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Mary Eberstadt, ed.
Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives
Chronicle Their Political Journeys
NY: Threshold Editions, 2007, 291 pp. hb
The capitalist class has hired a whole swath of people to spread "conservatism." With the qualification of being able to string together a sentence, one may find a job editing for "National Review" or typing up Sidney Hook. Then after proof of such merits one can get a job in a conservative think tank such as the Hoover. In recent times, the Amerikan conservatives try to copy the Leninist model of having intellectual leaders to point to while using what is called the "intelligentsia" to transmit or translate ideas to the population.
When it comes to conservatism, the whole game is really in the transmission as there is not much there intellectually. So Amerikan conservatism is an important lesson in propaganda. The one correct point of the conservatives is that the "masses" do not employ much rational thought in their activity. The writers of Why I Turned Right openly celebrate this point.
"My political convictions are a result of thinking or, to be specific, lack thereof," (p. 25) says P.J. O'Rourke in the first chapter in the book. "I never read any work of political ideology unless by accident," (p. 28) and "What's so bad about being a Philistine."(p. 40)
Mao criticized this attitude above as "Liberalism," a basic laziness or promotion of non-struggle. Although there are more PhDs and writers working for Amerikan conservatism than ever before, the intellectual content is still thread-bare, and it always will be thread-bare, because the philosophy of struggle is not conservatism's. In this regard, Hitlerism is a potential competitor of Marxism, but mere conservatism will never be. That is not to say that Hitler-style fascism does not benefit from the spade work of these writers.
We can be thankful for the frankness of Why I Turned Right. Rich Lowry says this of himself: "The one area of school where I had always reasonably excelled was English." (p. 277) As to being a conservative, he always was and admits there was never a rational reason. He just was and then afterwards took to reading the supposed intellectuals of Amerikan conservatism: "I didn't know anything. . . . What I knew is that I wanted to be a Reagan supporter--that was one of my subrational affinities." (pp. 271-2) In finally copying something of the worker organization and Marxist organizational strategies, capital has hired the equivalent of labor bureaucrats to churn out books like these, new versions of which we can always count on. Again, Lowry tells us, "Nothing, I thought, could be as blissful as to write and persuade for a living." (p. 276) Frances Stonor Saunders has already detailed how an English majors dominated section of CIA pumped money into the publishing business in the 1950s and 1960s to swamp the world with mediocre and bland publications as a bulwark against communism. The Ford, Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations so important to grants for intellectuals are also so heavily intermingled with CIA that drawing a distinction is often pointless. Reactionary money has stepped in to fund the Hoover think tank and many others.
As to be expected there is not a single social fact in this book, not one table of figures, no connection to reality in its social generalities anywhere--but there are countless lazy political stands taken. As MIM already pointed out, the hero of these writers from the early 1960s Norman Podhoretz was simply uninformed. He did not deal with the overall factual truth that Black college graduates made less than white high school dropouts, so much for their argument about "merit" opposing affirmative action. These are simply the kind of people who take things at the lazy and most superficial level. If the system claims it is promoting people based on merit, these Panglossian conservatives simply believe it at face-value and actively come to the system's defense when better-informed people attack.
Affirmative action was behind the active conservatism of many. The "decisive moment" for Stanley Kurz was that "I could barely believe that affirmative action would catch on." (p. 137)
Dinesh D'Souza was also pretty open about his racist sensitivities. The only thing he reports having noticed about the anti-apartheid movement was that its leaders were "disheveled." (p. 91) Again, there is no substance there, no struggle to understand an issue.
David Brooks was another looking at things superficially while reporting on crime and poverty in Chicago.
What has happened with the rise of this sort of right-wing of parasitism is that capital has paid people to say that it is OK not to know anything. P.J. O'Rourke led the charge: "What in short has been happening out there such that so many Americans are now comfortable with the conservative label."(p. 2)
The right-wing of parasitism is benefiting from democracy within the majority-exploiter countries. This democracy takes conscious form in discussion of "status liberals" or "limousine liberals." The egalitarian thrust applies as if to say politics is not something to be studied. Such a thrust where all are equal politically has to be recognized as democratic. Unfortunately the left-wing of parasitism does ape the right-wing of parasitism by insisting on democracy, when in a situation of a majority of the population being exploiters, elitism is much more necessary than usual.
While college education used to be reserved to an elite, it is now possible for some conservatives to obtain PhDs. Making Amerikkkans better-educated does not make them any-less exploiters. Instead what has happened is that there is now a well-formed intelligentsia to consume the rabid talk-show radio reactionaries and writers of this ilk. This barely educated middle-class now has the organization and means to reach into the authoritarian depths of the middle-classes; whereas, previously, the imperialists relied on highly symbolic manipulations of the less-educated petty-bourgeoisie. The right-wing of parasitism now finds that it can really talk with and mobilize a group of tens of millions of people in the labor aristocracy.
Many of the traditional right-wing of imperialism are not happy with the mobilization results--having to pay more attention to abortion, gay marriage and immigration than the original right-wing of imperialism was used to. So ironically, there is a wing of the imperialist class itself chafing at the realities of the imperialist- labor aristocracy alliance. These imperialists might have tended to unite on tax cutting and foreign policy bases in the past and now find themselves in a party catering to the labor aristocracy. John Dean is an example of a right-wing imperialist who is not happy where mobilization of the labor aristocracy has led.
