When the New York Times published an article about how roughly 50 percent of same-sex marriages and relationships in the San Francisco area are “open marriages” in which both partners consent to each other having sex with other people, I assumed it would cause a stir and that I’d be motivated to write a response. Oddly, though, the article seemed to generate little attention. But now I see my friend (and old sparring-partner on gay marriage) Rod Dreher has taken the bait.

Amidst making some valuable points about the politicization of social science research, Rod summarizes his view of the study on which the Times article was based:

If it's true that half of same-sex couples live in an open marriage/relationship, then concerns from SSM opponents that extending marriage to gay couples would redefine our culture's understanding of marriage can't be dismissed as unfounded.

Actually, I still think such concerns can be dismissed as unfounded, though I understand why Rod and likeminded opponents of same-sex marriage would think otherwise. Whereas proponents of same-sex marriage have spent much of the past two decades arguing the Andrew Sullivan position—namely, that permitting homosexuals to marry would lead them to assimilate to bourgeois social norms—opponents of same-sex marriage have made the opposite claim, asserting that once gay marriage is normalized, the morally dubious practices of the gay community would seep into and corrupt the traditionalist marital practices of everyone else. And now it seems the conservative case has received empirical confirmation: roughly half of homosexual marriages and relationships are non-traditional. Instead of producing the embourgeoisment of the gay community, the advent of same-sex marriage has sent us careening down the slippery slope toward the society-wide dissolution of traditional marriage. Right?

Wrong.  

Even if we assume that the study cited in the Times article is accurate and that gay community as a whole shares the outlook and attitudes of married homosexuals in Bay area, traditionalists need to explain the mechanism whereby the practices of roughly half of the members of a tiny minority who choose to marry will decisively influence the marital practices of everyone, or even anyone, else. Traditionalists dread this influence—just as some of those quoted in the article welcome it. But do those fears and hopes make sense? How is the change going to happen? Why should we assume that it will? Because sleeping around is fun, and the only thing holding traditional mores in place is ignorance among mainstream Americans that it’s possible to engage in consensual polyamory?

(Imagine the conversation: “Hey honey, I know we’ve always assumed we’d be faithful to one another, but have you heard that gays often sleep around with other partners even when they’re married? Sounds cool to me. Wanna try?”)

But of course most Americans have known for several decades that non-traditional marriage is an option, and yet there’s no evidence that rates of open marriage have skyrocketed, or even grown beyond what they were in the mid-‘70s (which appears to be somewhere between 1.7 and 4 percent of heterosexual marriages). On that note, I wonder if Rod and other traditionalists believe that heterosexual marriages in which both partners consent to extramarital liaisons should be nullified on the grounds that they fundamentally undermine a vital social institution. Consistency seems to demand that they should.

And yet that isn’t the standard position of traditionalists—because they (sometimes) respect the private decisions of consenting adults. If a heterosexual couple decides to have an open marriage, that’s the couple’s decision, made within the confines of their marital partnership, and the state has, and should have, no power to invalidate it. That, anyway, is what most of us believe. But why should gay couples be held to a different, more exacting standard? Because their particular form of deviancy is uniquely insidious?

But how could this be? Don’t traditionalists believe that heterosexual marriage is rooted in nature? And isn’t homosexuality an unnatural abomination? That’s what we’ve always been told. But if so, what sense does it make to assume that news of gay open marriages will lead heterosexuals to adopt those practices as their own? Is nature really that malleable? Can the desire for exclusivity in love really be erased? Is jealousy really likely to disappear from human relationships? Does monogamy really depend on universal moral disapprobation to back it up? But we’ve already lived through nearly a half-century without a social consensus on sexuality. Surely a handful of non-monogamous gay marriages isn’t going to make the decisive difference in mainstreaming polyamory. Or is it?

