All in the Gin that You Drink

James Panero, former editor of the Dartmouth Review, shilled out a tribute/profile of Review godfather Jeffrey Hart for the Jan/Feb issue of the Dartmouth Alumni magazine, and which he o so kindly reprints here along with a letter from Hart himself.

The article is highly illuminating, though not for the reasons Panero must have expected. It exposes the Review's conservatism for the meaningless posturing which somehow hoodwinks so many Dartmouth alums and students and which inexplicably gets a free pass from so many others. I will draw out a few points from the article and Hart's response to show what I mean:

Jeffrey Hart ’51 has the personality of a sportsman
Running throughout the article in a clumsy attempt either to give the whole thing a whimsical quality or just to tie a charmlessly ramshackle narrative together, Panero's tennis metaphor cuts to the bone of the Reviewer's attitude toward politics as a life's pursuit—it is, in the spirit of the worst of imperialists and the worst of capitalists, just a game. Insulated from the deleterious effects of their own strokes and errors, the players take a cavalier disinterest in stakes or results. Hart may truly be appalled at Bush's policies, but I can't help feeling that it's not from any true concern for the victims of those policies, but more from the notion that Bush has both betrayed his class, mingling with hick evangelicals, and rejected the common sense which Hart believes to be the province of proper conservatism. And even if Hart is realistic enough to understand that this isn't all just some gentlemen's parlor sport, Panero certainly isn't. Words like these—"Typing away at his computer, Hart is now engaged in the game of his life, and his opponent is an unexpected one: George W. Bush," "the most controversial political match of his career," "Hart relishes the sport of his latest engagement"—are, after all, his.

After two years at Dartmouth, Hart transferred to Columbia...
Wait, are you telling me that the founder of the organization which purports to be the protector of Dartmouth's proud tradition had such little pride in his school that he transferred... to Columbia?? He left the school which his neophytes uphold as the greatest undergraduate institution in the country to attend its virtual antithesis—big-town Columbia. Gee whiz.

Hart retired in 1993 as one of Dartmouth’s most admired professors of English—and one of its fiercest. In that year he taught his final course, on Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and T.S. Eliot, to a roomful of 600 students.
Note: The next time The Review complains about Dartmouth not offering enough small classes, throw this in their faces. 600 students? And I'll bet Hart had warm personal experiences with every single one of them.

Today Hart lives with his wife, Nancy, in a former schoolhouse in Lyme, New Hampshire, that was once owned by his father, Clifford (class of 1921). Nancy uses a corner of the house, by the stove, to keep the antique embroidery and quilts she sells at a stand in Quechee, Vermont. The other corners are filled with old paintings, mainly of ships.
What is wrong with this picture? Maybe the "keep the woman cornered in the kitchen" impression it gives. Being a conservative man's wife must be the hardest job in the world.

Hart wrote: “The Conservative Mind, most of the time, has shown a healthy resistance to utopianism and its various informed ideologies. Ideology is always wrong because it edits reality and paralyzes thought.”
I know conservatives of Hart's stripe don't like to hear this, but their dogged insistence on the universal uniformity of reason is itself an (almost pre-Kantian) ideology, is itself an unreformed utopianism. The "Great Books" worldview is just as ideological as multiculturalism, the Burkeian attitude a utopianism which rests on incredibly classist (and often racist) assumptions. And, ironically enough, blindness to one's own ideological moorings is exactly what Hart hates about Bush.

"My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar's on the rocks, or both."
Forgive me for being perhaps too literal, but is Jeffrey Hart really defining conservatism with equal regard given to his ideas on moral governance as to his drinking and shopping habits? Perhaps Hart is trying his hand at some drollery here, but I have no doubt that his acolytes, at least, sincerely believe bullshit like this. Anti-populism is the spirit of their conservatism, and it is sincerely buoyed up more by allegiances to brands of alcohol than to actual people or groups of people. This is a contentless political stance, an affectation of pretense, and not a legitimate political philosophy.

The irony is, from what I know, Hart and his merry band of egomaniacs are for the most part, nothing more than elevated haute-bourgeoisie trying desperately to stretch themselves just enough to make their grasping at aristocratic stature not look too stupid or juvenile. This posturing is merely another case of the House of Commons trying to act like the House of Lords, much like Burke did himself.

Yes, Mr. Hart, you have succeeded in instilling the spirit of Burke into a new generation. Reviewers are very good at learning to be snobs while appearing to be the genuine article.

Be sure to read the comments following Panero's post. Quite enlightening.