Month: November 2011

The Occupy Crackdowns: Why Naomi Wolf Got It Wrong

On Friday, Naomi Wolf made the attention-grabbing accusation in the Guardian that federal officials were involved in, indeed ordered, the violent crackdowns against Occupy Wall Street protesters that we’ve been seeing across the country these past few weeks. Congressional overseers, with the blessing of the White House, told the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] to authorise mayors to order their police forces – pumped up with millions of dollars of hardware and training from the DHS – to make war on peaceful citizens. The next day, Joshua Holland debunked Wolf’s claims on Alternet. I don’t have anything to add to Holland’s excellent critique. Wolf gets her facts wrong, and he shows it. To my mind, though, the problem is bigger […]

Shop Talk with John Podhoretz

While the shit was hitting the fan at Occupy Wall Street this morning, with reporters getting beaten and writers like Keith Gessen and Sarah Leonard getting arrested, I was fighting the small fight with John Podhoretz, son of Norman, on Twitter.  (D.G Myers, who kicked the whole thing off, is a blogger at Commentary.) “ @OccupyWriters—getting arrested for career advancement! RT @jpodhoretz: @alorentzen @nplusonemag I smell GQ first-person article! D G Myers November 17, 2011 12:21:21 PM EST ReplyRetweet “ @myers_dg @OccupyWriters @jpodhoretz @alorentzen @nplusonemag There are less honorable paths to career advancement. Nepotism comes to mind. corey robin November 17, 2011 1:32:09 PM EST ReplyRetweet “ @CoreyRobin How’s your book doing? Violently well? John Podhoretz November 17, 2011 1:43:28 […]

More News of the Book

Our last update of news about the book was October 26. Seemed like it was time for another one. As they say on Glee, here’s what you missed. Reviews Alan Wolfe had this to say in The New Republic: I confess to being one of those who likes to divide conservatives into their parts as opposed to treating them as a whole. Robin makes a vigorous case that I am wrong, and I am tempted by his analysis….Robin is an engaging writer, and just the kind of broad-ranging public intellectual all too often missing in academic political science. Now I too can invoke that hoary cliche “even The New Republic,” albeit to different purposes. John Kampfner was less enthusiastic in […]

I’ll be on C-SPAN this weekend

Just a quick heads-up to say that I’m going to be on Book-TV/C-SPAN 2 this weekend.  S.E. Cupp, who’s a conservative journalist and television commentator, interviews me about The Reactionary Mind. Unlike many interviewers, Cupp actually read the book (I saw all the yellow post-it’s on her copy). And we have a fun Marshall McLuhan/Annie Hall moment, in which Cupp emails Phyllis Schlafly to ask her what she thinks about my argument about Schlafly; the grande dame of the right replies!  The show will be broadcast four times: Saturday, November 12, 10 pm Sunday, November 13, 9 pm Monday, November 14, 2 am Monday, November 14, 3 am Check it out and let me know what you think.  In the […]

Whenever I read a professional Chomsky-basher…

Whenever I read the work of a professional Chomsky-basher*—you know, the person whose passport to mainstream respectability is stamped with a Chomsky-is-the-most-dastardly-person-on-the-face-of-the-earth visa—or someone who attacks anarchists or leftists in order to maintain his or her liberal street cred, I’m reminded of this passage from Hannah Arendt: In the following chapter, Karl Marx will be criticized. This is unfortunate at a time when so many writers who once made their living by explicit or tacit borrowing from the great wealth of Marxian ideas and insights have decided to become professional anti-Marxists, in the process of which one of them even discovered that Karl Marx himself was unable to make a living, forgetting for the moment the generations of authors whom […]

When the Right Hand Doesn’t Know What the Right Hand is Doing

So the editors at The American Conservative have finally decided to liberate that review of my book from their firewall.  You’ll recall that the reviewer—John Derbyshire, who’s a contributing editor at National Review—didn’t like the book at all.  But here’s one concession he does make to it: On the positive side, The Reactionary Mind at least does not snarl or sputter. It is a thoughtful, even-tempered sort of book. The old maid tendency that dominates liberal polemic in the U.S.—the shrieking, clutching at skirts, and jumping up on kitchen chairs that one gets from a Joe Nocera, a Maureen Dowd, or a Keith Olbermann—is quite absent. For this relief much thanks. Nor is the book as immaculately humor-free as most […]

From the American Slaveholders to the Nazis…

From my dialogue with Daniel Larison over at The New Inquiry: In the American context, there is a precedent for the conservative rush to empire, which you suggest is mostly a creation of the Cold War. And that is the slaveholders. But the slaveholders developed a fascinating vision of an imperial political economy, which would be centered around the Mississippi and spread out from there to the Caribbean Basin and beyond. It would be centered on slave labor, and it was thought to be a different kind of imperialism. And though I’ve never seen anyone discuss this, it strikes me that there are fascinating parallels to be drawn between their vision of a slave empire, based on land, and the […]

In Which I Talk to a Conservative about His Reactionary Mind

Daniel Larison is just about one of the smartest conservatives around. He’s a writer and editor at The American Conservative*, has got a PhD from the University of Chicago and a sensibility that hearkens back to Peter Vierick and the Southern Agrarians: anti-imperial, leery of corporate capitalism, regionalist, and fiercely independent. He’s one of the most scathing critics of the Republican Party and contemporary conservatism around, and he’s not afraid to call people out on their foolishness, even when they’re (putatively) on his side. Yet he still manages to get high praise from his peers on the right. So, naturally, when The New Inquiry—an online venture described by Jonathan Lethem as “evidence of book culture’s lastingly bright future“—offered to put […]

Our Negroes and Theirs: When Ann Coulter Tells the Truth, It’s Worth Listening to Her

Everyone’s going after Anne Coulter—and rightly so—for her racist comments yesterday on the “Hannity” show. Asked why liberals and Democrats are up in arms over the sexual harassment allegations that have been leveled against GOP candidate Herman Cain, Coulter said: Our blacks are so much better than their blacks.  To become a black Republican, you don’t just roll into it. You’re not going with the flow… That “our blacks” is especially gruesome. Sounds like the proprietary claim a fancy housewife would make, ca. 1960 (or 1860), about her black maid: “my girl” or something like that. But if you can suspend disbelief—or disgust— for a minute, there’s something in what Coulter is saying that’s worth paying attention to for it […]