WHO IS ARIANNA HUFFINGTON? The Woman Behind the Shadow Conventions Chameleon or Crusader?
Jacob Heilbrunn was until recently a senior editor at the New Republic. He also writes for Suddeutsche Zeitung, the National Interest, Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times.
This summer the ultimate parody of American politics will take place in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. "<http://www.shadowconventions.com/>Shadow Conventions 2000," as it's being called, will parallel the major party conventions taking place this summer. Featuring speakers like Paul Wellstone, Jesse Jackson, and Jonathan Kozol, as well comedians like Al Franken and Bill Maher, the conventions are supposed to critique and ridicule the actual Democratic and Republican conventions as out of touch and made-for-TV. The shadow conventions, which will focus on campaign finance reform, poverty, and the failure of the war on drugs, are being hosted by <http://www.calltorenewal.com/>Call to Renewal, <http://www.commoncause.org>Common Cause, the <http://www.drugpolicy.org>Lindesmith<http://www.drugpolicy.org> Center, <http://www.publicampaign.org>Public Campaign -- and <http://www.ariannaonline.com/>Arianna <http://www.ariannaonline.com/>Huffington.
Say what? Until recently, Huffington was best-known as the wife of Michael Huffington, as a Newt Gingrich hanger-on, and as a Washington Times columnist -- in that order. But in recent years, the brilliantly savvy Huffington has morphed into something else. To the fury of her former allies on the right, she has become a would-be leader of the remnants of the American Left. Her new friends range from Sojourner's editor Jim Wallis to Harper's editor Lewis Lapham, from Harris Wofford to Al Franken. At a dinner in her Brentwood mansion, Huffington and New America Foundation president Ted Halstead pushed Warren Beatty to run for president. Her new book How to Overthrow the Government denounces both political parties, calls for campaign finance reform, and assails the moral obtuseness of the rich.
No one seems to know quite what to make of Huffington. Opportunist? "The Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers," as one Los Angeles magazine dubbed her? Sincere convert? All of the above? Take your choice; Huffington's transformation has created a minor industry among commentators seeking to figure out whether she really means what she says, and whether it even matters. But one thing they all agree upon, left or right, is that Huffington has performed an ideological somersault. Nation columnist Katha Pollit complains that "now Huffington has reinvented herself as a reformer, claiming that her visits to slums during the 1994 run of her fabulously wealthy right-wing Congressman husband (now ex-husband) Michael opened her eyes to poverty. Right." Somewhat more equivocally, Joe Conason asked in the Los Angeles Times, "Is this a profound conversion or just another protean phase in the life of an ambitious climber." To which Emily Eakin, writing in the New Republic, responded: "Who cares?..When constancy is the measure of moral worth, Huffington falls spectacularly short."
Actually, she doesn't. The truth is that, for all her swerves and dips, Huffington is the original compassionate conservative. Long before George W. hit upon the idea, Huffington, who was educated in England, soaked up a kind of Disraelian ethos about the dangers of two societies. A Disraeli conservative -- a Tory wet -- views both the state and capitalism with caution, but thinks that the two can work together, given adequate, but not excessive, government oversight. Indeed, though it may seem as though her career is riddled with inconsistencies, Huffington has always decried materialism. Her political odyssey, you might say, has reached a logical end-point. Huffington's personal life may be a bundle of contradictions -- a foe of fame, riches, and celebrity who is a famous, rich celebrity -- but publicly she has steadfastly preached spirituality. Whether it's writing on economics, Picasso, Greek myth, or local communities, Huffington has railed against an obsessive pursuit of wealth and fame and stressed the need to create a critical mass of concerned citizens who, one by one, will change the general culture.
