Ding, Dong, the Cultural Witch Hunt Is Dead
The New York Times Magazine
February 24, 2002
By FRANK RICH
These days we look back at
the projectile name-calling
and nonstop sexual revelations
that defined Washington's
all-consuming culture war of the
1990's and ask: What in hell was
that all about? Like the reigning
sitcom of the time, ''Seinfeld,'' it
may have been about nothing, or
at least very little -- and with a
Lilliputian cast of characters to
match. In retrospect, the
archetypal figure of 90's
Washington may not have been
one of its many aspiring
Woodwards and Bernsteins or a
great man or woman of state
(were there any?) who will some
day get the David McCullough
treatment, but a
gossip-mongering schlemiel who
is already halfway to being an
answer on ''Jeopardy.''
David Brock, you may recall, was the bullying reporter for
the late, not-so-great American Spectator who labeled
Anita Hill "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" and later
broke Troopergate, the pioneering expose (much of it
culled from clandestinely paid "sources") into Bill
Clinton's Arkansas Kama Sutra. In his latest incarnation,
Brock is turning expiation for these and other past sins
into a second career that has played out like a striptease
over the past few years. He set out on this path in 1997 by
writing an article for Esquire, "Confessions of a
Right-Wing Hit Man," in which he started to recant "The
Real Anita Hill," his best-selling and often fictionalized
hatchet job that duped many reviewers (including one at
The New York Times) with its lavishly footnoted gossip,
half-truths and slander. Next up is a new book, a memoir
titled "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an
Ex-Conservative," that goes further still by serving as a
mea culpa for an entire era, not just himself. In it, he not
only takes back the falsifications in his reportage on Hill,
Clarence Thomas and the Clintons (among others) but
even offers an apologia for the over-the-top excesses of his
Esquire apologia, which was accompanied by a photo of
Brock in full martyr monty, lashed to a tree, his chest
bared, eager to be burned at a stake.
Though I've had my own journalistic battles with Brock,
I've never met him. He may be best observed at a distance.
He calls his new memoir a ''terrible book'' in its very first
sentence, but he's wrong about that as he has been about
so much else during his bizarre, chameleonlike career.
His book is terrible only in the sense that it takes us back
to a poisonous time. Whatever critics may make of it when
it's published next month, it may be a key document for
historians seeking to understand the ethos of the
incoherent 90's. It is also easier to warm up to than the
rest of the Brock canon, much of which was written in
spittle-spewing blind rage.
The Brock of ''Blinded by the Right'' is instead
humorously circumspect. There's an Albert
Brooks-in-Broadcast News'' moment when he describes
how he tried, as a rising young conservative talking head,
to imitate the ''magnificent half-recline'' of William F.
Buckley's television posture only to ''nearly fall off my
chair.'' To ingratiate himself with a conservative elite
presided over by the likes of Arnaud de Borchgrave, a
self-styled journalistic grandee in the toadying employ of
the Rev. Sun Myung Moon at The Washington Times,
Brock writes of endeavoring ''to look like an old fogy in
training, donning a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses and,
ludicrously, puffing on a pipe and occasionally even
carrying a walking stick.'' A Commentary action figure, in
other words.
Brock's publisher has billed Brock's confession as a
memoir ''in the tradition of Arthur Koestler's 'God That
Failed,''' but what makes the book an apt postscript to the
dim decade it describes is how little it has in common with
Koestler's disavowal of Communism, or Whittaker
Chambers's ''Witness,'' or the rest of the vast modern
literature of ideological about-face. Ideology, like
goodness, had little to do with the politics of the 1990's.
The cold war was over, Clinton embraced a centrism that
was echt Rockefeller Republican, prosperity was on the
march and nothing serious seemed at stake (or so we
thought at the time). Brock's book can't recount an
ideological journey because there's little evidence he was
a committed conservative in the first place -- or that many
of his ambitious allies were, either -- any more than he (or
the Clintonistas he now aligns himself with) is a
committed liberal now. And that's the point.
His story exemplifies a decade of post-ideological drift and
spitball politics in Washington: a cynical, highly pragmatic
struggle over power more than ideas that opened with the
Thomas-Hill confrontation of 1991, reached its climax with
the impeachment drive and now seems to have been
interred with so much else in the rubble of Sept. 11.
