Norman Podhoretz: for the greater good he’ll accept swarthy grand-kids but won’t be happy about it.

Fifty years ago, Norman Podhoretz wrote a profoundly stupid article called “My Negro Problem – and Ours.” The article was published in Commentary magazine, which is marking the anniversary.

I say “profoundly stupid” advisedly because Podhoretz himself, despite his reprehensible politics, is not a dumb guy. In fact, he’s a gifted editor and polemicist. The article itself is sometimes praised for being an honest attempt to describe the seriousness of racism.

Yet, what other phrase than profoundly stupid can apply to an article that argues that the best solution to racism is miscegenation. At the end of the essay Podhoretz writes:  “I cannot see how [the dream of erasing color consciousness] will ever be realized unless color does in fact disappear: and that means not integration, it means assimilation, it means—let the brutal word come out—miscegenation…. in my opinion the Negro problem can be solved in this country in no other way.”

Anyone who has given a moments thought to the issue would realize that 1) miscegenation has in fact been going on in the United States since the earliest European settlers and African slaves set foot on the continent 2) many of those who practiced miscegenation were in fact slave owners or white racists (the cases of Thomas Jefferson and Strom Thurmond were not universally known or accepted  at the time but anyone who knew the history of African-American was aware of racists white men raping women they regarded as inferior) and finally 3)  that far from getting rid of racism miscegenation simply increased the number of shades between white and black. (No less a figure than Ralph frigging Ellison tried to explain these elementary facts of history and race relations to Podhoretz).

In sum, you can’t get rid of racism by trying to obliterate blacks (or any other race) as a distinct group. That’s as absurd as trying to get rid of anti-Semitism by having all Jews convert to Christianity (interestingly Podhoretz does toy with the idea that it would be good for the Jews as well as blacks to disappear).  You fight racism and anti-Semitism by convincing people that racism and anti-Semitism are wrong, socially sanctioning racist and anti-Semitic behaviour and repealing racist and anti-Semitic laws. That’s the simple, obvious fact that Podhoretz did not consider in his essay.

The core problem with the essay can be seen in the title: “My Negro Problem – and Ours.” First of all, in 1963 America did not have a Negro Problem. It had a racism problem. Secondly, “My Negro Problem – And Ours” invites the reader to respond, “Speak for yourself, Norman.”

Early on in his essay Podhoretz wrote: “To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negroes were better off than Jews—indeed, than all whites. A city boy’s world is contained within three or four square blocks, and in my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole they were better athletes.” He also complained that as a child he  was “repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated” by blacks.

The great literary critic Marvin Mudrick wrote a splendid review of Podhoretz’s first book Doings and Undoings where he pinpointed exactly what’s wrong with the claims Podhoretz was making:

The calculated, didactic hysteria of this essay might be more persuasive if other Jews had not had the same childhood experiences as Podhoretz. They remember the fear, the hatred, the beatings. But they also remember that every bit of information that came to them, not at twelve but from the earliest age of consciousness, out of the world at large-their parents, their older brothers and sisters at college or work, the newspapers and magazines and books and movies, every text in their schools, what they saw whenever they walked into a hotel lobby or spent a day at the beach-assured them, and the Negro, that he was dirt and the future theirs: the jobs, the blonde actresses, the power of office, the arts, the money and all the places to spend it in. And these Jews will abhor Podhoretz’s ad hoc paradoxes, his belated and self-righteous squeals of pain; they will refuse to credit — except as a mask for other, unacknowledgeable personal problems — the image of a clever twelve-year-old Jewish city boy who didn’t already know that he would be a doctor, or a university professor, living in some lily-white suburb with occasional recollections of his distaste for the Negroes of his childhood.

Mudrick’s critique destroys any claim that “My Negro Problem – and Ours” should be celebrated at least for its honesty if not its policy proscriptions. Podhoretz was perhaps honest in admitting his hatred for blacks (indeed for blackness) but he didn’t really plumb the depths of his soul to find out what the roots of that hatred really came from.

(Mudrick’s essay is available in his collection On Culture and Literature and in The Hudson Review, June 1964. Someone should do a Best of Mudrick book).

POST SCRIPT:

As unhinged as Podhoretz’s 1963 essay was, his 2013 revisiting of these topics is even more radically divorced from reality. At least in 1963 Podhoretz was willing to acknowledge that white racism was a problem, even if his solution left much to be desire. Here are some selections from Podhoretz’s current views:

“For the almost complete abdication of black responsibility and the commensurately total dependence on government engendered by so obsessive and exclusive a fixation on white racism as the root of all racial evils has been nothing short of calamitous….Today, it is still other blacks who are most often the victims of black crime, but black-on-white violence is much more common than it was in 1963, so that many whites could now top my stories with worse. And yet even today, few of them would be willing to speak truthfully in public about their entirely rational fear of black violence and black crime…. But at the same time relations between the races have deteriorated. Gone on the whole are the interracial friendships and the interracial political alliances that were quite common 50 years ago….Thus, any and every criticism of Obama’s policies is now ascribed to racist motivations, and any and every little incident involving the mistreatment—or the alleged mistreatment—of a black is seized upon and blown up into another proof that racism remains rampant, if largely hidden, in American society….So far has this libel traveled that no less mainstream a personage than the editor of the New York Times Book Review has recently disgraced himself with a long article arguing that the ideology of the entire conservative movement is a covert species of racism, and that this ideology has now infected the Republican Party and sickened it unto death. In this intellectually and morally perverted reading, the party of Abraham Lincoln is magically metamorphosed into the party of John C. Calhoun, his greatest political enemy….No, the problem today is not white racism. Today the root cause of all the ills that plague the black community is the astounding proportion of black babies born out of wedlock who grow up without fathers, and who are doomed to do badly in school, to get into trouble on the streets, and to wind up in jail.” (Italics added)

What’s noteworthy here is the extreme ideological clarity that Podhoretz is imposing upon reality. By his account, blacks have a “total dependence” on the government, fear of black crime is “entirely” rational (and public policy doesn’t respond to these “entirely rational” fears despite the United States having an unprecedented incarceration rate), interracial friendships and political alliances are almost entirely gone (which makes it hard to explain how Obama got to be president), the GOP is still the party of Lincoln (which is why it’s now based in the South), and the “root cause of all the ills” of the black community is illegitimate births. The starkness of these claims is so violent and so easily contradicted by contrary evidence that the essay feels like the work of man who has given up trying to convince others. Once a formidable debater, Podhoretz no longer tries to engage with competing arguments but prefers to be king of his own internal mental universe.

