A Partial Defense of Senior

One thing worth noting about the Eric Boehlert piece that’s being widely discussed is that it focuses on the Blumenthal book. At least based on the Salon columns I read, I would agree that this part of the Senior review was problematic. I have to say, though, having read most of the Lapham columns (I let my subscription lapse after 2004, although it seems to have gotten better again this year) Senior’s analysis strikes me as fundamentally correct. No matter how heavily he wears his erudition, his analysis of contemporary politics is shallow, trite even when it’s accurate, lacking in detail and repetitive. (These traits are particularly striking when you read his recycling of ludicrous “Gush/Bore” conventional wisdom during his Nader lionization phase.) Another excellent example is to look at the content of his infamously, er, prescient column about the 2004 GOP convention. It’s not just that he made it up, it’s that he can’t even make up plausible lies:

The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal–government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden’s prayer–and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn’t stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

As any remotely sophisticated follower of American politics is well aware, Republican conventions circa 2004 don’t involve people stepping up to the podium and talking like Milton Friedman. Republican conventions, when it comes to domestic policy, are all about erecting a Potemkin facade of moderation, not preaching hardline anti-statist economics. Assessing that would be far more interesting than Lapham pompously writing as if it were 1964.

Senior’s review can be legitimately faulted for trying to paint Blumenthal with the same brush; she makes some distinctions, but it’s sloppy to talk about these two quite different writers as if they were similar just both of them are strong opponents of Bush. But as for her critique of Lapham, I think it’s pretty much right.