Book Reviews

By the time Pat Buchanan suggested that the United States was embroiled in a cultural war, the forces of social conservatism that he represented had already lost. No better demonstration of the truth of this exists than Buchanan’s subsequent fate: once a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination, then a third-party candidate exhibiting derisory electoral performance, and now a gadfly easily dismissed as a right-wing extremist.

The left won the cultural war because its leaders understood at an early point that success in its struggle, which sought no less than an utter change in the character of society, entailed much more than winning elections. It involved making “the long march through the institutions”—academia, the news media, entertainment and the arts—as well. The scruffy adolescents who burnt their draft cards and defecated in the filing cabinets of their college deans’ offices are now forty- and fifty-something tenured professors, journalists, and television producers. Conservatives, concentrating on how many precincts they could carry, either regarded cultural institutions as secondary to their concerns, or completely dismissed them out of philistine disregard. This is how, despite conservative electoral successes, American society remains vulgarized, sexualized, and consumerized, with Marxian economic and social analysis and Freudian psychology underlying many of its prejudices and assumptions. Few feminists may be aware of Marx’s scathing remarks about “the claptrap of the bourgeois family” in the “Communist Manifesto,” or Engels’s argument that the only difference between marriage and prostitution was the duration of the contract, but such beliefs are the commonplaces of modern feminism.

Much of The Long March is devoted to quotations from the writings of radical leftists. Some are so hysterically laughable as to defy parody. Others will inspire anger, and still others, disgust (the praise of pedophilic, sadomasochistic homosexuality quoted from Ginsberg and Burroughs is not for the weak of stomach).

This isn’t a long book, and some interesting questions are left untreated. For example, why did such “establishment” figures in academia as Kingman Brewster and Grayson Kirk supinely accept the destruction of order in their institutions? The answer has to be found in their own philosophical deficiencies. It is a matter of record that many of the academic generation previous to that of the victorious sixties radicals were themselves profoundly unconvinced of the order they should have been resolute in defending. Few of them really were convinced of the virtue of the European humanist tradition based in the blending of Judeo-Christian religious faith with classical Graeco-Roman philosophy, history, and literature. Much less did they value the system of private property, free enterprise, and the rule of law which we still designate by the epithet Marx applied to it—capitalism. Many hearkened back to beliefs expressed by their own predecessors, such figures as Dewey and Conant, that some sort of socialism was inevitable.

Finally, Kimball does not devote enough attention to how bourgeois values, the passing of which he laments, was subverted, not by radical academics, poisonous journalists, and nihilistic, vulgar entertainers, but by entrepreneurs who found it a lucrative business. The role of such cynical promoters in foisting off the meretricious pop culture with its nostalgie de la boue as fashionable, youthful rebellion has yet fully to be explored. At a level once removed from this, the modern world of corporate business and the manufactured suburban environment have created a sense of rootlessness and spiritual vacuum contributing much to the effective “proletarianization” of what once was a solid middle class.

For a more expansive view, see Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. There may be found a general etiology of the disease that is here viewed in a more specific and further advanced condition.

—Michael S. Swisher