7. I Hate Max Lerner

I HATE MAX LERNER

I HATE MAX LERNER

November 1990

November 1990. All my life, it seems, I have hated the guts of Max Lerner. Now, make no mistake: there is nothing personal in this rancor. I have never met, nor have I ever had any personal dealings with, Max. No, my absolute loathing for Max Lerner is disinterested, cosmic in its grandeur. It’s just that ever since I was a toddler, this ugly homunculus, this pretentious jackass, has been there, towering over the American ideological scene. In the fifty-five years that I have been aware of Max’s presence, in all of his many permutations and combinations and seeming twists and turns, he has taken the totally repellent position at every step of the way. Thus:

I hated Max Lerner when he was a brilliant young editor of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, spreading his Marxo–Veblenian poison for the decades that that publication was highly influential in American intellectual life.

I hated Max Lerner when (in 1937) he wrote an introduction to the Modern Library edition of the Wealth of Nations, in which he dismissed Adam Smith, in Marxo–Freudo lingo, as “an unconscious mercenary in the service of the rising capitalist class.”

I hated Max Lerner when he was a Stalinist apologist before, during, and after World War II. I hated his pompous, sing-song Stalinoid delivery when he was a radio commentator in New York just after the war.

I hated Max Lerner when, in the unforgettable imagery of that hilarious and perceptive work by Dwight Macdonald, Confessions of a Revolutionary, reporter Lerner, advancing through Germany at the end of World War II, leaped from an army jeep to confront an elderly shell-shocked German farming couple, asking them: “Do you feel guilty?” after which he proceeded to a gala banquet with Red Army generals, wolfing down caviar and toasting each other with champagne.

I hated Max Lerner when, leaping on the “consensus” bandwagon in the 1950s, he ignored all conflicts and problems and celebrated America as a Civilization.

I hated Max Lerner when, in his insufferably clotted and tedious column in the New York Post, he began to boast about being the “patriarch” of his newly-burgeoning family.

I hated Max Lerner when he abandoned that family to take up permanent residence in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, there celebrating the sleazy joys of hedonism.

I hated Max Lerner when he became a pro-Vietnam War liberal and then a Reaganite.

And now I hate Max Lerner especially when, now—of course—a neocon, he emerges, at the age of 180 or whatever, out of his residence at the Playboy Mansion (Hefner himself having thrown in the towel on the hedonic life), to join the Smear Bund in their assault on Pat Buchanan (Washington Times, Oct. 8). But leave it to Max to add that special Lernerian twist, in which he shows himself not at all different from the Original Lerner of long ago. In his newspaper column Lerner commits his foul act in the course of a running smear of Charles Lindbergh (the excuse is a review of a documentary on the Lone Eagle) in which Lerner shamelessly resurrects the old, discredited Rooseveltian-Stalinist lies about Lindbergh being pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic.

So, Max. Here we are again, old buddy. What goes around comes around, eh? After fifty-five years we can close the books at last. Marxist, Veblenite, Stalinist, 50s consensus-man, pro-war liberal, Reaganite, neocon, what in Hell’s the difference? Nothing’s changed. Two constants loom through all the gyrations of your life. You’ve always been a pompous, humorless egomaniac. And you’ve always worshiped at the shrine of war and the State. So what else is new?

MAX LERNER: AGAIN?!

April 1992

Drat! I thought I had disposed of Max (“Slapsy Maxie”) Lerner once and for all. But the guy simply doesn’t know when he’s licked. His syndicated column is called “Civilization Watch,” and I guess it figures, because as the neocon’s 2000-year-old man, he’s seen every human civilization come and go. Now (Feb. 28) he’s back at the old stand, trumpeting about how he, Max, stood side-by-side with FDR in their heroic battle against the “menacing isolationism” of the 1930s, against Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, the German–American Bund (as if all these had about equal weight!), and, especially against the “original sinister “America First” movement out of which Patrick Buchanan’s new one has arisen. Max and FDR, shoulder to shoulder, were fighting, Max says, for Woodrow Wilson’s foreign policy, and for “collective security.” Then, after the war, Megalomaniacal Max “joined with” Dean Acheson to battle against the equally sinister “opponents of the Marshall Plan.”

Well, I’ll tell you, Max. All those battles that you and the other lesser guys, like FDR and Acheson, fought together, I was there too, every time, on the other side, trying my best to kick you in the shoulder. (Max’s shoulders are about on a level with other people’s shins.)

On the basis of his 2,000-year perspective, Max has some sage advice for all of us American youngsters. What is it? Surprise: that we should once again follow this path of what he calls “the fusion of Wilsonian idealist ends with realistic Hamiltonian means.” Sure: as someone who has never been able to make up his mind about who is the single most evil politician in American history: Hamilton, or Wilson, that’s a real appealing combination. Myself, I prefer a counter-fusion: isolationist ends (Borah? Nye? Lindbergh?) joined to Jeffersonian means. Now how does that grab you, Max?

Now comes the concrete applications of Max’s fusion for today’s world. First, Max urges both parties to embrace his fusion: “Only thus can they show they are ‘presidential’.” That’s it, Max: above all, the dice must be loaded in this wonderful “democratic” game you’re always prating about: make sure that the dumb American masses get no choice. Right?

And what does this fusion entail? First, “heroic alliance measures” (English translation: massive subsidy and control) “to shore up the new Russian republics” (well, only owe republic is “Russian,” but Max can’t allow petty details to disturb the grand sweep of his strategic vision). “Shore up” against what, exactly? Here it comes: “against plunging into a ‘Russia first’ ethnic and anti-Semitic nationalism.” Ahh. I guess, in his own heavy-footed way, Max Lerner has outlined for us with great clarity the neocon version of the New World Order: an order where not only any America First trend is stamped out, but also any “Russia first” or anyones else first movement everywhere in the world, in order to eradicate all nationalisms and “anti-Semitism.” Does this mean that the United States is supposed to run the world in order to crush all nationalism and anti-Semitism throughout the globe? Can this foreign policy doctrine be sold, in all its candor and clarity, to the American public? Is Max willing to take a democratic vote on this issue?

