Lean Left

Shorter Andrew Klavan: “I’m a Dick”

by KTK

June 6th, 2008

Some clown named Andrew Klavan has an essay at the conservative New York City Journal chock full of his insights into family, media, and culture. Predictably, in telling us what’s wrong with all the above, he mostly just tells us what’s wrong with Andrew Klavan.

He opens by recalling a recent visit to a fourth-grade classroom in a “slum” (I assume he means a neighborhood where people make less money than him). The students, he assures us, were mesmerized by him and hung on his every word.

“Don’t take it personally,” the teacher told me brusquely. “It’s just that they’ve never seen anyone like you before. A man—obviously tough—who’s not a gangster.”

I don’t know how tough I am—they were fourth-graders; I guess I could’ve taken most of them in a fair fight one-on-one—but that’s not what she was getting at. Her point was that you have to take just one look at me to see what, in fact, I am: an unapologetic, because-I-said-so, head-of-household male. They used to call us “husbands” and “fathers” back in the day. That’s what these kids had never seen.

From there he seques into the usual rant about the “heart breaking” phenomenon of “illegitimate” children who have their mothers’ family names (yes, his heart breaks over that), how poverty is no big deal because you can always just get a job and “beat” it, how “the culture” has abandoned children, dooming them to a life without virtue and liberty, and how “the media” are all owned by dirty liberals bent on destroying “the culture” by shutting out conservative thought. (His Web site boasts of his 8 published murder-mystery novels and 4 Hollywood movie deals or screenplays. I guess it must have been some other liberal media he was referring to.) He throws in some kind of pseudo-philosophical circular reasoning (”Personal behavior in a free society has to be a matter of choice—choice without which there is no virtue—virtue without which a society can’t be free.”) to establish his credentials as a conservative intellectual. (His check from the American Enterprise Institute must be late this month.)

We could mock all that, but it’s been done before. What’s interesting to me about this is the sheer boneheaded mind-in-a-groove reasoning that his conservatism amounts to. Klavan hasn’t got anything new to say, but he’s a walking illustration of the illogic and cognitive failure that makes conservatism what it is.

He has a few reasonable observations to make: that some kids lack male role models who aren’t bad examples; that many kids are born to uncommitted parents; that a high-school diploma, a job, and avoiding early pregnancy are major contributors toward building a stable life. But he does not merely jump from these simple facts to ungrounded practical conclusions - he goes whole hog in assuming that the obvious, necessary, and only corrective to the problems he mention is to behave like a patriarchal asshole.

For him, not being a “gangster” is, and can only be, equivalent to “unapologetically” ordering your wife and kids around “because I said so” while declaring yourself “head” of a household that - by his definition - must include at least one other full-grown adult, an adult who differs from you only in that you are “male”. He explicitly states that the names for an unapologetic patriarchal asshole of his kind are “husband” and “father”, apparently without suspecting that there is any way to be a husband or a father that doesn’t involve demanding unquestioning obedience from your famil subjects for no reason, or that that kind of attitude bears any relation to the resentment women and children feel toward men of his kind.

For Klavan, there’s no alternative to “traditional” families under the thumb of unapologetic patriarchal assholes, because there is obviously just no other way to grow up without become a gangster and living in a slum, like all those other kids who have their mothers’ family names.

But where are these kids going to learn such things? It’s the stuff you just sort of absorb in a healthy, traditional, two-parent home, and that’s exactly what they’re missing. If they learn what they’ve lived, they’re done for . . . .

It’s not just that he idealizes right-wing fantasy life so fully that he thinks it’s real; he believes the patriarchal fantasy life he imagines for these kids is somehow self-fulfilling and inevitable. If your parents are married, and particularly if your father is a domineering asshole, you “just sort of absorb” wholesome middle-class values. That’s great! Having a marriage license (he opposes them for gays, of course, but they’re mandatory for everyone else - because liberty doesn’t mean actually having the right to live your own life) means you don’t have to put any effort into raising your kids. It doesn’t matter what kind of parent you are: if you’re married and live together, your kids “absorb” Andrew Klavan’s authorized lifestyle, and if you’re not, “they’re done for”. There are no good single parents, unmarried parents, or gay parents, and there are no bad married hetero parents (or at least none where the father is “head”, “because I said so”). So the debate over marriage, and single parenthood, is over; you can’t defend the (perfectly traditional) “non-traditional” non-nuclear family, because, duh, kids can’t “absorb” anything there; you don’t have to talk about male/female relations, class, poverty, race, or anything else, in the context of the married two-parent family, because kids just effortlessly “absorb” what they need, regardless, in that environment. Everything about families and childrearing is simply invisible to him - everything, that is, but patriarchy and a marriage license. He says it explicitly: live his way and you “absorb” success; live any other way, and you’re “done for”.

