Better right than rich...Big fat stupid books...Prudishness at the Times
By Kelly Jane Torrance
Americans who have come to maturity since Ronald Reagan took office have taken it for granted that to be a "conservative" is as valid as being a "liberal." It is easy enough for us to forget what a victory this is. For after the Second World War and the utopianism it inspired, it became a commonplace that America was a liberal country and would be forever. "Right-wing" was an insult; indeed, T.W. Adorno's infamous 1950 book The Authoritarian Personality posited that conservatism was a form of "psychopathology."
Post-war America had no major conservative journals or publishing houses. Conservative books (apart from the Old Right titles published by Devin-Adair and Caxton) were as rare as hen's teeth. Henry Regnery (1912-1996) set out to rectify this, to establish an intellectual basis for the recrudescence of American conservatism. The doughty Chicagoan co-founded Human Events in 1946; the next year he founded the imprint that bears his name.
Regnery struck gold in 1951 with William F. Buckley, Jr.'s God and Man at Yale and in 1953 with Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, works central to the establishment of what came to be called the New Right (as was Buckley's National Review, founded in 1955). But these successes came at great cost, as liberal bigotry resulted in his losing the lucrative contract to publish the University of Chicago's Great Books series.
Regnery always preferred to be right than rich, however, and the books he published--not only polemics but also art, poetry, memoirs, and belles letters--provided sustenance for two generations of American conservatives. Most of the old Regnery titles have been out of print for decades, unfortunately, and are now rather expensive to acquire second hand.
So the founding of the Henry Regnery Legacy Project is a cause for celebration, not only to those interested in the wellsprings of modern conservatism but also to scholars of American history. The Regnery Project has made the full text (in Adobe Acrobat format) of 29 books now available online, including Regnery's fine autobiography, Memoirs of a Dissident Publisher, What is Conservatism? by Frank Meyer, The Conservative Affirmation by Willmoore Kendall, The Attack on Leviathan by Donald Davidson, and Liberty or Equality? by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, about which philosopher Max Eastman said to Buckley, "Reading it is like going to college and graduate school, all over again."
Projected titles in the series include Cold Friday by Whittaker Chambers, John Randolph of Roanoke by Russell Kirk, The Ethics of Rhetoric by Richard Weaver, and The Idea of a Christian Society by T.S. Eliot.
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The Regnery firm flourishes still. In fact, it is much more successful now than it was in its founder's day. But it would be fair to say that intellectual standards are not now what they were in the 1950s. Modern conservatives are not much concerned with the thought of Edmund Burke or George Santayana, just as modern liberals don't waste much time on John Dewey or Thorstein Veblen. Take a look at the New York Times bestseller list, where political partisanship has devolved to the level of a catfight. Bush is mean and stupid; no, he's the best president ever. The GOP is evil incarnate; no, that would be the Democrats.
On the one hand, we have Calvin Trillin's satire in verse, Obliviously On He Sails, Al Franken's Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them), and two books each by Michael Moore and Molly Ivins. On the other, we have David T. Hardy and Jason Clarke's Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man, Ronald Kessler's A Matter of Character, and the ominously titled If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It by Hugh Hewitt.
The latest entry, Times columnist Maureen Dowd's Bushworld, is typical of the genre. As the sympathetic review by Amazon.com puts it, "Each column is relatively short, and Dowd never shares much new information." But then the promulgation of ideas is not really the purpose of these tomes. Does anybody really expect to learn anything from a book with the phrase "big fat stupid" in its title?
No, these works seem to provide Americans with the feelings of community and identity they cannot find elsewhere. Forget Red States versus Blue States. This nation is really divided into those who feel Michael Moore is a Big Fat Stupid White Man and those who feel Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Stupid White Man.
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Bowdler lives! And in the city that never sleeps, of all places. The Good Gray Lady, like the New York Post, has had a look at Tom Wolfe's new novel and is appalled by its "salaciousness." As noted in my last column, I Am Charlotte Simmons is an unexpurgated depiction of university life. Too much so for the New York Times Book Review, which has agreed to excerpt it only on the condition that phrases such as "get laid" are replaced with the words "sexual activity" in parentheses. One is gladdened that the nation has been spared the appearance in print of an expression one might hear, oh, say, a hundred times on television every day, but where were the Times Guardians of Public Morality during the heady days of Bill Clinton and Kenneth Starr? An archive search reveals 57 Times stories that reference a certain substance resulting from [sexual activity] found on the dress of a certain Miss Monica Lewinsky, quondam acquaintance of the former President.
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And in The Prude-Calling-the-Priggish-Stuffy Dept., guess who has complained that "Literary lion Tom Wolfe is being censored by the New York Times"? Why, the New York Post, of course.
Kelly Jane Torrance is arts and culture editor of Brainwash. Her Web site on culture can be found at www.kellyjanetorrance.com.
