The Magus of MIT

National Review, August 23, 2004 by Michael Potemra

THE three years since 9/11 have turned Noam Chomsky into a household name. His pamphlets of left-wing political extremism sell extremely well, and can serve as Exhibit A in the mainstreaming of American paranoia. He is by all accounts a brilliant man; so, we must ask, how can such a bright person be peddling the worst form of conspiracist hysteria? And it matters: When a scandal-sheet tabloid makes wild charges, people know it's okay to chuckle; when the voice issues from the ivied labs of MIT--home, after all, of rocket scientists--it's harder to keep smiling.

In The Anti-Chomsky Reader (Encounter, 260 pp., $17.95), editors Peter Collier and David Horowitz have assembled nine essays that demonstrate why Chomsky is screamingly wrong on the major issues he has tackled. In whitewashing the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge, writes Steven Morris, Chomsky dismisses eyewitness accounts of horrific atrocities; Eli Lehrer shows Chomsky engaging in similar legerdemain in forwarding the theory of a conspiratorial corporate media in the United States. Throughout, Chomsky is shown to be a master of bald assertion, whose incantations cannot survive a basic reality check. "Chomsky weaves his malicious fantasies with the skill of Thomas Mann's Mario the Magician, a famous fascist prototype," write David Horowitz and Ronald Radosh; his "hypnotic power derives from the impression that his bizarre text is based on actual sources like the New York Times, and that the reality he is busily inventing can be decoded only by intellectual wizards like himself." To read this fine book is to receive an unsparing view of what lies behind the Chomsky curtain.

* An enduring canard about the Religious Right would have us believe that conservative Christianity encourages men to be insensitive, hyper-masculinized patriarchs: strong, silent, tough, and--not to put too fine a point on it--blockish. Fortunately, a prominent sociologist--University of Virginia professor W. Bradford Wilcox--has taken the time to study the reality of the conservative Christian family, and he finds that the stereotype is factually incorrect. In Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Chicago, 328 pp., $20), Wilcox reports that evangelical religion actually "domesticates men.... At least when it comes to parenting and marriage, the soft patriarchs found in evangelical Protestantism come closer to approximating the iconic new man [of more liberal gender-ideology] than either mainline or unaffiliated men do." This is because "the positive effects of high levels of theological conservatism, familism, and church attendance among conservative Protestant men more than offset the negative effects of gender-role traditionalism." The "active and expressive approach to family life" taken by these conservative men may, ironically, make them, "in some ways, more progressive than their nonconservative peers."

The book is full of fascinating information--for example, women who are married to theologically conservative husbands are more likely than other married women to report themselves happy with the understanding they receive from their husbands; and husbands who are active conservative Protestants are much less likely to commit acts of domestic violence than husbands who are only nominally adherents of that religion. Wilcox has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the American family as it tries to preserve the best part of its traditional character.

* The definitive biography of Ronald Reagan is now available in a handsome two-volume slipcased paperback edition. Lou Cannon's Ronald Reagan: A Life in Politics (PublicAffairs, 1,462 pp., $35) includes Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power and President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime; together, these volumes tell an unbeatable story of the guy from the Midwest who changed the world. Cannon is not a conservative, and that makes his testimony all the more valuable: He is a journalist who is telling the truth about what he saw and what he learned. One of the blurbs for this new edition is especially revealing. It's from Clinton attack dog Sidney Blumenthal, who writes: "No other journalist had [Cannon's] access. ... Cannon's diligent effort to understand the inner Reagan is utterly devoid of the slightest smirk." Imagine that: If you examine the facts directly, without filtering them through the smirking prism of anti-Reagan bias, Reagan comes across as really impressive.

* One of the most important issues facing President Bush in a second term would be the need to rescue Social Security from insolvency. Social Security and Its Discontents: Perspectives on Choice (Cato, 386 pp., $29.95), edited by Michael D. Tanner, is a valuable handbook on the problem. June O'Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, points out in this volume that in the year 2018--less than a decade and a half away--"Social Security will become a current liability to the budget and the government will be compelled to take measures to find the extra funds needed to cover benefits." In short, that's the year in which the American people will discover that the Social Security "trust fund" is just an accounting gimmick and that there's not actually any cash in it.