Mona Charen has touched a nerve. Briefly, in case you took a break from the news over the weekend:
On a panel discussion at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Charen excoriated Republicans who observe a double standard on sexual harassment. Then she tore into CPAC for inviting Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to speak earlier in the week. Charen called Le Pen’s grandfather, Jean-Marie, “a Nazi,” which is close enough to the truth that his defenders would be well advised not to get into the weeds of an argument about it. “The Le Pen name is a disgrace,” Charen said. And his granddaughter “claims that she stands for him.”
Overnight, European-style nationalism-populism has moved from the fringe of American conservatism to its mainstream. Some conservatives welcome the development; others, Charen being their spokeswoman of the moment, oppose it; still others watch and wait to see whether it will modulate or peter out. Perhaps they can work out a modus vivendi with it in the meantime?
It has a certain pedigree, as Charen indicates, and covers a swath of political terrain at the far end of which stand avowed neo-fascists. There we draw the line. All who are reading this agree that we have to draw it somewhere. No two of us will agree about where to draw it exactly. Charen draws it closer to the center than do her critics to her right.
The stir she created at CPAC reminded me of when Susan Sontag got booed at Town Hall in New York in 1982, for calling the American Left hypocrites about Communism. They organized the event to give themselves a chance to redirect the narrative about Poland’s Solidarity movement, which was in the news. Solidarity was essentially an anti-Communist labor movement, and that embarrassed the Left on this side of the Iron Curtain. Speaker after speaker at Town Hall recited bits of anti-anti-Communist boilerplate. “This broad consensus was abruptly – some have said rudely – disturbed by a speech by Susan Sontag,” wrote the editors of The Nation, in their introduction to a symposium in response to her heresy.
Sontag was on fire. A few excerpts:
I have the impression that much of what is said about politics by people on the so-called democratic left — which includes many people here tonight — has been governed by the wish not to give comfort to “reactionary” forces. With that consideration in mind, people on the left have willingly or unwittingly told a lot of lies. We were unwilling to identify ourselves as anti-Communists because that was the slogan of the right. . . . The anti-Communist position seems already taken care of by those we oppose at home.
I want to challenge this view.
[. . .]
We were so sure who our enemies were, . . . so sure who were the virtuous and who the benighted. But I am struck by the fact that, despite the rightness of many of our views and aspirations, . . . we were not responding to a large truth. And we were countenancing a great deal of untruth.
Mutatis mutandis, Charen’s remarks yesterday were a restatement of Sontag’s complaint 36 years ago. In its day, the anti-Communist Left — Lionel Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Partisan Review, Dissent, the whole Family — raised the intelligence and integrity quotient of political debate in the United States. Charen has made a contribution to an equivalent development on the right. Godspeed to her.