Left-wing snobs

...To Lapham, the American system is "Democracyland," "Versailles on the Potomac...

...the poor man really has a stake in the country...

...So the court remains securely in place...

...Instead of continuing to make grubby distinctions and, inevitably, compromises about what goes on in the room, one can rise to the ceiling, look down on the stupidities of our age, and comment witheringly...

...they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government...

...All memoirs are dishonest in as much as they are written for revenge, but Palimpsest puts its own spin on mendacity...

...And since contempt is so much a matter of style, this is a trade-off Vidal couldn't afford...

...They can announce that the real conversation is actually happening on another floor, in departmental offices and professional journals...

...It's understandable as a symptom of atrophy, a style suited to a political tendency that has been marginal for almost three decades, but it should be left to those writers who really do have a hatred of progress...

...In his essays, and more explicitly in his memoir, there are two American golden ages: the pre-expansionist early republic, 1787-1803...

...Vidal's imaginative vision, capable of great subtlety and precision when focused on 1776 or 1886, grows increasingly blurred and unable to make distinctions the nearer it comes to 1996...

...The second ended with McCarthy, Korea, and Vidal's fall from grace due to the homoeroticism of his third novel, The City and the Pillar...

...Gore Vidal's essays, collected a few years ago in United States, together with his 1995 memoir Palimpsest show the corrosions of political contempt at work on an elegant and learned mind...

...Between Camelot and Weltschmerz there is a straight line of privilege...

...I am past all serious desire for anything—at the moment, anyway...

...We should have had better from writers like Vidal...

...But the letter was never published, and Howells probably didn't send it...

...The range of his interests is remarkable, and so is his knack for creating vivid little narratives that go to the heart of the moral and psychological condition of historical figures...

...Fascism was taking off," he writes in Palimpsest, "never to come to earth again, though it is, occasionally, put briefly on hold...

...At the height of Watergate he wrote in the New Statesman, "I do not think that the American system in its present state of decadence is worth preserving," which was exactly the wrong conclusion to have drawn from Nixon's crimes...

...A few of our writers have written on public themes," Vidal wrote in one of his later essays [U.S.], unconsciously describing his own fate, "but as they were not taken seriously, they have ended by not taking themselves seriously, at least as citizens of a republic...

...Vidal) who give high-minded after-dinner speeches and tremble at any democratic noise out on the street...

...Neglect is harder to take than defeat, and one of its worst effects is to trivialize...

...Two Lapham columns from 1994, one on foreign and one on domestic policy, show the inadequacy of his style for answering real questions like the one that confronted William Dean Howells, who cared passionately and had something to lose...

...and, perhaps not coincidentally, it was at this time that his political thought emerged, in an essay called "Homage to Daniel Shays," under the influence of the sociologist G. William Domhoff, with the idea that there is only one party in American politics, the Property party, controlled by a plutocratic elite, which beguiles the public every four years by inventing issues to distract it from the robbery taking place...

...Mencken was the great American example of the twentieth century...

...Like Vidal, Lapham is always a reluctant participant, though unlike Vidal he keeps most of his thoughts to himself until he sits down to write one of his "Notebooks" (in which other dinner guests appear usually without names and always without sexual details...

...When health care reform was losing in Congress, and intellectuals might have made a difference in rallying public opinion against the insurance companies, he devoted a column to praising Seneca's stoicism and ridiculing "the belief that death is a mistake and disease an accident distinctly unAmerican" [Hotel...

...Then, "by the time the waiters replaced the grilled rockfish with the roast pheasant" or"during the interval between the champagne and the cassis sorbet" [Hotel] or "by the time of the lemon sorbet," he realizes (once again) that America has become a democracy of, by, and for the rich...

...Belief in something that isn't likely to happen in your lifetime eventually turns into negation of everything that is...

...The context for this quotation is an odd one, because Lapham himself stands in the lineage of Vidal, being wealthy, on intimate terms with the court, and drily contemptuous of the sham democracy America has become since Reagan and maybe Kennedy...

...By 1972 he had installed himself in a villa on the southern Italian coast...

...World disaster is always comforting to contemplate if not to undergo . . . . I do not want anything...

...It makes real, incremental progress impossible...

...In Palimpsest he portrays his role at Camelot as that of an unwilling but coveted dinner guest who speaks witticism to power and then leaves...

