"Judge our contemporary culture warriors by the standards of books, and they disappoint: logic, evidence and reason are conspicuously absent. Judge them by the standards of pamphleteering, and they may be doing democracy a favor, reminding our apathetic public why politics matters. Let me, then, apply the pamphlet standard to a slew of recently published volumes in which liberals and conservatives have at each other. Pamphleteering flourishes because in both publishing and politics, established elites and institutions are no longer able to ensure consensus and insist on moderation."

The New Pamphleteers
The New York Times July 11, 2004
By ALAN WOLFE

Whether or not you can tell a book by its cover, you can generally tell a country by its books. If most political books are any indication, the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs; it's all ''gotcha'' commentary and attributions of bad faith. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible.

Yet if the technologies used by bloggers and hardballers are new, the form is older than the Republic. While they appear as books -- and are staples of the best-seller lists -- today's give-no-quarter attacks, as George Packer noted recently of bloggers, have their origins in the pamphlets of the colonial era. ''Whatever the gravity of their themes or the spaciousness of their contents,'' Bernard Bailyn has written of these 18th-century op-ed articles, ''they were always essentially polemical.'' Long before deconstruction, we were fond of a hermeneutics of suspicion. We had partisanship even before we had parties. Our framers warned against the dangers of faction because we so rarely stood together. If you prefer your invective unseasoned by decorum, check out what the anti-Federalists had to say about the Constitution or how the Whigs treated ''King Andrew'' Jackson.

Judge our contemporary culture warriors by the standards of books, and they disappoint: logic, evidence and reason are conspicuously absent. Judge them by the standards of pamphleteering, and they may be doing democracy a favor, reminding our apathetic public why politics matters. Let me, then, apply the pamphlet standard to a slew of recently published volumes in which liberals and conservatives have at each other. Pamphleteering flourishes because in both publishing and politics, established elites and institutions are no longer able to ensure consensus and insist on moderation.

The new pamphleteers certainly do not lack for what in Great Britain would pass for libel. Ann Coulter set the tone with ''Slander'' (2002) and ''Treason'' (2003). But they are lamblike compared with her columns, which called the publisher of this newspaper a ''traitor,'' and (at a more innocent time, before California recalled governors) declared the possibility of an Al Gore-Gray Davis presidential ticket ''the only compelling argument yet in favor of friendly fire.'' Her new book, HOW TO TALK TO A LIBERAL (IF YOU MUST): The World According to Ann Coulter (Crown Forum, $26.95, October), will include television and talk-radio transcripts as well as reworked columns.

Coulter's style of attack politics, while still far ahead of the pack in the violence of its language, is no longer confined to the right. In CRUEL AND UNUSUAL: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (Norton, $24.95, August), Mark Crispin Miller, who teaches media studies at New York University, dangles the possibility that the Bush-Cheney team took no action on intelligence warnings in the months leading up to 9/11 because it ''chose to let those horrors happen for its own political advantage.'' Bush Republicans, Miller writes, are ''genuine subversives''; ''more than the Islamists,'' their aim ''is to undo the framers' work, and force an alien form of government on the United States.''

Similar sentiments and language are on display in ROGUE STATE: America at War with the World (Nation, paper, $14.95), by T. D. Allman, a veteran foreign correspondent and the author of ''Miami: City of the Future.'' Bush pursues a ''middle-finger foreign policy, '' Allman writes, formulated by ''capos'' like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and sold by ''the Two Stooges of the Bush comedy team, Richard (the Magician) Perle and Kenneth (Cakewalk) Adelman.'' And for Nicholas von Hoffman, the New York Observer columnist and the author of HOAX: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies (Nation, paper, $13.95), George W. Bush isn't good at the Big Lie only because he doesn't have Hitler's chutzpah.

Just as the key to winning office these days lies in mobilizing the base rather than appealing to the center, so the aim of the new pamphleteering is to stay on message, no matter how contradictory your ideas become.

L. Brent Bozell III, the head of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group, wrote WEAPONS OF MASS DISTORTION: The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media (Crown Forum, $25.95) to counter Eric Alterman's claim in WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? The Truth About Bias and the News (Basic Books, paper, $15) -- itself a reply to Coulter and other smackdown artists on the right -- that conservatives dominate the airwaves. Logical inconsistency raises its head instantly: Bozell himself frequently appears on radio and television to make the case for liberal domination. Bozell has no use for reasoned argument; on one page the left controls everything on television, on another commentators like those on Fox (whose bias Bozell refuses to acknowledge) do not count as counterbalance, for they only discuss the news, not report it.

Such sleights of hand leave Alterman untouched. But Bozell did not write his book to convince anyone duped enough to listen to Alterman in the first place. A study of book-buying habits that cross-referenced the New York Times best-seller list with the ''customers who also bought this book'' feature of Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com found that conservatives tend to read and recommend conservative books and liberals, liberal books. The content of books like Bozell's supports the researcher's conclusion.