All nationalisms must be stamped out, it seems, but one. For Israel must be supported to the hilt and beyond. Of course, bipartisan all-out support for Israel would mean, in Max’s words, “a rejection of Patrick Buchanan and America’s most dangerous isolationist movement since the dark days on the eve of World War II.” But Max admits he’s got a tough row to hoe. For President Bush is persisting in terrible anti-Israel policies, “his petty personal grudge against Yitzhak Shamir” (who, knowing Shamir, could possibly have a personal grudge against this lovable character?); his “false realism” in courting “terrorist” Arab countries (Hey, Max, your pal Shamir has no mean terrorist record himself); and Bush’s “indifference” to the “plight” of new immigrants to Israel (English translation: Shamir’s urge to settle these immigrants in Arab areas). And behind Bush, says Max, is the even more terrible “James Baker and his media claque” (Go ahead, say it, Max: his “amen corner”). Well, how about the Democrats? No, because none of the Democratic candidates are denouncing Bush and Baker for their “betrayal of the American–Israeli alliance” (alliance against whom exactly, Max?).

Sorry, methinks the chances for Max’s bipartisan fusion are dwindling every day. The glory days of you and those other guys battling the German–American Bund are long gone, Max. Face it, and come on, for Heaven’s sake. Max, shut up already.

Frankly, I prefer the wisdom of Mel Brooks’s 2000-year-old man. Any day in the week.

THE EVIL EMPIRE STRIKES BACK:
THE NEOCONS AND US

June 1992

It was bound to happen, as the night follows the day. Organized Neocondom, perpetually manning the parapets against heretical challenges to their rule, would attempt to Strike Back. Sure enough, the first fruits have arrived in the form of an extension of the usual Anti-Buchanania in the May issues of two prominent neocon monthlies...a lead editorial in the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus’s First Things (“The Year that Conservatism Turned Ugly,”) and an article by Norman Podhoretz in his Commentary (“Buchanan and the Conservative Crackup”).

The Rev. Neuhaus is an interesting case. Once the neocons’ tentacle inside the Lutheran clergy, pastor Neuhaus has recently flip-flopped to become one of their appendages in the Catholic priesthood. A former employee of the Rockford Institute, the then-Pastor betrayed his employers with their donors behind his employers’ back, for which he was properly ejected by Rockford. It was that firing that gave rise to the neocon smears of Rockford for “anti-Semitism,” “nativism,” and all the rest of the neocon variant of the bundle of Politically Correct garbage. Things have come to a pretty pass in America when the firing of a disloyal Lutheran/Catholic employee can automatically give rise to accusations of “anti-Semitism.”

Norman Podhoretz, of course, is the Field Marshal of the Neocon network and Commentary its central organ. As they say in the espionage business, Podhoretz is the “control” of Neuhaus and the other neocons operating in the field.

It is important to realize that, for all their complaints about left Political Correctness, it was the neocons who pioneered in that odious practice. For the neocons first developed the practice of smearing all critics of Israel or of Zionism as “anti-Semitic,” and all opponents of civil Neocons, Mensheviks, Social Democrats rights despotism and of compulsory integration as “racist.” It was the neocons who first developed Victimology to a fine art by egregiously extending collective guilt for Nazi crimes first to all Germans, and then to all of Christendom. Left Victimology simply shifted the victimological emphasis to blacks beyond what neocons would accept, and then to women, homosexuals, Hispanics, and finally to anyone not a white, heterosexual, middle-aged, male. In a sense, then, Left Victimology is just punishment for the neocons: chickens coming home to roost. Unfortunately, the rest of us, of course, are caught in the crossfire.

The first point to make about the two articles is that they are oddly—or not so oddly—alike. Their line is much the same: that we are marginal no-account inhabitants of the remote “fever swamps” of the right, and yet, contradictorily, that we are in danger of taking over the conservative movement. Even more revealingly, Podhoretz and Neuhaus quote at length almost the same words, in the same paragraph, of my speech. Surely this is coordination and concordance (dare we call it “conspiracy”?) rather than the effusions of two independent minds.

PODHORETZ

Of the two, Poddy is far less interesting, so we will dispose of him first. In style as well as in thought, Poddy is very much the stolid, plodding Commissar of Thought Police, much like his Kremlin counterparts of days gone by. There is the usual hackneyed recitation of Buchanan’s alleged sins; Poddy is particularly agitated about the name of ‘America First,” which sets him off on the usual smears of Charles Lindbergh, et al. Amusingly, Poddy cites for support the fevered smear of Joshua Muravchik in his own Commentary, adding as a supposedly objective historian of America First, Alonzo Hamby, without noting that Hamby is a notorious isolationophobe. If Poddy were a serious intellectual, he at least would come to grips with the recognized leading authority on the America First Committee, Professor Wayne Cole, but serious intellectual discourse is hardly what Commentary or the neocons are all about. Poddy is a commissar, not a thinker.

There is one interesting revelation embedded in Podhoretz’s rant. He mentions that Governor Wilder of Virginia stressed the term “America First” when he launched his brief campaign for the Democratic nomination for president. But then, says Poddy, Wilder was “clearly unaware of or had forgotten about these [terrible, terrible] associations [of the term America First], and he dropped it as soon as they were called to his attention.” Interesting use of the passive tense: just who called them to his attention, Poddy? Which lobbyists or smear artists? What pressures (threats?) were used to induce Wilder to drop the centerpiece of his campaign?