It was a time of take-no-prisoners mudslinging, in which the
Republican right, with no Communists to unmask, found
a new kind of enemy within that it tried to bring down by
means of a disingenuously holier-than-thou moral
crusade fueled by a gossip machine of which Brock was an
early and influential cog. The hottest partisan battles
revolved around Long Dong Silver and Paula Jones, not
Stalin
For the right, the principal means of battle was a kind of
cultural profiling that slick (and entirely secular) political
operatives adapted from their allies in the religious right.
If Anita Hill could be painted as nutty and slutty, if the
Democratic leader Tom Foley could be called gay (even if
he wasn't) and if Bill Clinton could be branded as a
pot-smoking libertine from Day 1 of his presidency, then
liberals in general and Democrats in particular could be
dubbed, as Newt Gingrich would have it, ''the enemy of
normal Americans,'' responsible for every moral breach in
the nation. In Gingrich's formulation, ''The left-wing
Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total
exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness.'' On his
way to becoming speaker of the House, he even
grandfathered Susan Smith's 1994 drowning of her two
children in South Carolina into 60's hedonism, as an
example of the ''pattern'' of ''the counterculture and
Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.''
There wasn't much intellectual content to this debased
and often histrionic line of cultural attack; it was to a
serious debate over values what McCarthyism was to
anti-Communism. But the triumph of Reaganism and the
passing of its architects from the front lines left a vacuum
that had to be filled. As Brock explains: ''Political
movements arise from the spadework of intellectuals, not
politicians. The older generation of conservative
intellectuals who had framed the political culture that
brought Reagan to power and sustained his
administration -- the Norman Podhoretzes, the Charles
Murrays, the theorists of supply-side economics at the
Wall Street Journal editorial page -- were spent. Whatever
one thought of their ideas, they were serious thinkers,
and there was no one of their caliber to replace them.''
Their noisiest successors, the prominent younger
conservatives of Brock's Washington generation, had little
aspiration to do any intellectual heavy lifting of the sort
once conducted by a Buckley or Irving Kristol, whether in
book form or in the pages of small-circulation journals like
The Public Interest. Rather than fight (or work hard) in
the trenches of the academy whose political correctness
they professed to loathe, the new conservatives preferred
to become what might be called welfare deans; they
collected academic-sounding titles that required
intellectual output in almost inverse proportion to their
financing by right-wing foundations. A Richard Mellon
Scaife-financed talk-show bloviator and cut-and-paste
writer like William Bennett, rather than a practicing,
untelegenic intellectual like James Q. Wilson, was the
role model. Even Brock, with no advanced degrees or
particular expertise in the subject, was early in his career
christened John M. Olin Fellow in Congressional Studies
at the Heritage Foundation. The main aspiration of his
Washington pack was to churn out quick, slashing
character assassinations or screeds (for which ''The Real
Anita Hill'' and Rush Limbaugh's ''Way Things Ought to
Be'' became the ur-texts) and to achieve celebrity in the
new medium of cable TV news, a phenomenon whose
rapid growth in the 90's, like that of the Drudge-fueled
Internet, paralleled the rise of the mudslinging right and
was essential to the dissemination of unsubstantiated
dirt.
By his own account, Brock has lied so often that a reader
can't take on faith some of the juicier newsbreaks from
the impeachment era in his book, including his portrayal
of the murky role supposedly played by Theodore Olson,
now the Bush administration's solicitor general, in the
doomed ''Arkansas Project,'' in which The American
Spectator spent millions of Scaife's dollars to try to link
the Clintons to any and every sexual shenanigan, drug
scheme and murder that ever happened within hailing
distance of Little Rock. What makes Brock's tale effective
is his insider's portrait of a political slime operation, much
of it comic from even this slight historical remove, about
which the facts already exist for the most part on the
public record -- and sometimes on the legal record as well.
(For what it's worth, his accounts of events in which I
figured are accurate.)
The literary antecedent for ''Blinded by the Right'' is less
''The God That Failed'' than Julia Phillips's scorched-earth
memoir of Hollywood, ''You'll Never Eat Lunch in This
Town Again.'' But Brock, unlike Phillips, can write, and he
seems to have expelled much of the bile that marked his
past writing. In his portrayal, there are some honorable
and principled conservatives who cross his path -- John
O'Sullivan of The National Review (which had the guts to
pan ''The Real Anita Hill''), Tod Lindberg of The
Washington Times, the writer Christopher Caldwell -- and
there's a humanity to some (though not all) of the
gargoyles and lunatics who outnumber them. R. Emmett
Tyrrell Jr., the editor who exploited Brock's ''investigative
journalism'' to increase exponentially The American
Spectator's circulation and then overreached to the point
of losing his magazine altogether, is such a colorful,
self-destructive and at times generous eccentric that it's
hard to hate him even as he plays editorial muse to all the
Clinton-haters. He's a nut, perhaps, but with a soft
Dickensian center.
