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Kevin Mattson interviewed about his new book on the Conservative mind

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kevin Mattson, Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University and the author of many books including, Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century and When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism. His new book is Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America.

FP: Dr. Kevin Mattson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Mattson: Thanks for having me.

FP: What inspired this book?

Mattson: A paradox I noticed. Conservatives seemed rather brash and war-like in their demeanor. I remember reading a book by Fred Barnes about George W. Bush entitled Rebel in Chief. I thought it strange for conservatives to sound brash and rebellious. I had always thought conservatism was about conserving rather than tearing things down. The depiction of George W. Bush as if he were Marlon Brando in The Wild One struck me as bizarre. I wanted to explore this theme historically, especially in relation to conservative ideas and the style in which conservative ideas have become so prevalent today.

FP: What is the main thesis of your book? Illustrate it for us with a few examples.

Mattson: That conservatives have consistently thought of themselves as rebels – as existential outsiders who rail against a monolithic establishment. This is a permanent feature of their thinking, even when they’re not outsiders but in government. I start with the Cold War, tracing out an apocalyptic strain in thinking about America’s role in the world (especially clear in Whittaker Chambers’s Witness). I move into the sixties and trace out Russell Kirk’s embrace of campus radicals and Norman Podhoretz’s love of Norman Mailer and the ways he used the “new sensibility” of the 1960s to frame his own neoconservatism. I then end with the culture wars of today and the rise of what I call “postmodern conservatism” – how an almost poststructuralist embrace of diversity and criticism of universal values informs the wars against “objectivity” and the mainstream media, the dominance of evolution and the call to teach intelligent design (ID) in public schools, and David Horowitz’s struggle for a student bill of rights in higher education.

FP: Can you kindly lay out the thesis of your book a bit more for us? It leads up to the idea, as you just noted, of the "post-modern conservatives", of which David Horowitz is an emblematic figure. Can you crystallize for us what the thesis here is and how exactly David Horowitz fits into it?

Mattson: Postmodern conservatism is the culmination point for the book. Postmodern conservatism takes from Buckley’s model of the conservative the stance of the rebel (still, against a liberal establishment, but as that establishment has taken numerous blows). From the sixties, postmodern conservatism takes “hipness” and the “new sensibility.” And then it bundles these things together with an interest in the postmodern ideas of “diversity” and “anti-foundationalism.” Consider the use of the term “diversity” in the original Academic Bill of Rights. The justification for ABOR also argued that “there is no humanly accessible truth that it not in principle open to challenge.” The argument is thus infused with postmodern theories about knowledge – knowledge as contingent, grounded in language games, never foundational, etc. But the conservative weds this postmodern outlook with a stance of war – the “political war” that Horowitz outlines in one of his more popular books (popular among elected Republicans). The postmodern style is also found in two other important struggles in the conservative culture wars recently – namely an attack on “objectivity” and the mainstream media as well as an attack on the teaching of evolution in public schools and an argument for the alternative paradigm of Intelligent Design. Postmodern conservatism is also the style of the existential rebel taking down an establishment.

FP: Have conservatives had to become rebels because the Left has controlled the boundaries of debate in the culture at large and stifled conservative ideas?

Mattson: Stifled? First off, the rebel stance that I’m talking about is at the beginning of my story. That’s what made Buckley so important. He cast himself as the rebel in God and Man at Yale and called conservatives the true “radicals.” In many ways, he embraced the style of rebel even before C. Wright Mills, a key intellectual influence on the New Left, embraced the style of rebel (the leather jacket, motorcycle, love of Cuban revolutionaries, etc.).

Did later post-1960s radicals use the rebel style that proliferated throughout the 1960s? You bet. Including David Horowitz who took the style of his 1960s radical days and then transposed them into his conservative style of today. But if you look at someone like Russell Kirk writing in 1969 in praise of “campus radicals,” you get a sense that this was always there, not just something conservatives adopted because it worked for them; it was much more constitutive of conservative identity. Conservatives have consistently seen themselves as rebels against a liberal establishment.

FP: Please elaborate on the continuity between Buckley's generation and the present one.

