Bookshelf Another One Bites the Dust, Or a Radical Gets Real
By ROGER KIMBALL
Irving Kristol once famously observed that a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. There is a lot of reality in Harry Stein's thoughtful and entertaining "How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" (Delacorte, 274 pages, $23.95).
Mr. Stein began life as a bona fide liberal. Raised in "America's most progressive precincts," he grew up rooting for sports teams "for the sole reason that they had more black players." He instinctively voted for liberals. He embraced the entire menu of left-wing social initiatives, from feminism to radical multiculturalism. His wife even belonged to a group called Women Against Right-Wing Scum. All of which, Mr. Stein recalls, "made me feel pretty damn good about myself."
But then something happened. The old certainties -- about what was scary (the Moral Majority), what the world needed in order to be a better place (more compassion) -- started to crumble. Both Mr. Stein and his wife began to contemplate the possibility that the liberal agenda contained "too little respect for the accumulated wisdom of the ages and too much playing havoc with truth and common sense."
Mr. Stein's book is a chronicle of his odyssey from left-liberal smugness (I am progressive, therefore I am virtuous) to "the values of old-fashioned liberalism: a bedrock commitment to fairness and individual liberty." As he looked around at the moral chaos of our culture, it gradually dawned on him that maybe -- just maybe -- "the problem was with us and a perspective as painfully narrow and provincial as that of any of the small-town Baptists about whom we always assumed the worst; without, of course, having ever met one."
Mr. Stein attributes his change of heart partly to the influence of his wife, partly to the realities of fatherhood. When their first child came along, Mr. Stein was at first shocked when his wife announced that she was giving up her career to take care of the baby. But he quickly decided that there was wisdom in her decision. Mr. Stein himself graduated from regarding babies as "slightly more animate shrubs" to behaving like a doting father, a development that prompted one of his progressive friends to observe: "You guys are like an old-fashioned family."
It was meant to be a withering put-down. But both Steins recognized the justice of the charge. Mrs. Stein stopped going to her Scum group; magazines like Commentary and the Weekly Standard began to supplant the Nation and the Village Voice in the Stein household.
How can you tell if you, too, have joined the vast RWC? Mr. Stein enumerates some tell-tale symptoms: "You hear someone talking about morality and you no longer assume he must be a sexually repressed religious nut. You're actually relieved that your daughter plays with dolls and your son plays with guns. You understand that the homeless guy who mumbles to himself and stinks of urine is not 'disadvantaged' but a lunatic."
Of course, such realizations do not come without penalty. It was only a matter of time before Mr. Stein's liberal friends came to understand that he had broken ranks. But it wasn't until May 23, 1992, at about 9:30 p.m. that the worst happened. It was then that Mr. Stein first got called a"fascist" to his face. Many of us members of the vast RWC have gone through that rite of passage. It sticks in the mind. Mr. Stein's crime was suggesting that Vice President Dan Quayle might have had a point with his famous "Murphy Brown" speech critical of single motherhood. Mr. Stein didn't wholeheartedly endorse Mr. Quayle's speech, you understand; he just raised the possibility that the attack on traditional two-parent family might need rethinking.
But that's the way it is when you are identified as a member of the vast RWC. In 1998, someone did a Nexis search of the phrase "mean-spirited" in the New York Times. It appeared 102 times, never about a liberal. On a recent Saturday, the Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich wrote about the rock star Bruce Springsteen and the talk-show host Laura Schlessinger. Mr. Springsteen, with his new cop-bashing song, was praised as "a pillar of humanity in rock" while Ms. Schlessinger was disparaged as -- yep -- "a mean-spirited 'doctor.'"
Inevitably, a large part of Mr. Stein's book touches on matters of education. Liberals want to use education, he notes, to "change the world." Members of the vast RWC look to education to help preserve a world. Along the way, Mr. Stein provides some harrowing statistics about what's happened to America's schools and colleges. If further evidence is needed, there is always the latest product from a distinguished university press.
One such product, just out from MIT Press, is the English translation of a book called "Histoire de la Merde," in which the author, Dominique Laporte, attempts to relate human waste to . . . well, you figure it out: "The imperative of profit marks the return of a repressed fantasy of whichutility is merely the displaced reversal, that is, the dream of satisfying all need and thus liberating the subject from lack. Hence the primordial status of philanthropy and hygiene alongside the supposed 'three sources' in the genealogy of Marxism."
If you read that passage and think -- "How interesting! I do hope my children will be assigned Ms. Laporte's book when I bankrupt myself sending them to college!" -- then Harry Stein has a few things to tell you about reality.