AS MUCH AS LIBERALS WERE MYSTIFIED by conservative hostility toward Bill Clinton, so conservatives were baffled by liberal love for Clinton. How did this good old boy from Arkansas manage to inspire the affection of the Left from Harvard to Hollywood? One answer is to be found in The Truth of Power, Benjamin R. Barber,s account of his “memorable affair” with the president. A distinguished professor of political science at Rutgers University, Barber has written many well-received scholarly books. A modern day disciple of Rousseau, he advocates participatory democracy, and in his widely noticed book Jihad vs. McWorld (which, not coincidentally, was praised by President Clinton on national television in 1995), he attacked global capitalism. Now in The Truth of Power, Barber sets out to investigate the relation between truth and power, the struggle between the New Democrats and the party,s old wing, and finally, the enigmatic personality of our forty-second president. But the book is less a serious treatment of these large and important issues than a gossipy and rather smug account of Barber,s time in the White House as a court intellectual. The book centers around several presidential bull sessions attended by Barber and a Who,s Who of America,s intellectual Left, including Stephen Carter, Robert Putnam, Michael Sandel, Cass Sunstein, Michael Walzer, and Richard Rorty. Unhappily, we have (at least for now) only Barber,s record of the symposia-a record that transcribes some of the conversations and arguments but only comes alive in its chatty vignettes of the participants and how they fared. Barber is not kind to his fellow thinkers. “Sound byte ideology,” he writes of Al From,s contribution. “Everyone seemed to like” Henry Cisneros, “but nobody quite got what he was saying.” Alan Wolfe is a “churlish critic” and Michael Lind a “prudent opportunist.” Amitai Etzioni, we learn, regaled the party with the triumphs of the communitarian movement, “which were not altogether distinguishable from the triumphs of Amitai Etzioni.” Meanwhile, Alan Ehrenhalt is compared to Dr. Laura for his “neo-conservative rant about authority and its loss,” and Barber exults that Ehrenhalt “blew his chance” to influence the president. William Galston also commits the sin of neoconservatism and has to be reminded by Barber at one of the sessions that “nostalgia for this world that never was was a neo-con excuse for refusing to confront the reality of social, religious, and political change.” Barber always shines at these seminars, of course. Some of Barber,s gossip is more revealing of liberal prejudices-at least if we take Barber as representative of the breed. What, for example, does the intellectual in good standing think of his black colleagues? Are they entitled to speak as individuals? Or must they conform to his expectations? One of the participants, Eddie Williams-whom Barber describes as “a modest and soft spoken African-American”-is criticized for rambling “amiably through what should have been a fiery call to justice.” Thereafter he fell silent, becoming “our seminar,s ,invisible man.,” Of the contributions of Skip Gates and Randall Kennedy to a subsequent seminar, Barber opines, “I wish they had given themselves over more to rage.” Apparently, only angry blacks need apply. The female participants in the seminars hardly come off better, described by Barber as though they were characters in a Harlequin romance novel. Poor Jane Mansbridge began her remarks “in a critical vein, but quickly melted,” allowing herself to be seduced by “the president,s laser eyes,” while “her convictions withered in the hot sun of his presence.” But it is Amy Gutmann who enthralls the president: “Sitting right next to him, a seismograph to his every small move,” Barber writes, “I sensed the president was taking a kind of small shivering pleasure in her heartfelt comments.” In his scholarly writing, Barber has defended what he calls “strong democracy,” and in The Truth of Power, he refers to himself as a “populist.” But his life, as described in this memoir, is hardly typical of the life most Americans lead. He casually lets us know of his sailboat, four-wheeler, and summer cottage in the Berkshires, of his taste for weekly gin and bitter lemons, and the plays he has written for off-Broadway. And he anticipates congratulations on being married to a woman with a “dancer,s body” and “easy sexiness.” As he would later say of the president,s “post-nouvelle” kitchen, one might say of Barber,s life-that it is post-populist. Indeed, his participation in the presidential seminars is not easily reconciled with his populist ideology. Few Americans can exclaim, as Barber does, that having caught the ear of the president, they might “change the world.” The question troubles Barber, who avers at one point that it is the job of intellectuals “to persuade the people at large,” not simply whisper advice to their leaders. So what is the basis for the intellectual,s influence in a democracy? He is not elected by the people, and he lives a lifestyle that is not that of most Americans. Still, he desires to rule, to have America more closely reflect his own enlightened opinions. In the end, the secular intellectual of today can make sense of his disproportionate influence and justify it to his fellow citizens only by invoking religious metaphors. “We [White House intellectuals] were modern prophets,” Barber declares. “I know that sounds, if not actually pretentious, a little portentous,” he volunteers, “but that,s how it was.” And so as these “modern prophets” supped with the president on a “Lobster and Jicama Salad in Rice Paper, Chicken with pumpkin gnocchi and spiced huckleberry sauce, and Caramel and Roasted Dried