Ezra Klein.

Brian Morton, a fine novelist and engaging public intellectual, recently tweeted: “Leftists should stop sneering at @ezraklein. If we’d had liberal policy wonks as solid as Klein in the 1970s neoconservatism would never have attained the stature that it did. It would have been intellectually checkmated.” These tweets elicited some responses from me and a few other interested parties but my thoughts on this are a bit more complex than can easily be fitted into 140 characters, so I’m posting a longer argument here.

I understand the impulse behind Brian’s tweets. One of the most heartening developments in recent American politics is the emergence of a generation of passionate young left and liberal writers who have been very effective in challenging the lazy hegemony of conservatism that has dominated elite opinion since the 1970s. Ezra Klein is a convenient synecdoche for this generation. To see him go after blowhards like David Brooks or Bob Woodward is a rare example of a witnessing a salutary public service that is also bracing and delightful.

But aside from Klein there are many other young and youngish writers who have a similar profile. Off the top of my head there’s Matthew Yglesias, Lindsay Beyerstein, Chris Hayes, Alyssa Rosenberg, Adam Serwer, and Jamelle Bouie. But again, as with Klein, these are symptomatic names, not exhaustive but a wedge indicating a much larger generation or cohort.

All of these writers are 1) young 2) liberal or further to the left 3) adept at dismantling conservative ideas 4) comfortable at arguing policy and politics at the level of fairly detailed wonkery (this is even true of Rosenberg who mainly writes on culture, but does so with a knowingness about technological context typically described as geeky, the aesthetic counterpart to policy wonkishness) and finally 5) very successful at expressing themselves on new platforms such as blogs, twitter, etc. (I should add that there’s also another cohort of superb writers even further to the left, found in publications like Jacobin, The New Inquiry, and N+1).

This cohort of writers is doing wonderful things and certainly present a stronger journalistic challenge to neo-conservatism than anything we’ve seen in the past few decades. But I don’t think the problem with generations of liberal and leftist writers was that they lacked the wonkish chops of the kids today.

A bit of history is in order: the neo-conservative ascendancy in American policy making began in the late 1960s and had two main wings. The more intellectually respectable wing consisted of the critique of the social welfare state made in the pages of The Public Interest by writers like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer. Less brainy but still influential was the foreign policy wing of neo-conservatism, located in Commentary magazine’s attempt to revive hawkish Cold War policies in the teeth of the Viet Nam debacle and the policy of Détente.

The ideas of both domestic and foreign policy neo-conservatives did not go uncontested, and were in fact consistently challenged by very well briefed liberal and left intellectuals. Michael Harrington, although now remembered as a general interest socialist intellectual, was no slouch when it came to going into the wonky details of social welfare policy. He could more than hold his own against such neo-con heavyweights Kristol and Nathan Glazer in any discussion of the welfare state. (Worth looking up in this regard is Harrington’s devastating review of Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: “Crunched Numbers: Charles Murray’s Stunted Statistics,” New Republic, 28 January 1985).

In the foreign policy realm, there were any number of cogent critiques of neo-conservative militarism, ranging from conservative realists like George Kennan to left intellectuals such as Walter LaFeber. In the 1970s, publications like the Village Voice presented a lively and aggressive left critique of American politics (best exemplified by Alexander Cockburn’s slashing media criticism). Further, while the New Republic of that era is sometimes remembered as being a fellow-traveler of neo-conservatism, the magazine did in fact publish many forceful and convincing critiques of right-wing ideas. Hendrik Hertzberg alone deserves to be counted as one of America’s great liberal polemicists, a worthy forerunner to Ezra Klein.

I’m perhaps speaking for my own political prejudices but intellectually speaking there was always a strong case against neo-conservatism. And it was undeniably made by sharp-witted writers who could wend their way through the wonkish thickets.

If neo-conservative ideas triumphed in the 1970s and 1980s, it wasn’t because of the lack of convincing alternatives from either liberals or leftist. Rather, I think structural and institutional factors were paramount. The Democrats were in disarray in the 1970s and 1980s because the old New Deal coalition was falling apart but the newer coalition (of minorities, social liberals and the well-educated) hadn’t fully coalesced. This created an opening for the GOP (working with conservative Dems) to dominate American politics. Naturally the Republicans turned to the neo-cons as a storehouse of ideas. The political victories of the GOP were amplified in intellectual life by the success of think tank entrepreneurs such as Irving Kristol and William Simon, who used ample funds provided by the business elite to spread the neo-conservative message far and wide.

The success of the neo-conservatives in building an infrastructure was met with a counter-thrust by liberals like Paul Starr and Robert Kuttner, who created The American Prospect in 1990 as progressive alternative to The Public Interest. I don’t think it’s an accident that many of the Ezra Klein generation of writers emerged out of either The American Prospect or its online allies.

My argument is perhaps a too familiar Marxist one: structures and institutions set the parameter under which individuals operate. Since neo-conservatism emerged in the late 1960s, it always faced a strong opposition from liberals and leftists. But that opposition could only carry weight when it had institutional strength and also worked under a more congenial political atmosphere. It’s simply much easier to be a liberal policy wonk when Obama is in power than during the Reagan years. (There is perhaps a technological factor at work here too: blogging has given the Klein cohort a far larger audience than they would have found in the era of small magazines). Or to paraphrase the hoary old Marxist truth: people make history, but not under the conditions of their choosing.

In the two decades before his death in 1915, Booker T. Washington was far and away the most admired black man in America. He was almost unique in having many supporters in both black and white America. This was a period when black America reached its post-slavery nadir in virtually every area of life – socially, economically, politically. In the South — where 90% of black Americans lived — the successful counterrevolution against Reconstruction meant that Jim Crow was firmly and ferociously in place. In the north, blacks enjoyed more political rights but socially and economically were at the bottom of the ladder.

To this dire situation, Washington offered a path for progress for improving race relations which was designed to appeal to both blacks and whites. In his famous 1895 speech in Atlanta, Washington advocated a compromise whereby African Americans would give up the demands for equal political rights in exchange for assistance in a mutually beneficial program of education and economic improvement. In words of Washington’s most intellectually rigorous critic W.E.B. Du Bois, this program consisted of “industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence as to civil and political rights.”