What makes history that seemed ugly at the time play like
farce now is the almost unending hypocrisy of so many of
Brock's circle in journalism and politics. Those who led
the charge against the morality of Anita Hill, Bill Clinton
and the rest were almost to a man and woman living in
glasshouses of their own, whether pursuing sex, alcohol,
abortion or some combination thereof. The checkered
''family values'' of the likes of Gingrich, Scaife, Dan
Burton, Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston and The Wall Street
Journal's anti-Clinton polemicist John Fund, among
many others, are now part of the historical record.
Clarence Thomas's history of regularly renting
pornography in the 1980's -- documented by the Wall
Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson
(Abramson is now the Washington bureau chief of The
Times) in their book ''Strange Justice'' -- also stands
virtually unchallenged, now that Brock has withdrawn his
previous rebuttal of it. It's particularly hilarious that The
Washington Times was the paper of record (and of
frequent employment) for this whole pious crowd, given
that its owner, Moon, with his mass weddings of mostly
strangers, probably took more direct action to undermine
the institution of marriage in America than any single
person in the 20th century, the Gabor sisters included.
For a political movement that wanted to police sexual
''lifestyles'' and was pathologically obsessed with trying to
find evidence that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, the New
Right of the 90's was, in Brock's account, nearly as gay as
a soiree in Fire Island Pines. Even before Brock publicly
acknowledged his own homosexuality at the height of his
fame, he tapped into a Washington subculture of closeted
conservatives that seemed to hold forth everywhere from
The American Spectator to the closest circles around
Gingrich and Kenneth Starr.
There is, of course, a long
history of usually closeted gay men, some but not all of
them public homophobes, on the American right,
including Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover and such top
Reagan-era operatives as Terry Dolan, Marvin Liebman
and even Jesse Helms's political consultant, Arthur
Finkelstein. The same goes for such intellectual patron
saints of conservatism as Chambers and Allan Bloom. But
that's just the short list. When Brock revealed his
homosexuality, he expected to be hit with bigotry from his
publicly antigay allies, but to his surprise was at first
more often hit on instead. At a party at his Georgetown
home, ''the house that Anita Hill built,'' he had to eject a
conservative columnist ''after he pushed me onto a bed,
into a pile of coats, and tried to stick his tongue down my
throat.'' There is also, among others, ''the closeted
pro-impeachment Republican congressman, who had
pursued me drunkenly through a black-tie Washington
dinner offering a flower he had plucked from a bud vase,
condemning Clinton for demeaning his office.'' It all plays
like slapstick out of ''The Birdcage.''
Why would a conservative movement so obsessed with
vilifying homosexuality as a subversive ''lifestyle'' contain
so many homosexuals? Looking at his own past, Brock
writes, ''The doctrinaire absolutism, the thunderous
extremism, the wildness of expression -- these qualities
were not uncommon among other closeted right-wing
homosexuals I had known. . . . At the bottom of my rage
there must have been a loathing not of liberals, but of
myself. By giving voice to their hatred of Anita Hill, I was
trying to force the conservatives to love a faggot whether
they liked it or not.'' Certainly after reading Brock's
account, you're left feeling that too many of those
protesting about homosexuality are protesting too much --
not necessarily because they're gay themselves in the
manner of the cliched militaristic neighbor of ''American
Beauty'' but either because they may be angry to discover
that their children are (as in the case of Phyllis Schlafly)
or, most conventionally, because they may be politically
jealous of the clout of the tight-knit cliques of gays on
their own team. (The numerous gays in ''the seniormost
ranks of the Reagan administration called themselves the
'laissez fairies,''' writes Brock.) A similarly self-destructive
overcompensation -- the eternal Jimmy Swaggart
syndrome -- seemed to be at work among the straight
right-wing WOMANIZERS, like Gingrich, who led the charge
against Democratic hedonism while engaging in their
own.