Pears Mousse Cake with Kumquat sauce,” they debated the meaning of liberalism and the Third Way, argued over various ways of reviving civil society and citizenship, and pondered how to reignite or remain true to the “progressive” agenda in a post-New Deal, postmodern era. They thought hard. Perhaps I,m one of those cynical Americans who, Barber believes, “might even have found their cynicism mildly challenged had they witnessed the public-spirited and earnest, even patriotic, tenor of our conversations.” But cynicism is not entirely unwarranted. Consider Barber,s description of the president,s gaze as “a brilliant and warming floodlight,” a “glowing orb,” a “pool of luminosity”-while Barber worries about becoming just one more of his “jilted lovers, stewing in the poison of their indignant jealousies and simmering resentments.” Descriptions generally reserved for a love affair spill from Benjamin,s pen. “The second time is never the same as the first,” he laments of his second session with the president. When Barber is passed up for the chairmanship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he almost cuts things off with the president: “I turned to my wife, my sweetheart, to tell her that finally, yes I could say it, it was over. Except I couldn,t say it.” After all, “I was his soul mate,” he mused on another occasion. The president haunts his dreams: “When I finally sank into what I thought would be a deep sleep, I was troubled by presidential dreams in which-this was a dream I had over and over again during these years and still have today-I was courting his attention, sometimes getting it and feeling elated, sometimes being ignored, and feeling mortified.” Barber genuinely seems to think that he had an affair with the president, “of a rather different nature” than Lewinsky,s affair, he writes, “though perhaps not as different as I,d like to think.” It,s worth considering for a moment Barber,s comparison of himself to Lewinsky. Both were seduced by the president, that,s clear. Barber is every bit as much in the president,s thrall as Lewinsky ever was, and both were apparently attracted to him for the same reason: his power. So, too, while Clinton meant everything to them, both Lewinsky and the intellectual mattered little to the president. Barber painfully relates that all those intellectual jam sessions with Clinton contributed almost nothing to presidential policymaking or speechwriting. Nonetheless, both Barber and Lewinsky remained loyal to the president to the bitter end. About Monica Lewinsky,s heart I can venture nothing, but of the swooning loyalty of the liberal professoriate more can be said. The strangest part of their affair with Clinton is that they loved him not in spite of his sexual escapades but because of them. Or perhaps it,s not so strange. For at long last, after six years of a poll-driven, five-and-dime presidency, after one compromise after another on such key progressive issues as civil rights, health care, welfare reform, and gays in the military, here finally was a towering principle the liberal intellectual could fight for: Stop “sexual McCarthyism!” as Alan Dershowitz put it. Expose those hypocritical Republicans, Larry Flynt rallied. “Don,t let those f-kers bring you down!” Barber muttered to the president in the midst of the Lewinsky crisis, “anxious to signal a sense of intimate solidarity.” Intimate solidarity? Barber occasionally dresses up the point in finer drapery: “The whole American experiment in republican governance and the separation of church and state was organized around the conviction that moralistic crusading across the boundaries separating private from public was the very thing that had nearly destroyed Europe in its era of religious wars and from which many of the founders of the United States and those who followed them across the seas in subsequent centuries had fled.” Yet the principal thesis of Barber,s book is that Clinton stood not for something old but something entirely new. He was, Barber says, this “nation,s first antiwar president, its first openly reefer president . . . in the remarkable words of Toni Morrison, its ,first black President.,” Clinton embodied “the new open America of a hundred cultures,” “a multicultural, multi-gendered, multi-sexual, multicolored nation.” Paying the highest compliment Barber knows to the president, he exclaims that Clinton was “like Elvis and Madonna, not merely exhibiting but flaunting their sensuality.” One gets the impression that were it not for his affair with Monica Lewinsky, Clinton would never have assumed such iconic status with the Left. In the book,s opening chapter, before his first presidential symposium has taken place, Barber is unstinting in his praise of philosophers like himself, who hail “from the land of truth,” and who attempt to “speak truth to power.” We “moralists and philosophers,” he grandly pronounces, “are the conscience of a democracy . . . [and our] task is to act as irritants from the outside, bearing witness to truths that oppose complacency.” But by the end of his memoir, he has worked an amazing transformation. Now a grizzled veteran of several presidential seminars and an intimate of the president,s woes, he sees things quite differently, having come to believe that morality and truth are not always worth fighting for, that in fact, “moral judgment invokes pious complacency and makes war on diversity.” This was the strange magic of Bill Clinton, his ability to transmute everything he touched. Benjamin Barber may have come to Washington to speak what he believed was truth to power. But power whispered a few sweet nothings in his ear, and truth melted away. Adam Wolfson is executive editor of the Public Interest.