Poddy expresses satisfaction that most of the conservative spokesmen fell into line in not supporting or not smearing Pat Buchanan. One exception was Human Events, whom Poddy writes off as such blind admirers of Buchanan that in their eyes “he could say or do no wrong.” Ridiculous. At the beginning of his campaign, Human Events was cautious about Pat’s foreign and trade policies, and it was only the malignantly vicious smear of Pat by the neocon shrink Krauthammer that led Human Events to all-out support of Pat’s campaign. Actually, Human Events’ policy is genuinely what National Review’s is supposed to be: an eclectic supporter or friend to all movements on the right. Human Events is therefore not at all anti-neocon (except for the monster Krauthammer) but it is not anti-paleo either, and for that Poddy cannot forgive it.

Evans and Novak (who surmounted neocon smears in the past) are attacked as “even more hostile to Israel” than Buchanan. (Are they then “anti-Semites?” Tell us, Poddy!) The paleos are “a group of enraged academics whose isolationist fervor” predated Buchanan’s “and was if anything more extreme.” (Hooray!) He also says that the paleos are “fanatical nativists,” to whom “immigration from anywhere except Western Europe (or perhaps only England)” is a great threat to “the health and integrity of American society.”

Sorry Poddy, you were only accurate on the previous point. Paleos, including Pat Buchanan, have no quarrel with immigration from any section of Europe, West or East. Pat Buchanan is deservedly a hero to all Croatian–Americans, and to virtually all East European nationality groups in the United States (with the understandable exception of the Serbs). Chronicles’ first editor, the late Leopold Tyrmand, was a Polish Jewish immigrant, but he was not a Menshevik, and so he doesn’t count among the neocon scorekeepers. Paleos are all committed to a Euro-American culture as a vital groundwork of the American Republic. But, unlike the neocons, there are no commissars and no party line amongst the paleos: and so we differ, for example, about the value of the North Asians, particularly the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese, to American culture.

After praising conservatives who went along with the “anti-Semitic” smear of Buchanan, Poddy spends the rest of his article denouncing Bill Buckley for betraying the anti-Buchanan cause by not being anti-Buchanan enough, especially in his tactical support for Pat in the New Hampshire primary. How, how, Poddy wails, can his old buddy Buckley support a horrible anti-Semite, even tactically? Podhoretz cites the Neuhaus article in blaming National Review editor John O’Sullivan for (a) believing that Pat is not an anti-Semite, and (b) for convincing Buckley to go along with the tactical support of Pat in New Hampshire. In a gentle reproof of his Lutheran/Catholic satrap, Commissar Poddy states that “Neuhaus is being too kind to Buckley”; after all, Buckley allowed himself to be convinced by O’Sullivan and is therefore equally culpable, and even added an allegedly new sin: guessing that Buchanan is “not anti-Semitic.” Poddy treats this as a new horror injected by Buckley in his reply to a letter of “thirteen eminent conservative intellectuals” in National Review who had protested Buckley’s tactical support of an “anti-Semite.” But Poddy conveniently forgets that in his original “In Search of Anti-Semitism” essay, Buckley had already guessed that Buchanan’s statements stemmed not from anti-Semitism but from an “iconoclastic” turn of mind. (“Thirteen eminent conservative intellectuals” is neocon talk for thirteen willing stooges, who include, of course, Pastor/Father Neuhaus. Poddy’s sense of intellectual discrimination may be gauged by the fact that this label includes American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., but then, of course, commissars can’t be choosy.)

Poddy then turns to the correct point that O’Sullivan’s attempt to bring all sides together, and, even more bizarre, to get Pat to “apologize,” is doomed because one of Pat’s major goals is to “take back” the conservative movement from the neocon conquest. That’s where Paddy quotes my speech, astonished that “even Buckley and National Review themselves have come under assault.” And high time, too!

Poddy is worried that I might be right, and that the Buchananite legions might actually gain control of the conservative movement. It’s Poddy’s worst nightmare, and he then rants about the usual villainies in the neocon catechism: anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia, and nativism. In short: all the shibboleths of the older Political Correctness of the neocons. (With “sexism” and “homophobia,” of course, missing from the incantation.)

In the course of his peroration, Poddy lets the cat out of the bag on the genuine nature of neo-“conservatism.” Our takeover of conservatism would be “as destructive in its way as the obverse radicalization of liberalism turned out to be in the late 60s.” Poddy adds: “The surrender then of so many liberals to the perspective of the New Left resulted in the corruption of a healthy political tradition.” And there we have it: Poddy, is not a “conservative” at all, but still a Truman–Humphrey liberal driven by the New Left and its successors out of the Democratic Party, and roosting among conservative Republicans. Podhoretz and his ilk are simply Old Leftists: not of the Bolshevik, but of the Menshevik wing of the church.

NEUHAUS

In contrast to the habitually plodding Poddy, Pastor/Father is a snarling pit bull, straining at the leash to impress his Master. Certainly, there is a striking lack in Neuhaus of the Christian love that is supposed to be suffusing the works of the rev. clergy.

Plunging into the Buckley/anti-Semitism question, Neuhaus writes of the “vicious” personal attack on Buckley launched by Chronicles, “the flagscow publication of something called the John Randolph Society.” It is remarkable how many errors the Rev. Neuhaus, in his own mind a distinguished editor, can cram into a mere half a sentence. In the first place, Chronicles, as the Pastor/Father knows only too well, is not the publication of the John Randolph “Society” (sic), but of an organization which he, the Rev. Neuhaus, used to work for: the Rockford Institute. Second, it’s not “something called the John Randolph Society,” but the John Randolph

C-l-u-b. Third, it was not Chronicles that leveled the attack, but an author named Dr. Samuel Francis. F-r-a-n-c-i-s. It would be nice, Pastor/Father, if you get a few elementary things straight, in order to justify the lush neocon funding of your magazine.