What a fascinatingly bleak view of the human condition we find among sexual traditionalists: Traditional marriage is natural, and homosexuality is contrary to nature; but nature is so fragile that it needs to be backed up by unquestioning tradition, as well as by the force of law; the moment those traditional mores and legal sanctions are loosened, people begin to diverge from their own natures and conform to the unnatural practices of the deviants, thereby dissolving traditional marriage. This is why I’ve always had a perverse respect for those traditionalists who have been willing to follow their darkly pessimistic convictions all the way to the end—to admit that they think traditional marriage is fundamentally incompatible with freedom. (And no, redefining freedom to mean “obedience” doesn’t count.)

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It’s been nearly a year since I wrote a post titled “What Realignments Look Like.” In it I reflected on how disorienting it was to see the Democrats take the White House, increase their margins in the Congress, and confidently pursue a progressive policy agenda. Having politically come of age during Reagan’s presidency, when the Republican critique of liberalism seemed to permeate the political consciousness of the nation, such a thing seemed unthinkable. Through the two decades separating the end of the Reagan era and the election of Barack Obama, I was convinced that the only electorally viable liberalism was a moderate, centrist liberalism. The post-1994 Clinton administration served as a model.

During 1990s, Bill Clinton's modest ambitions ... seemed perfectly reasonable to me—a severely chastened form of liberalism being the only one possible in a world in which the failures of Great Society social programs were obvious to just about everyone. In this world, Republicans set the parameters of political debate and established the requirements of electoral success. And when Democrats challenged these limits, as Clinton tried to do during his first two years in office, they paid a heavy price. This America was a center-right nation—one pragmatic enough to entrust the presidency to a moderate Democrat like Clinton, but only if he played by the rules established by the Reagan revolution.

Writing twelve months ago, I wondered if Obama had managed to begin a partisan realignment that would shift “the political spectrum to the left for a generation, while also managing at long last to bury Reaganite conservatism.” I didn’t consider it likely, but I thought it was possible. No, the 44th president had not “reawakened the liberalism that's been slumbering in the soul [of the American majority] since the summer of 1968.” Still, Obama seemed to be a master of selling liberalism as a non-ideological form of pragmatism, as if he were saying to the American people, “Hey, I'm not a big-government guy; it's just that the Republicans made such a wreck of the place that I have no choice but to do some big things to clean up the mess.” Maybe that message would succeed in persuading the country to go along with what would otherwise appear to be a overly ambitious progressive agenda.

A year later, with a massive stimulus package having done little to lower unemployment, the deficit going through the roof with no end in sight, health care reform on the verge of collapse, and the electoral tide turning sharply against the Democrats even in liberal strongholds like Massachusetts, things look very different. Or rather, they look very much the same as they have since 1980, when the winds of public opinion began to blow from the right. The United States might not be a center-right nation, but it shows every sign of being a nation in which more people oppose (or can be demagogically goaded into opposing) a progressive policy agenda than support (or can be rallied into supporting) it.

It’s understandable that liberals would lament this fact. But they shouldn’t allow their disappointment at electoral reality lead them to do something civically irresponsible, like punishing the Democrats by failing to support the party in 2010 and 2012, thereby insuring the political resurgence of the Republicans. Easily the most enduring sentences of my year-old post are the ones in which I describe the post-Bush condition of the GOP. (I’m referring to Samuel "Joe the Plumber" Wurzelbacher, whose 15 minutes of fame ran out about 2 minutes after my post went live, but one could easily substitute Sarah Palin, the leaders of the “tea party” movement, or even prominent members of the House Republican caucus for good ol’ Joe.)

Having badly bungled a war, shown gross incompetence in responding to a natural disaster, and presided over the near-total collapse of the nation's (and the world's) financial system, the leadership of the Republican Party thinks it's a good idea to follow the advice (or rather, to pretend to follow the advice) of some guy who (to put it delicately) has no fucking idea what he's talking about. I'm not sure I'd go so far as David Brooks in describing this ideology as "nihilism," but whatever it is, it has no business getting within a stone's throw of the White House any time soon.

If anything, things have gotten considerably worse over the past year in this respect, with the Republican Party imposing ideological purity tests in a futile desire to placate its infuriated populist wing and party leaders (and leading intellectuals) proposing nonsensical alternatives to the nation’s very real problems. 

