{"id":2020660,"date":"2023-09-03T05:20:01","date_gmt":"2023-09-03T09:20:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/memoirs-of-a-closet-conservative\/"},"modified":"2023-09-03T05:27:05","modified_gmt":"2023-09-03T09:27:05","slug":"memoirs-of-a-closet-conservative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/memoirs-of-a-closet-conservative\/","title":{"rendered":"Confessions of a Secret Conservative"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"float:left\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">10<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fmemoirs-of-a-closet-conservative%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=2020660&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div>\n<h2>The Controversialist: A Memoir Worth Reading<\/h2>\n<p>I suppose some readers will have a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/desantis-fires-back-after-some-republicans-promote-kamala-harris-lies-about-florida-curriculum\/\" title=\"DeSantis retaliates against Republicans endorsing Harris' false claims on Florida curriculum.\">hard\u200c time<\/a>\u2063 getting past the\u2063 cover of <i>The Controversialist<\/i>, the new memoir by Martin Peretz, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/chinese-state-media-after-biden-calls-for-pandemic-probe-china-must-prepare-for-nuclear-war-with-u-s\/\" title=\"Chinese State Media After Biden Calls For Pandemic Probe: China Must Prepare For Nuclear War With U.S.\">longtime editor<\/a> of the \u2064 <i>New Republic<\/i>. First there&#8217;s the cover photo. It shows the author recumbent and smiling and sprouting a wooly\u2062 thatch of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/womens-rights-champion-never-say-transwoman\/\" title=\"Women's Rights Champion: Never Say 'Transwoman'\">chest hair<\/a> from the opening of a linen shirt. Martin Peretz is 84 \u2064years old.<\/p>\n<p>This whole\u200b unpleasantness could have been avoided if Peretz had not persisted in his lifelong habit of leaving the second or \u2064even third button of\u200c his shirts\u200b unbuttoned. In the book itself, he\u200b says this look, which I guess is meant to be rakish, \u200cderives from French intellectuals like Bernard-Henri L\u00e9vy. More down-to-earth \u2062bookstore browsers will\u2064 glance\u2062 at the photo and instead recall long-gone, and very non-French, Vegas\u2063 lounge\u2064 lizards like Sammy Davis Jr. and Tony Orlando, and give it a pass.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond the photo, there&#8217;s the problem of the title. <i>The Controversialist<\/i> would well fit a\u200d biography of Peretz \u2062by another\u200d writer, someone holding up Peretz&#8217;s career of endless public bickering for objective inspection, admiring or not. But for a man to hold himself up in this third-person manner, declaring himself \u200cby implication a kind of archetype or icon, betrays \u200ba disconcerting self-regard. Imagine an ordinary Washington backbencher like, say, Ben Cardin writing\u2062 an autobiography and giving it the title <i>The Senator.<\/i> It&#8217;s unseemly. Muhammad Ali could write an autobiography called <i>The Greatest<\/i> and get away with it. \u200dEven\u200b discounting for religious\u2063 differences, Peretz is no Muhammad Ali.<\/p>\n<p>He \u2063is,\u2063 however\u2014and this will become\u200d clear to anyone who makes it 30 pages past the cover\u2014a first-rate memoirist who has \u200cwritten a book of a very high rank. <i>The Controversialist<\/i> \u2063is\u2063 candid, vivid, wise, self-aware, and funny, almost always \u200bintentionally so. As a portrait of &#8217;80s-era Washington, the days of High Reaganism and the <i>New Republic<\/i>&#8216;s greatest moment, it is matched only by Peggy \u200cNoonan&#8217;s heretofore matchless memoir\u200d <i>What I Saw at the Revolution<\/i>. \u2064The book\u200c tumbles\u200d along with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/memoirs-of-a-closet-conservative\/\" title=\"Confessions of a Secret Conservative\">expertly \u200ddrawn word portraits<\/a> of interesting people\u2014some so \u200ddeft\u200d they\u200b need only a single sentence. The investigative\u200c reporter Seymour\u2064 Hersh: &#8220;His penetration leads him to\u2064 the right places until \u2064his ideology \u200dsteers him off course.&#8221; Kennedy butt boy Richard Goodwin: &#8220;He \u200cwas very smart, but he always looked like he \u200dwas thinking about\u2063 what he \u200cwas going to say when he wasn&#8217;t talking.&#8221; Peretz is hell on the Kennedys,\u2063 by the way, but he doesn&#8217;t belabor the point.<\/p>\n<p>He is equally deft with ideas. \u200bHis\u2063 earliest mentor as an undergraduate at Brandeis\u200d was the New Left demigod Herbert Marcuse, \u200bwhose airy theorizing became a credo \u2062for every &#8217;60s radical student with intellectual \u2063pretensions. Peretz&#8217;s\u200d capsule summary tells us more in two paragraphs\u2064 about the old flimflammer&#8217;s Marxist porridge\u200b than anything \u200dI&#8217;ve read, with a \u200bdroll kicker revealing the true source of Marcuse&#8217;s\u2063 appeal: \u2064&#8221;This insight led Herbert to the solution that sex\u2014real sex, exploratory sex, \u2062sex \u2064sundered from\u2064 consumer corruption\u2014was the key to political liberation. What \u200dtwenty-year-old <i>wouldn&#8217;t<\/i> like going to class and hearing that?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>He \u200cgives the \u2062same pithy (and accurate) explanatory\u200b treatment to Freud, the &#8220;free love&#8221;\u2062 movement, the \u2064rise of racial \u200cpolitics, and\u200d much else, \u2064across a wide range. For 50 \u200byears Peretz taught at Harvard in a\u2063 baggy \u200bdiscipline called &#8220;Social Studies,&#8221; a variant on the \u2064history of ideas. I envy his students.<\/p>\n<p>Like a\u2064 lot of professors, Peretz&#8217;s true interest was politics. He became an \u2064activist early \u2063on. His prominence and effectiveness were \u2063guaranteed by his marriage to an heiress named Anne Labouisse, whose family was &#8220;astoundingly, alienatingly\u200d rich.