Then, revealing the inner workings of National Review editorship, the rev. goes on to denounce O’Sullivan for betraying the anti-anti-Semitic cause in re Buchanan. The rev. professes himself astonished how Pat Buchanan could vigorously deny being anti-Semitic, and yet persist in “refusing to...apologize for making statements that lent themselves to such hurtful misunderstanding.” Look, Pastor/Father: I’ll do my best to explain. Pat Buchanan, as he insists, is not anti-Semitic; therefore, the “misunderstanding” for these statements is the fault of “the malevolent and the manipulated” as you correctly if satirically put it, who are determined to smear any conservative leader who refuses to truckle to the victimology of the Israel First lobby. Capice? Our culture is suffering from an epidemic of absurd and generalized apologizing, apologizing to the world, to every conceivable victim group. In Pat Buchanan, you and your neocon ilk tremble because here is a man who will not bend the knee to your victimological blackmail. If any apology is in order, it is that of you and your malignant crew of neocon hatchetmen, all the more repugnant for your wearing the cloth of the Christian clergy.

When the Pastor gets to the substance of the anti-Buckley replies in NR, he inadvertently makes the mistake of quoting a few sentences from the scintillating retorts in National Review of Joe Sobran and of the great literary critic Hugh Kenner. For their quotes stand out as a sparkling beacon in the malignant miasma of the Pastor’s prose. “An ‘anti-Semite,’” Neuhaus quotes Joe Sobran, “in actual usage, is less often a man who hates Jews than a man certain Jews hate.” And this marvelous quote from Hugh Kenner: Anti-Semitism “has no stable meaning; it can run all the way from gas ovens to a mere wish that Abe Rosenthal...would moderate his frenzies.”

Even the Pastor/Father balks at calling Kenner an “anti-Semite.” Instead, he pronounces himself intrigued by Kenner’s point: indeed, he runs up against the crucial question in this whole miserable controversy: what is an “anti-Semite” anyway? How can one “convict” (as Poddy puts it) Mr. X of anti-Semitism if we are never enlightened on what in blazes we’re talking about? Neuhaus goes on to say, in the neocon manner, that Kenner is right on such recent left terms as “sexism” and “homophobia,” but not on “racism” and “anti-Semitism.” Why the difference? Because, says the Pastor/Father, “Sexism’ and ‘homophobia’ are terms of recent ideological invention and are designed to discredit opponents in the culture wars in which our society is embroiled.” But, gotcha! Pastor/Father, for that is precisely the function of your beloved terms, “racism” and “anti-Semitism.” The only difference is that these latter terms are of slightly less recent origin, employed continually by you and your buddies in the culture wars. Both terms have been mainly used during this century, for smear purposes.

Neuhaus does try to come up with a definition of “racism”: “the view that different races are inherently superior or inferior, and that the superior race(s) should dominate the inferior.” Not a very satisfactory definition, because it contains two clauses that don’t necessarily go together. The problem is the “and” term: for (a) one may hold that Race A is superior to Race B, but not advocate that the former dominate the latter–one may advocate, for example, separateness of the races rather than domination; and (b) one may hold that Race A should dominate Race B even though the former is not necessarily superior, but for various utilitarian or religious reasons. Very foggy, Reverend.

But though he at least makes a stab at defining racism, the Reverend comes up empty on the issue he clearly considers the most crucial of all: anti-Semitism. He simply airily refers to his previous editorial; but, look at his previous editorial in the March issue and there is no definition at all, but only cloudy vaporings. Carefully avoiding a definition, the Pastor/Father can feel free to accuse me, and virtually everyone else, of “trivializing” anti-Semitism.

In my defense of Pat Buchanan in the Los Angeles Times (Jan. 6), I offered a definition: of personal anti-Semitism as someone who hates all Jews, and of political anti-Semitism as someone who wishes to levy political disabilities on Jews. Not only is this the only cogent definition I know of, but it’s the only one that accords with the ordinary-language view of this concept. Put this baldly, it is patently obvious that neither Pat Buchanan nor Joe Sobran nor any other prominent American could possibly qualify under this dread label. Far from “trivializing” anti-Semitism, this definition at last reduces the term from a bogey to a sensible concept, and reveals that whatever the state of anti-Semitism in other countries it is, as it has always been, virtually non-existent in America.

Pastor Neuhaus then arrives at my speech before the John Randolph “Society.” Humorless like all neocons, he of courses misses the wit. When I “rant” and “rail” against Buckley’s long-time self-appointed role as Pope of the conservative movement excommunicating heretics, Neuhaus absurdly implies that I endorse each of these “heresies”: Randians, Birchers, anti-civil rightsers (not “white supremacists,” Pastor/Father) and “anti-Semites” (no, I said anti-Zionists, Father, a slip that obviously stems from your own neocon belief that the two are identical). It’s not that I agree with all of these variants, Pastor; it’s that I am opposed to their being excommunicated from the conservative movement. Neuhaus’s mindset should be clear: this Pastor/Father/Commissar cannot conceive of peacefully co-existing with views with which he disagrees. Scratch a neocon, and you get a totalitarian, but of course always a “democratic,” a Menshevik, totalitarian.

Not catching the wit is evident in Neuhaus’s simply stating, as if it were self-evident, that Gore Vidal is filled with “anti-Semitic bile,” and he darkly notes that Chronicles admires Vidal. Well, look Pastor/Father: Gore Vidal is anti-war and anti-imperialist, he is an American patriot, and he is very, very funny. But of course your neocon tin ear can never pick up the vibes.

