Demise of the Right?

The New York Times last Sunday had a big article on "The Right" and its possible demise. Has the paper ever run a piece on the possible demise of the left? I don't think so.

The terms left and right come from the arrangement of seats in the French parliament, so the presumption underlying the terms is that there will always be a continuum of political opinion, not that one or the other side will disappear. The article asserts that the right in America (with no attempt to distinguish among various schools like paleocon, crunchy con, neocon, etc.) is thought by some (the writer carefully dissociates himself from this happy prospect) to have suffered a fatal blow from the deposing of Paul Wolfowitz and the death of Jerry Falwell. That's like thinking liberalism was finished because some Democrat eminence grise like Averill Harriman died and Bill Clinton was impeached. Incidentally, the article says that Bill Clinton was not impeached; that is incorrect: he was impeached by the House, but not convicted by the Senate.

Never mind that Paul Wolfowitz was clearly set up by Europeans in the World Bank who did not care for his distasteful connection to the Iraq war or his emphasis on not conducting business as usual. Never mind that Falwell had not been a significant player in national politics for years.

The article also posits without evidence that the right arose in the 1950s, which as we all know was a terribly uptight period, filled with repressions that were released in the following decade. But if the right did not exist before the 50s, who opposed FDR? What about John Adams? Randolph? Calhoun? For that matter, what about Edmund Burke? I recommend the NYT reporter peruse The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk.

Totalitarian Streaks

I was reading a blog by Rich Broderick, who teaches at a local community college and at the Loft, a Minneapolis literary organization. Wow. He thinks that the new U.S. Attorney for Minnesota, Rachel Paulose, is part of the Bush right wing conspiracy to take over. Part of the proof? Paulose is a member of the Federalist Society. Ann Coulter is also a member, so thr group must be beyond the pale, not really conservative but Jacobin in its radicalism. QED. Didn't that sort of argument used to be called guilt by association? Wasn't that a MCCarthyite technique?

Actually, I do recall something I like about Broderick. Some 20 years ago he wrote a piece about the decline and fall of Control Data that refused to add to the hagiography that surrounded William C. Norris, the company's famously independent-minded first (and almost last) CEO. I saw a more typical piece only a few months ago, after Norris's death. I think it was in The New Yorker. Broderick's piece correctly laid the blame for the company's collapse squarely on Norris. Having spent seven years at the company, I saw firsthand the pernicious influence of Norris's lack of interest in growing the business by paying attention to important trends. Instead, he seemed more interested in his social programs.

Also today I read on SCSU Scholars that the College Republicans at the College of St. Catherine staged one of those "affirmative action bake sales" that seem to rile up the left so much. What I found interesting is not that the usual suspects didn't like the bake sale; they are seeking to silence this different point of view by having the school revoke the group's officlal status. There is a real totalitarian streak, more worrisome to me than Rachel Paulose.

Posted by Finn MacCool

The New Yorker

I've been reading The New Yorker since the 50s. In college, my subscription copy arrived in my mail slot every Friday afternoon, making for an enjoyable start to the weekend. (I had a student subscription, which cost, as I recall, $4 for the year.)

Like many others, I did not like the politicization of the magazine in the late 60s, which filled the Talk of the Town pages with antiwar pieces then as well as now. I also missed the quirky columns on subjects like Ivy League football and trains; these subjects, like nightclubs and boxing, were dropped over time. Still, there remained the cartoons and the ads, although I liked both more in the past. But the occasional piece still succeeds in winning my attention and repaying it, e.g., many of James Surowieki's pieces on finance.

But an article on Hugo Chavez a while back illustrates what is wrong even with the financial or economic stuff. The gist of the article was that oil companies, despite their opposition to Chavez, were finding ways to work with the new leader, showing a realism and flexibility at odds with (and better than) a reflexive conservative dislike for the leftist. What does this view make of the latest news from Venezuela, of further nationalization of oil production in the country. Sounds to me like the reflexive conservative reaction was the correct one all along.

