For about a week the
conservative establishment lamented the fact that “AEI scholar” Christina Hoff
Sommers was treated rudely by students while speaking at Lewis & Clark Law School
in Portland, Oregon. The New York Post (March 7, 2018) complainedabout “campus fascism on the march”
and then proceeded to explain Sommers’s unique contribution to our political
culture: “She argues that much of modern feminism betrays the movement’s
founding ideals.” Unfortunately the “lefty kids” at Lewis &Clark did not
appreciate her message and her achievement in keeping alive a better feminism
than the one that has now replaced it.
It so happens that I spoke
last October at a more prestigious institution of learning than Lewis &
Clark Law School, namely Hamilton College in Upstate New York, where I was a
guest of the Alexander Hamilton Institute. I too suffered the slings and arrows
of campus activists, and later my host was left to bear the brunt of the
leftist blowback. Not surprisingly, my plight did not receive the same media
treatment as Sommers’s adventure. All the same, George Leef of the James G.
Martin Center for Academic Renewal graciously posted material about my experience at Hamilton and
even managed to insert comments about it in National Review
Online. But it was hard for me to recognize myself in the
latter comments, since by then I had sunk into insignificance.
Although one can’t
blame George for presenting me as an innocuous
nebbish, someone “who is neither famous nor provocative,” I may in fact be the
most relentless critic of the conservative establishment on the Right. I have
repeatedly scolded that establishment for being a media-promoted enterprise
that bears little resemblance to its worthier post-World War Two predecessor.
The movement in question has gone from trying to stand athwart history to
becoming a slavish defender of the positions that the Left abandoned just before
embracing their present ones. But the conservative establishment has
tenaciously held on to some positions. These are, for example, military
belligerence promoted as “American exceptionalism,” inflicting the current
version of “our democracy” on the entire globe, and providing corporate tax
breaks to benefit the movement’s donor class.
Since the 1970s Martin Luther
King has gone in movement hagiography from being a philandering communist dupe
to a profoundly conservative Christian theologian (he was neither); homosexual
marriage has gone from being an obscenity to a family value; and even Orthodox
Jews, who are leading media conservatives, celebrate the transgendered Caitlyn Jenner. It seems
this newly discovered moral pioneer celebrates Israel for supporting the LGBT
cause. Robert E. Lee during the same time has descended from being a great
American hero, especially for the American Right, to someone whom Rich Lowry at
National Review considers so morally dubious that he deserves to have all
statues with his likeness pulled down. Senator
Joe McCarthy, the golden boy of the conservative movement of
the 1950s and 1960s, has gone from being a conservative hero to a conservative villain, while National
Review has published glowing tributes to the
Communist mass murderer Leon Trotsky.
The historical and moral
revisionism that I have only superficially touched on has taken another form,
of which Christina Hoff Sommers is a prime representative. Like other idols of
establishment conservatism, Sommers affirms an ism that until about forty years
ago was associated with the Left. But now feminism, properly understood, is
supposed to belong on the Right. True feminism for Sommers is synonymous with
the ideas and legacy of Betty Friedan, whom Sommers considers an admirable
social critic, reacting against the intolerable sexist conditions of the 1950s.
Writing in the neoconservative New York Sun in 2008, she vigorously defends Friedan’s concerns:
“Her essential point is down-to-earth and true. Postwar America has taken the
ideal of femininity to absurd excesses. Women in the fifties were encouraged to
be childlike, dependent passive.”
Sommers shields Friedan
against the charge of being something other than what she wants her to be,
namely, a very outspoken, spunky Jewish lady who was properly offended by
sexism. But David Horowitz (among others) has shown convincingly, that Friedan and her
parents had close links to the American Communist Party; and so the attempt to
depict this lady as someone above politics reeks of blatant dishonesty. Friedan
came from a radically leftist family, and as an adult she made the normal
leftist transition from Marxist-Leninism to the present war against inherited
social institutions and distinctions. There is no reason to imagine that
her revolt against post-World War Two sexism stood antipodes apart from what
the radical social Left now teaches.
In an incisive work on the evolution of feminism, Domestic
Tranquility, F. Carolyn Graglia, tells us what should be obvious to those
without vested professional interests. The work of Friedan and others who
downgraded the traditional role of women as homemakers led inescapably to the
more radical phase of the feminist movement that emerged about a decade later.
The war against the real or imagined domestic life of the 1950s, begun by
Friedan and her generation, fueled a crusade against gender distinctions that
continues down to the present. What Sommers has condemned as “the war against boys” goes back to what
was allegedly an early, nice form of feminism. But integral to feminism, as
Friedan herself taught, was “busting the masculine mystique.”
In Western countries today,
and not least of all in the US, we are witnessing a continuing social and
political transformation from the Left. For better or worse, it may be
impossible to halt this process; and there is no possibility of restoring the
American society that existed before the roller-coaster ride got underway. But
let’s stop lying about the remembered past and punishing old-timers on the
Right who know that deliberate misrepresentations are occurring! One
would have to be hopelessly naive to believe that our social problems started
when feminists started reading Gloria Steinem instead of Betty Friedan. And
pace Sommers, no one “stole feminism.” It simply evolved.
Paul
Gottfried [send
him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities
at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American
Right. His latest books are Fascism: The Career of a Concept and Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other
Friends and Teachers.
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