Controllable Laughter: An Obituary of Jeffrey Hart

The closing paragraph in Jeffrey Hart’s New York Times obituary is a quote, one given by Hart to a former pupil of his, from a 2006 interview. It reads:

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.

There is a certain element of self-caricature here, an elitism that is both earnest and yet also facetious: it is the voice of a troll.

I mean that word in the current sense of a person who attempts to provoke others into making fools of themselves by attacking a position that is just shy of being ludicrous: the troll tricks you into taking him seriously, then laughs at you for getting worked up over something that obviously cannot be taken seriously. Conservatism defined by one’s gin choices? Is Tanqueray not good enough for conservatives? Too foreign-sounding? Of course he can’t be serious.

What gives the game away, incidentally, is the optative nature of Hart’s creed: “maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay [Sapphire] or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both.” The option is a posture natural to the troll because he doesn’t—cannot—commit. “I’m just asking questions—why are you getting so upset?” Trolls are agile—they poke from a thousand directions.

Jeffrey Hart was one of a number of voices essential to the William F. Buckley years of the National Review—Hart even wrote a history of the magazine in 2006—but he made his independent mark as the faculty advisor and spiritual director of the Dartmouth Review, the infamous college publication that has become, since its origins in 1980, the template for a mode of conservative critique that specializes in provocations both crude and cruel. A roll call of the Review’s obnoxious campaigns of harassment is too long for me to bother reproducing here: one can easily find some accounts on the internet.

Hart’s faux-Whiggery—his faculty position at Dartmouth College was as a professor of 18^th century English literature, but he was a notoriously lazy and desultory teacher—was the party spirit of the Review, and in many ways his emphasis on style over substance was its calling card. Although it had hobby-horses it loved to ride, the Review was at its most visible in the grotesque nature of its plumped-up elitism and political incorrectness. Reviewers wore their politics on their sleeves—or rather on their ties, as one of the most visible symbols of the organization was the Indian head tie its staff members wore. You see, Dartmouth College had curtailed the use of the Indian as its mascot and the Review wanted to bring it back. Their ties—and the more plebeian t-shirts and other memorabilia with the Indian head emblazoned upon it—were a gesture of defiance: defiance of the administration’s authority, and defiance of what they argued was a discarding of tradition for purely ideological reasons.

But those ties—and many other things that the Review did—were also meant to make students and faculty angry, to get them to make fools of themselves, to splutter or even attack—and all over a tie.

We can see the progeny of this style across the conservative cosmos, from activists like Charlie Kirk to motivational speakers like Ben Shapiro to alt-right edgelords like Milo Yiannopoulos to amateur historians like Dinesh D’Souza (who actually wrote for the Review) to Fox News pundits like Laura Ingraham (also a Review alum). All are, in a sense, children of Jeffrey Hart, whether they drink Beefeater martinis or not.

To really understand why this mode of conservatism has been so successful, I think we need to understand what Hart is telling us in his articulation of “my conservatism,” to understand why he felt compelled to define it in such terms. And I think we need to zero in on that note of self-caricature, that self-amused evasiveness. Why—to twist a phrase—why so unserious?

You are no doubt familiar with the Margaret Atwood quote to the effect that men’s great fear is that women will laugh at them, while women’s great fear is that men will kill them. One of the ways that men (or anyone one with some power) can avoid being laughed at is to make other people seethe with anger. Another way is to behave in a manner that will be read as self-amused—to court eccentricity or caricature. If one can do both at the same time—my, what a fantastic armor against laughter!

Of course the most effective way to prevent someone from laughing at you is just to exclude them outright, and it is an important piece of context that the Dartmouth Review was created less than ten years after the College had begun admitting women. When one is no longer powerful enough to exclude the people who might laugh at you, other strategies must be deployed. The Review happened upon some good ones.

But I think it is not sufficient—not quite sufficient—simply to diagnose the Hart/Review brew of conservatism as a kind of reaction formation emerging out of the fear of being laughed at, although I don’t think we should underrate how powerful that motivation can be. Atwood was not being droll when she made her remark. But alongside the fear of being laughed at, what comes through even more clearly in the Hart quote is how spooked it is by the prospect of committing to an ideology—a set of intellectual and moral commitments that both bind one hand and foot to certain idées fixes and yet also animate you in ways you cannot control.

Note the presence of the “moral authoritarian Evangelical” in the paragraph—easy to glide by on the way to the bar with the Dewar’s on rocks. In fact (although the Times didn’t quote this part) Hart’s definition of his conservatism emerged in conversation about what was wrong with the kind of conservatism that was ascendant under George W. Bush. Here is the rest of the paragraph, leading immediately into the sentences quoted by the Times:

“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative.”

One way to read that is to fasten onto his critique of “populist religion’s” ignorance: Hart is professing to hate it simply because it is vulgar, the spiritual expression of the hoi polloi. But the more correct reading, I think, is to emphasize the last sentence where he characterizes evangelicalism as a form of possession, a state that is not merely anti-intellectual but anti-mental.

There is a kindred depiction to be found in Cold War texts characterizing people consumed with Communist ideology, and we might also look to the way that “political correctness” or “cultural Marxism” is treated as a kind of intellectual infection that takes over its hosts, depriving them of a sense of humor, of perspective, of the ability to see another point of view. Social justice warriors—SJWs—are very well characterized (in the minds of their conservative nemeses) as “driven by emotion” and “thoroughly erratic.”[1]

We are still not very far from the issue of laughter (“Why can’t feminists just take a joke?”) but we are also moving toward an articulation of conservatism as a kind of anti-ideology, as a defense against becoming ideological, against becoming possessed. Hart’s turn towards a sartorial and alcoholic definition of conservatism ought, I think, to be read in that vein: if one can identify conservatism by such really rather petty criteria, then in no way can it be called—much less actually be—ideological. It can exist as a (limited) set of optional preferences: maybe tennis or golf.

The fear of ideology as a form of intellectual possession is a longstanding one, and I do not think it is inaccurate to go at least as far back as the French Revolution to see some of its most influential forms. Hart may not have been a very good reader of Burke (I’d defer to Corey Robin or Drew Maciag about that), but Burke functioned for Hart as a symbol of a man who denounced ideological possession when he saw it. That nearly two hundred years later, the Review would turn this fear of ideology on college “co-eds” rather than Jacobins is, perhaps, yet one more case of “first time as tragedy, second time as farce.”

At any rate, what Hart and the Review placed as his barricade against ideology—and here again, I think he believed he was following Burke—was prejudice, in the sense of discriminatory preference. The Times quotes him as denouncing the “liberal rote anathema on ‘racism’ [which] is in effect a poisonous assault upon Western self-preference.” Western self-preference: a way of redefining racism as just an expression of taste, like Dewar’s on the rocks.

“Why can’t we be proud of white culture?” is not a very long step away from this assertion of the right to have “self-preferences,” but the trick, I think, is to see how intricately bound up this all is in the fear of becoming “ideological,” which in turn is so closely bound to the fear of being laughed at. The desire to control others’ laughter, and some of the methods to do so—that is Jeffrey Hart’s legacy.