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Political Prophecy in Contemporary American Literature: The Left-Conservative Vision of Norman Mailer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2007

Cyrus Ernesto Zirakzadeh
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Abstract

Popular and prize-winning writer Norman Mailer has advanced a view of American politics and society that he calls “left conservatism.” This paper analyzes elements of Mailer's critique and describes how the parts fit together. Special attention is given to his interpretation of economic history and social psychology, his vision of moral health that he associates with the term “hipster,” and his fear of a new political mentality in the United States that he conveys through a neologism, the “wad.” The paper closes with a sketch of the ways Mailer's left conservatism both dovetails with and departs from the concerns and arguments of other contemporary American conservative thinkers.

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Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 69 , Issue 4 , Fall 2007, pp. 625 - 649
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2007

For more than a half century, two-time Pulitzer-prize winner Norman Mailer has used novels, magazine essays, movie scripts, campaign quips, and other forms of literature to warn citizens of the United States about a transformation in their hearts and minds. He contends that the emergence of the American corporate economy during the twentieth century has spawned unprecedented frustrations and fears across the continent. These, in turn, have contributed to several pressing problems, including ill-advised military adventures, popular enthusiasm for the suspensions of civil liberties at home, and reluctance by individuals to accept responsibility for their social environment.

Mailer names his understanding of the problematic nature of contemporary United States “left conservatism.” He first used the label during the 1960s to highlight his ideological distance from Cold War liberals.Footnote 1 The programmatic implications of the phrase evolved during Mailer's unsuccessful 1969 campaign to become mayor of New York City.Footnote 2 Today, Mailer continues to portray his political reasoning as a subspecies of American conservatism.Footnote 3 He says that the phrase “left conservatism” is appropriate because it alludes simultaneously to his admiration for Marxist understandings of historical change and his respect for Edmund Burke's commitment to the preservation of one's cultural heritage.Footnote 4 Mailer also adopts the paradoxical-sounding label because it conveys his distance from both the law-and-order programs and the liberal hopes promulgated by leaders of the Republican and the Democratic parties.

This paper expands on Mailer's vision by analyzing his assumptions about social psychology and historical determinism, his vision of moral health that he associates with the term “hipster,” and his fear of a new political mentality in the United States that he conveys through a neologism, the “wad.” Without denying that from time-to-time Mailer reconsidered particular elements of his argument, this paper highlights how Mailer melded aspects from different theoretical traditions and thereby created a coherent and distinctive synthesis.Footnote 5 The article leaves the reader with a sketch of the ways that Mailer's version of conservatism both dovetails with and departs from the concerns and arguments of other contemporary American conservative thinkers.

Technology Land

And American civilization had moved from the existential sanction of the frontier to the abstract ubiquitous sanction of the dollar bill.

Norman MailerFootnote 6

[T]he country is in a terrible time. It is full of the worst disease. You don't begin to know how bad this country has become.

Norman MailerFootnote 7

Mailer thinks about current political events in terms of their contribution to long-term historical trends. His vision of history is in many ways Marxist in its logic. Yet, ironically, it is also non-Marxist because of a romantic moral outlook and a prejudice in favor of individual entrepreneurs. Mailer typically paints small-scale capitalism in energetic colors. His vision of the man-on-the-make resembles Thomas Jefferson's image of the hearty, innovative, and self-reliant yeoman farmer. Both images depart sharply from the dreary accounts of bourgeois self-denial found in the writings of European commentators such as Charles Dickens, Thomas Mann, Adam Smith, Max Weber, or the Reverend Thomas Malthus. At the same time, Mailer does not see U.S. capitalism as standing still. According to Mailer, entrepreneurial capitalism—even in the United States—inevitably evolves in dangerous directions that Karl Marx and his interpreters, especially the Trotskyists, foresaw.