Washington’s program won much applause at the time but by the beginning of the 20th century was starting to be criticized by a rising generation of black activist, the foremost of which was Du Bois, whose 1903 book The Soul of Black Folks includes an incisive dissection of the limits of the Atlanta Compromise. For Du Bois, economic advancement without political equality was an untenable goal which would do little to solve the race problem. The quarrel between Washington and Du Bois was one of the central debates of modern American history and set the contours of African American politics for the rest of the century (the echoes of this argument can still be heard to this day).

More than a century later, Booker T. Washington’s reputation has fallen tremendously. Although his role in founding the Tuskegee Institute made him a central figure in the history of African-American education, it’s fair to say that the general consensus is that Washington was a trimmer who worked to support the status quo rather than worked to change it,  a capitulator to Jim Crow, a patsy who served the wealthy whites who financed his school and political program. In short, a sell out and Uncle Tom.

Over at the Daily Beast, David Frum, with the help of a new biography of Washington, has written a series of posts trying to restore some of the luster of black leader’s name. (The posts are collected here).  Frum’s argument relies heavily on emphasizing the severe constraints that Washington worked in a deeply racist America. In 1901 Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dine at the White House, the first time an African-American had received such an invitation. In response South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman warned that “The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.”

I’ll leave it to readers to evaluate the cogency of Frum’s argument. They did remind me of a very interesting semi-defense of Washington offered by the late Irving Howe in an essay on Du Bois published in Harper’s, March 1968 (and reprinted in Howe’s book Celebrations and Attacks). The main purpose of Howe’s essay is to give readers a largely admiring overview of the achievements of Du Bois (I say largely admiring because Howe is appropriately curt with the Stalinism that Du Bois adopted in the ninth decade of his very long life). In rehearsing Du Bois’ story, Howe assumes most readers of Harper’s – an audience largely made up of well-educated, middle-class whites – wouldn’t be familiar with him.

Yet in celebrating Du Bois’ importance, Howe is careful to give a very empathetic account of the great nemesis that Du Bois combated:

Booker T. Washington was in effect the leader of a conquered people, and a conquered people is never quite free to choose its own leader. He was, if you like, the Petain of the American Negroes, but far shrewder and far more devoted to his people than Petain was to the French. The evidence also suggests that Washington was sometimes a surreptitious de Gaulle, deeply involved in a quasi-underground resistance.

Professor August Meier, a historian whose sympathies are wholly with the civil-rights militants, has printed in the Journal of Southern History, May 1957, a fascinating account of the Washington-Du Bois struggle in which he presents a large amount of evidence to show that the issues cannot be reduced to acquiescence vs. militancy. Du Bois was an intellectual whose obligation it was to think in terms of long-range ends; Washington was a leader who had to cope with immediate problems. The white South had just achieve a counterrevolution in which Negroes had been reduced to near-slavery; in fact, as Washington made clear in still-impressive autobiography Up from Slavery, the Negroes were in many respects worse off than before the Civil War. They were frightened, demoralized, and economically helpless. Simply to come to them and cry out for militant struggle would have elicited no response from them, would have been little help to them, and would have provoked ghastly retaliation from the white South.

Washington had then to manoeuvre from day to day to day, making the best he could of all but total defeat. He spoke deprecatingly of political rights in order to assuage the whites whose money and toleration he needed; but in practice as Professor Meier shows, he covertly tried to preserve the Negro franchise and kept supplying funds for test cases in courts….

Washington was not an attractive figure; he was a remarkable leader who helped sustain the morale of a broken people. And to the extent that he succeeded, he prepared the way for his own removal. Du Bois was a brilliant intellectual who insisted that only a program of unconditional equality could be acceptable to enlightened Negroes and who proposed a major immediate task the training of a Negro elite, ‘the Talented Tenth,’ which might lead the black masses into struggle…..

We see here one of those utterly tragic situations in which two enormously talented men are pitted against each other in ferocious struggle, each clinging to a portion of the truth, each perceiving a fraction of necessity, but neither able to surmount those objective barriers which the triumphant whites place before all Negroes, acquiescent or rebellious. The more men like Du Bois and Washington were penned in as Negroes, the more they were driven as Negro leader to fight with one another. Yet from that war, at unmeasured cost, there emerged the Negro movement as we know it.

There’s much to say about Howe’s beautifully balanced and modulated essay. It deserves to be read in its entirety (and it’s a shame Celebrations and Attacks is out of print). One thought that occurs to me is that there is an element of hidden autobiography here. In 1968, Howe was the middle-aged veteran of socialist politics who suddenly found himself out-flanked by a new generation of radicals who advocated much more aggressive politics than he ever dared to. Howe’s battles with the New Left left many scars but it also informed his attempt to see both sides of the great debate between Du Bois and Washington. Howe was, in effect, searching for an equipoise in the Washington-Du Bois debate that eluded him in the politics of the late 1960s.

(For a more recent evaluation of Booker T. Washington, see this interesting essay from Blair L.M. Kelley.)

David Frum and I have had an interesting twitter debate about the merits of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope (you can read the dialogue here). I have a much higher regard for Trollope than Frum does and I thought it might be useful to spell out at greater than 140 character length why he’s one of my favorite novelists (and also quote some sharp critics on Trollope).

I’ve had a soft spot for Trollope ever since I started reading his novels a teenager. It’s good to start young when delving into Trollope because it takes a lifetime to survey his work. He was one of the most prolific writers of good fiction. He had 47 novels under his belt, many of them hefty tomes weighing in around the length of Bleak House, Anna Karenina or The Brothers Karamazov. As if those novels were somehow insufficient there are also five volumes of (quite excellent) short stories and miscellaneous but still voluminous books of (solid, informative) travel writing and other non-fiction (including an excellent, rewarding memoir). All of which adds not just to an oeuvre but almost a mountain range, a formidable requiring time and perseverance to conquer.

And yet despite Trollope’s copiousness I’ve never found reading him to be a chore. In fact, during one of my Trollope-binges I went through ten of his novels in a row, marveling all the while at his narrative resourcefulness, the very wide spectrum of characters he created, the psychological acuity with which these characters were presented, and the remarkable social scope of the novels (which gave the inside dope on any number of English institutions ranging from the Anglican Church, to Parliament to the financial industry to boarding schools).