Mattson: What Buckley offered the conservative movement was the image of the rebel against a liberal establishment. He was brash and confrontational (receiving rave reviews for his style from none other than the cantankerous left winger Dwight MacDonald in a review of his book "God and Man at Yale" in which he celebrated how a "campus rebel flays faculty"). Buckley argued that conservatives should embrace controversy and sensation when making their claims. He placed academe at the center of the conservative attack, where it exists to this day. His style can be heard in the style of Ann Coulter's
rants (Coulter wrote an obituary about Buckley where she pointed the continuity with her own style out) and many other conservatives who talk in brash, rebellious, and confrontational tones. What Buckley did was to say that conservatives shouldn't think of themselves as backward looking preservationists of the existing social order. Instead, they should start tearing stuff down -- including the establishment. This style never left the conservative mind. It's the basis of our contemporary culture wars.

FP: In terms of the Academic Bill of Rights, which you mentioned earlier, this is a legitimate effort to try to bring some kind of intellectual diversity to the campus, no? You are not, surely, denying that the Left has suffocated free thought and expression in academia for a long period of time?

Mattson: Things have been changing in academe for awhile now, especially as there’s been a generational shift. A recent story in the New York Times shows this pretty clearly in my opinion, pointing out that conservative ideas are much more accepted today than they were in the past and that the charged political atmosphere of the sixties has dissipated. In any case, calling the SBOR “legitimate” is wrong, because even if there is a liberal tilt among academics, that doesn’t justify state legislatures getting involved in the situation and policing ideological leanings among the professoriate. In the end, the thing conservatives should do is say: Yes, I’m a conservative and I have strong academic credentials and stand up for what they believe in. There’s a weird whiny quality to the conservative complaint.

FP: Who was the Right’s greatest rebel? Who is he/she today? Why?

Mattson: Buckley for sure started the trend. He consciously made National Review a magazine that looked forward to full-fledge revolt against the liberal establishment – rather than an embrace of reaction and remnants. In God and Man at Yale, he labeled conservatives the “new radicals,” setting in place a style that remains to this day.

Today, there are numerous pundits who play the role (Ann Coulter for instance). But I’d choose Sarah Palin, the feminist rock star for Republicans. She’s sassy, tough, populist, anti-intellectual, anti-elite, anti-establishment. She portrays herself (and ironically enough the 72-year old McCain) as a maverick rebel standing outside the establishment. And her whole campaign is framed as an attack on the mainstream media – elite liberals – who dare to questions her credentials or who want to examine facts about her past.

FP: What do you think of how the Left has attacked Palin? You see any hypocrisy or unfairness in the attacks?

Mattson: Sure, I watched Bill Maher go after her, and I found his criticism insulting. I can’t recall the specifics here (it was late at night in a hotel room during a long road trip), but it wasn’t productive. But in general, the attack on her has been right on and certainly not sexist (the McCain camp’s attempt to protect her from the media smacks of sexist paternalism more than anything else). The attack that I’ve followed the most has been that she misrepresents her standing as a reformer, that she was certainly not against the “Bridge to Nowhere” and that she in fact benefited from it. There’s concern – sometimes seen in “troopergate” – that she governs with a style of secrecy and cronyism. And she seems too chummy with Alaska secessionists (which points to a long tradition of seditious thinking on the right – going back to its attacks on the civil rights movement in the 1950s). And the campaign clearly moved into a culture war stance by attacking the media, rather than explaining just why people shouldn’t worry about such things.

FP: You note that a good number of conservatives are ex-communists (the writers for NRO etc.) Give us your angle on this phenomenon.

Mattson: It goes to show that the apocalyptic mindset that communism induced never left them. They change their politics but their frame of mind stays the same. They see the world in apocalyptic and utopian terms. Think here of Whittaker Chambers.

FP: Speaking of Chambers, your thoughts on how the Left has come to the defense of communist spies despite all the evidence to the contrary? For instance, what do you think of Morton Sobell's recent admission that both he and Julius Rosenberg were Soviet spies? Where are the Left’s admissions of error? How about the case of Hiss?

Mattson: Yes, there were communists in America who posed a danger. Yes, I believe that Whittaker Chambers was right in his accusations about Hiss (and there are liberal friends of mine who disagree with this). But this has always been the stance of Cold War liberals. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Reinhold Niebuhr admitted that there were communists in America and that something needed to be done about it; they resisted, on the other hand, the tactics used by Senator Joseph McCarthy. I don’t think liberals have to admit errors here, because the strain of cold war liberalism that I myself identify with had always taken communists as an enemy. Pure and simple. It’s the question of how big a danger communists were in America after Truman cracked down on them that is probably the biggest difference here. Chambers was right in making his accusations, but he was wrong when he suggested that the Cold War should be fought as a religious war, lest the West lose.

