They Really Did (and Do) Mean It

SJ has always known that left liberalism endows one with mind-forg'd manacles that inevitably curtail imaginary sympathy, the sine qua non for adept cultural and literary criticism. And yet SJ has always found it hard to believe that members of the clique that once surrounded Partisan Review and then splintered into Commentary and other redoubts, have been called neoconservatives by themselves and others, and whose epigones dotted the White House truly believe that some sort of resurrected Victorianism, epitomized by laissez-faire economics, repressed social mores, and more recently, by America taking up the White Man's Burden of global empire, represents a plausible and moral path for the US, and those who stand in the way of that path are treasonous, at the very least. Yet Commentary has reissued from its archives a piece (.pdf) by Midge Decter mocking the actions of "literary lions" on the occasion of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and whose peroration clearly indicts the same lions (and American culture) as "decadent."

This claim is an old marxist charge, but means here, at least generously interpreted, the call for a reinvigorated Victorianism mentioned above. Nowadays, SJ thinks that Dinesh D'Souza really has shown the skull beneath the skin of these jeremiads. Due to the condition known as left liberalism. SJ can't imagine what they are thinking. Are they nostalgic for the workhouse? for the Black Hole of Calcutta? for naked resource extraction by any means necessary? for the Opium Wars (started by the British infusion of opium into China)? Or (this is what SJ suspects) are they a lot like people who when they imagine they have past lives are always someone famous? Someone who presumably would not have to care about the sheer terror, misery and hypocrisy of 19th century England, because they would be enforcing it? (SJ might go for 19th century Europe, with its political clashes and novels written for adults, but for these people, there will always be an England.)

Well, if they don't mean it, then why do they keep saying it? (Kudos for James Wolcott for his adept skewering of this crowd.)