However dispirited liberals feel at the moment, surely they can agree that the post-1994 Clinton administration, for all of its triangulation-inspired humility, was better than a Dole administration would have been—and that given the genuinely alarming condition of the current Republican Party a less ambitiously progressive Obama administration is still vastly preferable to just about any GOP alternative.

“Anything But The Other Guys” isn’t a particularly inspiring slogan, especially in comparison to the (let’s face it) exaggerated expectations for change many progressives entertained during the 2008 campaign. But the phrase captures the most pressing fact about the present political moment: Today’s Republican Party is unfit to govern and so must not be permitted to win the presidency. Everything else—including health care reform and climate change legislation—can and should be treated as negotiable. If the Democrats conclude that compromise or caution will make a Republican resurgence less likely, then they should take that path, for the good of the country. Until the Republicans come to their collective senses, depriving them of power must be the most urgent aim of progressive politics.

Neocons have begun to warm to Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision. What they’ve liked about his recent speeches (at West Point, but far more so in Oslo) is his willingness to defend (against the anti-political pacifism that dominates a segment of elite European opinion) the idea that there can be morally justified wars—and that the war in Afghanistan is one of them. I’m delighted that some on the American right have come around to supporting the president, but they should do so knowing that on one crucially important matter Obama will never satisfy them. That is the issue of American exceptionalism.

For the tradition of Christian realism from which the president’s foreign policy views derive, the United States is all-too-inclined toward what Alexis de Tocqueville aptly described as the “perpetual utterance of self-applause.” Neoconservatism has many facets, but the one that dominates today defines itself primarily by the opposite conviction—namely, that the United States suffers above all from a lack of self-confidence. That’s why neocon essays and editorials so often take the form of pep talks designed to serve as rhetorical standing ovations in our national honor.  

For Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest exponent of Christian realism, this gets things exactly backward—and threatens to encourage the very aspect of America’s national character that most needs to be moderated or restrained. “Every nation has its own form of spiritual pride,” Niebuhr noted in The Irony of American History (1952), and the American version takes the form of the myth that “our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning”—a beginning marked by moral purity and the special favor of God. This uniquely American self-understanding has tended to inspire national over-confidence with regard to our virtue.

Niebuhr maintains that American over-confidence makes us a nation impatient with various limitations that are coeval with the human condition. We are, first of all, impatient with limits on our knowledge and power. Convinced that God is on our side, we lack the humility to accept that “the whole drama of human history is . . . too large for human comprehension or management.” We are likewise impatient with limitations on the degree of moral purity—especially our own—that is possible in political life.

Niebuhr rightly remarks that Americans nearly always mean well when they act in the world. Our moral perils are thus “not those of conscious malice or the explicit lust for power.” Yet the rules of the world are such that good intentions—even our own—often lead to unintended bad consequences. This is a lesson we seem incapable of learning, or remembering, so eager are we to deny that the actions of even “the best men and nations” are “curious compounds of good and evil.” And this leads to a third, distinctly American form of impatience—one that expresses itself in an attitude of impotent defiance toward “the slow and sometimes contradictory processes of history.” We desperately want to believe that we are contributing to the realization of God’s plans for humanity, but we find it exceedingly difficult to accept that the path humanity will take on the way to its appointed end is as obscure to us as the precise shape of the end itself.

Having imagined ourselves standing by God’s side as his trusted lieutenant, we half believe he has granted us wisdom and power comparable to his. But this is folly, a prideful delusion as old as Genesis 3. In Niebuhr’s view America needs regularly self-administered doses of humility. It needs to recognize that like the shapes discovered in the amorphous ink blots of a Rorschach test, patterns detected in history are unavoidably subjective, reflecting the necessarily narrow standpoint of the person or nation proposing the interpretation. Seeing and judging the whole with accuracy transcends our meager powers, both because of our limited perspective and because of the passions, including self-love, that nearly always lead us to judge poorly when our own case is involved. All of which is why, according to Niebuhr, we must “moderate our conceptions of the ability of men and of nations to discern the future.”