Of course, even when I was most enamored with Trollope I knew he had his faults. His prose is at best serviceable in carrying his narratives forward but he was no stylist, lacking the antic theatricality of Charles Dickens or the polish of Austen. As consequence of the speed at which he wrote, he could often be verbose. He belonged to the last generation of serious British novelists not to influenced by Flaubert. In fact, the Flaubertian search for le mot juste was alien to his personality.

But despite all that Trollope has given me more pleasure than any of the classic British novelists apart from Austen and Dickens.

Trollope’s distinctive achievement can be seen in two areas, politic and gender.

1. Politics. Almost all the major works of political art deal with the extreme politics of monarchies (Shakespeare) or dictatorships (Dostoevsky, Orwell, Koestler). Trollope is almost alone in being the great bard of liberal democracy. Parliament is not just the backdrop to the Palliser novels but really their subject. Trollope delineates the workings of party politics in a liberal democracy in a way that is knowing and clear-eyed but without being cynical. He’s the classic Victorian conservative liberal or liberal conservative: the man who is trying to balance out the competing claims of tradition and reform, working to improve society without disrupting its functioning. It’s actually a bit odd that Frum is so anti-Trollope since Frum’s current project of trying to modernize conservatism seems like an eminently Trollopian enterprise.  As I suggested on twitter, Frum’s novel Patriots is very much in the tradition of the Palliser novels. (I suppose it’s also strange that I like Trollope since my politics are far to the left of the novelist’s own. But I like writers who can make me understand worldviews I don’t share).

2. Gender. Subtly related to the politics is the fact that Trollope, although occasionally lapsing into the ideological sexism of the era, constantly created forcefully female characters who are very much agents in their own destiny. Irving Howe, who didn’t much care for Trollope, noticed that in his political novels Trollope “placed, with a very warm sympathy, a number of women who display strong appetites and aptitudes for politics but, hemmed in by traditional expectations, must suffer the thwarting of their ambitions. Lady Laura Standish, Madame Max Goesler, Lady Glencora Palliser all have to accept the frustration of pretending to be docile while working behind the scenes. They love the skirmishing of political life and they spur their men to polemical sharpness; at a later historical moment they would be M.P.s or Cabinet members. In his opinions about ‘the women question’ Trollope was a blunt philistine, but in his imaginative writings he transcended his opinions.”

As far as I’m aware, no critic has written on Trollope with the appreciative gusto and crisp discrimination of Marvin Mudrick. I want to quote at length from Mudrick’s book The Man in the Machine because it gives a fair appraisal of Trollope’s merit and flaws:

Critics have a hard time with Trollope. He won’t sit still for a portrait (sometimes he looks like a minor-league Austen, sometimes like an unflashy and tough-minded Thackerary, sometimes like a cigars-and-whisky George Eliot); he is obviously an intelligent and talent writer who merits examination….

He was by temperament and talent a journeyman novelist (the term doesn’t mean “bad novelist”), he was deliberate rather than mechanical, and his novels are models of immediate unmeretricious attractiveness, credible intrigue, momentum, suspense, breath of knowledge about social and personal relations, satisfying disentanglement and resolution. He hasn’t much gift for long or climactic scenes; he would rather ruminate and sum up than dramatize; he doesn’t do low or rural characters well, and he often does them at immoderate length; he tends, especially when he grows anxious about the reader’s memory of pervious instalments, to be prolix and repetitive….

Customarily, Trollope is too prudent to be tempted by phenomena that threatens to exceed the requirements of his plots. If he weren’t also a passionate man, there wouldn’t be much else to say about the mass of his work. He prides himself on being a craftsman, what he aims at is fitness, but he is a passionate man: his job as he sees it is to keep things under control, but he starts with the handicap of having a great deal to control. Some of the fun of reading him is in looking for moods that don’t fit, feelings that get rather out of hand, surprises. For instance, he is the only Victorian novelist who gives the impression that men and women sometimes touch each other for purposes neither celestial nor infernal but simply because they like to. To be a Victorian novelist, however, is not to be in a position to take exuberant advantage of this insight, which makes itself felt as more than an ultrasonic vibration only in the guise of Trollope’s knowledgeable gallantry towards his female characters….

In another essay on Trollope, Mudrick returns to the novelist’s handling of women characters:

It’s no surprise to a reader of any Trollope novel that Trollope is fascinated by women in an altogether un-Victorian (“modern”) way: they aren’t gifts or rewards, they’re obstacles and temptations, sources of energy and centers of consciousness, sexual objects and subjects, emblems and agents of opportunity, they know perfectly well what the score is, they walk right in and take part and often take over-nobody who has read the Palliser novels would ever mistake Lady Glencora for a haze of sentiment or the resident doormat at Gatherum Castle….In other words they send Trollope up the wall, he can’t stop thinking about them, he’s always in love with several and ready for more, visions of sugarplums dance in his head, and there’s never the shadow of a doubt about what he really wants for Christmas.

***

Irving Howe’s essay on Trollope is from The New Republic, Feb 22, 1993. Marvin Mudrick’s writings on Trollope can be found in his book The Man in the Machine and the following issues of The Hudson Review: Autumn 1972; Winter 1983-84; Winter, 1987.

The conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza is in the news lately for a number of reasons. His book Obama’s America , which purports to show the Kenyan anti-colonialist roots of the American president’s worldview, is a bestseller. Accompanying the book is a documentary entitled 2016 which has been been a great popular success, at least as far as polemical political films are concerned.

But aside from his public activities, D’Souza’s private life is now much talked about with the news that he offended his Christian evangelical fans last month when he was spoke at a South Carolina Baptist church. When he arrived at the event, for which he was paid $10,000, D’Souza came not with his wife of two decades but with a much younger woman who was introduced as his fiancé. (This so-called fiancé graduated high school in 2002, when D’souza was 41 years old and the author of nine books).  Further investigation revealed that D’Souza  hadn’t in fact initiated divorce proceedings against his wife when he gave the talk, but did so when he started being questioned about his behavior. (Sarah Posner has an fine rundown of the controversy here).

The idea that the personal is political comes out of the political left, but it applies nicely to D’Souza since he has a history of using personal facts about his political opponents against them. Given D’Souza’s current prominence, this history is worth reviewing.

