But the Emerson quote is a nice touch

I was planning about blogging about this, as I took Harper’s to read on the plane to Montreal and was dismayed to see that the Lapham essay was extra-long, hence taking away from something that might not be incredibly fucking annoying, but fortunately Hit and Run beat me to it. Really, though, there’s no reason why Lapham shouldn’t just pretend to have watched a convention that happened several months after he wrote the piece. After all, this article–whose thesis is that American society is much more conservative than in 1960 partly because of well-funded conservative organizations, and whose central figures are Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz (who don’t tell us much about conservatism circa 2004, but Lewis has probably never met Bill O’Reilly at a social engagement)–could have been, and probably was, written during the Reagan Administration. There’s nothing there that hasn’t been said much more effectively dozens of times. And, really, that’s what most of Lapham’s columns are like; pretentious as hell, despite the fact that he churns out the same crap about how shocked he is that the people he meets at trade conferences and Upper East Side cocktail parties are reactionaries every month.
Having his interns dig up a quote from Voltaire or Twain doesn’t make this interesting; it makes him the “progressive” George Will.

My favorite thing about Lapham, though, is that the one issue he really seems to care about is the New York ban on smoking, and yet his political hero is that puritain authoritarian Ralph Nader. But otherwise, it makes sense. Lapham–the upper class swell whose political thought consists entirely of vacuous banalities–is the ultimate Naderite.