The point is not that patriots and politicians should abandon their faith that American power can play a positive role in the world. It is that they should act with caution in applying that power. Above all, they need to take the lessons of humility closely to heart and resist the temptation to view themselves as God’s agents in history. To do otherwise—to view their policies as having been personally authored or approved by the divine—is foolishness that will tend to distort their judgment, inspiring the distinctly American over-confidence that Niebuhr warned against so powerfully. Then there is a different temptation—one that needs to be resisted by believing and skeptical politicians alike. This is the urge to use exceptionalist rhetoric and the hopes and expectations it raises to mold and manipulate public opinion for the sake of political gain.

Many American politicians, from George Washington to George W. Bush, have succumbed to these temptations. Yet the case of Barack Obama may be different. Not only does Obama follow Niebuhr’s teaching very closely, but in his public rhetoric he clearly strives to follow in the footsteps of Abraham Lincoln—the public figure Niebuhr singles out for having left behind a public meditation on American exceptionalism that lives on to teach us by example. In his second inaugural address, delivered as the Civil War was at long last drawing to a close, Lincoln somehow managed to step back from his position as Commander-in-Chief of the Union Army to achieve a broader perspective on the conflict as a whole. Rather than praising the North for its victory or denigrating the cause of the defeated South, Lincoln spoke in tones of irony—of each side’s invocation of the blessings of the divine against the other. If providence was at work in the slaughter of the Civil War, it could be seen not, or not simply, in the triumph of the Union, but in the incalculable suffering of soldiers and citizens on both sides—as divine retribution for the national sin of slavery. But Lincoln did not permit even this humbling thought to serve as a consolation. For not even this possible theological meaning of the slaughter, or its ultimate outcome, could be known with any certainty. All the nation could do was hope and pray for an end to the conflict—and humbly accept whatever providence might bring.

Lincoln thus managed to invoke the idea of American theological exceptionalism while avoiding the vices it so often encourages. Which is why Niebuhr described the speech as an “almost perfect model of the difficult but not impossible task of remaining loyal and responsible toward the moral treasures of a free civilization . . . while yet having some religious vantage point over the struggle.” It was a considerable achievement—and one that our current president apparently wishes to emulate. So far the neocons have been receptive to the message. But will it continue, as the president combines military action with efforts to rein in the country’s theologically inflated vision of itself? Only if they begin at long last to learn their Niebuhrian lessons.

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Conservatives would have us believe that they hold a monopoly on common sense. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and many other right-wing rabble-rousers regularly portray themselves as defenders of the good, old-fashioned common sense of average Americans against an out-of-touch liberal elite. A growing cadre of ambitious politicians likewise aims to lead a crusade in the name of “commonsense conservatism.” Glenn Beck has even gone so far as to publish a runaway bestseller that explicitly piggybacks on Thomas Paine’s Common Sense to argue against the danger of “out-of-control government” and the forces of organized foolishness that would foist it on the American people.

The unanimity is impressive. But it is also ridiculous. The fact is that the right’s appeal to common sense is nonsense. Unfortunately, though, it is a form of nonsense with deep roots in the American past and a very long history of political potency. Whether it continues to prove effective in the future will depend in no small measure on how cogently the rest of America responds.

This will be my only post on Sarah Palin.

Let me explain why. Unlike most (political or non-political) celebrities, whose fame is some admixture of gossip and buzz, talent and accomplishment, Palin has no discernable talents (beyond antagonizing coastal elites like myself) and her accomplishments are minimal at most. (Mayor of a small town? Come on. A half-term governor of the most undeveloped state in the union? Please. A mom? Just like tens of millions of unfamous women. Sinking the McCain campaign? Can’t say I disapprove, but so many others deserve to share the credit!) She has no policy views beyond “Drill, Baby, Drill!” and whatever foreign policy position Bill Kristol has whispered in her ear during the past week. And as she showed yet again on Oprah, she can’t even pull off poise. She’s famous because she’s famous. And that is all.

