Mailer In TAC, c. 2002

I know Mailer’s reputation, and I remember how jarring it was for some people I know to see Mailer on the cover of TAC as well, but if I was going to post something about him I thought I should try to find something good to say about him. “Don’t speak ill of the dead” seems like a pretty good rule, and that’s certainly true in the days immediately following someone’s passing. There will be decades for people to rehash all the reasons why they don’t like Mailer. He saw some things quite clearly, and that should also be kept in mind.

I’m not so sure that there are so few “value conservatives.” Defined that broadly, there are plenty of them even now. There are not nearly so many who translate their attachments to “family, home, faith, hard work, duty, allegiance” into a politics that actually helps to defend the things they value, and there I would agree with Dan that you could gather like-minded folks into that stadium.

A lot of these “value conservatives” have been scared into backing the “flag conservatives” because the latter can always invoke some enemy, real or imagined, and claim that it is coming to destroy all those things that the “value conservatives” cherish. So the “value conservatives” yield to schemes of the “flag conservatives,” including the very destructive ones, and believe that they have taken the right side. The division between them is not exactly like the breakdown between patriot and nationalist, because I know there are people who consider themselves nationalists who are nonetheless not “flag conservatives,” but that is a good way of understanding it. The nationalist is obviously very susceptible to schemes that promise power and “greatness” or that claim to be defending those things. Nationalism typically includes the drive for domination over other nations, which may be framed in many ways that make it sound like something other than domination (emancipation, enlightenment, etc.), so to the extent that the American right, at least since WWII, has been very nationalist it has also been entirely at home with American superpower and therefore also comfortable with American hegemony and imperialist wars. Because nationalists are interested in increasing the nation’s power, in spite of the costs this may impose on the actual people and country they profess to defend, they ultimately have no objection to imperialism, unless it can be shown that this or that particular imperialist venture damages national power overall. One of the reasons why many “‘realists” do not impress me is that they think that hegemony is perfectly fine and just needs to be managed well.

Sympathy for old European colonialism is trickier. There are the unabashed promoters of nostalgia for the “good old days” of a particularly liberal imperialism (Boot and Ferguson would fall under this heading, and perhaps even a Brownback might be included here to some extent), and then there are those who see the age of empires as the summit of Western civilisation (once again mistakenly identifying power with accomplishment) and decolonisation as a disaster for the West. There probably are some who may simply want to express admiration for Western technical accomplishments who wind up becoming apologists for the colonial empires. Indeed, as I think George Grant saw very clearly, championing modernity and supporting technological empire go hand in hand. (This is one of the reasons why traditionalists and anti-modernists find, or should find, empire undesirable, and it was one of the ways that Grant discerned a lack of conservatism in American conservatives of his time.) Attempting to assert dominance over non-human nature and then using the means of that dominance to wield power over other humans are closely related. Both entail the application of reason for the acquisition of power for the purposes of exploitation rather than stewardship and charity, which are the right relations of man to nature and his fellow man.

I don’t know that anyone has “embraced” Mailer in his entirety or that pointing out areas of common agreement constitutes an endorsement of a person’s entire life and work. TAC had one interview with Mailer five years ago when he had something interesting to say to their readers. Neoconservatives regularly tout Hitchens and shower him with praise, and he, in turn, writes apologia for their most loathsome policies and figures. Hitchens is a would-be arch-nemesis of everyone who believes in God, and you scarcely hear a word from neoconservatives about his enthusiastic godlessness, whereas Mailer, much to the amusement of people on the left, actually believed in God and spoke about this publicly. Obviously, Mailer had his flaws, but even so the differences between the two men and between the treatment of them seem clear to me.

I have no objections to people pointing out everything that he got wrong. It seemed inappropriate to dance on the man’s grave, and so I thought I would find something else to say if I was going to say anything.