Then there was a piece about an interview with a Hezbollah official in Beirut, around the time of last year's war. Maybe it was before the fighting actually began. The article describes meeting this guy for ice cream and having a civilized chat. What are we suposed to make of this account? That we should not demonize Hezbollah? That they are regular guys and we should get to know them better? That we should discount their pronouncements about death to Jews and Israel as mere posturing? That we should ignore their murder of innocent civilians? Talk about cognitive dissonance! But the piece didn't take up any larger argument, only the narrative of the meeting, leaving us to draw conclusions about the humanness of this guy and, presumably, his fellow members of Hezbollah. I could not do it, knowing what else I know. It was like reading a piece about a Gestapo official in his free time, who shows a friendly and human side at home. In their effort to have a different take, the magazine succeeds only in being willfully blind to reality.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Ben Stein

I enjoy reading Ben Stein, mostly. A few years ago, I always read his articles in The American Spectator. (I liked to buy my copy from the leftwing bookstore in my town; it was fun to see the cashiers register disgust as they took my money.) He wrote about funny things that happened to him while traveling, about his son, about everything. His columns on Yahoo Finance are great also; they contain savvy financial advice from the worldly-wise uncle most people never had. On the other hand, his pieces in the New York Times business section on Sunday are more political. In one he remembered fondly his old neighborhood outside Washington, D.C. where he grew up. Everyone was middle-middle class, except for the family that had a swimming pool (but it was shared by the neighbor kids). Everyone knew each other, and there was a sense of community. Stein contrasts this 1950s scene with his current neighborhood in Beverly Hills, where no one knows his neighbors, apparently, and there is no sense of community.

This contrast Stein relates to income taxes. In the 1950s, under the affable, avuncular Ike, the top marginal tax rate was 90%. Today, with the marginal rate topping out at 39.6%, we have apparently unleashed rapacious isolates who care naught for community, only getting and spending obscene amounts of money. (One column discussed $10 million bar mitzvahs as examples of this wretched excess.) Everyone in Beverly Hills has his own swimming pool. Ben finds it especially unfair that people serving in our military make so little money, at the same time hedge fund fat cats are lighting their cigars with Benjamins.

I remember my father talking about 90% marginal tax rates, and how terrible they were. But I think he also said that wealthy people hired clever tax lawyers to find ways to avoid paying such a high rate. Ronald Reagan once complained that it didn't make sense for him to make more than one picture a year, because of the 90% tax. And of course the Beatles sang of the taxman, who said "that's one for you, nineteen for me." (The top rate in Britain was 95% at one time.) The question is how such confiscatory, rates can foster anything except tax fiddling. How do they build a sense of community? Perhaps the sense of community has other origins besides the tax code. For one thing, if these high rates did not kick in until income was so high that only a few people were subject to them, the rates would have little effect, socially or financially, except to motivate some of the wealthy to flee or cheat. I have the sense that most people were not so affected in the 50s.

We are surrounded by examples of wretched excess, e.g., by professional athletes as well as Wall Street moguls. And I would like nothing better than to double the pay of our miliary; it would be one of the best uses of tax dollars. But I don't want to try to tax everyone into behaving well; that seems quixotic in the extreme. Besides, those $10 million bar mitzvahs must benefit lots of less wealthy people. I know, that's trickle-down economics, but isn't it true nonethless?

Stein seems to have contempt for supply side theories, but I do not recall that he directly argues why these theories are wrong. Why were tax rate cuts in the 20s, 60s, 80s, and 00s followed by increased tax revenues? How are Steve Forbes and Arthur Laffer and Larry Kudlow and the WSJ wrong on all this? How is Paul Krugman right?

I wonder what Stein would find if he went back to his Maryland suburb. Perhaps a sense of community there is alive and well, despite the depredations of Reagan and Bush. I know it is in lots of neighborhoods in the Twin Cities. Perhaps Ben should move back.

Posted by Finn MacCool

English Department Then and Now

I received in the mail the quarterly magazine from the English Department where I was a grad student and TA many years ago. This issue included a tribute to a professor I remember with fond respect: Samuel Monk. He was an 18th-century scholar best known for his book on the sublime, but in person he was charming and down-to-earth. I took a seminar with him the last year I had classes; it was quite demanding, with hefty readings and frequent papers, but I loved it. We met in a small conference room, just big enough for the six or eight students plus Professor Monk. Once we met in his apartment, an occasion when he served sherry, as I recall. He referred to himself as "an old toper" that day. In pointing to his extensive library, he noted that Samuel Johnson was once described as "buffeting his books." Professor Monk allowed as how he could not conceive of buffeting his own books, only of quietly "rearranging" them.