In a review that ran in the May 20, 1991 issue of The New Yorker, Louis Menand gave a good rundown of D’Souza’s background:

After his arrival in the United States, [D’Souza] attend a public high school in Arizona for a year, and then entered Dartmouth College. There, as a sophomore, he became editor-in-chief of The Dartmouth Review, an off-campus newspaper found in 1980 by students unhappy over what they regarded as Dartmouth’s liberal tendencies, and in particular its efforts to attract female, black, and Native American students. During D’Souza’s tenure at The Dartmouth Review, the paper published an interview with a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, illustrating it with a staged photograph of a black man hanging from a tree on the Dartmouth campus, and an article on affirmative action written in what was supposed to be a parody of black speech (“Now we be comin’ to Dartmut and be over our ‘fros in studies, but we still not be graduatin’ Phi Beta Kappa”); it once ran the slogan “The only good Indian is a dead Indian” on its back page; and it printed documents, stolen from the office of the Gay Student Alliance, that revealed the homosexuality of at least two Dartmouth students who did not wish it to be made public.

After graduating from Dartmouth, D’Souza went to Princeton, where he edited Prospect, an alumni magazine that had been started, by an organization called the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, in 1972, not long after the university began admitting women as undergraduates. Under D’Souza’s editorship, at a time when Princeton was trying to increase the number of women in its student body and on its senior faculty, the magazine published an article making fun of women’s studies, written by D’Souza, in which the sex life of a female undergraduate, who had decline to be interviewed by the magazine, was described without her consent.

Michael Berube has written a useful blog post amplifying the cases Menand describes and also discussing D’Sousa’s attempts at covering them up. One of the students D’Souza outed at Dartmouth contemplated suicide. Berube’s post can be found here. Berube’s also wrote an devastating review of D’Souza’s book The End of Racism which demolishes any claims D’Souza has to intellectual credibility, available here for those with access to jstor.

Nor can D’Souza’s obsession with the sex life of college students be dismissed as a callow conservative’s youthful sowing of wild oats. As Michelle Goldberg has noted, D’Souza’s latest book is rife with misogynist speculations about the sex life of Obama’s mother:

D’Souza argues that part of the reason Ann Dunham sent Obama to live with her parents in Hawaii was so she could pursue affairs with Indonesian men. “Ann’s sexual adventuring may seem a little surprising in view of the fact that she was a large woman who kept getting larger,” he writes. On the next page, he continues, “Learning about Ann’s sexual adventures in Indonesia, I realized how wrong I had been to consider Barack Obama Sr. the playboy … Ann … was the real playgirl, and despite all her reservations about power, she was using her American background and economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention of third-world men.”

D’Souza’s speculation that Ann Dunham used her “economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention” of younger men is very revealing and perhaps autobiographical. Could it be that D’Souza has used his “economic and social power to purchase the romantic attention” of a much younger woman?

A few weeks ago a friend of mine predicted that D’Souza will soon be exposed as having a sordid sexual secret. How was he so prescient? It’s a well-tested law of nature that creepy moralists always have something to hide. My biggest disappointment is that D’Souza’s dirty laundry turned out be fairly banal: bringing your mistress to church is small potatoes compared to previous conservative Christian sex scandals involving variously public washrooms, prostitutes, diapers, and similar accrourtiments. If D’Souza really wants to stay in the game, he needs a much filthier erotic imagination.

National Review makes an appeal to Latinos.

Matt Yglesias and others have raised their collective eyebrows at the fact that Jay Nordlinger of National Review Online was willing to very casually deploy the derogatory term “wetback.” As it turns out, Nordlinger is a repeat user of this word. In 2006, Nordlinger wrote that for many on the right, George W. Bush was “big-spending, wetback-lovin’ squish.” And going back away, I discovered that other National Review writers have used the term “wetback”, notably the magazine’s resident light verse writer William H. von Dreele, who wrote in 1979 that his love of Mexican tomatoes could only meant that “I’m a wetback to the core.”

Words, of course, only have meaning in the context in which they are used. On at least one occasion National Review employed “wetback” in a defensible way, in an article from February 14, 1986 by K.E. Grubbs Jr. deploring anti-immigrant sentiment titled “Just Another Wetback.” But the other uses  of “wetback” have all been as an offhand slur, the type of derogatory term you habitually use when talking about an inferior race.

I thought it might be useful to do a quick survey of ethnic slurs by the National Review crowd. This is only a cursory treatment based largely on memory, and I’m sure that one day some enterprising graduate student will do a full-dress monograph on the subject. But here’s what comes to mind:

One. In 1967, William F. Buckley, the founder of National Review, wrote an editorial attacking the African-American politician Adam Clayton Powell under the headline “The Jig is Up, Baby.” At the time many objected to the implied smear (“jig” being a slightly archaic but still offensive slur). Buckley claimed, rather unconvincingly, that he meant no offense. Buckley’s pose of innocence when it comes to ethnic slurs seems especially implausible since there are many reports that the n-word flowed freely in Buckley’s circle. In 1989, Spy magazine published this instructive account of back-stage shenanigans at National Review: “Race relations is also a popular subject. In November 1986 NR ran a cover story, ‘Blacks and the GOP: Just Called to Say I Love You,’ that outlined possible GOP strategies for attracting black voters. Presiding over the traditional post-issue recap, Buckley quipped, ‘Maybe it should have been titled, “Just Called to Say I Love You, Niggah.”’ During another editorial meeting, Jeffery Hart reflected wistfully that ‘under a real government, Bishop [Desmond] Tutu would be a cake of soap.’” Talking to the writer Wilfrid Sheed, Pat Buckley (William Buckley’s wife) once noted that an acquaintance “worked like a nigger for the Nixon.”

Two. Willmore Kendall, a key early editor, was absurdly fond of the phrase “the wogs begin at Calais.” The supposedly-witty Dreele did a variation of this as recently as 1997, writing “Calais is where the wogs begin.”

Three. In 1979, Joseph Sobran complained that if you were working on a history textbook you have to “include celebratory little passages on all the vocal pressure groups: women and minorities, or chicks and spies as you’ll wind up wanting to call them.”

Four. A 1968 James Burnham’s review of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It started by saying that “among the classic masks assumed by Jews in dealing with the zig-zag of destiny is The Clown.” Later in the review there is this very curious sentence: “Though he resented the break in his program for making it, and hated the first months, those Army experiences did seem to push his semantic nose into a certain amount of reality.” The phrase “semantic nose” really makes no sense at all unless we see it as a strained pun meant to suggest the idea of a “Semetic nose” – i.e. what Burnham is suggesting is that “the army did a good job of rubbing Podhoretz’s Jewish nose into reality.”

