Hayward’s Pen Defeats the Wayward Left

Upon Further Review: Books and Arts, 1983–2020, by Steve Hayward (Kindle Direct, $8.95)

T here’s a dark, unacknowledged secret about book reviewing.

Many critics never read more than a chunk of the book that they are reviewing. This can lead to embarrassment. Harvard President Drew Faust Gilpin, for instance, evidently failed to do more than skim Richard Brookhiser’s recent book Founder’s Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln. In her New York Times review she falsely claimed that within its pages the Union generals who lost “the Civil War battles of the Seven Days, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville” were “left unnamed.” In fact Brookhiser discussed them at some length, and at 347 pages Founder’s Son isn’t even that long. Was Gilpin incapable of doing more than thumbing through the book or of assigning one of her many aides and assistants with the task of reading it to make sure that her review was accurate?

More troubling still is the routine phenomenon that critics lack the background, intellect, or perspective to comment properly on the books they have been assigned. One has only to go back and read the initial comments on nearly every literary classic to see this.

Nonetheless, occasionally you’ll encounter a commentator of real excellence. I was reminded of this because longtime Powerline author and Berkeley professor Steven Hayward has just put out a new collection of his essays, Upon Further Review: Books and Arts, 1983–2024. Those who know Hayward from his Powerline articles — or from his occasional pieces in National Review — are aware that he can be not only incisive but funny, amusing and cutting. What the new collection shows is that he has a stupendous intellect and a rare care and concern for his subjects. Indeed, they demonstrate that over the past three decades he has been one of the best reviewers and commentators in America.

Especially notable is the subtlety and depth with which Hayward examines complex questions in American history and political philosophy. Although Under Further Review is a relatively short book and written in an engaging style, it is not a fast read. Indeed, it took me several weeks to finish its essays, many of which originally appeared in the libertarian journal Reason or in the Claremont Review of Books. (Hayward served as an editor at both publications.) These are pieces to savor and ponder — fine dining, not fast food.

Hayward has resisted the impulse to organize the pieces chronologically, and he has deliberately included at least one that he is, by his own admission, less than wholly enthusiastic about now. That is in a 1995 Reason magazine review in which he snipes at The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, by Christopher Lasch. Retrospectively, Hayward admits that he was unduly critical of that posthumously published final work by the contrarian academic.

That review of his stands out for another reason, as well: It’s likely the only piece in the collection that hasn’t aged well. So many others are not only enjoyable to read but remarkably prescient.

Decades before others, for instance, Hayward anticipated that liberal politics would come to be dominated by a fascination with personal identity (race, sexuality, etc.) and that the Democratic Party would sink or swim with the popular appeal of these concerns. Similarly, he saw early on that Barack Obama’s main purpose in pushing the Affordable Care Act was his desire to create a legacy, one that was to a great degree unmotivated by any meaningful ideology beyond self-aggrandizement. At the same time, Hayward convincingly argues that Obamacare is, more than anything else, a continuation of trends that first appeared during the Progressive Era. Rightly, Hayward sees Woodrow Wilson’s faith in “scientific” administration as a wholesale rejection of the American constitution and the belief in limited government, one that carried through the New Deal and has yet to be adequately confronted.

These questions interest Hayward as a legal scholar and political scientist, and he displays a special knowledge of the questions related to America’s founding and to the issues in political philosophy that obsessed the Founding Fathers: virtue among the citizenry and limits on governmental authority. Connected to this is his keen appreciation and deep familiarity with Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Burke, and de Tocqueville. Each of these philosophers is considered with delicacy and insight, and this serves as background to his detailed examinations of the careers of two of his heroes, Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

These takes are multifaceted. Hayward is profoundly intent on examining one of the questions that so concerned historian Harry Jaffa: What is the connection between the Lockean strains in the Declaration of Independence and the principles of separation of powers, first espoused by Montesquieu, that appear in the Constitution? Do they represent a continuation of a set of consistent beliefs? Or a divergence? Hayward looks at these issues as he queries Lincoln’s belief that the two are indissolubly bound up with one another. To the same degree, in light of Churchill’s role as a practical politician and a prudential stateman, Hayward reviews the great events of the statesman’s career, including his support for a Jewish state and his conflicts with Lord Halifax over whether to fight on after the Battle of Dunkirk.

Yet there are also shorter and lighter pieces in the collection. There he offers readers his takes on several novels and movies and the Ken Burns docuseries Civil War.

One of the most surprising pieces is a detailed assessment of the Unabomber’s manifesto. Hayward shows that to a large degree it was the work of a right-winger who routinely mocked socialism and leftists. Even better are his revisionist takes on two Democratic icons, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jimmy Carter. Although Hayward is properly respectful of the intellect of the longtime New York senator who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, he makes use of a volume of his letters to show that his regular votes on behalf of left-wing legislation likely grew from a cowardice founded in his fear of the might of the liberal intelligentsia. Still more revealing is his portrait of the peanut farmer from Georgia and former president who falsely claimed that it was “Zionist” propaganda that had persuaded people that the PLO had sought Israel’s annihilation.

Included as well are reviews of books by William Manchester, Robert Caro, Simon Schama, William Safire, Walker Percy, William Buckley, James Piereson, Forrest Macdonald, and George Will. There is also a vast amount of fascinating information on such topics as the history of affirmative action, welfare policy, and the creation of the John Birch Society. Altogether, the author’s intellectual facility is as remarkable and impressive as is his range of subjects.

Permit me to mention one emblematic instance that demonstrates that Hayward reads the whole of even the most gargantuan door-stoppers he comments on and that he has the requisite background for judging them. Rick Perlstein, a hack journalist and former writer for the Nation, has been widely criticized for his series of left-wing screeds about post-war American politics, and he has been particularly attacked for his lack of research. (Perlstein seems to compose his pieces based on internet searches rather than interviews or archival study.) In reviewing his 1,100-page Reaganland, Hayward did more than just observe Perlstein’s reliance on cut-and-paste authorship. Hayward took the time to read the book page by page and caught these damning errors:

North Carolina’s Senator Sam Ervin is transmuted into Sam Erving. The book says the GOP hadn’t controlled the House of Representatives since the Hoover administration when it did so in 1947–48 and 1953–54. It says that New York had 21 electoral votes in 1976 when it had 41. It misidentifies ABC News anchor Frank Reynolds by placing him at NBC, where he never worked. It claims that the Liberty Fund was a creation of Charles Koch; it wasn’t. It says George H. W. Bush beat Ronald Reagan in the 1980 Oregon primary 58.3 percent to 54 percent, which would be a neat trick of overvoting. Beyond these embarrassments are the gross misstatements and mischaracterizations of many particulars, from the 1965 Moynihan Report on the black family to the landmark Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision in 1976.

This is a first-rate read from a first-rate mind.