&#8221;\u200d Their money, however, was not so alienating that he refused to spend\u2062 it. Candidates and causes flocked to him as if he\u2064 were a milch cow with a thousand teats. (Perhaps this \u2063explains the unbuttoned shirts.) Starting as\u200c a radical in the 1950s,\u200d he gradually worked his\u2064 way rightward, almost to the center,\u2062 and eventually, on most subjects, well beyond.<\/p>\n<p>A watershed moment came in \u200c1967\u2064 when he organized a\u200b left-wing lollapalooza \u200bcalled\u200b the National Conference for New\u200b Politics that could have been scripted by Tom Wolfe. The leaders met at Peretz&#8217;s seaside\u2062 mansion on Cape Cod \u200c(natch) \u2063and were \u2064instantly at\u200c each other&#8217;s throats \u200d(also natch). Later, the conference keynoter, Martin Luther King,\u2064 was heckled \u200dby \u2064the black caucus, \u200cwhose leader took the stage and proclaimed \u2062himself &#8220;dictator.&#8221; A rabbi announced that all white men should be &#8220;castrated&#8221; because of slavery. \u2063The conference dissolved in an acid bath of anti-Semitism, \u2064but not before Peretz had an instructive peek into the\u200d future of the left.<\/p>\n<p>The most enduring expression of his political interest was his editorship of the <i>New Republic<\/i>, a worthy, boring Democratic weekly that he decided to buy in 1974\u2014&#8221;Anne, sweetie, where&#8217;s the checkbook?&#8221;\u2014and he built it rather quickly into an \u200dindispensable element of the country&#8217;s political and intellectual life. The magazine&#8217;s\u200c success over the decades was owing to\u200b his gift for recruiting clever, word-savvy liberals who, under his loose-reined oversight, became very good journalists, as editors and writers. Michael Kinsley, \u2063Leon Wieseltier, Charles Krauthammer, Emily Yoffe, Andrew Sullivan, Hendrik Hertzberg,\u200c Charles Lane, Ann Hulbert, \u2064Adam Kirsch\u2026 it&#8217;s \u2063a long\u2064 list. On every issue but one\u2014the defense and survival of Israel is his consuming passion\u2014he was happy\u2063 to let everyone disagree. He describes his guiding editorial principle like so: &#8220;My bullshit goes \u200bin, so does yours.&#8221;\u2064 The magazine\u200c was often\u2062 ferociously contentious and soon \u2063became beloved of a journalistic class that pretends to value contentiousness.<\/p>\n<p>In the\u200b new century it all ended badly, of course, as so many things \u2062have. He \u200cand Anne divorced, for reasons\u2063 he only \u2062hints at, though his run-amok adultery with other men\u200c and his sulfurous rages were much discussed in political and journalistic\u200b circles. By the sound of it he became a therapy addict. His\u2063 residual wealth wasn&#8217;t great enough\u2063 to maintain the magazine&#8217;s independence from kibitzing\u200b moneymen, and \u2064he had to sell. (After a brief revival under the hand \u200bof the veteran editor \u200cChris Lehmann \u2063it \u200dhas entered permanent decline.) Finally, his anti-Islamic views, coarsely\u2064 expressed,\u2062 got\u200c him\u200b canceled at Harvard.<\/p>\n<p>Many more things could be said \u200cabout <i>The Controversialist<\/i>, but I&#8217;ll\u200c limit myself to two, one appealing, \u2062the other \u2064not. The reader won&#8217;t help\u200d but be surprised by the warm, wholesome patriotism that suffuses\u2064 the book. Few accounts of\u200d the lives lived at the highest levels of American politics and journalism \u200btake full account of \u200bthe miraculous country that has made them possible. Peretz loves his country, \u2064and he writes \u200bmovingly about the exceptionalism that often embarrasses its more\u2062 progressive beneficiaries.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand, though the evidence of\u200b his right-wing\u2063 beliefs mounts on every page, he insists on keeping a\u200c fanciful \u200ddistance from\u200c the conservatives \u2062who believe the same things he does: not only about the bedrock \u2063goodness of his country but \u200balso about the virtues of capitalism, the corrosive effects of identity politics, the decline of\u200d the universities, the horrors of Utopianism, the intellectual\u2064 and social disaster that these days goes under \u200dthe polemical tag \u2063&#8221;wokism.&#8221; He uses &#8220;right wing&#8221; as an insult, but Martin Peretz is a\u200c right-winger. He\u200b should fess \u200cup. His refusal to join\u200c the\u2063 side he&#8217;s on is more annoying \u200cthan the chest hair.<\/p>\n<p><i>The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left\u2064 Right and \u200bCenter<\/i><br \/>  by Martin Peretz<br \/> Wicked Son, 336 pp., $28<\/p>\n<p><i>Andrew Ferguson is a contributing writer at the<\/i> Atlantic \u2064 <i>and nonresident\u2063 fellow at the American \u200bEnterprise Institute.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Controversialist, Martin Peretz&#8217;s memoir, may deter readers with its cover. The author, known for editing the New Republic, is depicted reclining, grinning, and sporting a wild tuft of chest hair peeking out of his linen shirt.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":781,"featured_media":2020661,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[544],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2020660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-free-beacon"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020660","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/781"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2020660"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2020660\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2020661"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2020660"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2020660"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2020660"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}