Five. In 1969, the anthropologist John Greenway wrote an essay for National Review arguing that “without war and raiding and scalping and rape and pillage and slavetaking the Indian was as aimless as a chiropractor without a spine. There was nothing left in life for him but idleness, petty mischief, and booze.” Greenway asked “Did the United States destroy the American Indian?” and answering his own query replied: “No, but it should have.”   When Native Americans objected to this article, Greenway wrote a response in Hollywood mock-Injun gibberish dialect, which ran like this:

“How! White brother readum chicken tracks of red brother, makeum paleface heart heavy; tears of sorrow flow all over floor of teepee like great river.

Lo, many moons ago Injun smokeum peacepipe, promise Great White Father puttum down tommyhawk, no makeum war forever more. Now me thinkum, Injun speak with forked tongue.

D. Chief Eagle he says he invade white brother own hunting ground and castum lance at white brother. What kind talk this talk? Maybe D. Chief Eagle heap big silly humbug; maybe better watch out, you thinkum? White brother maybe lift up Injun hair pretty damn smart, hey? Maybe bury hatchet in D. Chief Eagle head, he come up here steal land, steal women. Makeum damngood Injun right quick, by Chrise.

Ugh!

John Greenway

Heap Big Chief Medicine Man

The interesting thing in all this is that National Review is an intellectual magazine which putatively represents the more civilized strand of American conservative. One would hate to imagine the language used by cruder, more uncouth right-wingers.

Hilton Kramer: cover photo for The Revenge of the Philistines

Hilton Kramer, the art critic and founding editor of The New Criterion who died at age 84 earlier this week, rather enjoyed his own reputation for being fearsome and formidable. Take a look at the back cover of his essay collection The Revenge of the Philistines (1985) where Kramer presents himself to the world as a very severe killjoy, almost like a caricature of the critic as hanging judge. “Would it kill him to crack a smile?” a friend asked when he saw that photo. (The photo is pasted above).

Yet as off-putting as he could seem from afar, Kramer enjoyed many close collaborators and admirers, who are already bearing witness to his virtues. Since others writers are making the case on behalf of Kramer,  I want to enter a few dissenting notes about his writing and public presence.

Back in his salad days in the early 1950s, Kramer’s big break came from publishing in Partisan Review and he saw himself as heir to that magazine’s stance of being both politically and aesthetically engaged. Unfortunately, his politics were absurd. He started off as a cold war liberal (with perhaps a few social democratic sympathies). In the early 1960s even served as art critic for The Nation, an alliance that both he and the magazine would later regard with bemused puzzlement.  In reaction to the turmoil of the late 1960s Kramer became a very fierce and unbending neo-conservative, of the sort that prefers ideological purity to any acknowledgement of reality.

In a 1987 essay on Sidney Hook, Kramer with his characteristic obtuse overconfidence argued that Mikhail Gorbachev was a far bigger threat to the free world than Joseph Stalin had ever been. “Under Stalin, both the military power of the Soviet Union and its vast espionage apparatus were seen to constitute a danger to every non-Communist society in the world – yet Gorbachev commands a far greater war machine than any Stalin ever had at his disposal, and if recent revelations are any guide, a no less effective espionage network,” Kramer asserted. “By every significant measure, the Soviet Union is a far more formidable adversary today than it was forty years ago, and one of the things that makes it more formidable is its unbroken record of conquest in the intervening years. It already enjoys an unchallenged hegemony in more parts of the world than it did forty years ago, and the momentum of its drive to seek further conquests shows no sign of abatement.” Equally in keeping with his impervious intellectual manner was the fact that when Kramer reprinted this essay in his 1999 collection The Twilight of the Intellectuals he carefully excised this passage, displaying an appropriately Soviet willingness to re-write history.

The same perverse ideological prism that allowed Kramer to see Gorbachev as worse than Stalin also made him regard the various social movements of the 1960s (feminism, gay rights, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, environmentalism) as agents of subversion and destruction rather than attempts, however partial and flawed they might be, to build a more decent and equitable society.

Perhaps the worst part of Kramer’s worldview was his rigid gender politics, which infected his criticism with an intellectually debilitating homophobia and sexism. Kramer, of course, would have rejected any account designation of himself as a homophobe and sexist. As he once told New York magazine, “Some of the people I’ve been closest to in my life have been homosexuals.” But whatever his personal conduct might have been, as a public figure Kramer stood in steadfast opposition to the idea that gays should be open and equal citizens in a democratic polity. He did this moreover not by making any rational arguments against gay equality but by constantly and snidely assuming that the very practice of gay sex was naturally repugnant to all right-thinking people.

Derisive hooting and cheap shots were his favourite rhetorical modes, as when he referred to the gay rights movement as “orifice politics.” He once criticized Gore Vidal for writing “in praise of buggery” and on another occasion offered this account of artistic style known as camp: “the origins of camp is to be found in the subculture of homosexuality. Camp humor derives, in its essence, from the homosexual’s recognition that his condition represents a kind of joke on nature.” I hate to be pedantic about such matters but Kramer seemed to be unaware of certain biological and social facts that many clever high-school students are able to figure out these days: that not all gays engage in anal sex while many heterosexuals do and that gay relationships, like straight ones, can be cemented by love as well as by sex.  Notoriously, Kramer’s distaste for public displays of gay identity fuelled his tireless crusade against Robert Mapplethorpe late-period photography but I would argue that there is a gay-fearing subtext to virtually every essay he wrote on a gay artist or writer.

All this gay-baiting occasionally exacted a personal toil. The very conservative gay critic Bruce Bawer loved Kramer as a father figure and published in virtually every issue of The New Criterion for nearly a decade. Yet even Bawer broke with The New Criterion and Kramer when the journal published a cruelly mocking account of a gay pride march in 1993.

As for Kramer’s gender politics, it is hard to forget the absurd claim he made in a 1991 Partisan Review symposium that “orthodox feminism” dominated television, offering as evidence “the ads in which the women are all so much smarter than the men, and the general depiction of women in their social roles, in their vocational roles now determined by the feminist agenda.” About one of America’s most prominent female intellectuals Kramer wrote, “In the end, Mary McCarthy’s politics were like her sex life—promiscuous and unprincipled, more a question of opportunity than of commitment or belief.” When writing about sexually active heterosexual male intellectuals (notably McCarthy’s ex-husband Edmund Wilson) Kramer somehow avoided the word promiscuous.  Like a school yard bully, Kramer knew that slut-shaming is reserved for girls.