No one who cares about the health of American political culture can be pleased about the emptiness of the whole Palin phenomenon, let alone the prospect of such a cipher running for president. But how to respond? Most Palin critics (from the casual to the obsessive) have done what one would expect: they have hit back, pointing out her lies and deceptions, mocking her mediocrity and unsuitability for high office.

Criticism has its place, of course. And yet, on Palin I've come to favor a different approach—one that refuses to collude with the media-driven farce. To respond to an opponent, even harshly, even rudely, is to accord her a certain respect—to treat her as worthy of a response. But Palin is worthy of no such thing. She stands for nothing beyond her own self-promotion. She craves attention, and negative attention is a form of attention. Even ridicule can be a form of flattery. Better to bow out, to decline the provocation, since responding to her perpetuates and legitimates the illusion that she’s a serious player in our nation’s politics. I, for one, refuse to play that silly little game. And I wish more of her critics felt the same way. Instead of wasting their analytical and polemical talents on the topic, they could work to change the subject to something more substantive and deny Palin what she most greedily craves: the spotlight.

Want to talk about and debate Obama, terrorism, health care, gay marriage, the economy, abortion, climate change, Iran, or dozens of other topics? Go for it. But Palin? No way. All she deserves is silence.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger gets a lot of bad press. And for good reason. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis, he did and said and wrote some nasty things before and after serving as the rector of Freiburg University from 1933-1934, and though he eventually distanced himself from his earlier enthusiasm for Hitler, he seems never to have ceased believing that there was an "inner truth and greatness" (those are Heidegger's own words, spoken in a lecture from 1935) to the National Socialist movement. That sounds bad, and it is. By now, scholars have demonstrated beyond just about any reasonable doubt that, judged from moral and political standpoints, Heidegger was a pretty despicable human being.

But here's the thing: Heidegger also possessed the most powerful philosophical mind of the twentieth century. If he had written nothing besides Being and Time (1927), he would deserve to be recognized as Europe's greatest philosopher since the death of G.W.F. Hegel in 1831. (I realize that for many philosophy professors trained in the Anglo-American tradition, the judgment contained in the previous sentence is absurd on more than one level.) But Heidegger wrote much more than Being and Time. His collected works--including previously published books, transcripts of university lectures, private notebooks, and much else--will eventually run to over 100 volumes. There's a lot of redundancy in those books, some of it is impenetrable, but there are also frequent flashes of philosophical brilliance that rival the profoundest passages of Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. And that means that rendering a global judgment of Heidegger and his legacy is extremely complicated.

Unless, that is, you're Carlin Romano. I'm referring to Romano's recent essay from the Chronicle of Higher Education in which he uses the sordid evidence of Heidegger's Nazi enthusiasms compiled in a just-translated book by French philosopher Emmanuel Faye to argue that the time has come to excommunicate Heidegger--or rather his writings and ideas--from the university. In Romano's view, "the pretentious old Black Forest babbler," the "provincial Nazi hack," should be considered "a buffoon" whose ideas are "the butt of jokes, not the subject of dissertations."

I've long admired Romano's essays for the Chronicle and the Philadelphia Inquirer. But this column is an intellectual disgrace, and one that the Chronicle should be ashamed for having published. I say this as someone who's very far from being one of the "acolytes" who "bizarrely venerate" Heidegger and his ideas. I've written critically about his thought on a couple of occasions myself and am in complete agreement with Romano about the moral obscenity of Heidegger's actions (and of some of what he taught and wrote) during the 1930s. But moral disgust does not relieve a reader--let alone a critic--of the burden of intellectual engagement.

Faye is hardly the first to demonstrate continuities between Heidegger's thought and his political enthusiasms--or even to argue that the philosopher went out of his way in the mid-'30s to collapse the distinction between his philosophy and his public actions. Where Faye, according to Romano, goes further is in his efforts, using unpublished lectures from the Nazi period, to implicate Heidegger's entire philosophical corpus.

