From the WSJ Opinion Archives
DE GUSTIBUS
Where Today's Big Ideas Came From
Commentary is a magazine loaded with intellectual ammo.
NEW YORK--The timing couldn't have been better. The U.S. is soon likely to go to war in Iraq in no small part because of the arguments of thinkers who have graced the pages of Commentary magazine over the years, opposing appeasement and urging a strong U.S. military presence in the world--to face down tyrants and spread democracy. And here was the City University of New York hosting a conference this week to discuss the 57-year-old magazine and its legacy.
John Patrick Diggins, a CUNY history professor, reminded the conference that with readers and contributors such as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams, all now advisers to President Bush, Commentary "has enjoyed more influence on recent government foreign policy than any other intellectual journal." He meant this as a compliment, though, as we shall see, he had less kind things to say later on.
Commentary was making news on Iraq well before 9/11. In its July-August 2001 issue, it published a piece by Gary Milholin quoting unpublished assessments by United Nations inspectors that Iraq was importing banned "dual use" goods and technologies from at least 20 countries. Naji Sabri, Iraq's minister for foreign affairs, called the article "sheer lies and fabrications." Sounds like today's debate at that axis of paralysis known as the U.N. Security Council.
Nor was that the first time a Commentary article presaged a shift in U.S. foreign policy. Shortly before his 1980 election, Ronald Reagan was shown an article that Jeane Kirkpatrick had written in Commentary called "Dictatorships and Double Standards." She argued that there was a vital distinction between communist totalitarian states, which were evil, and authoritarian regimes, which, while not desirable, were serviceable as allies and amenable to reform.
Mr. Reagan was so impressed that he made Ms. Kirkpatrick his ambassador to the U.N., where she defended U.S. interests in the tradition of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, another Commentary contributor.
But Commentary has always focused on much more than foreign-policy articles. After a flirtation with the New Left in the 1960s, it rebelled against the rebels themselves and their anti-Americanism. The magazine published path-breaking articles on the failures of liberal urban policy, affirmative action and public education. And it championed, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, the best that has been thought and said. At the conference Terry Teachout, the author of a recent biography of H.L. Mencken, noted Commentary's long tradition of spotlighting the most worthy--and sometimes the most lamentable--aspects of literature and the arts, all the time striving to make the "noble achievements of a truly democratic culture accessible to all."
Norman Podhoretz, the magazine's distinguished longtime editor, who turned over the editorial reins to Neal Kozodoy in 1995, told the conference that the magazine had always tried to serve the "common reader" and the specialist alike, to put current debates in historical perspective and convey the "heat" of intellectual passion.
Heat was certainly generated during a panel on Commentary's role in the end of the Cold War. Mr. Diggins accused the magazine of ignoring signals that the Soviets were collapsing and of playing down the Islamic revolution that began in Iran. He mocked Jeane Kirkpatrick's thesis as "dictatorships and no standards." This led to an impassioned riposte from Josh Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute, who accused Mr. Diggins of evasiveness and a selective use of facts and reasserted the overarching importance, both morally and politically, of Cold War anticommunism.
Perhaps George Nash, the author of a seminal book on the conservative intellectual movement, captured Commentary's achievement best. He noted how far its efforts to celebrate America's "bourgeois democratic order" had carried the magazine and its writers. "Commentary was born in 1945 into an immigrant-based subculture and an intellectual milieu which touted 'alienation' as the true mark of the intellectual vis-à-vis his own culture," Mr. Nash said. "Two generations later it stands in the mainstream of American culture and even of American conservatism as a celebrant of the fundamental goodness of the American regime. It was a stunning achievement."
Can Commentary top that? We are about to learn if its prescriptions for the muscular assertion of American values and power, which worked so well to triumph over the Soviet "evil empire," will succeed in Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Mr. Fund's Political Diary appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com.
