Jim Sleeper: Time For a Review of the Times Book Review?
Two years ago the New York Times Book Review published an essay of mine, "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind," in which I showed that Bloom rejected conservatives' touting his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students as if it were a manifesto for their movement.
True, Bloom's book was properly scathing of leftist racial and sexual "identity" politics and of the political-correctness police. And it inspired a surge in conservative campus funding, pedagogy, and activism intended to rescue liberal education from a vapid, divisive multiculturalism.
Far from rescuing the liberal arts, though, the conservative surge was weakening them. It was inundating undergraduate life with premature training in marketing, self-marketing, national-security strategizing, misplaced religious enthusiasms, and sometimes, as a grace note, jejune affectations of classical virtue. And no one, I showed, had decried all this more loudly than Bloom himself.
Bloom was eccentric, and not, shall we say, my cup of tea. But some of his arguments deserve rescuing from conservative ideologues and from journalists addicted to "left vs. right" scenarios or confused and embittered by what they think liberals did to their own educations. Such journalists thought I must be trying to rescue Bloom from the right in order to claim him for the left. They didn't notice that liberal education is endangered far more now by conservative capitalist surges than by tenured radicals – an important distinction.
As it turns out, some of these confused journalists were working at The Times Book Review itself.
Under its editor-in-chief Sam Tanenhaus and a curdled former leftist apostate or mini-con or two, the Book Review clambered onto the bandwagon of neoconservative folly in Iraq, skewing its mix of reviews toward bashing critics of the war until sometime in 2005. Around then the Book Review began doing some damage control, sometimes bashing addled liberals all the more eagerly, as if that would cleanse its own excesses. How many more rounds of reviews by Christopher Hitchens, David Brooks, Paul Berman, Peter Beinart, Joe Klein, and others fixated on the follies of the left will it take to make obvious the Review's displacing of its own war guilt onto whatever liberals it can find who are even more addled than its own liberal war hawks and neo-con fellow travellers?
Occasionally the Book Review does praise a good liberal book (by the Times' own Frank Rich, for example), or it lets someone like the sorry Beinart hustle some truly embarrassing neo-con like Norman Podhoretz off-stage. Tanenhaus, in a meltingly tender New Republic profile of William F. Buckley, Jr., seemed to me to be trying to insinuate himself retroactively into Buckley's early and prescient skepticism about the war. But integrity at the Book Review (and the New Republic) will require a change not of tactics but of hearts -- and, in some cases, maybe even hands.
I've assailed the Book Review on this in passing here, and in The American Prospect, perhaps annoying some review editors. And now comes another Times Bloom essay by one of them that really ought to be read alongside my own.
Rachel Donadio's "Revisiting the Canon Wars" is fair and balanced, so to speak, but it repeats so much of what I said two years ago that one wonders why she wrote it at all. This is the Bloom book's 20th anniversary, but, if the timing of these two pieces were reversed, wouldn't Book Review editors have told me, "We can't run yours because we ran a big essay on this subject only two years ago."?
Donadio's essay is also twice as long as mine, but that's no improvement, reflecting as it does Review editors' penchant for writing much more voluminously and ponderously than they let other reviewers do. (Did you ever finish Tanenhaus' grand reassessment of Richard Hoftstadter, nearly five times the length of most full-page Times reviews? Or Barry Gewen's encyclopedic and exhausting meditation on the death of art?)
Donadio's extra space does let her call around to savants for apercus on who's killing liberal education, but her composite of their comments is something of a muddle. She acknowledges that Bloom mistrusted capitalism and that market and career pressures may indeed hurt the humanities more than mad lefties do. But her essay leaves the impression that if liberal education is ailing, it's mainly because – as an enlarged "pull quote" in the margin puts it -- "Two decades after Allan Bloom's book, it's generally agreed that his multiculturalist opponents won the canon wars." So it was they who shattered any possible consensus about which great books and core courses are essential to a good education.
But was it? Mightn't it also be "generally agreed" that while multiculturalist leftists were winning the canon wars, multiculturalist (global) capitalists were winning almost everything else? As Todd Gitlin put it memorably in The Twilight of Common Dreams, while the left was marching on the English Department, the right was marching on the White House, pushing a neoconservative interventionism that turned on the universities themselves. That has ill served liberal education, let alone ancient or Enlightenment republicanism. I say more about this today in The Guardian.
When I made such arguments in the Book Review in 2005, some of the most encouraging responses came from thoughtful conservatives: Ross Douthat wrote that "the questions Sleeper's essay raises are important, and deserve a hearing on the Right." Four of Bloom's former editors and friends wrote to thank me for rescuing his legacy from "Take Back the University" yahoos like Kimball and David Horowitz. Bloom's colleague Nathan Tarcov, who'd co-directed with him the conservative Olin Center at the University of Chicago, said so in a letter to the Times.
It was right of the Book Review to publish Tarcov's letter then (next to one from David Horowitz, of course), but on Sunday a tiny but very telling indication of how the Review has changed came in the online box of "Related" Times articles posted with Donadio's essay. It failed to link the most "related" article the Times has published in recent years – my Bloom essay. Yet it did link the conservative zealot Roger Kimball's glowing 1987 review of Bloom's book, and then Kimball's own book, "Tenured Radicals," as well. Whether out of pique or incompetence, editors who can't reference their publication's own published work are getting Orwellian and letting their own paper down.
It would be nice to "take back the Book Review" from its punch-drunk conductors, but not in order to hand it over to politically correct former editors like Rebecca Sinkler. We badly need gatekeepers with a civic-republican integrity and courage that reflects liberal education, not the curdled ressentiment about professors that we get so much from Tanenhaus, culture columnist Edward Rothstein and others I'm too merciful (or just not annoyed enough) to name.