By Joseph Epstein
Monday, January
27, 2025
Whenever I am among people discussing politics and the
discussion begins to turn contentious, I generally remind my companions that “I
have never lost a political argument” and, after a brief pause, add, “but,
then, neither have I ever won one.” The reason for this seeming paradox is
simple: To win an argument you need reason, and, when it comes to politics, you
cannot, as Jonathan Swift had it, reason someone out of something into which he
or she has not been reasoned.
Consider how one came to one’s own politics. Many among
us have adopted the politics of our parents. Others have come by their politics
in direct opposition to their parents’ politics. Some take up the politics
reigning among their social milieu; still others, seeking to distinguish
themselves, choose a politics of nonconformity. For some people, politics is of
trifling interest; for others, politics dominates their lives. Still others,
bored blue by the subject, scarcely have any politics at all.
Aristotle thought politics, which for him meant the
governing of the polis, contributed to the cultivation of virtue and
thence to the good life. In such novels as The Secret Agent, Under Western
Eyes, and Nostromo, Joseph Conrad made the case that politics was an
obsession that often quickly turned into an illness, bringing out the worst in
its full-time practitioners. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
concludes that politics can do little to assuage the human condition.
Michael Oakeshott thought politics “an inferior form of
human activity” that was about nothing more than the struggle for power, and as
such “an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule
others.” Oakeshott viewed “politics [as] the art of living together & of
being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life but of organizing a
common life.” He contemned those who in the political realm thought they had
all the answers, which many strongly politicized people do.
Michael Oakeshott’s were the politics of conservatism,
but of a kind that entailed “the propensity to use and enjoy what is present
rather than to wish to look for something else.” For him, to be conservative
“is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried,
fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the
near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the
perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” Conservatives, in Oakeshott’s
view, do best to “inject an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate,
to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them
down.”
***
I grew up in a household in Chicago, during the strongest
days of the Irish political Mafia—Kellys, Kenellys, Daleys everywhere—where all
politicians were judged guilty until proven innocent, which none ever was. My
father was strongly for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because he wanted the United
States in World War II, in the hope of saving the lives of Jews then being
massacred by Hitler. So strongly did he feel this that he would not permit
Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, with its isolationist
policy, in our apartment. He used to tell the story of his car stalling off
Lake Shore Drive, when a driver in a Tribune truck pulled up to help
him. My father told the man he didn’t want his goddamn help. “That,” he
concluded the story by saying, “shows how stupid politics can make you.”
My own first political utterance came in 1943, in the
playground of Eugene Field Grammar School when I was six years old. It was: “We
want Roosevelt. / Where, where? / We want Roosevelt in the White House Chair.”
Pause. “We want [Thomas] Dewey. / Where, where? / We want Dewey in the electric
chair.” If there were any Republicans among the parents of my Jewish
contemporaries, I did not know of them.
I thought my father a lifelong Democrat, but when I asked
him whom he planned to vote for in the 1952 presidential election, Eisenhower
or Stevenson, he replied, “I think I’ll wait to see which way Walter Lippmann
goes.” The columnist Walter Lippmann, it turns out, went for Eisenhower,
thinking him in a better position than Stevenson to block the disruptive antics
of Senator Joseph McCarthy. My father voted for Eisenhower again in 1956,
noting, “He’s pro-business, and I’m a businessman.”
I don’t believe I had a single political thought through
four frolicking years of high school. The University of Chicago in the
mid-1950s, when I was a student there, was not a very political place. A small
number of students formed an organization for A Sane Nuclear Policy. I, never
much of a joiner, did not sign on. I thought of myself in those years as a
radical, and a radical, as Daniel Bell used to say, was someone who went to the
root of the matter. Reading Sidney Hook cleared me of any interest in Communism,
though neither was I great booster of capitalism, viewing it, as Churchill
viewed democracy, as the worst form of economic systems except for all the
others.
My first presidential vote was in 1960 and, as with most
of my presidential votes since, was a lesser-evil vote in favor of John F.
Kennedy over Richard Nixon. I never believed in Kennedy’s idealism and still
don’t. He may in fact have won the presidency owing to Chicago Mayor Richard J.
Daley’s finagling the vote count in Illinois. (A Chicago political motto in
those years: “Vote early and vote often.”) My low opinion of Nixon derived from
my believing that his rise in politics came from a McCarthy-like anti-Communism
that elevated him to Congress and thence on to the Senate and the vice
presidency.