...The obvious reply that this doesn't come well from a man with the best doctors at his disposal is only a retort, not an argument...

...For those of us who don't get invited to State Department dinners, Lapham is our food-taster and spy at conclaves of the elite, letting us know through the back door that they are far more hollow and corrupt than we ever imagined, before returning in time for the marinated shrimp...

...Some of his columns were collected last year in Hotel America: Scenes in the Lobby of the Fin-de-Siêcle, having already been recycled in The Wish for Kings: Democracy at Bay (1993...

...In praise of looking forward, it gazes back...

...He could have written "Fascism was taking off' and left it at that...

...Contempt is knowing: it implies a reserve of wide and hard experience (and much better to be thought a snob than a fool...

...A typical column in Harper's starts with Lapham happening to "find myself" at a luncheon on the Upper East Side or a high-level policy conference in Washington...

...This is having it both ways on a grand and nasty scale: namedropping Jack and Jackie as intimates (no one, not even Vidal's hated mother, appears on as many pages of this memoir as JFK) while seeing straight through the Kennedy mystique...

...how in 1953 in the Chelsea Hotel he "fucked" Jack Kerouac, who then borrowed a dollar for subway fare that he never paid back)—all the while assuring us that he has never felt either sexual or professional jealousy, nor any interest in the sex lives of real people...

...The first ended with the Louisiana Purchase and what Vidal calls "Jefferson II...

...But analytically it is worthless...

...Yet they keep inviting him, and he keeps going, and his store of anecdotal evidence keeps growing...

...What starts as analysis ends as a mental habit FALL • 1996 • 127 Books and a condition of soul—sweet but depressing, like too much liqueur...

...Vidal grew up in Washington, D.C., and spent the first half of his life (the period covered by Palimpsest) close to politics and political figures: first his grandfather, later the Kennedys...

...Less known, though, is the effect on those faculties of going years without a chance that your ideas might be realized, of never having to ask yourself what you would do in such-and-such a situation if you had the power to do something...

...Gore Vidal, PALIMPSEST: A MEMOIR (Random House, 1995...

...Above all, contempt seems irrefutable, since human beings more often than not act out of selfish motives and politics is largely a record of folly and corruption...

...Vidal's political style depends on there being nothing at stake...

...When Lapham sketches his positive vision of democracy, like Vidal he has to wish away history, the present, and social possibility in favor of a very unironic idea of individual freedom, this one a blend of Jefferson, Huck, and Gatsby: "We are a nation of parvenus, all bound to the hopes of tomorrow, or next week, or next year . . . . If America is about nothing else, it is about the invention of the self...

...How many on the left—on either side—combine his literary skills and historical knowledge with a willingness to enter the political fray, even run for office (maybe not the best use of intellectuals, but admirable...

...There is another approach, in some ways the most attractive one...

...It is clear: instead of having to make new judgments every day, contempt already knows what it thinks about everything...

...Gore Vidal, UNITED STATES: ESSAYS 19521992 (Random House, 1993...

...Debates at school and around the family dinner table concerned 'real,' not theoretic, politics: Do we go to war or not...

...The rich have gotten away with murder, politics is soaked in money, journalists are 126 • DISSENT Books self-satisfied and cozy with power...

...All of its institutional players—politicians, businessmen, think-tankers, journalists, novelists, academics—have been bought off by power and money, a pack of self-promoting "courtiers" (cf...

...But what is curious as the century ends is how political snobbery flourishes not so much on the right as among leading polemicists of the left and their journalistic imitators...

...According to Vidal, who learned Jeffersonian principles from his grandfather Senator Thomas P. Gore of Oklahoma, the first years of the republic were golden (or at least yellow, since men of property were in charge from the beginning) because they approximated Jefferson's dream of "a society of honest yeomen, engaged in agricultural pursuits, without large cities, heavy industry, banks, military pretensions" [U.S...

...They can make their meek adjustments and position themselves more opportunely—maybe not as far as the spent generation of neoconservatives, but close enough to the center of the room to have an occasional say in the political conversation...

...After the United States intervened to end the atrocities in Haiti, Lapham neither attacked nor defended, but merely sniffed that "the Haitian expedition had shown what could be done with some first-rate sentiment, enough helicopter gunships and 20,000 combat troops" [Hotel...

