Russell Jacoby: Hats off to conservatives' literary skills — but it's easy to be entertaining when your ideas are simplistic and illogical
[Russell Jacoby is a professor in residence in the history department at the University of California at Los Angeles. He is author, most recently, of Picture Imperfect: Utopian Thought for an Anti-Utopian Age (Columbia University Press, 2005).]
Do conservatives write better than leftists?
Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (Threshold Editions), to be published this month, is a collection of essays by a dozen conservatives on their political peregrinations from left to right. Almost without exception, each essay is lucid and articulate. Would it be possible to assemble a countercollection by leftists that would be equally limpid? Unlikely. Why?
Several answers suggest themselves. Leftists largely inhabit the academy, and the professoriate does not prize elegant writing. On the contrary, it distrusts clear prose as superficial. Oddly, English and literature professors led the way. A trip to Paris, a bottle of wine, a Foucaultian appetizer, and a Derridaian main dish, and they became convinced that incomprehensibility equals profundity.
Over the years the menu has changed, but the damage has been done. Leftist scholars continue to believe that clotted language confirms insight; to write well receives little regard. Consider the ringing conclusion of a recent manifesto of the radical intelligentsia, Eric Lott's The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual: "If patriotism itself is rethought as 'plural, serial, contextual and mobile,' in Apparduari's words, then postnationalist collectives of labor and desire might earn the devotion they deserve." Lott — yes, an English professor — crafted that sentence.
Compared to that, much conservative writing has a deft, light touch. Only one author in this collection is an academic; almost all are affiliated with conservative think tanks, which encourage readable prose for a reading public. Many are ex-academics, however, and abhor the university. Stanley Kurtz, a contributing editor of National Review Online, breathed freely once he "escaped" from the campus. "For the first time in years, I could speak my mind." For two decades at least, going back to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, conservatives have effectively savaged the academic world. That polemical zeal marks this volume as well, especially Heather Mac Donald's reflections on studying literature at Yale with Paul de Man ("a story of a nightmare from which I did, at last, awake"). Indeed, their academic experience drove many of the contributors into a conservative orbit. Kurtz believes that university "one-sidedness and extremism" produced today's conservatives.
Could this be so? The classic anthology of political conversion, The God That Failed (1949), responded to sterner stuff. After joining the Communist Party, partaking of the anti-Nazi resistance, witnessing the Spanish Civil War, and finding himself interned in France, Arthur Koestler moved to the right. Today's more timorous souls run home when they see a Che Guevara T-shirt or catch a little feminist claptrap. Peter Berkowitz, of the Hoover Institution, underlines the significance of a "collective dirty look" directed at a conservative professor during a Harvard gathering. Oh my! Mac Donald tells of de Man's star graduate assistant, a true believer, who responded with "a strangled laugh" to the heretical comment that people could actually communicate. Kurtz draws the conclusion: "The food, clothing, and music in elite universities were a whole lot nicer than in the Soviet Union, but the intellectual setting was barely better." That dissent spelled incarceration in the USSR and a cold shoulder in the U.S. academy does not register on these specialists in freedom....
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education
Do conservatives write better than leftists?
Why I Turned Right: Leading Baby Boom Conservatives Chronicle Their Political Journeys (Threshold Editions), to be published this month, is a collection of essays by a dozen conservatives on their political peregrinations from left to right. Almost without exception, each essay is lucid and articulate. Would it be possible to assemble a countercollection by leftists that would be equally limpid? Unlikely. Why?
Several answers suggest themselves. Leftists largely inhabit the academy, and the professoriate does not prize elegant writing. On the contrary, it distrusts clear prose as superficial. Oddly, English and literature professors led the way. A trip to Paris, a bottle of wine, a Foucaultian appetizer, and a Derridaian main dish, and they became convinced that incomprehensibility equals profundity.
Over the years the menu has changed, but the damage has been done. Leftist scholars continue to believe that clotted language confirms insight; to write well receives little regard. Consider the ringing conclusion of a recent manifesto of the radical intelligentsia, Eric Lott's The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual: "If patriotism itself is rethought as 'plural, serial, contextual and mobile,' in Apparduari's words, then postnationalist collectives of labor and desire might earn the devotion they deserve." Lott — yes, an English professor — crafted that sentence.
Compared to that, much conservative writing has a deft, light touch. Only one author in this collection is an academic; almost all are affiliated with conservative think tanks, which encourage readable prose for a reading public. Many are ex-academics, however, and abhor the university. Stanley Kurtz, a contributing editor of National Review Online, breathed freely once he "escaped" from the campus. "For the first time in years, I could speak my mind." For two decades at least, going back to Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, conservatives have effectively savaged the academic world. That polemical zeal marks this volume as well, especially Heather Mac Donald's reflections on studying literature at Yale with Paul de Man ("a story of a nightmare from which I did, at last, awake"). Indeed, their academic experience drove many of the contributors into a conservative orbit. Kurtz believes that university "one-sidedness and extremism" produced today's conservatives.
Could this be so? The classic anthology of political conversion, The God That Failed (1949), responded to sterner stuff. After joining the Communist Party, partaking of the anti-Nazi resistance, witnessing the Spanish Civil War, and finding himself interned in France, Arthur Koestler moved to the right. Today's more timorous souls run home when they see a Che Guevara T-shirt or catch a little feminist claptrap. Peter Berkowitz, of the Hoover Institution, underlines the significance of a "collective dirty look" directed at a conservative professor during a Harvard gathering. Oh my! Mac Donald tells of de Man's star graduate assistant, a true believer, who responded with "a strangled laugh" to the heretical comment that people could actually communicate. Kurtz draws the conclusion: "The food, clothing, and music in elite universities were a whole lot nicer than in the Soviet Union, but the intellectual setting was barely better." That dissent spelled incarceration in the USSR and a cold shoulder in the U.S. academy does not register on these specialists in freedom....