If Kramer’s politics were distasteful, his better self occasionally shone through in his art criticism and editorship.  He was a very gifted journalistic art critic, with the rare skill of being able to write intelligently about aesthetic matters under the constraints of newspaper deadlines and word counts. During his long tenure at the New York Times from 1965 to 1982, he elevated the paper’s cultural coverage, bringing to the daily press some of the brainy excitement of The Nation and Partisan Review.

His great strength as a critic was his forthrightness. He knew his mind and never hedged or equivocated. When describing the art he loved best – the masterpieces of high modernism created by European and American artists from 1890 to 1960 – his blustery prose achieved a hard-edged eloquence.

As unlikely as this may sound, Kramer’s distinctive prose style represented a popularization of three of his cultural heroes, the critic F.R. Leavis, Henry James, and John Milton. Leavis was the immediate precursor. Anyone who reads Kramer’s mixture of tart sarcasm and high solemnity, his barely controlled rage that is held in check and given form by Latinate abstraction, his complex, serpentine sentences that curl around the subject before starting strangulation — anyone, that is, who reads Kramer with care will hear the echo of Leavis’s prose. It was the discovery of Leavis that a modified version of Henry James’s studied involution could allow a critic to pursue an argument sedulously and forcefully while maintaining an urbane air. Kramer followed Leavis in imitating James’s syntax. To put it another way, Kramer’s stuffed shirt was a hand-me-down.
Even beyond Leavis, Kramer’s literary roots go deeper into the history of style and sensibility. Consider these typical items from the Kramer lexicon: “horrid,” “baleful,” “pernicious,” “despicable,” “malign” and “ghastly.” For an art critic, these are odd words, deliberately archaic and pointedly moralistic. Kramer’s diction is quite literally and literarily Puritan. Milton repeatedly used such words in that Puritan masterpiece Paradise Lost.

The diction of judgment and damnation moves with surprising ease from its religious home into the domain of art criticism, where souls are condemned to the eternal perdition of kitsch. Paradise Lost was not only the title but also the theme of Milton’s famous poem. A similar vision of the fall from Eden informs Kramer’s account of art history. The 1950s, for Kramer, was the paradise of high modernism when God-like artists like Picasso and Jackson Pollack walked the earth creating beauty ex nihilo. Alas, our feckless common parents (Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag) ate the apple of camp and pop art. By giving in to temptation, they doomed us all to the fallen world of post-modernism.

Kramer’s ove-rreliance on the didactic language of moral reproach hampered his critical acumen. He once defined post-modernism as “modernism with a sneer, a giggle, modernism without any animating faith in the nobility and pertinence of its cultural mandate.” By this account, post-modernism is simply a result of artists being naughty. Even if one agrees that post-modernism represents a falling off from the lofty ambitions of high modernism, Kramer’s explanation of where post-modernism comes from is almost pathetically inadequate. To really understand why modernism metamorphosized into post-modernism we need to turn to a much more theoretically-savvy analyst like Fredric Jameson, who persuasively sees post-modernism as the cultural working out of late capitalism.

Passionate and hard-working though he was, Kramer simply couldn’t measure up the genuinely front-ranking art critics of his era. He lacked Clement Greenberg’s theoretical reach, Harold Rosenberg’s phrase-making brio, Wendy Lesser’s playful ability to upturn our received ideas, or Arthur Danto’s grounding in philosophy (to name only a few distinguished contemporaries). Unlike Kramer, these critics wrote journalism that makes the same lasting claims on our attention as the best literature.

As an editor Kramer left a similarly divided legacy. The New Criterion opened shop in 1982 and for roughly a decade it offered meaty, argumentative cultural analysis month after month. While at times infuriating in its cultural politics, The New Criterion did take art seriously and gave a venue to many fine writers, notably Jed Perl, Karen Wilkin, Donald Lyons, and Bruce Bawer. It is a sign of how relatively catholic the magazine was in its early days that many of these writers didn’t share Kramer’s politics. The situation changed in the 1990s when the Cold War gave way the Culture Wars and The New Criterion became much more of a party-line right wing rag, sharing an editorial outlook that made it indistinguishable from Commentary or National Review.

In Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow gave a typically malicious portrait of the young Hilton Kramer, shown in the novel to be a shallow careerist. The real Kramer was a more interesting and admonitory figure. He started off loving art and had a talent for explaining his passion but never became the first-rate critic he could have been as he started to see paintings and novels as weapons in a cultural war against enemies that existed largely in his own mind.  The gap between what Kramer could have achieved and his paltry legacy is immense and worth mourning.

Aside from his care for his father, Dmitri lived a very active and colorful life (although also a seemingly lonely one). He was an opera singer and a race car driver, a high liver and a world traveler. One interesting biographical tidbit is that during his car racing days someone tried to kill him by sabotaging his vehicle. I believe that the mystery of this attempted murder was never solved. Dmitri Nabokov talked about this and about his father in this 1986 interview with Don Swaim.

Over at the National Post, I have a review of Modris Eksteins’ Solar Dance: Genius, Forgery and the Crisis of Truth in the Modern Age, which makes a provocative but not wholly convincing case linking the Van Gogh cult with the failure of Weimar democrcacy. You can read the review here.

An excerpt:

Although Eckstein’s encyclopedic cultural knowledge allows him to roam through many continents and decades, Solar Dance is anchored by the story of Otto Wacker, a shadowy art dealer who amazed collectors and curators of the Weimar Germany by bringing to the market a stockpile of previously unknown Van Goghs. Questioned about the provenance of his mysterious Van Gogh booty, Wacker spun out a colourful yarn about a Russian exile and an oath of secrecy.

A prototypical young man from the provinces in the tradition of Julien Sorel or Jay Gatsby, Wacker was a slippery character with no official background in art and a checkered history as a dancer and habitant of Berlin’s sexual and social underworld. An offspring of a resourceful working-class family that made its money on the outskirts of polite society, Wacker managed through sheer brazen guile to get some of the world’s top Van Gogh experts to certify to the authenticity of his collection. Even when the grand poohbahs of the gallery scene started questioning how so many Van Goghs could suddenly have appeared out of nowhere, Wacker still had his defenders even as he stood trial for his alleged fraud.