Not long out of school, I began writing for the New
Republic and Commentary. For the latter in those
days, under its new and then-left-wing editor Norman Podhoretz, I wrote
takedowns of Henry Luce and Adlai Stevenson. When Norman’s thinking took a
rightward turn into neoconservatism, I did not follow him and in fact wrote an
emphatic put-down of neoconservatism for Irving Howe’s magazine, Dissent. In
my put-down I accused Norman, Irving Kristol, and other neocons of the ultimate
intellectual sin, that of “selling out.” I also wrote for Dissent a
strong attack on William F. Buckley Jr. Norman and Irving Kristol later became
friends I much admired, and Buckley 30 years later praised a book I wrote on
snobbery, calling me “perhaps the wittiest writer (working his genre) alive,
and the funniest since Randall Jarrell,” which showed an impressive gift for
forgiveness.
I did not in any way participate in the politics of the
1960s protest movement. Chiefly conducted out of universities, that movement
provided easy sex and drugs as side dishes to its antiestablishment and later
antiwar sentiment. I was spiritually disqualified from participation by being
married, the guardian of four sons, and having already served two years as a
drafted enlisted man in the United States Army. I viewed the movement askance,
and when in the early 1970s I myself began teaching at Northwestern University,
my disapproval was intensified when I witnessed younger professors sleeping
with their undergraduate students, espousing a leftist radicalism that never
touched their own lives, and supporting hiring policies that lapsed into an
identity politics that favored women, African Americans, and other supposed
victim groups over those with genuine intellectual and scholarly distinction.
Several years ago, I gave a talk at the American
Enterprise Institute on the subject of friendship. In the talk I argued that it
was a mistake to look for a congruence of politics in a friend or to break up a
friendship over the want of that congruence. One looks, I held, for other
things in a friend—an interesting point of view, a generous nature, good humor,
an ultimate seriousness—than agreement about NAFTA. At dinner after my talk,
Irving Kristol remarked that he entirely agreed with what I said about politics
and friendship—“with,” he added, “the exception of Israel-Palestine.”
True enough, I have no friends who are anti-Israel, and I
keep a cold place in my heart for Jews who are. I am not sure that being
opposed to genuine racism or misogyny isn’t, far from being political, just
commonsensical. Opposition to much that travels under the banner of woke,
however, is political, because the adherents of woke are out to destroy their
political opponents through humiliation and ultimately cancellation and must be
fended off.
In our time, politics have more and more become about
dueling virtues: with those on the left claiming themselves superior because of
their struggle for justice, those on the right claiming the wisdom of their
perception of the limits of the possible. And each side is intent on crushing
the other. The more politics dominate a time, as Oakeshott noted, the worse
that time. Ours just now is such an intensely political time: with
anti-Semitism on the rise, aggressively authoritarian leaders reigning in Russia,
Iran, and China, our American political parties in shambles, and Donald J.
Trump using up much of the nation’s political oxygen. In such an atmosphere,
skepticism has been at the center of my own politics.
***
In 1985 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, I
coined the word “virtucrat.” Elsewhere I’ve defined a virtucrat as “any man or
woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but
deeply righteous in the bargain.” A virtucrat apprehends the world’s injustice
and feels obliged to set things right. He is confident that he sees through the
lies and cons of the rich and powerful, which he feels must be exposed. His
life becomes a mission, his view of himself that of a sensitive, serious, above
all highly virtuous person.
In today’s public life, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Co. are obvious examples of the virtucrat at
work. Their every public utterance shimmers with righteousness. Why the rest of
us do not perceive their home truths is an unending source of wonder, and of
sadness if not horror, to them. They view themselves as a force for good, with
those who think otherwise ignorant and insensitive, unimaginative, and finally
immoral.
Virtucrats have long been with us. Such a figure was
Claud Cockburn (1904–1985), about whom a recent biography, written by his son
Patrick, has recently appeared. The biography is disappointing on many grounds,
not least in its incompleteness. Only on its penultimate page does its author
note that it “concentrates on the first half of Claud’s career up to 1940, a
period of savage conflict.” Patrick Cockburn (pronounced Ko-burn) does not say
that another volume is planned, and those of us who have read the first will
await a second with infinite patience.
English, the son of a minor diplomat posted to central
Europe, Claud Cockburn was sent off to a public (what Americans call a
“private”) school whose headmaster was the father of Graham Greene—Cockburn’s
contemporary, longtime friend, and himself something of a virtucrat, with
Catholicism added. Thence Cockburn went off to Keble College, Oxford, where he
read Spengler and Keynes, and identified with the defeated countries in World
War I. “Claud was already sympathetic to people from the defeated powers,” Patrick
Cockburn writes, “whom he viewed as victims of collective punishment unjustly
inflicted by the victorious Western allies.”
In the 250 pages of Believe Nothing Until It Is
Officially Denied, Claud Cockburn never comes alive. Patrick Cockburn tells
us that his father was charming but provides little evidence. True, while
working as a sub-editor at the Times of London, he won a contest for
composing the dullest headline of the year: “Small Earthquake in Chile. Not
Many Dead.” He also early published a story in Marianne Moore’s The Dial
and later wrote novels, the best known of them Beat the Devil, which he
published under the pen name of James Helvick and which was made into a movie
with Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, and Gina Lollobrigida. But for Cockburn,
the passion for politics drowned out that of literature and just about
everything else.