But this is absurd. Unlike many other philosophers, Heidegger was relentlessly, obsessively interested in a single question--the question of "Being." And his interest in that question--as well as his characteristic ways of posing it--can be traced back to the period of his first lectures courses (1919 to 1923), which took place well before the rise of National Socialism as a serious political force in Germany. While there can be no denying a striking and deeply troubling convergence between Heidegger's ontological investigations and Hitler's political movement--a convergence that very much deserves to be pondered and probed--those investigations pre-dated Hitler, just as they survived Hitler by several decades, as Heidegger's philosophical project continued on its way through the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

Yet even if distinguishing between Heidegger's philosophy and his politics were as impossible as Romano (and Faye) would have us believe, that still would not justify excluding Heidegger's thought from serious reflection, study, and a place in the university. On the contrary, it would serve as an additional reason to wrestle with the challenge it poses.

I'm a liberal democrat and a humanist who considers totalitarianism in general, and Nazism in particular, to be moral and political abominations. I believe in the truth of science, and I like many things about technological modernity. I accept logic as a valid means of determining many forms of truth. And I happily accept the vision of Being that has prevailed in the Western world since the time of the ancient Greeks. In other words, I'm not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more "primordial" encounter with Being by subverting these and other aspects of our world. But what a breathtakingly exciting experience it is to be forced to think about and make a case for, rather than lazily accept as self-evident, our most fundamental assumptions about the world and ourselves!

That is--or should be--what philosophy is all about. Which is why Heidegger was right at assert in an electrifying lecture course from 1929 that "philosophy is the opposite of all comfort and assurance." What Carlin Romano has advocated in his essay is something altogether different--something tamer, more congenial, more comforting. Fine: By all means, let's offer another seminar on Rawls and the foundations of liberal justice. But surely there should also be a place in the university for a close encounter with a dramatically different style of thinking--with the stunningly radical (and perhaps radically erroneous) thought of Martin Heidegger.

Sorry I’ve been silent (again) for so long. In addition to teaching two writing seminars at Penn, I’ve been busy with book revisions. Those are now done, so I should be back (again) to more regular blogging.

Given the glacial pace of my contributions to TNR in recent months, perhaps it makes sense that I’d return with a post about . . . the pace of writing. Back in late September (an eternity ago in Internet time, I know), Ezra Klein—along with Matthew Yglesias, the boy wonder of high-speed blogging—wrote a post about the new partnership between The Daily Beast and the Perseus Books Group that will publish books on a highly accelerated schedule. Here’s the plan:

On a typical publishing schedule, a writer may take a year or more to deliver a manuscript, after which the publisher takes another nine months to a year to put finished books in stores. At Beast Books, writers would be expected to spend one to three months writing a book, and the publisher would take another month to produce an e-book edition.

This inspired Klein to remark on how much easier it’s gotten to write quickly:

Writing doesn't take very long. Quoting doesn't take very long. But assembling information used to take an awful long time. It required a lot of phone calls and microfiche and faxes and walking over to Brookings and paging through newspaper archives and begging a source at Gallup. Now it doesn't take much time at all. That   allows me to be the equivalent of a very fast columnist, and there's no reason it won't allow others to become very fast book authors.

“Writing doesn’t take very long.” I suppose not. I mean, I’ve written some long emails in the amount of time it takes me to type. Perhaps the next time I’m starting a book I should open my word processing program, imagine it’s an email, start typing, and keep typing until I’ve gone on for two hundred or so pages, taking momentary breaks to surf the Web so I can gather some needed information along the way. I bet at that rate I could finish it in a couple of months.

But would it be a book? Or at least what, until quite recently, we understood by the word? You know, a lengthy, sustained argument about, interpretation of, or engagement with a topic, one meant to be of lasting value—would my 200 or so pages of typing be that? Would it be worth reading six months—let alone ten or more years—after it was published? Or would it instead be something very different—merely a 55,000-word blog post, as ephemeral as the latest news cycle?

I like blogging. I enjoy its informality and instantaneousness—the way it provides me an opportunity to spout off publicly about this or that outrage of the moment. Opining is fun, and so is ideological combat.