...It has ready access to various types of wit, including satire and irony in all its shades—in fact contempt comes equipped with its own prose style, a light, deft, dancing technique that manages to punch and elude in the same motion...

...McCarthyism must have 124 • DISSENT Books seemed a mild version to anyone having fled the real thing in Europe, but its totalitarian shadings were ominous enough to excuse some hyperbole...

...It doesn't allow for exceptions (and exceptions can make some difference), and it's useless for the purposes of action in the world most of us have to live in...

...Eventually it dulls both the will and the analytical tools we need in order to act...

...In a sense he didn't have far to go...

...Since most people haven't gotten past all serious desire for anything and so can't afford to abolish "the American system," whatever its state of decadence, they're condemned to endure if not accept a measure of folly and corruption— to tinker...

...Political snobbery—a contempt for the entire governing class that almost invariably, though not as vocally, extends to the governed who blindly give their consent—is different from the populist mockery on talk radio because its tone is amusement, not rage...

...yet it has trapped many of the left's best writers, and not only those wealthy or British enough to be able to afford it...

...Who would deny it, especially today, given soft money and Dick Morris and Dwayne Andreas and the Reform party...

...None of it really matters among the chestnut trees at Ravello, where "the reflection of the intense gold light through the green leaves is dazzling...

...it implies superiority rather than subjection to politics...

...Revolutionaries want to blow the room up, but you can't go on being a revolutionary decade after decade if revolution is out of the question and no one is paying attention...

...Howells's response to the 1886 Haymarket Square riots and the execution of supposed anarchists was initially brave, leading to two scathing letters to the editor...

...From non-courtier-at-court to Tom-Paineonthe-Tyrrhenian took Vidal about a decade...

...In its present state of decadence" is permanently irrefutable...

...Howells was in enough trouble already . . . So he was heard no more on the subject...

...It becomes a reflex, a comfortable tic...

...The rich man hasn't...

...Next week," Howells wrote in the second, after the hangings, "the journalistic theory that they died so because they were desperate murderers will have grown even more insufficient than it is now for the minds and hearts of dispassionate inquirerers, and history will make the answer to which she must adhere for all time, They died in the prime of the First Republic the world has ever known, for their opinions' sake...

...Most of the essays that deal with literature, or with politics and politicians before around 1900, are superb...

...By his actions Nixon showed that in a sense he shared Vidal's view, for if as vague a phrase as "the American system" means anything, it means the legislative and judicial and civic forces that exposed Watergate and brought Nixon down...

...You can dine with FALL • 1996 125 Books the Kennedys at Hyannisport, you can write about their douches and bathtub sex, you can condemn to oblivion the system that you've been dining on, you can dream that America's last best hope is Jerry Brown...

...Faced with their own long-term irrelevance, critics on the American left are confronted with several ways out, none of them satisfying...

...So the throwaway clause betrays him...

...128 • DISSENT...

...Because we have little use for history, and because we refuse the comforts of a society established on the blueprint of class privilege, we find ourselves set adrift at birth in an existential void, inheriting nothing except the obligation to construct a plausible self, to build a raft of identity on which (with a few grains of luck and a cheap bank loan) maybe we can float south to Memphis or the imaginary islands of the blessed" [Hotel...

...This note of apocalyptic ennui keeps intruding on his later essays whenever they turn from history to the present...

...FALL • 1996 • 123 Books perciliousness toward one's own age, combined with ignorance of the actual lives of ordinary people, is a stance historically identified with the privileged right...

...Lewis H. Lapham, THE WISH FOR KINGS: DEMOCRACY AT BAY (Grove Press, 1993...

...But over the course of a book the contemptuous tone is tiresome, and it becomes clear how much the argumentative scores depend on metaphor...

...and the post-war, pre–cold war Pax Americana of 1945-1950...

...The letter is a wonderful example of the eloquence that comes when a good writer's blood is up and something real is at stake, of a polemic that is more interested in exposing an injustice than sneering at the bottom feeders and fools who let it happen...

...and unless you happen to be one yourself it offers the pleasure of seeing the powerful draped in ridicule...

...They can leave the room, write about other things...

...Vidal lays out his dilemma with a novelist's insight and forbearance: "I suspect that the cautious lifetime careerist advised the Tolstoian socialist to cool it...

