Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life, by Michael Medved. Here's what I jotted down in my notes: "As much a book of history as it is memoir . . . A history of American leftism as seen through the eyes of one who spearheaded it before rejecting it." I found his analysis of why leftism as a philosophy has a corrosive impact on personal happiness particularly interesting: Over the years, I've concluded that the obvious contrast between gloomy, dour liberals and cheerful conservatives has less to do with the reassuring influence of right-wing ideas than it does with the unfailingly depressing impact of leftist thinking. Over the past thirty years, the liberal project has emphasized national guilt over past American atrocities; competitive claims of victimhood from various aggrieved groups; reports of impending environmental disaster threatening the future of the earth itself; the helplessness of ordinary people in the face of cruel corporate elites; the impossibility of racial justice without preferential treatment for oppressed minorities; the doomed, outmoded nature of traditional marriage, conventional religious faith, and other sources of common comfort; and a constant sense of dire crisis which justifies the sweeping, radical governmental initiatives that the left considers our only hope. Good news and self-confidence present existential threats to "progressive" activists. If people feel happy in their private lives and personal arrangements, then why would they need the thoroughgoing transformation of society and its fundamental institutions that left-wing agitators invariably demand? For the true believers of the liberal faith, discontent, restlessness, and rage amount to far more than useful political tools; they provide the very basis for their philosophical orientation (230-231).There are 35 chapters ("lessons") in the book. It's a true autobiography in the sense that he begins at the beginning, i.e., with the story of his immigrant ancestors who emigrated to America from Eastern Europe (the Ukraine), their hardships and sorrows, the almost miraculous birth of his (Medved's) father, his own childhood and upbringing, first in Philadelphia, then in San Diego, and ultimately in Los Angeles, where he thrived intellectually and precociously (if not socially) and began his college career at Yale at the age of 16. There are fascinating, almost Forrest Gump-like encounters throughout his young adult life with people and situations that represent significant milestones in American politics (most interesting to me were his warm friendship with Hillary Rodham and his political activism in support of Robert Kennedy's candidacy for president. Medved was at present at the Ambassador Hotel the night Kennedy was shot).
Some of the chapters could be stand-alone essays: Chapter 4, "Business Isn't Exploitative--It's Heroic," about the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants; Chapter 9, "The Highway Provides a Better Education Than the Ivy League," an amazing story about his hitchhiking adventures (he logged a total of 82,000 miles hitchhiking over a period of five years during his college and young adult years); Chapter 16, "Sometimes Father Really Does Know Best," about his gradual return to Orthodox Judaism; Chapter 22, "Everything Worth Defending Depends on Military Might," about the Vietnam War, leftism, and his gradual shift from left to right.
Other chapters on divorce, re-marriage, abortion, the media, movies, talk radio, and a particularly detailed discussion about Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (Medved was actively and aggressively involved in helping stem the controversy that swirled around the making of this movie) are all, in their own rights, extremely interesting, insightful, honest, well-written.
Though a lackadaisical apostate at the time, I read Roe v. Wade at the suggestion of Jeremy Rabkin (then one of Cornell's few conservative professors), and found myself thinking, This can't be right. I listened over the years as one hyphenated kind of feminist after another sounded weirdly full-throated cheers for the routine trashing of what was obviously some form of human life . . . and just as repeatedly I thought: This can't be right either.
This can't be right: an intuitionist phrase does not a political philosophy make. But what started for me and, I believe, many other people weighing the real legacy of Roe went on to become something more--a ground-up rethinking of many other political facts that supposedly enlightened people regarded as self-evident, and that turned out on inspection to be be anything but (19-20).Of the twelve writers describing their political journeys rightward, the ones I enjoyed the most were Richard Starr ("Killer Rabbits and the Continuing Crisis"); David Brooks ("Confessions of a Greenwich Village Conservative"); Dinesh D'Souza ("Recollections of a Campus Renegade"--funny!), Stanley Kurtz ("Pig Heads"--disturbing discussion about how the left took over academia and how it silences "true," i.e., classical liberals). Peter Berkowitz also writes about the importance of "conserving liberalism, properly understood." Liberalism, that is, as distinct from leftism. Berkowitz writes:
Of course, the liberalism to which I refer is not what everybody understands by the term. In the United States, a liberal is a man or woman of the left, a progressive, who wants government to take an aggressive role in combating market imperfections and social inequities by ensuring all citizens a robust level of material and moral well-being...On the other side of the Atlantic, a liberal is a kind of conservative, a libertarian and free marketeer, who wishes to firmly limit government regulation of the economy and morals in order to emancipate individual creativity and drive...This larger liberalism refers not to a political party but to a centuries-old tradition of political thought and order. The liberal tradition is defined above all by the moral premise that founds it, which is that human beings are by nature free and equal, and the political premise that directs it, which is that the purpose of government is to secure the individual freedom shared equally by all (246).At the end is a bibliography (next up: Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind). Reading these essays, on the heels of Michael Medved's extraordinarily detailed, beautifully written autobiography, I realize there are many brilliant, educated, intelligent conservatives out there, writing, publishing, researching, speaking, working tirelessly to promote and advance conservative ideals and policies. It's a shame that more of these individuals are not only not given more prominence or respect, but are mocked, ridiculed, dismissed as irrelevant or fanatical. The caricature of the right-wing lunatic, the racist, the bigoted, the narrow-minded, conservative is just that: a caricature. How wrong, how inaccurate, that caricature.
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