FP: Near the end of your book, you note that "the conservative mind has triumphed." Tell us in which ways and why you think it is a bad thing. Is there anything good about this development?

Mattson: The conservative mind triumphed with the political victories conservatives had throughout the last decade. It triumphed in the remaking of the media establishment via talk radio, Fox News, and the right wing blogosphere. And it triumphed when George W. Bush, already in 2000, called the Republican Party the “party of ideas.” I emphasize the bad side: That a war-like state of mind is not healthy, that conservatives are too quick to reject norms and forms and institutions.

FP: In your book you refer to how Horowitz made an effort to teach conservatives how to fight political war. Is it your view that he played a significant role in helping them succeed in that enterprise and that the Left is now a failure in fighting political war? Does the Left, in your mind, now need its own Horowitz?

Mattson: Yes, Horowitz was amazingly successful at making the mindset of war so central to recent conservative triumphs. It’s hard to show direct influence, of course, but I think his style of taking the brash rebellious feel of the 1960s (when he embraced the Black Panther Party) and turning it in a conservative direction has a lot to tell us about the contemporary conservative style. It is clearly wedded to the culture wars. And it is clearly wedded to a fierce style put into campaign practice by Karl Rove and his minions.

No, I don’t think liberals need to mirror the stance that politics is a state of war. There’s too much complexity and nuance to see liberal ideas as the same as artillery or weaponry.

FP: Do you have any criticism of the Left in terms of how it has behaved in the terror war/conflict with radical Islam? For instance, you are critical of Hitchens in the book (p.4) but do you deny that there was some legitimacy in his disappointment with how the Left behaved in the context of 9/11 etc?

Mattson: Well, the left isn’t unified on that issue. I’ve always been partial to what Michael Walzer – in the context of 9/11 in fact – called the “responsible left.” My portion of the left always argues against its own pacifist and isolationist wing. There were plenty of people on the left who believed America needed to retaliate hard against Al Qaeda, particularly in Afghanistan. In fact, I can’t find too many liberals who didn’t believe that we shouldn’t try to get Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. The real question is whether Iraq was a logical and intelligent continuation of that war. That’s where many liberals disagreed. Of course, there was Paul Berman, George Packer, Peter Beinart, and to a lesser extent Hitchens who argued a pro-Iraq war line with liberal intentions. But this only incited a debate on the left, not a singular view. It goes without saying that liberals (I prefer that term to the left) should see Al Qaeda fundamentalists as their enemy just as much as they see Christian fundamentalists at home as their enemy. That strikes me as a no-brainer.

FP: How come conservatives engage leftists in debate but not vice-versa? For instance, here at Frontpage we have invited liberals and leftists to our pages and promoted many of their books, including yours – like today. But leftists never reciprocate ---even what you would call thoughtful leftists like The New Republic crowd, The American Prospect, Slate, Dissent and other liberal journals. None one of them, for example, has reviewed a book of David Horowitz’s in 10 years. And now, although Party of Defeat has been out for months, not a single review of it has appeared in the liberal media, and it is pretty evident that none will. Would you call this residual Stalinism?

Mattson: I think that’s what’s called a leading question. “Residual Stalinism”? Look, all authors complain that they can’t get their books reviewed. I do it myself all the time. The more specific complaint about Horowitz is whether he thinks of himself as an intellectual, as a free thinker, or as a cultural warrior. If he’s the latter, it probably hurts his ability go get his books reviewed. I quote his book on political war in the book, and I believe his stance there is as a warrior – not someone who wants to engage the other side in discussion but who wants to destroy the other side. Well, that’s a problem for getting a wider audience.

Another thing: I think today that many right wing pundits are seen less as intellectuals and more as people who whip up their own side of the political aisle. Think of Ann Coulter, a figure I deal a lot with in the book. There’s no way that anyone believes that Coulter tries to engage in a debate – that is, reach the other side of the political aisle. She writes for her preconceived fan base, not a “swing reader” (to coin a new political term). So when her books don’t get reviewed, it reflects the further balkanization of American politics. That’s a sad feature of contemporary politics, but the blame for it cuts wide.

FP: Thank you Kevin Mattson for joining us for this issue of Frontpage Interview. We ask our readers to stay tune for an upcoming issue of Frontpage Magazine in which David Horowitz will comment on Dr. Mattson’s portrait of him in Rebels. And we welcome Dr. Mattson to engage us in this dialogue.
Read entire article at Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com