All of which may explain why Arianna Huffington, now a woman of the left, did not write FANATICS AND FOOLS: The Game Plan for Winning Back America (Miramax/Hyperion, $23.95) to persuade the conservatives who once were her soulmates. Rare among pamphleteers, Huffington has a sense of humor, a disposition that might make her suspect as a true warrior of words. Here she is on ''selective amnesia'' as a campaign tool: George W. Bush ''could not recall any antiwar protests when he was a student at Yale. No one bothered to ask whether he actually recalled that there was a war at all in Vietnam.'' But her humor also tends to the salacious. ''Quick, get that man a dose of political Viagra,'' she says of Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader. ''At least get the blood flowing somewhere.'' This is the kind of ''taste'' one expects to find in a writer who calls the deputy defense secretary Paul Hawkowitz.

Huffington is not the only pamphleteer who has changed her mind; David Horowitz and Christopher Hitchens moved from left to right, while the onetime smear artist David Brock shifted, like Huffington, from right to left. One who believes as passionately now in the opposite of what was believed before does not invite our credence. But in the pamphleteer's upside-down world, switching sides is essential to persuading your readers of the infamy of what you used to hold dear.

Nor is this a new phenomenon. Failed gods have produced great works, like Arthur Koestler's ''Darkness at Noon'' and George Orwell's ''Homage to Catalonia.'' But those are deeply introspective books. No such nuance can be found in the writing of the new pamphleteers. David Brock's REPUBLICAN NOISE MACHINE: Right-Wing Media and How It Corrupts Democracy (Crown, $25.95) is a particularly dreary example of how uninteresting political conversion became once Communism found itself toppled.

Brock's previous book, ''Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,'' his 2002 mea culpa for gutter-shouting from the conservative side, was engaging and informative. Too bad, then, that he now seems blinded by the left. ''The Republican Noise Machine'' is as petty in its discussion of people as it is sloppy in its handling of facts. Unable to keep an insult in his quiver, Brock gleefully announces that the Catholic theologian Michael Novak had his thesis rejected at Harvard and that the political scientist Abigail Thernstrom did not get academic tenure, factoids that are either irrelevant (anyone familiar with the academy knows what thesis committees can be like) or wrong (Thernstrom rejected a full-time academic career).

Brock also fails to grasp the conflicts that have emerged within right-wing punditry since he served in its ranks. Chris Matthews was not a supporter of the war in Iraq and Bill O'Reilly has serious questions about it. Lou Dobbs now sounds like Dick Gephardt when he discusses outsourcing. Andrew Sullivan's position on gay marriage is anathema to many other conservatives. Conservatives may well have shared a party line when they were out of power, but now that they have an actual president advancing their worldview, their ideas suddenly have consequences -- and turmoil is the inevitable result. Libertarians attack Bush's statism; fiscal conservatives, his big spending. This kind of behavior among liberals is called political suicide.

The final missing ingredient, especially when the product of the new pamphleteering is compared with real books, is research. The rationale seems to be: case closed, why bother investigating anything? John Gibson, host of ''The Big Story'' on Fox News, evidently thought it a good idea to document the many ways in which foreigners, especially Europeans, hate Americans. But he seems not to have traveled anywhere or talked to anyone, instead relying on the Internet for outrageous statements about American perfidy. And so in HATING AMERICA: The New World Sport (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $25.95), Gibson leaps on the thinker Pierre Hassner for apparently equating Bush and bin Laden as ''born again'' leaders when Hassner truly is pro-American.

In CAN AMERICA SURVIVE? The Rage of the Left, the Truth, and What to Do About It (New Beginnings/Hay House, $24.95, August), Ben Stein and Phil DeMuth carry Gibson's mission to the home front. ''To hear the haters tell it,'' they say of American liberals, ''nothing has changed since the days of the Ku Klux Klan and the night riders. . . . If the editorialists at Al Jazeera could have written the script, it probably wouldn't have been terribly different.'' Don't get us wrong, they insist, there are some good liberals in America, but among the very worst are Al Gore and John Kerry. (Gore is in fact the target of the comment on the K.K.K.).

Stein and DeMuth see an alarming new trend in liberal thought, one brought to perfection by Stalin and Brezhnev, ''to portray anyone who isn't a card-carrying liberal as not only corrupt, but also mentally unsound.'' The tactic must be attractive, because Stein and DeMuth immediately adopt it. The authors see conditions of life in the United States as so wonderful that only the ''mental state of the haters'' can explain their determination to destroy their country. Leftists are, in a word, infantile. ''The image comes to mind of a powerless little baby,'' they write, ''lashing out and flailing, with delusions of omnipotence that mask an underlying fear of impotence, of non-being.'' Stein, once a speechwriter for Presidents Nixon and Ford and now a writer and television commentator, and DeMuth, an investment adviser, live in Los Angeles. It shows.

