Cutting Edges
Krauthammer, Charles
CUTTING EDGES: MAKING SENSE OF THE EIGHTIES Charles Krauthammer/Random House/$17.95 Terry Teachout Charles Krauthammer, a graceful stylist with an exceedingly sharp mind, is one of the very few...
...The New Republic was engaged in something different: a robust, self-confident defense of liberal values at home and abroad...
...On the other hand, the present-day American political (and journalistic) scene is full of people with late vocations...
...CUTTING EDGES: MAKING SENSE OF THE EIGHTIES Charles Krauthammer/Random House/$17.95 Terry Teachout Charles Krauthammer, a graceful stylist with an exceedingly sharp mind, is one of the very few journalists around whose best work really belongs between hard covers...
...The kind of criticism Charles Krauthammer is engaging in is exactly the kind of criticism conservatism needs...
...It is frustrating to find that Krauthammer calls a halt to this stimulating attack after two pages...
...His essay "Whatever Became of the American Center...
...Look at Ronald Reagan...
...Go abandoned the smelly carcass of liberalism altogether...
...This is the role which Charles Krauthammer as fledgling conservative means to play, and it is a role which he plays very effectively, especially in his longer essays on such conservative conundrums as Bitburg or the church-state problem...
...So what is going on here...
...He is sensible about AIDS, brusquely impatient with comparable worth, quick to praise baseball, even quicker to quote Chesterton...
...Treating people seriously, that is, as adults∔whatever their history, their culture, their unconscious drives∔means judging what people do and say, not what they intend or feel...
...Despite its occasional inconsistencies, Cutting Edges is one of the most pleasing books of its kind to appear in a long time...
...The problem is not with Krauthammer but with liberalism itself, which has (depending on which damage report you read) either disintegrated completely or veered sharply to the left...
...suggests that Krauthammer thinks of himself as a Scoop Jackson Democrat, but he is too smart not to realize that this would make him a dinosaur if true...
...The result, however, is a point of view which is sometimes slightly elusive-even for a New Republic editor...
...Terry Teachout is an assistant editor of Harper's and a regular contributor to National Review and High Fidelity...
...Seeing as how Krauthammer is no stranger to mid-life career changes, perhaps we can hope that he will eventually give up on the immortal soul of the Democratic party and make like Jeane Kirkpatrick...
...40 though it is hard to triangulate on the philosophical position that serves as underpinning for all of these opinions, one does not doubt for a moment that there is such a position...
...It's a shame that Krauthammer hasn't discovered a late vocation and...
...This perspective is clearly a function of diverse experience, his own having included everything from the practice of psychiatry to a tour of duty as speechwriter for Walter Mondale...
...Indeed, Krauthammer's dilemma strongly is reminiscent of the long intellectual journey of Lionel Trilling, who in his 1949 preface to The Liberal Imagination argued eloquently for a more rigorous in-house criticism of liberalism...
...Needless to say, this is an equally cogent description of the current state of conservatism, which is much in need of commentators who are more interested in playing the kind of role Trilling here outlines than in writing yet another snappy essay on why liberalism is in such lovely disarray...
...It is sobering to read an essay like "One Cheer for Capitalism," in which Krauthammer expresses with admirable force his reservations about an economic system which "welcomes, indeed invites, foolish bankers and wheeler-dealers to the market" and "randomly visits misery on selected groups...
...It remains politically hot, but it is intellectually spent...
...It is quite true that Krauthammer, in a well-regulated society, would be immediately recognized as the kind of liberal you can do business with, the kind who is still well within the consensus and not lost in the lunatic fringe, the kind who agrees with you on most of the eternal verities...
...One reason for the exhaustion is that the abortion issue has been∔and will be∔decided not by the popular branches of government, Congress or the President, but by the Supreme Court, our system's concession to aristocracy...
...There is not the slightest tinge of posturing in his writing: none of the self-conscious hard-nosed tough-minded muscular liberalism that so many of his contemporaries are prone to affect, none of the ludicrous moues with which any number of New Republic types diffidently reject the conservative label...
...Still, what we do have is very satisfactory and exceptionally promising...
...Instead we get a tantalizing, often brilliant cornucopia of occasional journalism in which there is a bit too much hit-and-run and not nearly enough sustained argument...
...Some of the hit-and-run jobs reprinted here are quite wonderful...
...Whether you're pro-life or pro-choice, it would be hard to better this elegant thumbnail sketch of the status quo...
...We cannot very well set about to contrive opponents who will do us the service of forcing us to become more intelligent, who will require us to keep our ideas from becoming stale, habitual, and inert...
...In the course of a hasty Washington Post column on abortion, for example, Krauthammer tosses off the following paragraph: A curious thing has happened to the abortion debate...
...The only problem with this fight is, of course, that nobody else is in the ring...
...Doctoring taught me about real suffering, which I can now readily distinguish from the more literary forms of anguish...
...For the definitive modern case against atheism, I suggest a radically modern experience: watch a Soviet funeral...
...Krauthammer may be tolerant of ambiguity, but he is by no means limply inconsistent...
...Uniquely among intellectual organs, The New Republic was trying to rescue liberalism from its drift toward defeatist isolationism, and from its growing confusion as to American purpose...
...Krauthammer is sound as a bell on the need for making firm moral distinctions...
...When the outcome of a struggle bears little relation to public opinion or practical politics, debate becomes increasingly autistic...
...Krauthammer is clear in his own mind on what he got out of all this: Medicine taught me science, a crucial form of literacy without which one misses the singularity of this century...
...Acting accordingly, Random House has just brought out Krauthammer's first book, a collection of essays and articles called Cutting Edges: Making Sense of the Eighties...
...But herein lies the trouble...
...A senior editor at the New Republic and the undisputed star of the essay slot at Time, Krauthammer has the kind of perspective not often seen in younger writers...
...A fight I wanted to join, and so (after a detour or two) I joined The New Republic...
...In fact, though Krauthammer is not much given to autobiography, the introduction to Cutting Edges contains a surprisingly personal statement of principle that clears almost everything up: I went to The New Republic . . . engaged in a struggle for the soul of the Democratic party...
...No jokes, please...
...He dismisses with crisp contempt such disparate but philosophically identical phenomena as Grenada's New Jewel Movement and Jane Fonda's Workout Book...
...Good as it is, this book suffers from a single non-ideological flaw: The best things in it are altogether too fine to keep company with the shorter newspaper columns and New Republic editorials that Krauthammer has pressed into service as high-class filler...
...This we will have to do for ourselves...
...All are full of the kind of startlingly apposite observations that cry out for leisuredamplification...
...And life in the shadow-and-mirror-world of psychiatry cured me finally of a young man's need for hardness to truth...
...There's no hurry...
...I do it all the time...
...On the other hand, he distrusts capitalism, accepts the inevitability of legalized abortion, and is highly uncomfortable with the social agenda of the New Right and the Moral Majority...
...If Random House had held off for another couple of years before bringing out Krauthammer's first book, we could have had an entire volume of carefully considered full-length essays focusing on the underlying problems of the new political orthodoxy...
...Everyone seems to know both sides of the argument backward and forward...
...It has for some time seemed to me that a criticism which has at heart the interests of liberalism might find its most useful work not in confirming liberalism in its sense of general Tightness but rather in putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time...
...Rumor has it that he voted for Ronald Reagan in 1984...
Vol. 18 • November 1985 • No. 11