Huffington's spirituality can be traced back to her childhood in Greece. She prayed to the Virgin Mary at age three, then went to study comparative religions, at the age of sixteen, at Shantaniketan University near Calcutta. She was born, as she puts it, "into a household of many and sometimes conflicting Greek passions." Her father joined the Greek resistance to the Nazis by editing Paron, an underground newspaper, and was imprisoned in a German concentration camp. After the war, he perpetually launched new magazines and newspapers that never quite reached solvency. Her mother, whose family fled Russia during the Bolshevik revolution, would cook up gargntuan midnight meals and read widely in psychology and the Greek classics. She insisted that Arianna hit the books -- she read the complete works of Ayn Rand at age eleven as well as Greek myths -- and that she become educated in England.
Intent on entering Cambridge, Arianna recalls waiting in terror for the results of her verbal exam. She landed a scholarship and "made myself learn to debate." Arianna became the third female head of the Cambridge debating society -- at Oxford Benazir Bhutto was president of the debating team that year. When William F. Buckley, Jr., debated John Kenneth Galbraith about the morality of the market, Huffington likes to recall, she took Galbraith's side. Huffington's tutor was the Maoist economist Joan Robinson. They would meet in the cafeteria where Robinson, dressed in a Maoist tunic, "would praise the glories of Maoism. I criticized her as much as I criticized Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises who idolized the market." Her father's experiences at the hands of the Nazis and her mother's flight from communism had inculcated a fear of excessive state power in her, but she never became a slavish devotee of the free market.
Perhaps her biggest education came under Times of London columnist Bernard Levin. As an undergraduate, Huffington had met Levin on a radio show. At Cambridge she had been a groupie of Levin's, recalling that she cut and pasted his columns into a scrapbook. They went out to dinner, and he was smitten. For the next eight years, they lived together and Huffington launched her career as a pundit. Where her father had failed, she became a success. After a publisher spotted her on a television show attacking Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, he offered her a book contract. Huffington hit it big in 1973 with a book called The Female Woman. Long before the current spate of Republican conservative women realized they could pose as rebels by attacking feminist orthodoxy, Huffington decried the subordination of intimacy, children and a family to the quest for equal opportunities and equal pay. "These longings were denigrated and even denied in those days," Huffington has written, "but, as more and more women discovered, they could not be extinguished." The twenty-two year-old Huffington's book was a best-seller and she hit the lecture circuit in Europe and the United States. But Huffington was dissatisfied. Sitting in a hotel room in Detroit, she began to sob from loneliness. In her 1994 book The Fourth Instinct, she recalled that "I had nothing to do that night and I had to leave at 5 in the morning to go an an early morning talk show, and I suddenly felt this total, utter depression and despair. What am I doing here?" She returned to London and went on a water fast "mostly because I so wanted to touch the spirit, to be filled by it, that anything that was not spirit or about spirit was an encumbrance." She stopped her fast, but not "before I could, blindfolded, tell the difference between sipsful of the various brands of bottled water I had in my flat."
Huffington went on to write her second book, After Reason. Scholarly in tone, it attacked both the left and right. Huffington charted up the human casualties that were a result, in her view, of the failure of political solutions to save the mentally sick, drug addicts, and the homeless. The centralized state was a menace to freedom, but prosperity, she argued, also could not satisfy man's spiritual needs. Huffington lamented that all moral and spiritual values that didn't support a rational reconstructed society were reduced to interests. Notions of freedom and justice were seen in terms of self-interest rather than as ends in themselves. Huffington wrote that "the reduction of natural law as an objective moral order, to subjective natural rights, and of natural rights to economic rights, is another dominant perversion of our age." So Huffington complains today about the elevation of the market, by both Republicans and Democrats. Huffington further noted that, "Politics as the art of the possible -- in practice the lowest possible, the course of least resistance -- springs directly from the fatalistic view of political events as consequences of irresistible necessity. The irresistible necessity can take the form of an immutable law either hidden in nature or revealed by Marxist dialectics. In the West today it is most commonly enshrined in Dr. Gallup's polls and recorded in the level of noise emitted by aroused minorities." Again, how far removed is this from Huffington's current complaints about the influence of pollsters and campaign finance moguls? For Huffington, it was the spiritual dimension that was being neglected; "it is not the unacceptable face of capitalism that is unacceptable; it is not capitalism that is unacceptable; it is our own fatal neglect of the spiritual and long-forgotten part of ourselves that is unacceptable. It is this neglect that has made us turn the necessary but peripheral human preoccupation with securing a material basis for life to an obsession with economic growth and uninterrupted increases in our standard of living. To what end?"