The story of Wacker’s unlikely rise and equally quick unravelling makes for compulsive reading, made especially gripping by Eksteins’ sure-handed unfolding of the narrative. A crackerjack archival researcher, Eckstein brings to life not just Wacker but the world that created him and allowed him to briefly thrive. It’s that larger world of early-20th-century European culture, wracked as it was by war and the rise of totalitarianism, that is Eksteins’ real concern. For him, both the lionization of Van Gogh and the forgeries that flourished in the art market are symptomatic of a larger cultural sickness, one that has serious implications for both the past and present.

Today’s Globe and Mail contains a column I wrote trying to explain the popularity of Newt Gingrich among GOP voters. Despite its obvious newsworthiness, the column hasn’t been posted online. So I decided to offer a slightly expanded version of the article for Sans Everything readers:

Bewitched by the Eye of Newt by Jeet Heer

For Republican voters, presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is like an ex-spouse who provokes a complex mix of longing and remorse. Even after the bitterest divorce, people often hook up with their exes, in ill-advised attempts to relive fonder days.

For many Republicans, as his last-minute surge in South Carolina shows, Mr. Gingrich is an old flame who still has that bad-boy charm. Voters remember all his faults, with the intimate knowledge of a former lover, but he has a way of melting their hearts: No other candidate is so adept at caressing GOP hot spots, such as fears of Mitt Romney being a “Massachusetts moderate” or of Barack Obama’s “socialist-secular machine.”

All this explains why Mr. Gingrich’s campaign remains hot, despite his well-known liabilities. He is either leading or a hair’s breadth behind the establishment-supported Mr. Romney in polls for the primaries being held today in the Palmetto State. Mind you, Mr. Gingrich’s numbers have been a roller-coaster ride: He soared in the spring but quickly fell back to Earth after reports about his lavish personal spending, including an account at Tiffany’s. There was another spurt of popularity in Iowa in early December that was beaten back by a barrage of negative ads. South Carolina, then, represents primary voters’ third fling with Mr. Gingrich in this long campaign season.

And frankly it is hard not to want Mr. Gingrich to stay in the race, no matter how you feel about his politics. Compared to the staid centrists and uptight puritans around him, Mr. Gingrich at least has character and colour (generally beet-red from shouting). If the Republican primaries are like a reality show, can anyone deny that Mr. Gingrich is Kim Kardashian – hyperactive, morally dubious and with an inexplicable power to hold attention?

Barack Obama ran an emotionally charged race in 2008, but he’s governed as a pragmatic technocrat, more than living up to his nickname, “No Drama Obama.” Mr. Romney looks and acts like a father from a 1950s sit-com, with a personality as square as his chin and hair. By contrast, Mr. Gingrich is a prankster and trouble-maker, an irrepressible life-force.

In classic Freudian terms, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are self-controlled super-egos, Mr. Gingrich is pure id, a creature of appetite and unchecked anti-social impulses who accepts and even embraces the darker side of human life.

He first came to national prominence in 1994, leading Congressional Republicans to victory and making his mark with remarkably intemperate rhetoric. When a woman named Susan Smith killed her two sons in 1994, he quickly linked the crime to liberalism, saying there was “a direct nexus between the general acceptance of violence” and “the pattern that the counterculture and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society began in the late ’60s.” In a 1990 memo, he urged his fellow Republicans to link the Democratic Party to these words: betray, bizarre, decay, anti-flag, anti-family, pathetic, lie, cheat, radical, sick, traitors.

The outlandish language wasn’t incidental to Mr. Gingrich’s politics. He was the first Fox News Republican, less interested in policy and governance than in scoring points loudly on TV.

That was the honeymoon period, but Mr. Gingrich’s political career unravelled in the late 1990s, due to a Congressional corruption investigation and revelations about his baroque personal life: He divorced his first wife, Jackie, in 1980 while she was battling cancer and he was carrying on an affair with Marianne Ginther, whom he married the following year. In the 1990s, even as he inveighed against Bill Clinton’s marital infidelity, Mr. Gingrich carried on another affair, with Congressional staffer Callista Bisek; meanwhile, Marianne Gingrich was grappling with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

In an interview this week on ABC News, Marianne claimed that in the late 1990s her husband suggested that they have an “open marriage” in which she’d allow him to continue to enjoy the favours of his mistress. She refused, she says, and so Callista became the third Mrs. Gingrich in 2000. (Mr. Gingrich denies the story.)
Mr. Romney comes from a church founded by the notoriously many-wived Joseph Smith, but Mormons have long since adopted the monogamous norm and the former Massachusetts governor seems to have a blissful nuclear family. If there’s a polygamist in this race, given his serial overlapping relationships, it’s Mr. Gingrich.

You’d think this might be a problem for conservatives who preach family values, but apparently not: Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin encouraged South Carolina voters to give their support to Mr. Gingrich and said this week that he is “now going to soar even more” because he’s being targeted by the mainstream media. Right-wing radio stalwart Rush Limbaugh quipped, “Everybody’s had an angry ex-spouse.” (Mr. Limbaugh has been married four times.)

Mr. Obama admires the novels of Philip Roth, but it’s Mr. Gingrich who lives his life like a Roth novel, as given to free-floating rants and illicit sexuality as a full-grown, pastier Alexander Portnoy. Roth’s famous anti-hero had a special fondness for receiving fellationes, a practice that Mr. Gingrich also allegedly enjoys (in part because it allows the wily politician room to deny he was having sex).

Much of the appeal of Rothian mischief-makers  like Alexander Portnoy and Mickey Sabbath is that they act on impulses which are widely shared but commonly repressed. They say and do things that most of us are too polite and repressed to do. Mr. Gingrich is the Republican Portnoy, not just in his sexual extravagance but in his tirades and rants against Obama as a Kenyan socialist, the mainstream media as the enemy of conservatism, and African-Americans as a people who need to be lectured on the importance of hard work.

Will Mr. Gingrich make a Saturday-night conquest, and might voters regret it Sunday morning? Ultimately, with him and the GOP, it’s a love-hate affair. In 1995, David Frum described him as “a man of ideas and a subversively high level of culture”; last year, the former George Bush adviser offered a harsher view: Mr. Gingrich’s problem, he said, “is not the infidelity. It’s the arrogance, hypocrisy, and – most horrifying to women voters – the cruelty. Anyone can dump one sick wife. Gingrich dumped two.”

But that’s the thing about Newt: Whatever he is, he’s not just anybody.