The New Criterion

Results are still being tallied in the great contest to decide who is the most preposterous pseudo-intellectual of the last thirty years. The contestants are many, the competition fierce, but I’d like to put in a word for Lewis Lapham. Not only has Mr. Lapham provided hours of entertainment with his own special brand of self-righteous, politically-correct bluster, but he managed to take a dull but worthy cultural institution--Harper’s magazine--and turn it into a low-calorie laughing stock that nobody reads. Mr. Lapham will be forgotten in about 12 minutes, but in the meantime, Instapundit links to a couple of classic commentaries on "Laphamization" (including this one--mirabile dictu--from The New York Times). I offer as a special bonus the reflection I published on the occasion of Mr. Lapham’s most notorious exercise in creative reporting, a 7500 essay called "Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill."

Mr. Lapham’s essay is full of charts and tables detailing the nefarious flow of money to conservative causes. There is nothing new here: liberals have been “exposing” philanthropic support for conservative causes for years. Three billion dollars in thirty years—that’s a lot of money. But wait, doesn’t the Ford Foundation support a galaxy of left-wing causes with half a billion dollars every year? And what about the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the various MacArthur Foundations? (The J. Roderick MacArthur Foundation, Mr. Lapham neglects to mention, provides an annual subsidy of $2,150,000 to Harper’s.) What about, for that matter, Teresa Heinz Kerry, who through her foundations doled out $65 million to left-liberal causes in 2002?

In fact, liberal philanthropy outspends conservative philanthropy by at least a factor of 25 to 1. But that is immaterial to Mr. Lapham. For him, conservatives by definition do not support ideas, they support “propaganda.” Indeed, in the world according to Lapham, conservatives by definition are propagandists, never thinkers. Norman Podhoretz is “a rabid propagandist.” Irving Kristol, though charming and “bright” (thanks, Lewis!) is also a “propagandist” who betrayed his early Trotskyite commitments for filthy lucre: “the times changed, the winds of fortune shifting from east to west, and after a stint as a CIA asset in the 1950s, he had carried his pens and papers into winter quarters on the comfortably upholstered bourgeois right.”

According to Mr. Lapham, no conservative writes a book or article in order to say what he thinks is true; he does it at the behest of some nameless conservative power broker in order to advance a political interest. Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose, Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations: you might have supposed these were thoughtful contributions to important issues of the day. Not a chance of it: Mr. Lapham reveals that they are merely “expensively purchased and cleverly promoted tracts.”