Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, has an essay in its September issue on conservatives.

* Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's, has an essay in its September issue on conservatives. The issue came out in mid-August. In his essay, Lapham reflects on the "rich man's dream of heaven that placed Ronald Reagan in the White House in 1980 and provides the current Bush administration with the platform on which the candidate was trundled into New York City this August with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the heavy law enforcement, and the paper elephants." Lapham continues, "The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hoftstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?" A weighty question. Yet not so puzzling as how Lapham can have listened to the Republicans' speeches before they were made. The Republican convention is to be from August 30 to September 2, and Lapham's essay was out by at least August 19. Perhaps this is why Lapham can affect world-weary sophistication in his every essay: He really has seen and heard it all--even before it happens. Except, we guess, for his publication schedule.