Right at Last

Harry Stein was mortified when his wife bought a copy of Commentary magazine several years ago — not only bought the thing but actually had the nerve to bring it into the house. Good god: What if the neighbors saw it sitting on the coffee table?

Stein is a successful journalist and novelist, best known in those days as the author of Esquire magazine’s “Ethics” column. Which is to say that by the very nature of things he was a conventional liberal, in political and other matters, and so were all his friends. His parents had been Communist activists in the 1930s who, this being America, went on to make a nice living and rear their children in suburban affluence. In college, during the 1960s, he had done the usual stuff: marched fiercely against bad things, ferociously demanded good things, tried to provoke school administrators who wouldn’t have expelled him in a million years, lampooned Republicans without mercy in the pages of alternative newspapers, and eventually fell in love and married a woman who predictably enough was a charter member of a club called “Women Against Right-wing Scum.”

And now here was his wife, a few short years and a couple of childbirths later, reading Commentary — whose editor Norman Podhoretz, Stein writes, “was as despised in my longtime circle as Jesse Helms,” which is saying a mouthful. So he put his foot down. “I don’t want this around here,” he told his wife. “I don’t want it around the kids.” Then, like a moron, he actually read it — and discovered that he kind of almost agreed with it, sort of. “It was a lot closer to where I was on all sorts of things than the [magazines] I thought were on my side, including some I wrote for.” His wife had long since quit her club, by the way. “When the group formed, I thought I was a fighter against right-wing scum,” she said. “By the time I left, I was well on my way to being right-wing scum.” Harry was close behind her.

The descent into scumdom is a slippery slope, as Stein notes in his charming new memoir, How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (And Found Inner Peace). “Trust me,” he writes, “once you start, the process of seriously rethinking things takes on a life of its own.” His fellow converts from the pre-fab liberalism of their youth will know what he means. One day you get an inkling that maybe affirmative action isn’t very fair; the next thing you know, you’re joining the NRA, even though you hate guns. It’s not always so quick, of course. Reading Commentary was only one of several crucial moments that marked Harry Stein’s conversion, spaced over the span of many years. Like the good conservative he now is, he blames it all on a woman — his wife Priscilla, specifically, for introducing him to the pleasures and rigors of family life.

A few days after his first child was born, as Stein tells the story, Priscilla announced she would not be returning to her glamorous job as East Coast representative of a movie studio. Stein thought it had something to do with hormones unloosed in childbirth; surely she’d sober up quickly enough and return to living the feminist ideal. “Instead,” he writes, “it was soon clear she was getting more satisfaction in an hour with our child in our tiny Upper West Side apartment than she had in all her time over at Columbia’s imposing office on Fifth Avenue.” Friends were shocked. “You guys are like an old-fashioned family,” one journalist pal told him in disgust.

The heterodoxy began to spill over into Harry’s work. For a special Esquire issue on women, he wrote a story questioning the wholesomeness of day care. This was in the early 1980s, and he received an avalanche of personal and professional denunciations. Rather than clamber back up the slope, however, he kept going. There was a story on the “groupthink” of Reagan-era liberals for the New York Times Magazine, and another, for TV Guide, criticizing (from the wrong side) network television’s hysterical coverage of AIDS. At a dinner party one night he made the mistake of mildly defending Dan Quayle’s infamous Murphy Brown speech.

“When did you become a fascist?!” cried one of the other guests (yet another journalist).

For a few moments after the jerk’s onslaught, I was reeling. But then I realized I was far from defenseless, having a lifetime’s worth of my own moral superiority to fall back on — which is to say, a nearly inexhaustible supply of slingable bulls — t. . . .

I long ago mastered the tone: not so much hurt as deeply, deeply disappointed.

“That’s how you argue?” I asked quietly. “By calling me names?“

Already a couple of other heads were starting to bob slightly. I shook my own sorrowfully, and moved in for the kill. “My God, is that really how you respond to someone else’s ideas?”

He can still argue like a liberal, in other words. And in truth Stein is made uncomfortable by some of his new ideological bedfellows — the “religious right,” for example, whom he says he once considered “a bunch of crazed zealots out to impose their repressive, intolerant theocratic values on the rest of us.” Today his view is more nuanced. Since his conversion he has come to see the religious right as “a bunch of crazed zealots who pretty much kept to themselves until ‘progressive’ zealots started imposing their values on them and theirs via popular culture and the schools.”

How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy is only partly a memoir; large stretches of it are devoted to pure polemic, with varying degrees of success. He is excellent on the French (he can’t stand them) and offers the only plausible explanation I’ve seen for the enduring cultural mystery of why they’re so crazy for Jerry Lewis. He is also very good on the new New York Times (he can’t stand it, either). But his arguments against multiculturalism, radical feminism, political correctness, and so on, while well-informed and snappily put, will be familiar to anyone who reads the conservative press.

Stein is a skilled writer of the breezy school, as successful contributors to the slick magazines often are. The pace of his book is relentlessly brisk. Its tone is casual, now and then veering dangerously close to chipper. For my taste, too many sentences begin with “Absolutely,” or “No question.” He is occasionally platitudinous, and self-righteous once in a while, too — the twin vices of polemicists everywhere. About the reluctance of some feminists to debate fundamental questions, for example, he writes: “That is not how we’re supposed to do things in this country — our republic was born in a riot of fierce argument over contending philosophies and those debates have served us admirably ever since.”

But I’m reluctant to complain. Quibbles like these miss the point of what is otherwise a funny, engaging, and heartfelt book. How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy isn’t the present to give friends who have been marinating for years in political discussion. It’s not the gift to give your pal who’s just finished his dissertation on Oakeshott’s epistemology. It is the perfect gift for “leaners” — almost-former liberals, not-quite-yet conservatives, relatively apolitical people made vaguely uncomfortable by the coarseness of popular culture, or the silliness of their kids’ schools, or the sanctimonious amorality of Clintonian politics. They will find in Harry Stein a man who speaks their language, a thoughtful and good-natured guide beckoning them happily down the slippery slope.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.