What's clear now is that David Brock's mea culpa for this
era may also be its epitaph. The holier-than-thou cultural
profiling used by Gingrich, Brock and their peers in the
Hill-Thomas-Clinton era is in serious decline as a political
tool. The proximate causes of its demise can be found in
the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. The televised
testimony by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the effect
that America was attacked in part because it gives safe
harbor to ''the pagans and the abortionists and the gays
and the lesbians'' was renounced by virtually the entire
country, up to and including Rush Limbaugh and
President Bush. Cultural profiling took an equally
dramatic hit when the first leader to emerge in the
postattack aftermath proved to be a walking compendium
of the attributes that horrified the lifestyle police of the
Clinton years: Rudolph Giuliani, a married man who
publicly abandoned his wife for a mistress and chose to
live in the household of a gay couple. He was a
Republican, besides. So was one of the attack's first
heroes -- Mark Bingham, a gay rugby player believed to be
one of those who fought the hijackers for control of Flight
93 before it crashed in Pennsylvania. Suddenly the
pre-Sept. 11 game of ''gotcha'' with Gary Condit (another
hypocrite who piously supported the impeachment
inquiry) seemed to belong to a vanished age.
In the months since the attack on America there have
been some efforts on what remains of the Brockian right
to revive the old culture wars. The biggest push has been
to turn John Walker Lindh into an exemplar of the 60's,
much as Gingrich did with Susan Smith. But as the effort
to pin Smith's murders on the left failed -- it later turned
out that she was the stepdaughter of a Christian Coalition
official (and Pat Robertson-for-president supporter) who
had molested her from age 15 -- so the
pin-Lindh-on-liberals effort has waned.
The case was most prominently laid out on The Wall
Street Journal editorial page, a knee-jerk home to
cultural profiling of this sort, by the conservative Hoover
Institution scholar Shelby Steele, who said the American
Taliban recruit exemplified ''a certain cultural liberalism''
to be found in Northern California -- never mind that
Steele also lives there (the Hoover Institution is at
Stanford University), as did a hero like Flight 93's Mark
Bingham (who was from San Francisco). To drive his point
home, Steele also invoked Cornel West (though he
misspelled his name) and noted that Lindh was a child of
divorce, was named after John Lennon, had read ''The
Autobiography of Malcolm X'' and went to an alternative
school. Unfortunately, to make his case, Steele had to
glide by the reality that the anti-American creed of the
Taliban was as far removed from San Francisco liberalism
as one could imagine -- an antiwoman, antigay
fundamentalist sect. Steele also had to ignore the fact that
Lindh had spent the first and more formative half of his
childhood not in Marin County but in Takoma Park, Md.,
a Washington suburb, where he and his family were then
regular Catholic churchgoers.
It shows the arbitrariness of Steele's case that he would
probably have had an easier time arguing that
Catholicism turns Americans into traitors -- since at least
he'd have another example to go with Lindh in Robert
Hanssen, the F.B.I. mole who was one of the most effective
spies in American history and a rigorous member of the
conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei. But of course that
argument would have been as silly as the one Steele did
make. Post-Sept. 11, choosing cultural profiling as a
political weapon can lead to incoherence, if not absurdity.
In a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, for instance,
one article tried to pin Lindh's defection to the Taliban on
the alleged homosexuality of his father (while carefully
ignoring the boy's Catholic background) while another
tried earnestly to examine Hanssen's defection to the
Soviet Union by focusing on his Catholicism.
Most Americans believe that Lindh and Hanssen are each
sui generis -- anomalous case studies that cannot be
pinned on any particular cultural influence, family
constellation, religion or sexual history. That's why the
efforts of the last practitioners of 90's cultural profiling fall
flat. Most Americans also know by now that for better or
worse both Thomas and Bill Clinton are going to be
judged by history for what they did in their official
capacities, not for what porn they watched or enacted.
This isn't to say that witch hunts ever become extinct in
American politics; they only go into remission. But in the
meantime, we're so removed from the political fisticuffs
that made a star out of David Brock that the landscape is
at times unrecognizable. As you watch those on the right
look the other way at Rudy Giuliani's sex life, it almost
seems as if they are flirting with what they used to hate
most -- touchy-feely cultural relativism. You know the
ground has shifted when the one prominent legal lion to
feel ''empathy and sympathy'' for John Walker Lindh --
and to argue that he be treated not as ''a Benedict
Arnold'' but as a ''young kid with misplaced idealism'' -- is
Kenneth Starr.
Frank Rich is a columnist for The Times and a senior
writer for the magazine.
nytimes.com |
