October 31, 2009, 08:00 AM ET

Lilla vs. Rosenthal

A few weeks ago, Mark Lilla had an article in The Chronicle on the high-handed way in which conservatives and conservatism are treated in academe in general and the Center for the Comparative Study of Right-Wing Movements at Berkeley in particular.

A month later the Chronicle published a "Counterpoint" by Lawrence Rosenthal, executive director of the Berkeley center. It is a symptomatic reply, and it deserves further comment.

Lilla's main contention is that the academic understanding of conservatism tends toward flat narratives and smooth summations, such as the placement of anti-communism at the center of conservative thought and the identification of conservatism with right-wing extremism.

Rosenthal appeals to the Center's Web site to prove him wrong. "Our Web site distinguishes the current right from its predecessors by noting that before the fall of Communism, anti-Communism 'overcame the particular claims of individual [right] movements and points of view, and created a unified lens through which the world was perceived and which directed action.'"

The assertion doesn't dispove Lilla's point, however. On the contrary, certain aspects and sub-movements of conservatism didn't fit that "unified lens" -- for instance, agrarian conservatives worried more about capitalism and industrialization than about communism, and cultural conservatives found the enemy mass culture amply present in both communist and capitalist nations.

Next, Rosenthal takes up Lilla's assertion that the Center forgets that anti-Communism "was first conceived by cold-war liberals, not by conservatives." He invokes another statement from the Web page in answer: "Apparently Lilla did not read with sufficient care to register our observation that anti-Communism also 'united the right with major political parties and movements on the center-left, parties like the Democratic Party in the U.S.A."

How, though, does this glib and fuzzy summation refute Lilla's point about the origins of anti-communism in postwar liberalism?

Finally, Rosenthal identifies Lilla's prime complaint. Lilla alleges the Center "presumes a continuous slippery slope running from conservatism down to violent far-right movements. It's a little like the Hoover Institution announcing a study 'comparing' the Red Brigades with, say, Adlai Stevenson."

Rosenthal's answer to the charge is extraordinary. In fact, it disqualifies the Center on the very grounds that Lilla lays out. One would expect an answer that displays the Center's sober approach to Hayek, Witness, Milton Friedman, 1970s neoconservatism, the 100-year-old origins of social conservatism, and so on. What we get, however, is a turn to contemporary right-wing journalism.

"It is crucial to understand the projection here," Rosenthal says. "Not only is Lilla expressing a baseless fear, but this kind of conflation is already going on in the conservative world he aims to protect. A photograph of the late William F. Buckley, the godfather of modern American conservatism, appears with Lilla's essay. The Web version of Buckley's magazine, the National Review, has been publishing a blog dedicated to a book by one of its writers, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change (2007). . . . The blog also discusses Barack Obama in this context. National Review Online might as well be "comparing" the Red Brigades to Stevenson!"

Rosenthal adds a paragraph on Glenn Beck and his encouragement of "right-wing activists, who have taken to town-hall meetings and marches primed to intimidate Democratic speakers, armed with pictures of Obama as Hitler . . ."

This is strange. Rosenthal replies to Lilla maintaining that the Center conflates conservatism with right-wing extremism by showing that popular conservative media figures conflate them. Why, though, does what rightist TV and magazine personalities do prove that the Center doesn't do the same? Rosenthal mentions Lilla's "projection," but here that defense mechanism characterizes Rosenthal himself. He cites the most visible and vocal figures in public life, an easy recourse that signifies a shallow understanding of the other side and an inability to affirm his own side. Here we have revealed the enduring complacency of the academic world in regard to conservative thought.

The irony seems to escape Rosenthal. He concludes with the very point that Lilla made: "We also reject the rosy belief that that bright line between conservatives and extremists is all that bright these days, as the link between the National Review Online and Beck et al. indicates."

There we have the full range of awareness, from NRO all the way to Fox. If this Counterpoint is representative of the Berkeley Center, we will wait a long time before anything illuminating about the right emerges from it.

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Comments

1. goxewu - October 31, 2009 at 02:21 pm

OK, help me out here. I'm down with the ideas that conservatism is multifaceted and that all conservatives aren't populist yahoos like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh,* but in this insider squabble between Mssrs Lilla and Rosenthal, I can't see the forest for the trees. Just what is it that conservatives are trying to conserve? (And please don't tell me that they're fighting to preserve my precious American right to pay Profiterium Health Care $1250 a month for its Platinum Premium Plan so that I can choose my own doctor when I need a flu shot.)

* GB and RL are, like Keith Olbermann and Ed Schulz, more showbiz entertainers than pundits with any gravitas. I suppose it's at least a quasi-honorable profession that goes back through Mort Sahl to Will Rogers. But Walter Lippmann they ain't.

2. markbauerlein - November 01, 2009 at 08:07 am

The point is that when Rosenthal set out to show that the Berkeley Center doesn't conflate conservatism with rightist extremism, he main rejoinder was, "Look at how National Review and Fox News conflate them." This proves Lilla's assertion.

3. clb8121 - November 01, 2009 at 02:51 pm

It does appear to me that Rosenthal's rejoinder illustrates the source of the "flat narratives and smooth summations" in modern academia of the complex of ideas and movements identified as conservatism. The contemporary academic approach comes out of polemics and advocacy, not out of the quest for understanding. Advocacy promotes the " us vs. them" mentality and cartoon portrayals of those on the "wrong" side of some line of shibboleth. So, Rosenthal justifies his own partisan rhetoric by pointing to the partisan rhetoric of Glenn Beck and the National Review. But university scholars ought to have some higher goal than being left-wing versions of partisan journalists.