping up the cracks, lest, through some mouse hole or broken window, some glimmer of reality might break in upon the stone-dead fortresses we have built around our souls.

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

Doing Death
by Thomas Fleming

Be not proud.

VIEWS

Afghanistan: Opium Market to the World
by Doug Bandow
No end in sight.

The Global Pharmacy
by Kevin Michael Grace
A reason for Americans to love Canada.

NEWS

Anything That Ails You
by B.K. Eakman
Women on tranqs in a self-serve society.

The Bush Clan at the “Oligarchs’ Ball”
by Wayne Allensworth
Helping out old friends.

REVIEWS

A Living Library of the Law Revived
by Stephen B. Presser

The Selected Writings of Sir Edward Coke: Steve Sheppard, ed.

plus

Clyde Wilson on Claes G. Ryn’s America the Virtuous: The Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for 
Empire and A Common Human Ground: Universality 
and Particularity in a Multicultural World

James 
O. Tate on Ben Macintyre’s The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan

Paul
 Gottfried on Alan Dershowitz’s The Case for Israel

H.A. Scott Trask on David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing

CORRESPONDENCE

Letter From Prague: The Perils of “United Europe”
by Srdja Trifkovic

Letter From Paris: Military Unintelligence
by Curtis Cate

VITAL SIGNS

CHRISTIANITY: The Triumph of Tradition
by Tom Piatak

ECONOMICS: Grading Greenspan
by David A. Hartman

DEMOCRACY: Democratizing Germany: A Success Story?
by Josef Schuesslburner

COLUMNS

BREAKING GLASS
by Philip Jenkins

PRINCIPALITIES & POWERS
by Samuel Francis

THE ROCKFORD FILES
by Scott P. Richert

THE AMERICAN INTEREST
by Srdja Trifkovic

IN THE DARK
Troy, Control Room
by George McCartney

THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN
by Chilton Williamson, Jr.

DEPARTMENTS

POLEMICS & EXCHANGES
AMERICAN PROSCENIUM
CULTURAL REVOLUTIONS

POETRY
Clock by Richard Moore
and Closing Tolkien by Andrew Huntley

ON THE COVER

Cover and inside illustrations by H. Ward Sterett
 and Melanie Anderson.

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.