So the anti-apartheid people were "disheveled" and some anti-war movement people carried around severed pigs heads in protests (p. 134) and others even had the excuse of dumping "liberalism," because an academic authority turned out to have a Nazi past. The reasoning of conservatives is in essence ad hominem, never at the level of substance. Their combined reasons for adopting conservatism would not equal the carnage we see on TV in Iraq in a single day. David Brooks tells us, "I still think the foray into Iraq is one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken." (p. 73) So we need to step back and not take conservatism too literally. In common among all these whiny ad hominem complaints is the real underlying problem.
Public speaking advice often includes the idea of thinking of the audience as sitting in its underwear and therefore not in a dignified place to judge the public speaker. It's a sort of ad hominem attack on the audience with the purpose of relaxing the speaker. Even more we can say that one will never get past Panglossianism without being able to see the audience for any given topic in its underwear, trying to reach orgasm with a rope around the neck and lathering armpits with mayonnaise--and still be possibly correct about a point of substance. If the speaker is for the Vietnam War and the audience is against, mayonnaise and all, then MIM is still with the audience, as is any real proletarian scientist. It is a known tactic of conservatism to throw off the struggle with irrelevant points. We would also advise that this will also divide people into two groups--the bourgeoisie that would be too embarrassed to go on and the lumpen and real intellectuals on the other hand. The lumpen cannot be shamed anymore than the injustice system has shamed it and it knows about bullshit power tactics while the real intellectuals can rise above the muck. The search for an individual authority to follow is bourgeois politics and we are happy to have people unable to reason sifted out of our ranks. There is no way to take in the middle-classes and take up the democratic impulse in the imperialist countries without leaving the proletarian camp.
The reason that even these educated members of reaction do not stop to ask themselves about details about supporters on each side of any question is that this sort of reactionary is really in search of a pure authority, not really an answer to a question such as "Is the Vietnam War a good thing or not?" So it becomes possible to say, "I don't like the anti-war demonstrators because some of them were carrying pigs' heads to make a point in a demonstration." It does not bother the reactionaries that Amerikan troops in Vietnam were scalping Vietnamese, claiming noses and leaving the evil CBS eye as a symbol in massacres. No, the fact that some anti-war people were carrying pigs' heads justified taking up reaction. The same line of reasoning applies when Dinesh D'Souza reduces the question to one where the anti- apartheid movement dresses shabbily. So the essence of conservatism is a laziness of non-thinking where space that should be occupied by thought is instead occupied by ad hominems and similar constructions that Mao called Liberalism.
These are the same kind of people who always denounce MIM as an unreliable "source." What matters to them is not that they can look up the data and footnotes MIM uses but that again, MIM is not religious, and not being godly, therefore we should not bother reading MIM. Again, it's about "arguing from authority," not really thinking for oneself.
Post-modernism and political correctness are mirror images of this sort of reaction addressing the authority of the speaker as the overriding preoccupation. The so-called conservative almost never attacks at the level of substance of a question. Rather the conservative attacks the speaker, unless of course that speaker is the trusted church authority or prince such as Cheney. Not for nothing these are also big fans of family, such as the mom and dad that shielded them from political struggles and nastiness at least long enough to make an impression at some point.
It will never occur to these people that at any given moment there are unshaved people on both sides of the anti-apartheid question. Nor will it bother them how they trivialize issues, because in the search for righteousness the authoritarian conservative is looking for the perfect authority, not the truth.
We Maoists had these people on our side in China while Mao was alive. The reason that those of crude thinking abilities sided with Mao is that he became synonymous with power, success and order. The whole lesson of the Cultural Revolution was that Khruschev snuck into the party while Stalin was alive and then restored capitalism when Stalin died. Yet when Lin Biao died, the authoritarian simpletons abandoned Mao in droves, because Mao's invincibility was broken, not because there was a single thing wrong with the substance of Mao's Cultural Revolution message, which in fact emphasized that people such as Lin Biao would arise in the party.
Relative to the right-wing of imperialism, post-modernism is more thorough in its ad hominem approach and for this reason approaches a scientific method or rather gives inklings of its influences. The most intriguing contribution to the book was by Heather Macdonald. She and some others explain their attraction to Theory as youth. This is the kind of theory such as Kristeva's that MIM has some misgivings about, theoretical ruminations without any connection to data of any sort. MIM has often asked where are the wimmin with PhDs in Theory that we know have been produced in the last generation. Is their sole contribution the spread of political correctness throughout society, admittedly further than this writer would have anticipated when political correctness started?
We can use Heather Macdonald as one data point in a larger pattern MIM has discussed before, the unconscious political effect of the level of the productive forces. She spends several pages discussing what she used to think and then only on the last page does she feel a need to discuss something else: "Our political arrangements, while far from perfect, are remarkably effective in improving our material well- being." (p. 130) Ah yes, many years in graduate school studying deconstruction and Theory and then end up taking the position of "mass man" on wealth. Perhaps Macdonald should have studied economic development and economic history if she now realizes that she's going to hinge her politics on bread-and-butter. But that's it--she finds disappointment in arduous intellectual endeavor and ends up with a simple assertion to glue her politics together. Maybe this is what is happening to all those English and Psychology PhDs writing about Theory. We know they are not making much of a political difference that we can see.
MIM has a liberating message--that we do not need a single member of the U.$. middle-classes or even its intelligentsia. We should go for the high-brow intellectuals and the lumpen. The middle-classes of Amerika have no progressive thrust and should only be manipulated. We need not be crushed by the inability of the middle-classes to reason or unite with the rest of the humyn species. The good news about the laziness of the reactionaries is that it is possible to manipulate them many different ways without their knowing.
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