The Pastor ends his philippic by solemnly averring that the “heresies” I mention “are in fact heresies.” And then he runs down his familiar neocon Politically Correct litany: “racism,” “nativism,” “paranoid conspiratorial-ism,” and “anti-Semitism.” “Paranoid conspiratorialism” is the neocon Establishment smear term against any radicals who are outside whatever respectable consensus happens to exist at any given time. It is the use of psychobabble to discredit opponents and to make sure their ideas are never heard. And indeed, that is exactly what our Totalitarian Pastor/Father wants: these heresies, he thunders, “have no place in civilized public discourse,” and, furthermore, “those who invited them back in to the public square invite the conclusion of others that they have no place there either.”

Well, so much for us, and so much for freedom of speech and inquiry, and all those other goodies that most people think are implied in the neocons’ vaunted concept of “democracy.” No, “democracy” is very much democracy guided by the Pastor/Father and his cronies, to make sure that dissident voices, politically incorrect voices, are permanently barred from “the public square.” Neuhaus goes on to say that he and his ilk are “defending the civitas “against” barbarians at the gates and within the gates.” Well, if that’s democracy, and that’s the civitas, then I say the Hell with them; give me the “barbarians” any day in the week. For it is crystal clear that the “heresies” that the Pastor/Father is so worried about constitute, plain and simple, opposition to neocon rule. “Democracy” and “civitas” are only code words for the submission of all of us to that rule.

Like Poddy, Neuhaus is worried, that despite all this kookiness, we might well win! Yes, say your prayers to the god of your choice, Pastor/Father, for the future does belong to us.

And I’ll make a deal with you, Pastor/Father: let me worry about anti-Semitism, and why don’t you devote yourself for once to your allegedly real job: defense of the Catholic faith against a host of enemies from without, and against a horde of modernist heresies from within. So far, all you seem to have done to defend the Catholic faith is to praise Martin Luther (!) after becoming a Catholic priest, and to worry your head about the spectre of “anti-Semitism.” Why don’t you clean up the mess in your own house?

LIBERAL HYSTERIA:
THE MYSTERY EXPLAINED

October 1992

An old paleocon friend of mine and I were musing the other day, “why are leftists so hysterically opposed to the reelection of an innocuous president like George Bush?” My friend and I agreed that we hadn’t seen such naked media bias since the days of the demonized Joe McCarthy. Why? Is it abortion? Feminism? What?

The first time I had seen left-liberal frenzy at work was growing up in the thirties in New York City. In the late thirties, my leftist family, friends, and neighbors were in a paroxysm of fear and rage over the counterrevolution of Franco and of the looming defeat of the leftist Spanish government in the Spanish Civil War. There abounded denunciations of Franco, and calls for everything from milk to arms to soldiers—the volunteer “International Brigade” to defend the Spanish left (dubbed “Loyalists” in the value-loaded term adopted by the New York Times and other Respectables).

Note, these were people who displayed no interest whatever, before or since, in Spanish history, culture, or politics. So why all the bother about Spain? Left-liberal historian Allen Guttmann has even recorded and celebrated this hysteria over Spain in his book, The Wound in the Heart (the title says it all). One time I asked my friend Frank S. Meyer, who had been a top American Communist, about this puzzle. “Why all the emotionalism about Spain, Frank?” Frank shrugged: “We [the Communists] could never figure it out. But we made use of the liberal emotionalism on the issue.”

The orthodox explanation of historians is that American leftists were especially sensitive to the “threat of fascism,” and that they were frantically pro-Spanish left because they saw the Civil War as a preview of an inevitable World War II. But the problem with that explanation is that, while left-liberals were of course enthusiastically in favor of the “good” World War II against the Axis, they never summoned up quite the same emotionalism, quite the same frenzy, even against Hitler, as they had done against Franco.

To come back to the present: is the abortion issue the key to the mania, to the fear and loathing? Yes and no. Yes, abortion is an important issue to the left, but consider the situation before Roe v. Wade in 1973. While liberals were of course always in favor of abortion rights, it was never a big political issue for them. In the decades before 1973, there were no “abortion rights” marches, no unkempt harridans shrieking, “get your hands off my vagina!” So, what’s the key?

I submit that a clue can be found in the mini-hysteria that the American left displayed over the counterrevolution against the leftist Allende regime in Chile, a counterrevolution that put Pinochet in power. The left has still not forgiven or forgotten the Chilean right and the CIA for the coup; Allende is still a beloved martyr on the left and his wife Isobel an icon. Is it because a Commie regime was rolled back? Close, but still no cigar; for the left showed no particular emotion, no great rending of clothes, when the Communist regimes collapsed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

I submit that The Answer to the mystery is as follows: the left are, in their bones, “progressives,” that is, they believe, in Whig or Marxoid fashion, that History consists of an inevitable March Upward into the light, toward and into the Socialist Utopia. They believe in the myth of inevitable progress; that History is on their side. As Social Democrats or Mensheviks, as kissin’ or sometimes feuding cousins of the Communists or Bolsheviks, they have a similar, though not the identical ideal goal: A socialist, egalitarian State, run by bureaucrats, intellectuals, technocrats, “therapists,” and the New Class in general in collaboration with accredited victim pressure groups striving for “equality.” These groups including, blacks, women, gays, Latinos, the disabled, and on and on. They believe that History is marching inevitably toward that goal. A vital part of that goal is the destruction of the traditional, “bourgeois,” two-parent, nuclear family, and the bringing up of all children by the State and its New Class of licensed counselors, child-care “givers,” and therapists.

