Death of a liberal God: reacting to Arthur Miller.

ATTENTION must be paid to the attention that's been paid to Arthur Miller, playwright, darling of the Left, husband of Marilyn Monroe, self-appointed public moralist, and did I mention that he was married to Marilyn Monroe? The outpouring of sanctimonious twaddle that greeted Miller's death at 89 in February was partly queasy-making, partly comic.

The emetic side came from the pent-up liberal self-righteousness that erupted everywhere like a nasty boil. The comedy--if such ghastliness can really be called comic--followed from the yawning disproportion between cause (Miller's modest artistic accomplishment) and effect (wailing and gnashing of teeth as if a hybrid of Sophocles and Mahatma Gandhi had suddenly passed away).

The New York Times started its obituary-cum-bid-for-canonization on Page One, above the fold, and continued inside the paper for two full pages. "Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays," quoth the Times, "and in them often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life--including a brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his staunch refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee."

Everywhere one turned there were headlines telling you that "Attention Must Be Paid" to Arthur Miller's passing (his most famous, indeed his only famous, line is from Death of a Salesman, Miller's "American King Lear," according to one paper). The Washington Post dilated on the "shatteringly human frailty in his plays," the Chicago Tribune mourned the "the major social conscience of the world stage," and the British press--my, how they went to town. John Peter of The (London) Times explained how you always knew you were in "the presence of greatness" when you were anywhere near his friend Arthur, while Erica Wagner, also in the Times, demonstrated why the 20th century was really "the century of Arthur Miller." The British director David Thacker issued the considered judgment that Miller was "as great as any writer in the history of playwriting," excepting W. Shakespeare.

It really was nauseating--not just the inflated praise, wildly disproportionate to Miller's actual accomplishment, but the oleaginous moralism that accompanied it. Terry Teachout, offering a voice of sanity in the Wall Street Journal, wondered "how much attention would now be paid to Miller if he hadn't married Monroe, and if the House Un-American Activities Committee hadn't made the mistake of subpoenaing him in 1956 to testify about his Communist ties" (which, by the way, were extensive). Teachout didn't really wonder, of course. He knew that the answer is "not much."

Most of what Miller wrote was what Teachout delicately described as "pseudo-poetic burble." Death of a Salesman became an instant hit when it appeared in 1949. Today, as I've said elsewhere, it looks like a period-piece melodrama. It's the same with Miller's other Big Play, The Crucible (1953), a heavy-going piece of allegorical didacticism about the Salem Witch Hunts--which hunts? Witch hunts; 1953; witch hunts: Get it, Senator McCarthy?

The truth is that Arthur Miller would be a footnote in the history of American culture were it not for 1) the accident of his marriage to the blond bombshell and 2) his status as a "moralist." The first earned him a place in the annals of celebrity, vide the section on voyeuristic curiosity about mildly salacious unions. The second earned him a spot in the annals of left-wing hagiography. You can't read a paragraph about Miller without being told that he was a "moralist," a man with a "social conscience" so big that doctors everywhere should have been alarmed. But as Mark Steyn observed, when it comes to Arthur Miller the word "moralist" is "code for leftie."

Why is Death of a Salesman regarded so reverently? Not because of the play's merits but because it crystallized the sentiment of anti-Americanism--the American Dream gone south--that has set left-wing hearts pit-a-pat for as long as anyone can remember. Willy Loman is thought to embody a certain species of rancid American ambition and idealism--so the poor schmuck had to commit suicide, you see. It really wasn't his fault, it was the fault of The System that he had bought into. Miller's patrons and admirers were not so naive, of course. They never subscribed to the American Dream, even if, like Miller, they were conspicuous beneficiaries of it. No sir. They pitied Willy Loman because he was a patsy, but they held him in contempt because he embodied everything they hated about America.

Well, not everything. The Crucible touched on the rest of the indictment. Miller could hardly go to the toilet without comparing some facet of American life to the Salem witch trials (which, by the way, were nowhere near as awful as they have been made out to be). In 1998, Miller took to the pages of the New York Times to warn that the investigation into President Clinton's extracurricular activities bore an ominous resemblance to, yep, the "iron vituperation," "the gut-shuddering hatred" of those "Salem ministers roaring down on the Devil as though they would grind their heels into his face."

What really bothered Miller, of course, was what bothered the Left establishment: that Kenneth Starr should actually have done the job he was hired to do. Time may have led us to forget the vicious demonization of Ken Starr: For the Left, he was Antichrist of the Week. Miller did his bit to contribute to the calumny. You remember Toni Morrison describing President Clinton as America's first black president? Miller liked the idea, and opined that the president's closeness with blacks "may have helped uncork the sewer of contempt on his head," i.e., "the Starr report."

All of Miller's public interventions--his displays of "social conscience" --bore the mark of his experiences with The Crucible. And why not? He writes an allegory about the House Un-American Activities Committee and is instantly hailed as a martyr, saint, genius, hero, and demigod. The Left loved Arthur Miller because he helped codify and perpetuate one of their dearest myths--the myth of McCarthyism.

Dear Reader, did you know that in the late 1940s and 1950s America was in the grip of a fearsome, paranoid witch hunt against supposed Communists and other alleged traitors? According to this myth, the assault was fearsome because it blighted thousands of careers and lives, and it was paranoid because it was essentially groundless. Sen. Joseph McCarthy ranted on about Communist spies, but really, the myth of McCarthyism maintains, there were no spies to speak of, only liberals like ...well, like Alger Hiss.

The historical basis of this myth has been refuted again and again. The Soviet archives, for example, showed beyond dispute that the State Department was home to numerous Soviet spies and that the American Communist party, far from being a beneficent homegrown expression of the "progressive" spirit, was in fact a tool of Moscow ideologues. As for Alger Hiss ...

But myths die hard. They are not subject to ordinary refutation. When it came to Hiss, for example, his defenders said he was innocent, not guilty, right up until the moment they allowed that he was innocent even if guilty. The emotional core of the myth of McCarthyism--a core that is invulnerable to mere facts--is that species of liberal sentimental benevolence that, fired by the socialist ideal, recoils from America and the spectacle of "selfish individualism" it provides. This is why the myth of McCarthyism is so dear to liberals: It allows them to keep alive the pleasing sense of their own virtue. Indeed, like God for Voltaire, had Joseph McCarthy not existed, he would have had to be invented.

Among other things, the myth of McCarthyism lays bare an old conundrum that dogs liberalism. I mean the fact that in seeking to create the maximally tolerant society one also gives scope to those wishing to create the maximally intolerant society. The French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel once observed that "democratic society is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it." It needn't be that way. Democracies, too, are based on affirming certain values and proscribing others. The liberal paralysis comes when the will to defend those values is stymied by unswerving commitment to an abstraction called "tolerance." The myth of McCarthyism is so dear to liberals because it helps them avoid confronting this fact. That is why Arthur Miller, a conspicuous guardian and perpetuator of this myth, was lavishly rewarded by liberals with the patent of secular sainthood.

Mr. Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion. His most recent book is The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art.