American Conservatism: Thinking It, Teaching It

2. Teaching Log: The Stretch Drive

64 chapter 2 Teaching Log: The Stretch Drive Neocons March 7 Well, we finally had one of those days. I looked forward to a discussion of neoconservatism with Marty presenting, with Kate as possible followup on Bill Bennett, and with Sarah on Allan Bloom. Marty did a bangup job on a difficult subject, but it was clear from the get-go that this was one weary group. Sometimes I forget that there are rhythms to courses. We are on vacation, spring break, next week; most of my students have exams and papers due this week. In fact I pushed back the second conservatism papers until after the break, not so much in order to give them relief as to examine more themes. But they just looked bleached, exhausted . When I noticed something was wrong, they spoke right up and told me of their burdens. We joked about it, I nudged them, but, alas, I did all the heavy lifting once Marty finished. It was all right—I gave them some framework for understanding the Trotskyist background, the Jewishness, the commitment to modernism, the reaction against the sixties , the role of Scoop Jackson, some of the media, the key articles, the core anticommunism. But this is difficult stuff, especially since few of my students have any background in what shaped the neocons. My conservative students at least have some awareness of Buckley and Goldwater, they know the TV and radio jocks—but not Daniel Bell on the cultural contradictions of capitalism, Nate Glazer on the law of unintended consequences , the role of Leo Strauss, the trajectories of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, Hilton Kramer’s defense of modernism against postmodernism , or the role of the Committee on the Present Danger. I hope Teaching Log: The Stretch Drive 65 some of this stuck with them. Mercifully, I let them go a few minutes early; I really can’t teach when it’s obvious that we’re just going through the motions. I made a good-faith effort; they understood and humored me. But this wasn’t going to be a good day for learning. Hopefully they can get it together on Thursday—hopefully. March 9, 2006 Today Kate made a top-notch presentation on Bill Bennett, former drug czar and virtucrat. She was, as usual, well prepared, vigorous, and passionate . Kate is a nontraditional student, one of my favorites, very bright, strong, opinionated, funny. She covered Bennett’s professional and political biography—NEH, drug czar, education commish—and then focused on the controversies, for instance, beheading drug kingpins, his gambling addiction, his unfortunate comments recently about aborting black babies . I tried to make sure that the discussion included his strengths, the basis of his concerns about virtue and character, his early civil rights advocacy —I ended with his own story of when he stopped being a liberal— at Harvard Law when one of his advisees, a black student, told him that he couldn’t join him for a bite because the table was limited to blacks only. But the class, including the conservatives, were astonished at his radio comments, although Jack noted that Bennett followed the abortion statement with a declaration that such a choice was totally unacceptable. But the class, urged on by Kate, felt that even to suggest such a policy was at best mischievous and ill-advised if not despicable. We ended up talking a lot about the similarities between traditionalist conservatives, including neocons, and many liberals and radicals— Bennett’s desire for the community to express its outrage over deviancy, Hillary Clinton’s notion of it taking a village to raise a child, in both cases leaning toward the premodern notion of shaming over guilt, of the community being responsible for maintaining appropriate behavior. I wanted them to recognize the shared assumptions that sometimes link all but libertarians—the idea of the polis. This led to an interesting discussion of crime and punishment. There was too much of the mindless conservative “let’s execute and stop coddling” versus the liberal “let’s do a better job of rehabilitating,” so I asked them to separate the moral from the pragmatic and empirical. What works? What are the consequences of capital punishment? Of residency laws covering sex offenders ? Why is it that our most punitive states continue to have the highest rates of violent crime? Mostly I asked them to consider why the United 66 American Conservatism: Thinking...