The Utopian march of History, goal of the Social Democrats is similar to, but not quite the same as, that of the Communists. To the Commies, the goal was the nationalization of the means of production, the eradication of the capitalist class, and the coming to power of the proletariat. The Social Democrats realize that it is far better for the socialist State to retain the capitalists and a truncated market economy, to be regulated, confined, controlled, and subject to the commands of the State. The Social Democrat goal is not “class war,” but a kind of “class harmony,” in which the capitalists and the market are forced to work and slave for the good of “society” and of the parasitic State apparatus. The Communists wanted a one-party dictatorship, with all dissenters stamped out or confined to the Gulag. The Social-Democrats far prefer a “soft” dictatorship, what Marcuse called, in another context, “repressive tolerance,” with a two-party system where both parties agree on all fundamentals and joust politely over minor issues. (“Should we increase taxes by 5, or by 7, percent this year?”) Freedom of speech and press will be tolerated by Social Democrats, but again only within minor and trivial limits. Social Democrats shuddered at the naked brutality of the Gulag; what they prefer is sending dissidents to endure the “soft,” “therapeutic” dictatorship of “sensitivity training” and “being educated in the dignity of alternative life-styles.” In other words: Brave New World instead of 1984. The “upward march of democracy” rather than the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Also typical is the distinction, in the two Utopias, about the handling of religion. Communists, as fanatical atheists, aimed to stamp out religion altogether. Social Democrats prefer the softer way: to subvert Christianity so that religion will become the Social Democrats’ ally. Hence, the shrewd Social-Democrat co-optation of the Christian left: emphasizing modernism among Catholics, and left-pietist evangelicalism among Protestants, the latter aiming to bring about a Kingdom of God on Earth that will be a coercive, egalitarian “community of Love.” It is a much shrewder strategy: to join in multi-cultural singing of “We Shall Overcome” rather than murdering priests and nuns and nationalizing churches. We should never forget, however, that the latter was done by the liberals’ own beloved Spanish Republican regime, and by its Trotskyite and left-anarchist supporters, with nary a peep of protest by their adoring liberal and social democrat supporters in the United States.

The difference in goals—soft vs. hard totalitarianism—is also reflected in the marked difference in means and strategies. The Communists, at least in their classic Leninist phase, looked forward to a violent, apocalyptic revolution to destroy the capitalist State and usher in the proletarian dictatorship. The Mensheviks, or Social Democrats, or Neocons, true to their “democratic” ideal, have always been uneasy about revolution, and have much preferred the more gradual “evolution” brought about by democratic elections. The elections are to be primed, of course, by a Gramscian long march in conquest of the nation’s cultural and social institutions. Hence, the discrediting of the Gulag and of revolution, and the disappearance of their Bolshevik cousins and competitors, have not been mourned by social democracy. On the contrary, Social Democrats now remain with a monopoly of the “progressive” march of History toward Utopia.

Which brings me back to The Answer about left-liberal hysteria. They become hysterical when they perceive a rollback, or the threat thereof, of the Inevitable March of History. They become hysterical at setbacks, at regressions in that march, regressions which have, of course, been dubbed “reactions.” In both the Communist and the Social Democrat world-view, the highest, if “progressive,” to be in touch with, on the side of, being the “midwife” of (in Marx’s famous term), the inevitable next phase of history. In the same way, the deepest, if not the only, immorality, is to be “reactionary,” to be devoted to opposing inevitable progress, or even and at its worst, working to roll back the tide, and to restore the past, “to turn back the clock.” That is the worst sin of all, and it calls out all the frenzies, perhaps because any successful rollback would call into question the deepest, most powerfully held “religious” myth of left-liberals: that historical progress toward their Utopia is inevitable. Let reaction occur, let the phases be rolled back, and these people be rolled back, and these people flip out, go into orbit, for then maybe their religion is a false one after all.

We are engaged, in the deepest sense, as Pat Buchanan said in his Houston convention speech, in a “religious war” and not just a cultural one, religious because left-liberalism/social democracy is a passionately held world-view, “religion” in the deepest sense, held on faith: the view that the inevitable goal of history is a perfect world, an egalitarian socialist world, a Kingdom of God on Earth, even if that God is pantheized (as under Hegel and the Romantics) or atheized (as under Marx). It is a religious worldview toward which there must be no quarter; it must be opposed and combated with every fiber of our being.

Who will win this war? No one knows. On which side lies the majority of Americans? It’s probably up for grabs. Most Americans are confused, pulled one way and the other, torn between conflicting world views. They can go either way. During his numerous factional battles inside the Marxist movement, Lenin once wrote that there were two battling poles, each in a minority, and in the majority were the confused whom he referred to as The Swamp. Most Americans are confused and constitute The Swamp; they are the terrain over which most of the battles will be fought. And the metaphor is properly military. The looming struggle is far wider and deeper than over indexing the capital gains tax. It is a life-and-death struggle for our very souls, and for the future of America. And now we see why Pat Buchanan drove the liberals into frenzy when he called for a war to “take back our culture, to take back our country”; it was not just the “war,” it was the taking back, the trumpet call to become openly and gloriously reactionary.

For left-liberals don’t very much mind, in fact they welcome the sort of liberal-conservative cycle that Arthur Schlesinger likes to celebrate: a decade or so of left-liberal “advance,” followed by perhaps a decade of consolidation, or slower rate of advance, effected by “conservatives.” That indeed has been the much-lauded historical function of “conservative” Republican regimes ever since the 1930s: the function of Eisenhower, of Nixon-Ford, and yes even of Reagan and Bush. It is the prospect of conservatism becoming reactionary, of actually rolling back liberal “gains,” that drives them berserk: hence, the hysteria about Franco and Pinochet, hence the lynching of Joe McCarthy (because he was threatening to succeed in rolling back not just Communists but even liberals and Social Democrats) and now the response to at least a perceived threat of conservative Republicans rolling back some of the gains on abortion, feminism, gay “rights,” black “rights,” and victimology in general.

