Roger Kimball’s pointless criticisms of the cultural left

Roger Kimball is the editor of the leading neoconservative magazine of cultural criticism, The New Criterion. Yesterday a correspondent sent me a Kimball column from Pajamas Media, “Some things you can’t say,” with the note, “I don’t know if you follow Roger’s work, but he seems to be making many very good points lately.”

I replied:

I don’t agree that this is very good. It’s more of the same pointless criticisms of the left that Kimball has been making for twenty years. He has no analysis, he has no explanation of why these things are happening other than to complain about them and say that they’re absurd.

Thus he writes (the bolding is mine):

In a recent column, Mark Steyn pointed out that the mighty Amazon.com is advertising a special music sale called “The Twelve Days Of Holiday”. (Hat tip for this to Instapundit.) This is what happens when you bend over backwards to mollify multicultural sensitivities. The linguistic absurdity (“On the first day of holiday, my true love gave to me …”) is not fortuitous: it is the presenting symptom of that moral illness that underlies the whole enterprise. In a later column, Mark reports that a reader who complained to Amazon about the excision of the word “Christmas” received this canned response from Amazon:

Please accept our sincere apologies if you were offended by the use of the word “Christmas” on our website. Our intention in referring to Christmas is to give specific ordering guidance for a specific holiday, not to exclude other faiths.

Pass the air-sickness bag, what?

So, the ongoing destruction of our culture is the result of “bending over backwards to mollify multicultural sensitivities,” it’s a “linguistic absurdity,” and it makes him “sick.” He has neither an explanation of why it’s happening nor an intellectual or practical response to it. His only response is to pretend to barf. It doesn’t occur to him that the nations of the West are led by an elite that is determined to destroy them as historic nations and cultures, and therefore “12 days of holiday” is not merely an absurdity but a logical expression of that program. It doesn’t occur to him that if you admit tens of millions of nonwhite / non-Christian / non-European immigrants into a society whose historic majority group and identity were white, European, and Christian, then the country’s historic identity will begin to lose its legitimacy and be thrown aside because it no longer fits your new population. It doesn’t occur to him that “conservatives” as well as the broad mass of the population fail to oppose these transformations because they all believe that discrimination is the worst evil and that it’s America’s destiny to become a multiracial, multicultural country.

So long as the problem consists of people “bending over backward to mollify multicultural sensibilities,” rather than the the rule of multiculturalism that they’re bending backward over to, so long as what we’re confronting is an “absurdity” rather than the logical, step by step destruction of our culture, what can we do to stop it? There’s no actual program arrayed against us, so there’s nothing to oppose. There’s only people’s silly and unnecessary response of “bending over backward.” If they would just stop being so silly, all would be well.

At one point Kimball refers to the “moral illness that underlies the whole enterprise,” but, typically, he doesn’t say what this moral illness consists of.

In the article he also attacks the Department of Homeland Security for adopting the Muslims’ recommendations on the sort of language the government should use. So the government should not say “Islamofascism,” as that’s insulting to Muslims, and it should not say “liberty,” since that conveys American hegemony, and so on. He continues:

While emissaries from the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security are making Herculean efforts not to do or say anything of “offend Muslims,” radical Muslims are busy extending the list of things they are offended by while also seeking new ways to insinuate elements of Sharia law into the West–a mode of theocratic imposition that, far from being “fully compatible” with secular democracy, is something closer to its antithesis.

That’s the closest he comes in the article to identifying an actual program and agenda that is against us, rather than just silliness, bending over backward. But the question that any serious writer would ask is, given that these radical, sharia-spreading Muslim are so hostile and dangerous to our society, why are they here at all, how did they get here, and what can we do about it? He offers not a hint. Nor does he have any explanation of why the government is accommodating them. Could it have anything to with the fact that America defines itself as a diverse, inclusive country which rigorously avoids discrimination against people of other cultures, and therefore must adapt itself to newly arrived cultures such as Islam? No. That doesn’t occur to him either. He points to no bad principle that is guiding these bad things, which we could oppose with the opposite, good principle. And he neglects to do this, because doing it would require that he oppose the liberal principle of non-discrimination that has led our government to surrender to cultural aliens. It would require that he oppose the neoconservatism to which he himself subscribes and which is a subset of that same liberalism.

In his last paragraph, after listing the changes in the British children’s dictionary (which I discussed here), he writes:

Do you believe that? Then you will also believe the US State Department when it tells you that Islam and secular democracy are “fully compatible” and that “liberty” should be avoid because its a synonym for “American hegemony.” Yesterday, I made mention of something called “The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.” I, too, thought it little more than a (bad) joke when I first heard about it. More and more, though, I wonder whether it is making far greater, if largely covert, inroads into civilization than we had ever thought possible. Not, alas, into those civilizations where the Religion of Peace reigns or is making rapid inroads. But many–maybe most–places that had traditionally identified themselves as Christian seem to have surrendered. Is “suicide” still in that junior dictionary? It should be. Twelve days of holiday to spend in the virtual world of a chatroom while emissaries from the religion of peace busy themselves making the laws of your neighborhood fully compatible with the tenets of Sharia law.