As a left-wing journalist, Claud Cockburn is said to have
lived by the shibboleth “believe nothing until it is officially denied,” which
gives Patrick Cockburn his book’s title. Cockburn had three marriages and many
lovers, among them Jean Ross, the model for Christopher Isherwood’s character
Sally Bowles (eventually the central figure in the musical Cabaret).
Never a faithful lover, Cockburn put his politics before his personal
relations.
Claud Cockburn worked at what he thought of as guerrilla
journalism. The guerrilla journalist does journalism outside the mainstream,
even though he might sometimes work for a large establishment journal, as
Cockburn did for a spell for the Times of London. Before he was done,
Cockburn also worked for Fortune, the Daily Worker, and Pravda.
He also privately published the Week, which was what today we would
call a newsletter. What qualified Cockburn as a guerrilla is that he
always strongly asserted his own point of view, one that went against the grain
of standard opinion and was invariably left-wing. (Closer to our day, I.F.
Stone was an American guerrilla journalist; so, currently, is Seymour Hersh.)
Patrick Cockburn sets out his father’s two core beliefs
as a journalist: “The first was skepticism, to the point of unalloyed cynicism,
about the doings of all in authority, high and low. But, secondly, he also
believed that decision makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more
self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand, and hence more
vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.” Claud Cockburn the guerrilla
journalist, in other words, supplied readers with the lowdown, the true gen, on
how the world really worked. Or at least confidently believed he did.
Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied takes
up in detail three main events in Claud Cockburn’s journalistic career: the
rise of fascism in Germany under Hitler, the stock market crash and the
Depression that came in its wake, and the Spanish Civil War. Cockburn got one
of the three right. Commendably, he early sensed the threat of fascism and the
monstrousness of Hitler, and through his one-man journalism fought off the
strong movement toward appeasement in England and Europe and America. The stock
market crash and the Depression that followed it he greeted, ideologically, as
good news, for it confirmed him in his belief that capitalism was defunct. As
for the Spanish Civil War, which Cockburn was confident the Republican side
would win, his views were without the complex subtleties of George Orwell’s in
the latter’s Homage to Catalonia. Orwell in fact accused Cockburn of
being under the control of the Stalinists in Spain and of falsely reporting
many aspects of the war. Later writers also viewed Cockburn as
functioning as a Communist propagandist in Spain.
In 1934, Claud Cockburn joined the Communist Party. “If
there were things to disagree with the Communists about,” he wrote in his
memoir I, Claud, “what I felt at the time was that they were a lot
nearer being a creative force in British politics than any other that I could
see. Also they were a force that was small, poor and adventurous, and the
distance between their thoughts and their actions appeared to me to be a lot
shorter than it was when you came to the Labour people, the ‘progressive
intellectuals.’” Claud Cockburn eventually departed the Communist Party, but he
left three sons—Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick—to perpetuate in books and journalism
their father’s virtucratic ideas. Alexander became a mouthpiece for Palestinian
terrorists. Andrew became a documentary filmmaker cataloguing the supposed
evils of American foreign policy and its intelligence services. Patrick wrote
this book. Claud Cockburn left quite the legacy.
Politics perhaps offers an easier outlet for displays of
virtue than any other realm. In politics one can register one’s deep desire for
equality, great regard for minorities, immeasurable sympathy for underdogs—all
at no cost to oneself. Those who have a rigid hatred of capitalism harbor it
because they feel it stands in the way of universal equality. Those ready to
believe that racism in America is “systemic” do so because it comports with
their notion that African Americans would otherwise by now have risen out of
their crime-ridden ghettoes. Those who find themselves siding with the
Palestinians against Israel do so in the belief that the former are the true
underdogs in the Middle East. The virtucrat not only believes all these things,
but also believes anyone who doesn’t is a right-winger, a barbarian, and
clearly part of the problem.
Politics are often required to counter the brutal
politics of others. Such was the case in the past century, when Communism and
fascism murdered millions and millions. Yet such towering intellectual figures
as Nietzsche, Stendhal, Proust, Kafka, and others felt politics was not of
primary or even secondary interest. In The Possessed, Dostoyevsky
wrote the ultimate take-down of the virtucrat, setting out the falsity,
hypocrisy, and even danger of the type. In his Pensées, Pascal,
anticipating the virtucrat, held that man was neither an angel nor a beast, and
argued that those who pretended to be angels were soon likely to act like
beasts.
The old adage has it that virtue is its own reward, yet
in politics the pretense to virtue has all too often brought not reward but the
severest punishment to those societies—Russian, German, Chinese—whose leaders
promised that under their plans virtue would flourish as never before.
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