But a book is, or should be, something different: A chance to slow down. An opportunity to raise one’s sights a little higher. To stop focusing so incessantly on the moment and strive, instead, to step back a bit, to take in a wider view, perhaps even to rise above the fray. To reflect instead of react. To ruminate instead of respond.

And what of style? Klein’s statement implies that the only thing that might keep a writer from producing a book in a couple of months is the time it takes to conduct research. As if writing were a process of compiling and arranging lists of facts and figures. Maybe when blogging about public policy, that’s what it mainly is. (Though surely even Klein has paused for five minutes now and then to make sure he nailed a put-down of George W. Bush?) A book can, and should, strive to be more than a list of information. At its best, a book of non-fiction can even aim to be a form of literature.

What Beast Books is proposing, and what Klein is promoting, is (in Truman Capote’s words) the reduction of writing to typing. The typing might be clever, and witty, and informed, and politically useful. But in most cases, it will also be hurried and harried, merely echoing or negating the conventional wisdom of the moment, not placing it in a wider context or viewing it from a broader perspective. And that will be a incalculable loss to our culture.

One of the best lines in Sam Tanenhaus’s wonderful little book on The Death of Conservatism comes in its opening chapter. Surveying intellectual life on the right in the opening months of the Obama administration, Tanenhaus concludes that too many conservative intellectuals “recognize no distinction between analysis and advocacy, or between the competition of ideas and the naked struggle for power.” Quite so, as one can see from the response (or non-response) of the right to Tanenhaus’s own book.

Tanenhaus is a tough critic of the conservative movement, but he is also a deeply informed one. He knows its history and shows considerable sympathy for some of its ideas. To be sure, his vision of conservatism—like Andrew Sullivan’s—is by contemporary American standards quite heterodox. Tanenhaus believes, for example, that the best and most truly conservative presidents of the modern era are Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton. That hardly places Tanenhaus in the mainstream of conservative thought today.

And yet Tanenhaus makes his counter-intuitive case with elegance and rigor, drawing on the ideas and policies of dozens of writers and public figures—including Edmund Burke, James Burnham, Whittaker Chamber, William F. Buckley, and Michael Oakeshott—whose conservative credentials are unimpeachable. An intellectually serious conservatism would jump at the chance to engage with an author who uses its leading lights to argue that the movement has gone seriously astray. But that’s not what contemporary conservatives are doing. When they aren’t ignoring Tanenhaus’s book, they’re doing what they do best: policing orthodoxy.

Irving Kristol, who died on Friday at the age of 89, was often called the godfather of neoconservatism. And so he was, along with Norman Podhoretz, who has actually done far more to set the (foreign-policy focused) agenda and (insistently combative) tone of recent neocon thinking and writing. Kristol's impact was felt earlier, as he led a group of moderately liberal academics and intellectuals on a rightward migration across the political spectrum during the 1970 and '80s. It's an important story that's been told countless times. What's less often recognized is that while Kristol was growing more conservative he was also undergoing a different sort of transformation--from a dispassionate analyst of American politics and culture to a fully engaged advocate for a comprehensive political ideology. Lamentably, it is this change more than Kristol's gradual drift to the right that may have done more to shape the contemporary conservative mind.   

Highly recommended: My old friend Mark Lilla’s essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education lamenting how academics neglect conservative and/or right-wing ideas. The occasion for Lilla’s article is the opening of a Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at UC-Berkeley. Even if the center does its job well, Lilla’s point will remain valid for a very long time. Professors in the humanities and social sciences tend to combine indifference to conservative ideas with a self-serving belief that there are no conservative ideas, just the “irritable mental gestures” once dismissed by literary critic Lionel Trilling. And unfortunately, lots of right-wing “intellectuals” today—not to mention their explicitly anti-intellectual minions, some of whom spent Saturday waving asinine placards on the Washington Mall—confirm the prejudice by confusing populist sloganeering with serious thought.

