I saw this column by Jonathan Chait when it came out, but I never got around to commenting on it. Along with some others who commented on it earlier, I think this may be the shabbiest piece I’ve ever seen Chait write.
He tackles a list of the 10 most harmful books of the last two centuries, published by Human Events. He scores some easy points, with a lot of name-calling thrown in (for exaomple, conservatives are “a gaggle of thick-skulled fanatics”). And I think he’s right that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion should have made the list — though I can see how the contributors overlooked it, since it’s more a propaganda tract. But, whatever.
What bothers me about Chait’s attack on the list is the seeming disingenousness of it. First of all, he surely must know that lists — especially those compiled by committees — are always stupid in one respect or another. It’s a journalistic conceit that knows no party affiliation.
Second, he asserts — simply for the sake of offering insults — that the contributors in particular and conservatives in general cannot “distinguish between seminal works of social science and totalitarian manifestos” simply because both sorts of books show up on the same list. But he must know that, say, Robert George knows the difference between The Communist Manifesto and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. But conceding this in good faith would detract from the entire point of the column.
Or take his riff on the entry on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique:
The squib on “The Feminine Mystique” begins with a fairly anodyne summary of Betty Freidan’s pioneering feminist tract. Rather than explain what’s so dangerous about allowing women the choice of having a career, though, Human Events proceeds to quote a review that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist.” Not just a Stalinist, but a Marxist to boot!
Personally, I fail to see how Friedan’s communist past — she was 42 when she published “The Feminine Mystique” — would discredit her insights about the repressive nature of a world in which women were discriminated against or barred outright from most professions and much of public life. Especially because the conservative movement was itself heavily salted with ex-communists. But then, my mind has already been poisoned by Dewey, Mill and other liberal relativists.
This is thick with bad faith. He creates a strawman by saying that what really offends conservatives is the idea that women have the choice of working (when was the last time you heard a conservative make the argument that women shouldn’t have that choice?). He scores a quick hypocrisy charge by mentioning that many conservatives were ex-Communists. He suggests that there’s no merit to the idea that Dewey’s influence on education has been negative even though this is hardly a crackpot or new argument, even among liberals. And, worst of all, he pretends that he doesn’t know the real substance of the complaints against Friedan. The issue isn’t merely that she was an “ex”-Communist. The critique offered by David Horowitz, and mentioned in the Human Events piece, was that Friedan was a collosal liar. She pretended to be a middle class housewife when she was really a pro-Stalin activist. Chait willfully ignores this in order to deliver a cheap shot. Call me crazy, but if a conservative were guilty of such propagandistic misrepresentation, I sincerely doubt Chait would write how he failed to see how a famous conservative’s pro-Hitler past was entirely irrelevant to his insights.