...After losing a race for Congress and falling out with the Kennedys, Vidal returned to novelwriting and left the country...

...But at least he, alone of the country's writers, had asked, publicly, on November 4, 1887, that justice be done" [US...

...If "fascism" had come back to earth around 1955 the sentence would have gained in truthfulness and seriousness but suffered irreparable stylistic damage...

...A reactionary idea, too—a wish for a society in which social constraints and therefore interests and antagonisms, including those of class, don't exist...

...It maintains a specious sort of engagement without risk of taint...

...SuBOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY Lewis H. Lapham, HOTEL AMERICA: SCENES IN THE LOBBY OF THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE (Verso, 1995...

...I had missed all the wars of ideology that for twenty years had convulsed New York intellectuals...

...The deeper objection is that the style of political contempt doesn't let us negotiate between criticism and action in a corrupt world today...

...But "never to come to earth again" rounded the metaphor off too irresistibly, an image of blithe polemical daring (though "put briefly on hold" carelessly mixes it up...

...But this republican dream is doomed to remain nostalgic, for Vidal doesn't admit or work out the tension between Jeffersonian individualism and his other desire for economic equality in the modern state...

...Also, a court affair—if one is not a courtier—has a certain nightmarish quality as everyone tries to get the attention of the sovereign...

...I have never liked parties of any kind, and the grander they are, the less I like them...

...Jack emerges as a competitor with Vidal in the sexual Olympics...

...Instead, from his Italian villa he took to sneering at America, hosting celebrities, and settling private scores in a malicious memoir...

...I doubt that there is another living essayist who could turn out twenty equally absorbing pages on the life and work of William Dean Howells—or who would bother to try...

...The Wish for Kings is entirely governed by the metaphor of the court...

...Vidal (who quotes Montaigne on the dehumanizing effect of lying) gets even for the supposed lies of family and friends by shining the light of truth on their sexual secrets (how his mother had to spoon in his partly impotent stepfather's semen...

...I ponder the eventual scorching of these woods, to be followed by the creeping flow of sterile ice...

...Vidal extends this imaginative sympathy to a range of historical subjects—the farther away in time, the more complex his feeling, the greater his tolerance...

...Most of it continues without resistance at the same rhetorical level: "As with the New York literary mises-en-scene, so also with the Washington public policy institutes...

...They can try to straddle the actual and the theoretical, engaging policy fights while keeping one eye out the window on the horizon (this has been Dissent's way, and its risks are earnestness and muddle-headedness...

...Most snobs end up as reactionaries for the obvious reason that the past offers a desirable alternative to the evil present and the impossible future...

...An attractive idea, but if it ever described most American lives it has long since stopped doing so...

...Political contempt seems incongruous with an ameliorative approach to society and government...

...A number of qualities make the contemptuous stance appealing...

...One has the sense of a rhetorical shrug—of the writer telling himself, "What the hell, go all the way with it...

...What the sentence offers us is a satisfying feeling compounded of disgust, superiority, and assent...

...Most of the political intellectuals whom I've encountered over the last twenty years might as well be wearing the liveries of their monied patrons— red brocade and silver piping for the American Enterprise Institute, blue velvet and gold braid for the Brookings Institution . . . ." Of course there's no reply to this kind of attack ("I am not a courtier...

...Reformers can't afford to leave the room because what they want to reform will still be inside...

...he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht...

...But political contempt is static, indiscriminate, and ultimately as complacent as the system it indicts...

...It also carries an undeniable truth, even more now than when Vidal was making the same claims twenty years ago...

...Chesterton explained this in a few lines that Lewis H. Lapham uses as an epigraph to an essay in the August 1996 Harper's: "The poor have been rebels but they never have been anarchists...

...Left-wing criticism ending in reaction seems like a paradox, until you consider the inhospitableness of recent times for more promising ways out...

...Jackie first appears teaching Vidal's half-sister Nini how to douche on her wedding day...

...His polemical gifts come through best in the monthly format: the witty analogy, the move from particular satire to general lament, the deep familiarity with elite speech and habits, the willingness to make enemies, the passion for a democracy of free thinking...

...The second golden age was largely personal, coinciding with the social and sexual adventures and the sudden rise to fame and then notoriety of a certain very young novelist...

...Without occasional exercise in the world, political writing tends to atrophy...