The fact, though, is that there is a rich and varied tradition of conservative ideas that is very much worth reading and studying, both for the sake of our national self-understanding and for the challenge it poses to settled liberal assumptions. That those ideas are rarely read or studied in the nation’s universities is an intellectual and scholarly disgrace that we can only hope will be rectified in the future. Bravo to Berkeley for taking the first tentative step toward doing so.

So Norman Podhoretz has written a book, briefly excerpted in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, in which he poses the age-old question (in the book’s title) Why Are Jews Liberals? Good question. And a deeply personal one for Podhoretz. You see, as one of the original neoconservatives, he moved right four decades ago and has grown rather lonely during his time hanging out with Gentile Republicans. He’s been waiting for the company of his fellow Jews—for vindication of his rightward lurch, for a sign that he was ahead of his time rather than a quirky anomaly. Surely the rest of American Jewry would eventually come to the same conclusions he did and begin voting in the same way. But it hasn’t happened. Not with Reagan. Or Bush I. Or Dole. Or Bush II. Or McCain. Nope, Jews remain liberals, and Norman remains lonely, waiting, “hoping again hope” that despite having given Barack Obama 78 percent of their votes in 2008, American Jews will turn against him and “the political creed he so perfectly personifies and to which they have for so long been so misguidedly loyal.”

Maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. I mean, it’s not as if Podhoretz has presented a compelling case in favor of such a development. On the contrary, his argument (at least as summarized in the Journal) amounts to the claim that among Jews liberalism has “for all practical purposes superseded Judaism and become a religion in its own right.” But this is just lazily circular. Why are Jews liberals? Because they really, really believe in liberalism, you know, like people believe in religion. Okay, but why is that, exactly? Norman hasn’t a clue because he can’t manage to enter imaginatively into the mind of his fellow Jews. Liberalism, for him, can be reduced to hatred of the United States and hatred of Israel, and Jews should love America and love Israel. So how could Jews possibly be liberal? The only explanation is collective self-delusion. You know, like people who believe in religion. (What will Norman’s allies on the religious right say about this insinuation that religion is an unquestionable dogma that obscures our view of reality? But I digress. . . .)

Everything Podhoretz has written for the past two decades reeks of self-absorption and self-satisfied certainty, and that’s what this project smells like, too. His work is an abject lesson in what happens to a man’s mind when he values nothing so highly as self-confidence. The animating thought behind his writing has long been, “I know I’m right—about America, about liberalism, about the '60s, about Judaism, about the religious right, about how to fight ‘World War IV,’ about Bush, about the Republican Party, about Israel, about Iran, about Islam—so why the hell doesn’t everyone agree with me??!!” That’s the mystery that sets the man’s mental life in motion.

So by all means read Norman Podhoretz’s new book. Just don’t expect to learn about much of anything besides Norman Podhoretz.

It's been a while. A long while. Even longer than Andrew Sullivan's vacation. Hell, the last time I wrote a blogpost the website looked completely different. I feel a little like I overslept on the first day of school or something.

But seriously, it was a very busy summer for me. My number one priority was going to be finishing a book, which I did. (You'll be hearing more about that in the coming months, I assure you.) But even the book ended up taking a back seat to some unanticipated personal issues in the family. Thankfully, things have now settled down on that front as well, and so I'm ready to re-engage with the world of instantaneous opinion.

And it's a good thing, too. How on earth did you manage without me to guide you through the continued meltdown of the conservative mind? I'm kidding, of course: You did just fine on your own. After all, what's there to say about a car wreck taking place in real-time before your very eyes? Nothing, really. So we just stand back and gawk. And wonder, in dismay, how the GOP has managed to gain some traction in public opinion despite its collective mental collapse. I guess if you jump up and down screaming "fascist!" and "socialist!" at least some people will eventually start to think you have a point. Or something.

I predict I'll have occasion to expand on these preliminary remarks, and venture into lots of other topics (Norman Podhoretz on why the damn Jews are (still) so damn liberal, perhaps; maybe Sam Tanenhaus's book-length version of his old TNR piece on the death of conservatism, which I originally commented on here), in the coming days as I ease myself back into bloggy action.

Don't say you weren't warned.