Perusing his other writings reveals a similar inflexibility: everything simply is whatever he previously imagined it to be, without the slightest regard for actual facts on the ground. In a previous City Journal essay on how shocking it is that many war films seem to be against war, he criticizes numerous Vietnam films for their depictions of soldiers and the war, without ever once referencing actual events of the war. For him, how we are obligated to feel about something has nothing to do with what that thing is actually like. He doesn’t notice anything about the Vietnam war that would lead people to criticize it; lack of patriotism is the only possible explanation. He criticizes the “self-serious militaristic buffoon[s]” of Dr. Strangelove without mentioning, or seeming to actually know, that several main characters were parodies of real people. He excoriates the depiction of atrocities in Redacted and Rendition without ever admitting that they were actual events. (He later grudgingly notes that “some” of the films he criticizes ”are based on fact”, without saying which, or in what way.) Again and again, whether a war film depicts war in the “right” way has absolutely nothing to do with what actually happened in the war - even when the films are factually accurate depictions of actual events. (The only counterexample in the piece is, predictably, his enthusiasm for the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan.) At times his obliviousness reaches the level of comedy: he describes M*A*S*H as “blood-laced” without noting that there is no combat whatsoever in the movie - many of the scenes take place in a hospital operating room!; he notes that the “fantasy” elements of Lord of the Rings allow the film to unironically depict “martial virtues” and the “glory” of the warrior in combat with absolute “evil without a human face”, without any apparent suspicion that that depiction might be somewhat unrealistic for that reason. (In fact, he declares that “Only in fantasy war films . . . does the truth of our present situation emerge” - citing as examples LotR, War of the Worlds, and . . . Transformers!)

In the same essay, he rants at length about the loss of American nationalism (he uses that word) in favor of traitorous, weak-kneed “cosmopolitanism”. He then goes on immediately to state that

[The American] Founding redefined nationhood along social-contract lines that Europeans can still only theorize about. [Magna Carta, Andrew? Ring a bell? The French Constitution? The European Union?] Our love of nation at its best was ethical, not ethnic. Our patriotism was loyalty not to race, or even to tradition, but to ideals of individual liberty and republican self-governance.

So . . . it doesn’t really have much to do with nationality, then, does it? It’s as if he has no idea what the words he uses even mean - he’s simply heard that “patriotism” is what conservatives think is good, and those condescending liberal elites are all, like, “cosmopolitan” and French and stuff, so that must be bad, and also American patriotism is about universal values like ethics and ideals and liberty and political rights, not local denominators like heritage, race, or tradition, so take that you dirty cosmopolitans! (Maybe he’s only heard of the drink. I have this weird vision of him lecturing on the Bolshevik Revolution as the war between the White Russians and the Black Russians.)

His charming character comes through again on his personal Web site: “Pour yourself a drink and light up something that will not only be bad for you but will irritate the person sitting next to you as well. . . . If you are politically correct, easily offended or simply annoying, hit the road.” That’s right: even your personal tastes should be chosen for the specific purpose of making other people uncomfortable - because indifference to others is what a “because I said so” man is all about. And, yes - “political correctness” - the right wing’s obsessive sense of victimization at the thought that not being offensive is some sort of infringement on their ability to express themselves. (It probably is, but that hardly makes them more attractive.) He even manages to work in a screed against “moral relativism” - a phrase that operates as a kind of “dummy sign” for conservatives who can’t distinguish between not imposing your values on other people by force and not having any values at all.

In short, Klavan’s a buffoon - a stereotypical conservative, stuffed full of unexamined ideological set-pieces that he barfs out whenever prompted by an appropriate keyword (”family”, “culture”, “warrior”). He is a self-parody who doesn’t get his own joke. But he’s an unusually clean and transparent example of that standard type. Everything’s right on the surface with him, though he doesn’t seem to recognize it. Blustering, insecure patriarch - pretend warrior - belligerent “rugged individualist” - self-admiring, incoherent thinker: he’s all of these, but, what’s more, he’s willing to adopt the persona and beliefs that they entail without the slightest self-criticism or embarrassment. He doesn’t even bother with the usual pretexts - the potted theories of psychology, history, politics, and science that are common currency among “sophisticated” conservatives. He just throws it all right out there: How do children learn to be successful? They “absorb” it from their patriarchs. What if there’s no patriarch? They’re “done for”. What attitudes should Americans have? Nationalist ones. Why? Because our loyalties are centered on ideals and not tradition. What should war movies do? Encourage people to approve of actual wars. What are the best war films? The ones that don’t depict reality. It’s not merely un-self-aware - there’s a kind of giddy indifference in it all. He revels in conservatism, he revels in his unexamined and undefended opinions, and he revels in offending people - with no sense that they’re all the same thing. It’s kind of charming, in the way poopy-pantsed toddlers are charming - as long as you’re upwind and don’t have to deal with the mess.

But here’s the thing: he’s a dick. He rains stupid and graceless condescension down on people whose lives are, apparently, much harder than his own. He blusters self-serving nonsense about being a “tough” “because I said so” man that adds up to nothing more than making the other people in his life submissive to him. He babbles about “protecting” women but doesn’t pause to note that the problems he identifies in their lives - poverty, education, lack of jobs, lack of family stability - aren’t things he can “protect” them from. He is dumb as a brick about politics, history, sociology, and even Hollywood movies that deal with those issues, but he’s willing to send other people to war out of his own mouth-breathing certitude. He is filled with complaints about other people’s lives and values, but thinks it’s OK to force them to live by his, and he thinks it’s funny to offend others deliberately with his own crude behavior. He is not the most eloquent conservative, though there is a refreshing clarity to his stance (I’d rather read Klavan than George Will, who is at least smart enough to pretend not to be what he is). But he’s an absolutely paradigmatic conservative. He’s a dick.

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