The war for reaction will require, above all, courage, the guts not to buckle at the all-too-predictable smear response of the media, of the pollsters, and all the rest. Above all, the goal must not be to become beloved by the New York Times and the Respectable Media. That way can only mean more sellout, more defeat.

And above all we need what the left fears above all: An adherence to the military metaphor, to the concept of us vs. them, good guys vs. bad guys, to Taking America Back. We must aim, not only for roiling it all back, not only for saving us from the Leviathan State and nihilist culture, and not only for restoring the Old Republic. For eventually we must drive the wooden stake through the heart of the Enemy, to kill once and for all the monstrous dream of the Perfect Socialized World.

KING KRISTOL

January 1995

On November 8, the American people carried through a mighty and glorious revolution against Big Government and its embodiment in King William (Jefferson Blyth IV “Clinton”). But what we got for our pains is Big Government headed by yet another King William (Kristol). A left-liberal (Socialist) in the guise of a New Democrat (Social Democrat) was replaced by a neoconservative (Social Democrat) in the guise of a conservative.

Officially, of course, our new Maximum Leader is Newt Gingrich, whose seat on the throne was hardly warm before he had maneuvered to grab more House power than any Speaker since the notorious Joe Cannon. Newt is a neoconservative (Social Democrat, wacko techno-futurist division), in the guise of a fiery revolutionary quasi-libertarian. In actuality, however, we are now being ruled by a duumvirate, by two kings, a two-headed monster: King Newt and King Kristol. Newt is the nominal chief, the outside front man who deals with the media and the public; William is the shadowy inside man, the “theoretician” who sets the public policy agenda and cracks the whip over the “intellectuals,” policy wonks, and strategists of the Republican Party.

There are advantages and disadvantages to each role, and who plays what is a function of many factors, including personal temperament. Gingrich, as the politician who gets elected, clearly loves the open exercise of power. Kristol, as the “intellectual” in this division of labor, is better suited for the inside handing down of the policy line to pundits, think-tankers, and the battery of neocon syndicated columnists.

One advantage to the intellectual slot is that the front man-politician gets the glory but also takes all the heat. Gingrich has already been subject to a lot of media “scrutiny” (the current euphemism for hostile profiles and articles) mainly by hard leftists outside the “mainstream” left center-right center neocon-social democrat spectrum. But Bill Kristol has gotten no scrutiny whatsoever, and to my knowledge has never been subjected to this process. King William has become a king beyond criticism for one reason: because the general public has no idea of Kristol’s enormous new power in tandem with Gingrich.

The neoconservatives, after having been dominant under Reagan, grew to detest George Bush toward the end of the Bush Administration. And so the tightly organized neocon ranks, extraordinarily well-funded and represented way out of proportion to their numbers in the ranks of journalists and syndicated columnists (a common quip is that there are 33 neocons in this country of whom 32 are syndicated columnists), openly or quietly threw their weight behind Bill Clinton, leading the Backstabbing Faction of the Republican Party. In fact, it was mainly the neocons, headed by their “left” faction who are nominal Democrats, such as columnist Ben Wattenberg and the media-hyped Democratic Leadership Council, who persuaded the American public that Bill Clinton was really not a bad Old Liberal but a centrist New Democrat.

After he assumed power, however, King Willie, the Slick One, betrayed his neocon supporters. In two ways: first, his policies, driven by his Gorgon spouse, were much Harder Left than the neocons had been led to believe. (Yes, everyone, even neocons, makes mistakes.) But secondly, and more important, Clinton appointed almost none of the neocons to high office. Instead, the multi-cultural, multi-gendered Hard Left got the appointments. And patronage, of course, is the key to politics and to power.

Nothing is more dangerous than a neocon scorned. And so, the neocons joined the rest of the American public in revolt against the hated Clintons. While the lower ranks of the neocons had to make do with menial jobs waiting for Their Turn, the neocon rulers of course did not exactly suffer economic deprivation during the dry two years of the reign of King Willie. While Bill Bennett made a small fortune in no-show jobs at a number of heavily neocon funded institutions, Bill Kristol segued neatly from his Bush-era job as chief of staff (“control”) of Vice-President Quayle, to head of the new, munificently-funded “Project for the Republican Future.” Kristol is chairman of the tiny board of directors of the Project, which also includes National Review publisher Thomas Rhodes, and, most significantly, Michael S. Joyce, head of the extremely wealthy Bradley Foundation of Milwaukee. Joyce is a long-time protégé of Kristol’s father, Irving, the “Godfather” of the neoconservative movement. Irving had led the long march of the neoconservatives from Trotskyite to Democratic liberal to Reaganite, and is still the chief theoretician of the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.

In recent years, however, the aging Irving has passed the mantle of power to his apostolic and dynastic successor, William. No sooner had William set up shop at the Project in Washington, than he began to issue ukases and edicts to his mailing list of God knows how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands, which includes every Republican, conservative, or libertarian leader or institution of any prominence. Strange to relate, his orders to the Republican/Official Con/Official Libertarian troops always seem to be obeyed. When the Clinton health plan took shape, King William issued a decree to the Republicans to close ranks and—sorta—oppose it. Sure enough, they did. Fortunately, the Clintonians stuck stubbornly to their Hillary-Ira Magaziner Hard Left health plan, so that Congress wound up passing nothing, nothing being a whale of a lot better than Kristol’s soft-core alternative. Before the election, moreover, William Kristol managed to “persuade” Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett to cut their own potential presidential throats by coming out strongly against Proposition 187, thereby going against, not only the overwhelming mass of the public, but also against Governor Pete Wilson and the bulk of the California Republican Party.