Anyway, in the magazine one of his colleagues, now retired, wrote about his first meeting with Sam Monk. "It quickly became apparent that Monk "had read the collected works of everybody," this professor noted. That tribute struck me with some force, because it seemed so dated. What came to matter was not how widely a candidate had read, but whether he or she saw everything through the correct prisms of race, class, and gender. Reading about the current doings of the department faculty bear this notion out. One professor, for example, was exploring how democracy wasn't all that great an idea.

Posted by Finn MacCool

The Broken Center and Dante

Here's another example of the power of the blogosphere. Father Richard John Neuhaus, on First Things, notes the passing of Nathan Scott, who sounds like a wonderful scholar and critic (who also liked cigarettes and dry martinis, which also earn points in my book). He mentions Scott's book The Broken Center. I check it out of the library of the college where I used to teach. It's stunning. It surveys modern literature's ways of coping with the disappearance of meaning from life, which coincided wqith the abandonment of faith. It finds parallels betwen 2oth century novels and ancient Gnostic heresies. It displays an amazing breadth and depth of learning, and it resonates with my own sense of modernists like Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.

It also includes quotes from other works that I now want to read or re-read. For example, he quotes from Richard Sewell on the essence of tragic action: "Man at the limits of his sovereignty--Job on the ash heap, Prometheus on the crag, Lear on the heath, Ahab on his lonely quarterdeck...with all the protective covering ripped off."

Perhaps to balance this book about the absence of a center, I have started The Divine Comedy, which perhaps is the literary work that demonstrates the unbroken center par excellence. I am reading Dorothy Sayers' translation, and it is marvelous, although I am finding myself wanting to learn Italian, so I can read the original text.

Incidentally, starting my own blog has made realize again how hard it is to convey as solid English what seemed so intelligent when it was but a fleeting idea. I thought of Eliot's famous description of poetry in this context:

(a) raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating,
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

"Undisciplined squads of thoughts" applies equally well to writing a blog post.

Posted by Finn MacCool

Living in the Blogosphere

It is easy to be surfeited with blogs. But then I recall my gradual realization in 2001 and after of how ineffably wonderful was this explosion of ideas, attitudes, information, and humor. My world would be strikingly poorer without Lileks, Powerline, Shot in the Dark, Fraters Libertas, SCSU Scholars (to name the local blogs that I read regularly), or Tim Blair, The Paragraph Farmer, the Anchoress, First Things, The Corner, The Belmont Club, Small Dead Animals, Tom McGuire, Scrappleface, and on and on. What riches. (I had a glimpse into these possibilities in 1994 with AOL, the walled Internet garden. But now it's a world.)

And in what unexpected directions I can be taken. Lileks, for instance, was writing about Bob and Ray, which reminded me that my older sister used to listen to them on the radio in New York (along with Jean Shepherd). I caught the tail end of radio humor; after that, it was wall-to-wall rock and roll for me. But the clips Lileks provided brought me back to Wally Ballou, and Mary Backstage, Noble Wife, and the rest--their whole, addicting, satiric take on things.

Another direction: Powerline was writing about Barack Obama's embrace of the comparable worth idea for jobs and wages. They dismissed it as a feminist idea from the 70s. But it reminded me of my time at a subsidiary of Control Data in the 80s. The company had set up a consulting business to help small companies survive. It didn't work very well, mostly because small businesses are unable to pay for much in the way of consulting. The problem was compounded by the company's decision to transfer dozens of HR staffers from HQ to the consulting firm. The only hope that all these people could actually be turned into consultants with tons of billable hours lay in the passage of federal legislation mandating comparable worth pay. The great model was the ERISA law of 1974, which helped employ armies of accountants. A comparable worth law would require the services of HR consultants who would analyze jobs and come up with some numerical value for each. Control Data had taken some job-analysis software developed by the Air Force and enhanced it for internal use. Now it would supposedly become a huge source of revenue--another case of the company doing well by doing good, its favorite public narrative. Alas, the law was never passed, and the dream died along with the consulting division.