After the publisher George Weidenfeld told Huffington that she had to stop writing scholarly books if she wanted to make a splash, she embarked upon a biography of the Greek opera singer Maria Callas. Again, Huffington delved into the world of image and reality, legend and woman. She saw herself as a younger version of Callas. Huffington explored her conflicts with her mother, her dependence on Aristotle Onassis, and her struggles with her voice. Huffington attempted to penetrate behind the public myth, turning up titillating details about Callas's personal life that made the book an international best-seller. It gained her entree to the New York social world, where she went to live in 1980. Huffington realized that her affair with Bernard Levin was going nowhere. For four years, she went to lunches at Le Cirque, dances at the Metropolitan Museum, and weekends in the Hamptons. Huffington says that the spritual emptiness of it all drew her to California. In New York, "there was the perfect courtier whose specialty was his concern for your children -- provided your net worth was over $100 million." In California there was John-Roger. Huffington employed many of the same techniques that she is using on behalf of her political causes to promote John-Roger, the leader of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA). Huffington became a minister in the organization and, according to Irene Lacher in the Los Angeles Times, "tapped her social contacts in the mid-80s to woo high society proponents to John-Roger's cause, holding recruitment dinners that sandwiched socialites between acolytes." At the time, Huffington wrote, that John-Roger, "dealt in the only thing that I was really interested in: helping people wake up to the spirit inside themselves, to their natural knowing and inner wisdom." John-Roger said that he was a religious figure called "Mystical Traveler Consciousness," but he came under attack for supposedly sexually seducing his followers. Huffington told me she's been through everything; "you name it, I took it. I've always been interested in the quest for the spiritual."
But Huffington also had her practical side. Her friend Ann Getty set about finding an appropriate husband for her. She met Michael Huffington, told him that God was the most important thing in her life, and, seven months later, in April 1986, they married. Huffington's wedding dress costs tens of thousands and Henry Kissinger supposedly observed tht the wedding had "everything except an Aztec scrificial fire dance." Initially, her marriage went smoothly. Michael, heir to the Huffco fortune, spent three million to unseat nine-term Republican Bob Lagomarsino in the primary. In Washington, Arianna had two children, Christina and Isabella, and recounts in The Fourth Instinct that she briefly exited her body after the pregnancy: "A few moments later, after everyone had left the room, I began trembling convulsively. ... And then my body was no longer shaking. I had left it." When her husband ran for the Senate against Dianne Feinstein and spent twenty-eight million dollars, Arianna was seen as having another out-of-body experience -- using Michael as a host for her own political ambitions. It was not to be. Huffington lost narrowly.
But Huffington's eclipse allowed Arianna's political star to rise. For a few months or a year or so -- depending on whether you talk to Huffington or her detractors -- she championed Newt Gingrich's Contract With America. Huffington first met Gingrich in 1992; he had seen a speech of hers to conservatives on C-SPAN challenging them to make helping the poor a priority. The speech was called "Can Conservatives Have A Social Conscience," and she delivered it at a National Review conference. Gingrich invited her to speak on this theme at the Republican congressional retreat in Princeton. She explains that when Ginrich said that the "balanced budget ... doesn't, in my mind, have the moral urgency of coming to grips with what's happening to the poorest Americans," she took him at his word. Portraying herself as a kind of naif, Huffington maintains that she was totally taken in by Gingrich. Disenchantment was just as complete. According to Huffington, "I began to see he didn't really mean it." In her columns, Huffington began to denounce Gingrich and other conservatives. She now calls Gingrich a "Stalinist" and has attacked Dick Armey as having an "ersatz, insipid, and duplicitous style." Huffington honed her public persona and attacks by joining the former "Saturday Night Live" writer Al Franken in a television show called "Strange Bedfellows." She also began to appear on Franken and Bill Maher's talk show "Politically Incorrect." The result of her forays into political humor was the send-up of the Clinton White House, Greetings from the Lincoln Bedroom, an often tedious book that contains chapter titles such as "Just One Orgasm Away from the Presidency." Huffington's exploits in Gingrich Washington prompted James McCourt to depict her rather cruelly in his new novel Delancey's Way as the meretricious Anastasia Harrington, chief promoter of the "the Newt Deal."