Conservatives cannot give up on the idea that the left runs the country when in fact the right does, which adds an element of unreality to books that are supposed to touch on the real world. We normally think politicians have to simplify reality to get elected, while book writers can deal with the world in all its complexity. In our current environment, the roles are reversed. (Say what you will about President Bush and Tom DeLay, they know they are in charge. Right-wing pamphleteers are not so sure.)

Not all the new political pamphlets are uninspiring; John W. Dean's WORSE THAN WATERGATE: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush (Little, Brown, $22.95) is a chillingly effective account of secrecy in the Bush-Cheney administration and the threat it poses to democracy. But the bulk of these adventures in polemics, so shoddily researched and poorly argued, might make us question the state of non-fiction publishing in the United States. In truth, the venomous rhetoric in books like these comes all too close to the extremist politics of 20th-century Europe. Yet pamphlets served us well during our revolutionary times; the question is whether the present moment is sufficiently pregnant with historical importance for them to serve us well again.

Our authors certainly think so. Lewis H. Lapham, the editor of Harper's Magazine, evokes Tom Paine throughout GAG RULE: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy (Penguin, $19.95), his lament for the loss of civil liberty in contemporary America. Mark Crispin Miller calls for a return to ''republican ideals'' and grounds himself in the spirit of Jefferson and Madison. T. D. Allman, a stickler for our 18th-century Constitution, argues that Dick Cheney, appearances to the contrary, is not actually vice president of the United States because, although the president and vice president can be from the same state, electors from that state can't vote for both of them, and Cheney, like Bush, lived in Texas. For the conservative talk show host Sean Hannity, whose DELIVER US FROM EVIL: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, $26.95) accuses liberals of appeasing terrorism, the appropriate founder is John Adams, for he understood the importance of religion to our Republic. (Hannity seems unaware that Adams was partial to Unitarianism and approved the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, which stated in Article 11 that ''the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.'') It is axiomatic to these writers that we live in revolutionary times.

In one sense, they are right. We are not, to be sure, about to face a coup d'etat, although according to Michael Moore's STUPID WHITE MEN . . . and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation (ReganBooks/HarperCollins, paper, $13.95), we already have. But we are living in an era when many of our key institutions are failing. Before Watergate and the collapse of Vietnam, there existed an American Establishment, a bipartisan group of bankers, politicians and journalists who shaped the contours of national opinion. The Establishment specialized in its own type of political book: Maxwell Taylor's ''Uncertain Trumpet,'' which made the case for developing military strategies to deal with third-world insurgencies; James MacGregor Burns's ''Deadlock of Democracy,'' which argued for a more coordinated domestic policy to counter the complacency of the Eisenhower years; and Theodore White's ''Making of the President, 1960,'' the gold standard of campaign coverage. Some of these writers may have been partisan, but they tried to sound judicious and evenhanded. There was such a thing as consensus, and their job was to find it and to speak on its behalf.

We cannot expect today's political books to stand up to the weightier tomes of the 1950's and 60's, since the Establishment that sponsored the latter no longer exists. Our pamphleteers spend so much time debating each other's media prominence because both sides recognize that there is no national interest for which any one journalist can speak; when the war in Iraq ends, it will not be because a television anchor pronounced it a futile enterprise, as Walter Cronkite famously did during Vietnam. Right and left continue to debate the 2000 election because even the Supreme Court proved itself incapable of making an impartial decision. They accuse each other of treason because no ''wise men'' can be found with the ability to define the proper use of American power. Pamphleteering is what happens when no one -- editorial writers, university professors, publishing executives -- is doing much ''filtering.'' Without strong political parties and powerful labor unions, Arianna Huffington's and Sean Hannity's politics is the kind of politics you get.

For all their ugliness of language and unpersuasive fury, then, the current crop of political pamphlets bears a striking resemblance to the increasingly democratic culture in which they flourish. If their authors are poorly versed in American history, so are the young executives talking about the election at the airport bar while waiting for their connecting flights. If these books treat their side as good and their opponents as evil, so do the sermons in our booming evangelical churches. The style is melodramatic, but that is also true of ''Troy.'' Our political culture cannot be immune from the rest of our culture. The model for political argument these days is not the Book-of-the-Month Club but TruckWorld.com.

If the only choice we have is between no politics and vituperative politics, the latter is -- just barely -- preferable. Of course this could change if we recreated an Establishment that decided which television programs we would watch and how much dissent we would permit -- a prospect as unlikely (because the Establishment is gone) as it would be unwelcome (because it would constitute censorship). In the meantime, we argue about politics and even argue about how we argue about politics, just what you might expect when no one is in charge but ourselves.
Alan Wolfe is the director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. He is working on a book about the idea of American greatness.
Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

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