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and Ward Society, since both seem to have the same zealot's con–
ceptions of morality and vice.
The strength of neoconservatism had been its critique of the
simplicities of liberalism and of utopian illusions . But if one seeks to–
day for some consistent presentation of a conservative anchorage or
standpoint , one finds incoherence. On the one hand, William Bar–
rett and Hilton Kramer defend modernity and modernism . At the
deutero-symposium of
Our Country and Our Culture ,
held by the Com–
mittee for the Free World in February 1983, William Barrett de–
clared : "What the artist is against is the spirit of modernity as such .
. . . And what the artist secretly, or otherwise, hankers after is the
society before 1789 . .."(A strange statement, considering the infat–
uation of the Bauhaus [Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Mies Vander
Rohe] with technology, or the geometric rationality of de Stijl, Mon–
drian, the constructivism ofGabo and Pevsner, or the modernity ex–
emplified by Malevich, Tatlin, and El Lissitsky which they identified
with the Russian Revolution. And I thought it was de Maistre and
his hangman who hankered after "religion, myth and tradition" and
the
douceur de vivre
before 1789.) For Kramer, modernism is the great
expression of the features of high capitalism. And the advent of post–
modernism, the Tom Wolfe-like celebration of the features of repre–
sentation , or Philip Johnson's architectural eclecticism, and other
artifacts of bourgeois taste, is cultural rubbish.
Whatever the historical veracity of these views, (for Trilling and
myself, modernism has been part of the adversary culture), the salient
fact is that both men are unabashedly defending the serious view of
high culture and an elite view of the arts. But against whom? The curi–
ous fact is that those who unabashedly proclaim the contrary
populist
view of art and politics are their fellow-conservatives. There is Ed–
ward Banfield's egregious defense of the market principle in culture
(which Kramer rightly denounced), and the generalized adoption of
a populist stance by Irving Kristol as a logical extension of the "com–
mon sense" of the people against the elite and the professionals, and
of the notion that the market should be the arbiter of taste and
preference.
Perhaps the most startling paradox of contemporary politics is
the unvarnished victory of "populism" as a political doctrine, em–
braced by both Left and Right. In the progressive tradition, popu–
lism was the hallmark of agrarian radicalism, the embattled defense