Huffington says that while she never was a captive of conservative dogma, she definitely began to alter her views after spending time with Franken and Robert Scheer. The futility of the drug war, she explains, was brought home to her by Scheer. But what really prompted her to go on the warpath against conservative indifference about the poor, she says, was seeing the slums near Santa Barbara during her former husband's campaign for the Senate. "A kind of numbing has happened," she told me. "The public wants to be numbed. If you look at riches of the 90s and how good things have been," the public has ignored the rise in income inequality. The only thing it worries about is "the state of the Dow Jones."
So in a sense Huffington has come full circle back to the very beliefs she enunicated at the outset of her career. In her columns and books, she batters away at her favorite themes: child welfare, campaign finance reform, the failed drug war, and the lack of leadership. Huffington animatedly explains how she contrasted the attention that conservatives are lavishing on Elian Gonzalez with what she sees as their indifference to impoverished American children. The drug war, she says, is a new Vietnam, a colossal waste of resources that could be redirected to assisting the needy. About the Clinton administration, she observes "all they know how to do is escalate." In her new book, How to Overthrow the Government, Huffington expands on these themes. Evoking Disraeli, she titles her first chapter "A Tale of Nations." Our era of prosperity, Huffington argues, is built on house of credit cards with personal debt sykyrocketing. Meanwhile, 35.6 million Americans are living in poverty, not much different from 1964 when 36 million lived in poverty -- that is, if you don't take into account the increase in population since 1964, which Huffington doesn't. As she notes, however, the U.S. child poverty rate at 21 percent remains the highest in the world.
To explain these ills, Huffington has points to a villain: the political system. Huffington's pointing the finger at PACs and corporate lobbyists is hardly original, but she does carry it off with verve. "Pandering to single-issue constituiencies improves little -- except the length of the politicans' stay in their comfy offices." The solution she outlines is to step up volunteering to community organizations and to create a new Progressive Era of citizen activism. Huffington urges her readers, among other things, to demonstrate at political rallies, engage in acts of civil disobedience, join a new political party or start one yourself, push for character education in schools. Huffington isn't simply exhorting her readers; she herself has been an indefatigable activist in recent years. When I met her at her penthouse apartment in Washington, she had just returned from a board meeting with former Senator Harris Wofford's "America's Promise -- The Alliance for Youth." No event seems too small for her to attend; Gary Ruskin of Commercial Alert glowingly recalls that Huffington handed out the "Most Corrupt Vision of Primary Education" prize to Merrill Lynch at the Fourth Annual Schmo Awards at George Washington University. "She was speaking my language," he said.
Huffington is longer on exhortation than on practical measures to alleviate social ills. Like George W., she says that big government isn't the answer. The Great Society is out; organizations are in. Fine. But Huffington is frustratingly vague when it comes to actual policies. She leaves the policy wonkery to the policy wonks. She doesn't so much have a political program as a set of attitudes. Still her activism can hardly hurt the left. Her success at becoming a star on the left shows how little of it is left anyway. And apart from her consistent moralism over the years, the title of her book How to Overthrow the Government does further suggest that maybe she hasn't moved all that far politically. The left has become embittered by the success of the Clinton administration, by its readiness to shed the old dogmas of the Democratic party and reinvent liberalism. The Clinton administration, after all, is somewhere between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. Are things really as bad in America as Huffington would have? And is it necessary to preach overthrowing the government? That's a slogan that fits in as comfortably on the fringe right as on the left. Democrats shouldn't be wary of Huffington's allure because she doesn't really believe in what she's saying, but because she believes in it too much.
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