Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America.

Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, by Robert Hughes (Oxford, 210 pp., $19.95)

SOMETHING odd has lately erupted in the ranks of the liberal intelligentsia in America. The liberals are appropriating the arguments of conservative critics in a newly launched attack--new, that is, for the liberals--on contemporary cultural values. The liberals don't call the arguments conservative, of course, and the less scrupulous among them engage in elaborate stratagems designed to turn the arguments against the conservative writers who originated them in the 1980s. Yet on a whole range of issues that are now central to the heated political debate about cultural values in American life--multiculturalism, political correctness, the institution of the family, sexual morality, pop culture, educational standards, the politicization of the arts, and the social policies that impinge upon all of these matters--liberals are busily adopting the conservative critique of culture that emerged in the Reagan era while adapting it to the blame-theconservatives agenda of the Clinton Administration.

The latest example of this intellectual scam is a popular book called Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America, by Robert Hughes, the Australian emigre art critic for the now ultra-liberal Time magazine. This is the most blatant attempt that has yet been made by a media liberal to lay the principal blame for all the ills of American cultural life on conservative critics--myself among them--while adopting without acknowledgment a good many of the arguments they were the first to formulate in their battle with the radical Left. The result is both a falsification of recent history and a colossal act of intellectual bad faith.

Take, for instance, the way Mr. Hughes deals with the emergence of multiculturalism, the ideology of racial, ethnic, and sexual separatism that the radical Left has now succeeded in imposing on large areas of education, the arts, and social policy. This is the most divisive political development in America today, for it effectively denies the very possibility of a national culture in which all citizens, regardless of their ethnic origin or sexual preference, can participate as equals. It is a development that conservative and neo-conservative intellectuals-many of them from immigrant families themselves--were the first to oppose when it made its initial assault on American society in the 1980s.

Liberals such as Mr. Hughes, having no stomach for confrontations with the militant Left and ever fearful of being identified with the conservative Right, remained silent in those days as the racial and sexual radicals successfully negotiated their long march through the institutions. While regularly denouncing Ronald Reagan and expressing their horrified distaste for Margaret Thatcher, the liberals stood mute in the face of the radical juggernaut. Their harshest criticism was reserved for Commentary, The New Criterion, and other conservative journals while they embraced without significant demurral the Left's lethal multiculturalist agenda.

Yet now, suddenly, with the sky positively black with chickens coming home to roost in precisely the way that conservatives had predicted, the air is filled with the jeremiads of liberals who can no longer deny the scale of the wreckage. Culture of Complaint is in this respect a representative specimen of liberal hypocrisy. Mr. Hughes now presents himself as an unaffiliated, above-the-battle analyst of the multiculturalist debacle. From the lofty perspective of this mythical "middie" ground, he straightaway complains about "neo-conservatives who create an exaggerated bogey called multiculturalism," and then, a few pages on, promptly compounds the hypocrisy by reprocessing at considerable length the basic arguments formulated by the conservatives--no doubt prematurely, in Mr. Hughes's view-- in their campaign against the "bogey" he has just derided.

This bifocal approach to the politics of culture--it's OK if I say it, it has no legitimacy if they say it--disfigures the discussion of every urgent question in Culture of Complaint. Have the universities gone crazy in imposing destructive political standards on the study of literature, history, and the arts? Well, yes, says Mr. Hughes, and proceeds to rehearse the charges that conservative critics made all through the 1980s, but not before smearing with ridicule the critics--Allan Bloom, Roger Kimball, Dinesh D'Souza, et al.--whose widely read books (The Closing of the American Mind, Tenured Radicals, Illiberal Education) made this a subject of national debate while the author of Culture of Complaint was taking cover from the storm.

Has the radical Left's unremitting assault on the traditional family proved to have catastrophic consequences for American society? You bet it has, Mr. Hughes now says, and blithely recommends as a model a family consisting of--guess what?--two married parents who love each other and their children. Yet he cannot bring himself to embrace this unexceptionable bit of good sense without first heaping scorn upon Dan Quayle for saying essentially the same thing during the fall election campaign. When the Republican Party took up the question of "family values," it was for Mr. Hughes "a coercive cliche," but when liberals like himself extol the same standard, it is suddenly believed to have some redeeming social value.

Far more honest and informative on this subject than anything you will find in Culture of Complaint was a twenty-page article called "Dan Quayle Was Right," published in the April Atlantic, itself a liberal journal that has suddenly awakened from its torpor. This article confirmed in abundant detail the former Vice President's basic charge that "the media depicts the married two-parent family as a source of pathology" while at the same time affirming "the liberating effects of divorce and nonmarital childbirth." Yet there isn't a whisper of acknowledgment in Mr. Hughes's book that Dan Quayle got the matter exactly right.

Even about a subject on which Mr. Hughes is supposed to be something of an expert--the contemporary art scene--Culture of Complaint woefully distorts recent history. "In matters of visual art, the American 'culture war' officially started on May 18, 1989," he writes. This was the date on which a controversy erupted in the U.S. Senate when it was discovered that the creator of a photographic work called Piss Christ, depicting a crucifLx immersed in a container of the artist's urine, had received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, an agency of the Federal Government.

But to date the "culture war' in the art world from 2989, which was apparently when Mr. Hughes finally woke up to what had been going on for a decade or more, is simply to confuse history with autobiography. The fact is, Mr. Hughes hates the Left's politicization of the art scene as much as I do, and now at last he has some very telling things to say about it. But in true liberal fashion he simply didn't have the guts to address the subject until he could safely indict the political Right as a co-conspirator in the debacle that has overtaken the life of art in America.

And so it goes on virtually every page of Culture of Complaint, as Mr. Hughes exerts himself to occupy some liberal middle ground that, in the real world of politics and culture today, simply does not exist. As we see now every day with the Clinton Administration in Washington, it is still the radical Left that is calling the tune, and as long as liberals such as Mr. Hughes cannot bring themselves to acknowledge this obvious truth and suspend their slander of the conservatives from whom they have lately appropriated so many of their arguments, they will remain morally compromised. Behind all the bluster in Culture of Complaint there emerges a familiar phenomenon: the spectacle of the liberal mind suffering one of its periodic failures of nerve.

Mr. Kramer is the editor of The New Criterion.