The groveling adulation of Bill Kristol by virtually every conservative leader in the country has to be seen or read to be believed. Conservative bigshots vie with each other in heaping the kind of extravagant praise upon William that Ayn Rand devotees used to heap upon their Leader. Thus, Bill Kristol is routinely referred to by virtually everyone as “the most brilliant conservative intellectual in the country,” the only permissible range of dispute being those who gently demure and claim that Bill is merely second in brilliance to his beloved poppa. Liberal pundits go along with this assessment, in their case with grudging but not worshipful admiration. To paraphrase Tom Fleming’s pungent comment on the allegedly increasing brilliance of The Bell Curve’s heralded “Cognitive Elite”: If the Kristols, William & Irving, are the “most brilliant intellectuals” in the conservative movement, that movement is in deep doo-doo indeed.

When the American people voted on November 8, they were not consciously voting to elevate William Kristol to Supreme Power. Indeed, the vast majority of the American public, fortunately for their peace of mind, have never heard of William Kristol. But such are the wonders of the Guided Democracy that the neocons have arranged for us, that is what has happened.

No sooner had the election been won, than Bill Kristol leaped to assume the reins of command. The first order of business of the Betrayers of the Revolution was to rush Gatt-WTO through the lame-duck Democrat Congress. It should occasion no surprise that one of Kristol’s first decrees after the election was to order the Republicans to “Pass Gatt-Quickly!” Of course, the Republicans, including the “libertarian revolutionary” Gingrich, hastened to obey.

Of some interest is the quality of the intellectual reasoning that Kristol used in his “Memorandum to Republican Leaders” of November 21 to persuade them to obey. The Republicans, said Kristol, have won, they should be strong and confident, they should stick to principle and not compromise or dicker with Clinton—and therefore they should hasten to pass Clinton’s Gatt proposal right away, without delay or qualifications! If you can make sense out of that line of reasoning, you’re a better man (or woman) than 1. But sense, intellectuality, persuasive reasoning, have nothing to do with the case. Argumentation is here only a figleaf for the naked exercise of power, in this case the power of King William K. and the neocon movement which he heads and controls.

After succeeding in suppressing Bob Dole’s abortive attempt to delay Gatt in order to gain more concessions from Clinton, King K. turned his attention to shaping up the conservative intellectual front. On December 16, he headed a panel of Official Con/Left Libertarian think-tankers on “What to Kill First: Agencies to Dismantie, Programs to Eliminate, and Regulations to Stop.” Despite previous bold talk by Kristol and the others about “principle” and rolling back the welfare state, left Libertarian think-tankers, under King William’s watchful guidance, decided to suddenly “mature,” to “grow in stature,” to “accept the responsibilities of power,” as the liberal media always like to dub sellouts to statism. Except for Wall Street’s favorite, capital gains tax cut, no calls came for cuts in taxes, only their “limitation,” in effect, the stopping or slowing down of tax increases. No appeals rose up for abolishing any agency or program. The merger of neoconservatism and left-libertarianism, of Official Conservatives and Libertarians is now virtually complete.

King K. followed up this panel with a foreign policy panel a few days later. The “spectrum” on foreign policy was narrowed to one tiny band of “bipartisan” neocon interventionists and warmongers, including former Defense Department biggie Paul Wolfowitz, and former State Department heavies Robert Kagan and Robert Zoellick, topped off by the sinister syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. How’s that for a broad range of “Republican” opinion?

And yet, in all of the commentary on the election by the conservatives and libertarians, only one person has broken into print with sharp criticisms of King Kristol. As might be expected, that person is our very own paleo point man, my colleague Lew Rockwell. Writing in the Washington Times (“Striking the Pose on Welfare Reform,” Dec. 4) Lew revealed William Kristol’s repeated post-election denunciations of any attempt to carry out a revolution or genuine rollback of the Welfare State. Lew points to Kristol’s execrable advice to the neocon-controlled (Kemp-Bennett) “Empower America” conference: “Don’t take a kamikaze approach,” ordered King K. For that would “wipe out everything at once that took 60 years to build up.” Awww! Perish the thought! Would K.K. take the same view toward the painstaking 72-year “buildup” of the Soviet Union? Bill Kristol elaborated by telling the New York Times that Republicans “should shed the minority mindset” of “let’s do everything we can all at once.” Instead, he explained, the important thing is not to worry about principle or rollback but to elect a Republican president in 1996 (i.e., do nothing). In short, don’t do what we told the American people we were going to do. Instead, wait comrades! Wait for a Republican president! And then it will be wait for his re-election! Wait for the Second Millennium! Wait for the light at the end of the tunnel! Pie in the sky by and by!

During the first two years of the Clinton administration, our prime polidcal task was to expose, expose, and attack, attack the collectivist schemes of the Clintonian Democracy, and to help build a right-wing populist revolution against Clintonian rule. Now that the people have made that revolution and it has already been betrayed, our task is to expose, expose, and attack, attack the leading betrayers, the Gingriches and the Kristols as well as their support system of the neocon/Official Con/Official libertarian punditocracy. The grassroots right-wing have marvelous libertarian and anti-statist instincts, but they are unsophisticated about people and political leaders, especially those who clothe their treason in the fair garb of rightist and libertarian-sounding rhetoric. Our task is to strip the glowing rhetoric from our misleaders, and reveal the ugly reality underneath. Our task, in short, is to show, once again, that despite the systemic deceit practiced by our Official movement apologists and word-spinners, our Emperors, be they Willie or William or Newt, are wearing no clothes.