Dead center: the myth of the middle

National Review, Nov 2, 1992 by Terry Teachout

LAST FEBRUARY, Time published "The Fraying of America," an essay by Robert Hughes devoted mainly to a ferocious attack on multiculturalism, the political-correctness movement, and particularly Afrocentrism. According to Hughes, these enterprises are not merely intellectually fraudulent ("To plow through the literature of Afrocentrism is to enter a world of claims ... so absurd that they lie beyond satire") but, if allowed to "Balkanize" our common culture, could actually endanger democracy.

Which is all old news, but the fact that Hughes chose to say it, and in the pages of Time, did come as a surprise. Could it be that Robert Hughes has moved to the right? Not exactly. According to him, conservatives pose an equal if opposite threat to the good, the true, and the beautiful. Hughes sees the American Right and the PC movement (which I shall use here as shorthand for the whole constellation of political and intellectual ideas associated with the term "multiculturalism") as "two puritan sects, one masquerading as conservative, the other posing as revolutionary but using academic complaint as a way of evading engagement in the real world." In the center, we are given to understand, stands Robert Hughes, lonely defender of the West.

In fact, Hughes is not quite so lonely as he'd have us think. Standing shoulder to shoulder with him is Frederick Crews, whose latest book, The Critics Bear It Away: American Fiction and the Academy, is a collection of tough-minded essays in which the PC approach to literary criticism is drawn, quartered, and dumped by the side of the road. Yet Crews, like Hughes, does not wish to be thought of as a conservative, and so he has appended to his book a seemingly irrelevant attack on William Bennett, Lynne Cheney, Roger Kimball, and the late Allan Bloom--apparently designed to prove to his faculty-lounge colleagues in Berkeley that he is still, occasional fits of heterodoxy notwithstanding, a man of the cultural center:

I reject the rightists' apocalyptic account of the current state of criticism, whose complexities altogether escape them. To hear them tell it, something comparable in gravity and finality to the 1949 "loss of China" is occurring before our eyes .... It is an old story, really: academics who sense that their hour has passed, or malcontents who have failed to find or keep the academic careers they once dreamed of, have always identified their outmoded school of thought with the lost cause of civilization itself.

Another prominent cultural centrist is Arthur Schlesinger Jr., whose The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society is as straightforward in its condemnation of the "doctrinaire ethnicity" of the PC movement as it is silent about conservative opposition to PC. Schlesinger refers to American conservatives only once in his book: "Panicky conservatives, fearful that the republic is over the hill, call for a constitutional amendment to make English the official language of the United States." Reading Schlesinger's book, you'd never suspect that the Right had anything whatsoever to contribute to the current debate over American culture.

The cultural center is also home to a number of ageing leftists who suffer from anxious second thoughts about the fruits of their lifelong labors. Alfred Kazin, for instance, recently blasted the new left-wing cultural orthodoxy: "In the name of class-racegender equality, teachers and students all over America are now being trained in such intolerance to defame and exclude those who do not follow the party line ... the cultural damage seems irrevocable.'' Having gotten this grievance off his chest, Kazin hastens to remind us that he hates conservatism as much as he hates PC: "Don't think for a moment that the Right is more public-spirited than our academic ideologues." As proof that all conservatives are "illiberal" and thus unacceptable to right-thinking Americans, he places in evidence Antonin Scalia's "indifference to 'restorative justice' for blacks." No other examples are forthcoming.

It begins to look as if the center is getting a trifle crowded. Plenty of other high-powered Left-liberal types have pitched their tents there: Harold Bloom, Christopher Lasch, Yale professor David Bromwich, even the ineffable Camille Paglia. There are times when whole issues of The New Republic seem to have been written by such folk. Some are no doubt sincere in their belief that conservatives are congenitally unfit to defend high culture. Others, like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard's own academic-fashion consultant, look as if they're working both sides of the street. A couple of years ago, Gates was celebrating the "sexual carmvalesque" of 2 Live Crew on the op-ed page of the New York Times. He has obviously wet a finger and tested the wind since then, as can be seen by examining the dustjacket of his new book, the coyly titled Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture War, which assures potential readers that Gates "avoid[s] the stridency of both the Right and the Left."