So he refers to “suicide.” This also comes close to identifying something definite. But whence comes this suicide, and what can we do to stop it? He has no idea. In fact his first response to the notion of suicide was that it was a bad joke, which he only now is starting to take seriously.

In sum and to repeat: Kimball neither identifies a principle guiding the left, not an opposite principle with which to oppose the left. As he has been doing for 20 years, he catalogs and decries and mocks and moans about and looks down his nose at and grits his teeth at the phenomena of the cultural left, but offers no sense of why this is happening, what we did to make it possible, and what we need to do to stop it. His pointless criticisms bespeak an impotence that announces the victory of the tendencies he’s decrying, rather than a determined fight against them.

See my articles on why it’s necessary to go beyond complaining about the “absurdity” of “political correctness,” and to start attacking its principled root, which is liberalism:

Is there a difference between “silly” and “non-silly” PC?

Why Conservatives Call PC Tyranny “Silly”

George Fraser, the ruin of Britain, and the possibility of true resistance to liberalism

In the last article, I argue that criticizing political correctness is inadequate. Instead, we must understand the cause of PC, which is liberalism; what liberals really believe in and seek; how they seek the destruction of tradition; and how, by standing for tradition, we can effectively oppose liberalism.

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Rick Darby writes:

I’m with you on this. Roger Kimball is what I think of as a Bow Tie Conservative—the mirror image of the deconstructionist “artist” who imagines he is a brave rebel by producing (creating wouldn’t be the mot juste) garbage art that perfectly fits the Avant Garde Establishment specifications.

Kimball has a nice soft couch in the New Criterion salon from which he can play the Outspoken Critic of PC without bothering to analyze its source and meaning. I don’t subscribe to the NC anymore, but when I did I noticed he’d crank out one of these screeds for the front-of-the-book section in just about every issue. Look at those crazy professors! Can you believe all these stupid euphemisms! Everybody’s doing back flips to keep from offending anyone! I am cultural conservative, watch me bait the tiger!

Twenty or 30 years ago, when PC was really beginning to sink in, this viewing with alarm served a valid purpose. Reporting to people who could still be astonished, who weren’t yet cowed by the great liberal redefinition project, at least represented an early warning system for those who might have stopped the PC monster when it was still teething. But to just go on repeating the same old line about the problem being over-sensitivity is not only to mischaracterize it; it’s a form of intellectual anesthetic, dulling the outrage and, yes, fear that we should be experiencing. Kimball and his crew of high-class sarcasm artistes, whether they realize it or not, have a subliminal message: the liberals have the power, we are powerless; they are at the wheel, we are back-seat drivers who can only mutter, “Watch your speed! You’re going to miss the turn!”

Recently I expunged the immigration sites from my blogroll. With the one honorable exception of Numbers USA, they have all lost the plot. They think griping is a game changer. Peter Brimelow does his semi-annual (quarterly?) webathon, pleading for people to send money to Vdare so he can keep the assembly line of ain’t-it-awful posts going for people who know how awful it is. He’s busy converting the Pope to Catholicism. I can’t recall a single article at Vdare proposing tactics or strategy to fight back.

I’ve had it with the conservative opposition that can only recycle the same complaints. Thanks for providing bandwidth for people like Shrewsbury—maybe his manifesto is quixotic, but at least he’s thinking about means of therapy for our poor sick nation, not just telling the poor patient, “Hey, you know, coughing up blood is bad for you.”

LA replies:

I am so happy to receive this excellent comment from you, so happy to know that others have had similar thoughts about Kimball. By the way, I’ve known him slightly, going back to the early ’90s and Vile Bodies, a monthly get together at the building of the Manhattan Institute, in the days when the different branches of conservatism hadn’t completely split. A couple of years ago when he published Mark Steyn’s dreadful article with the anti-intellectual title, “It’s the demography, stupid,” which neocons touted as a Churchillian call for civilizational defense against Islam but which was, as I demonstrated, a call to surrender to Islam, I wrote to Kimball criticizing it. Kimball replied that the article was “brilliant.” I wrote back with further points, Kimball didn’t reply, and I haven’t communicated with him since.

You write: “Kimball and his crew of high-class sarcasm artistes…”

That’s perfect.

As for Vdare, I think they publish good articles, and their blog presents much useful information, but the site is too much in the paleocon mold of indulging in negativity and anger.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 09, 2008 12:10 PM | Send