The influence of Marx's ideas on Mailer has been noted (and debated) by numerous commentators.Footnote 8 Mailer himself has argued that as a young man, he was “overpowered” by Marx's writings.Footnote 9 Energized by the Henry Wallace campaign of 1948, Mailer devoted a considerable amount of time familiarizing himself with the debates between Trotskyists and other Marxist circles. He then spent nine months carefully reading Das Kapital (“I do not know any other book to which I devoted as much time.”Footnote 10). Later in life, Mailer, when describing his journalistic style, said that he wished to use the methods of Marx to make sense of current events.Footnote 11

Mailer, however, has never blindly endorsed the political programs and slogans coined by Marx and his followers. First of all, Mailer remains dubious about the wisdom of revolutionary socialism. In his opinion, we can and should revise, amend, and modify our inherited economic system. We should, however, be reluctant to replace our economy in toto because needless suffering will surely result. Writes Mailer, “[I]f you outlawed the corporations tomorrow, America would have food famines, a frightening loss of jobs, name it… [W]e can't look for quick results… [even though the] war against the corporation is profound, as it should be.”Footnote 12

Mailer also departs from most Marxists in his admiration for small-scale free-market capitalism. In his opinion, the United States at one time was a rare land of social opportunity and physical challenges, where free spirits could grow proud in their uniqueness and were often materially rewarded for their unconventionality and daring.Footnote 13 Mailer's romantic view of U.S. social history at times resembles that of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Frederick Jackson Turner in believing that frontier life on the North American continent contributed to the formation of unusually self-reliant and resilient personalities.Footnote 14 But Mailer, unlike Schlesinger and Jackson, further contends that the classically stiff-necked and heroic American character is produced on small farms and also in small businesses, and, therefore, can thrive in cities. What Mailer calls “genuine” capitalism—a system of innumerable small, independent producers securing their families' livelihoods through commercial trade and modest lifestyles—nurtures an excitable and risk-taking (almost reckless) outlook in citizens. Entrepreneurial activity, he argues, quickens one's reasoning and intensifies one's awareness of outside challenges and opportunities.

The small businessman is always taking his chances. He leads an existential life. He's gambling that his wit, his energy, and his ideas of what will work in the marketplace will be successful. He can be a sonofabitch, but at least he's out there in the middle of life.Footnote 15

Comfortable with the argument that entrepreneurial activity rewards ingenuity and resilience and contributes to an energetic and strenuous outlook, Mailer reasons that through a process of natural selection, the United States became a breeding ground for an unusually headstrong and lively people. The nation's stingy wilderness and rough-and-tumble cities rewarded persons who showed courage, initiative, and imagination. Conversely, its small-business and free-market economy punished the meek, passive, and dull. Thanks to its urban and rural frontiers, America was “the land where a new kind of man was born from the idea that God was present in every man not only as compassion but as power, and so the country belonged to the people; for the will of the people—if the locks of their life could be given the art to turn—was then the will of God.”Footnote 16

Mailer cites himself as an example of a person from a petit-bourgeois background whose character was steeled through the country's traditional capitalist economy and competitive environment. Allegedly, he “had been born to a modest family, had been a modest boy, a modest young man, and he hated that, he loved the pride and the arrogance and the confidence and the egocentricity he had acquired over the years, that was his force and his luxury and the iron in his greed, the richest sugar of his pleasure, the strength of his competitive force.”Footnote 17 Mailer believes that the fluidity and undefined nature of American society provided him with unparalleled opportunities to cut his own artistic path. He enjoys his life as an independent, creative writer, and “want[s] it to go on, which mean[s] he want[s] America to go on.”Footnote 18

The snake in Mailer's American entrepreneurial dream is big business, whose multiple plants, bureaucratic organization, and collusive pricing strategies have replaced small entrepreneurs, their scarce resources, their catch-as-catch-can organization, and their small and vulnerable markets. The rise of the large private corporation has led to the rise of a new type of person: the somber, cautious, methodical, and unimaginative functionary. The “pioneer lust for the unexpected and incalculable” has been replaced by “the pure, the clean-shaven.”Footnote 19

According to Mailer, by the mid-twentieth century, large-scale, bureaucratically organized, and heavily mechanized methods of production had replaced traditional capitalism for most Americans.Footnote 20 Defenders of the new economic order often labeled it “corporate capitalism” or “advanced capitalism,” implying a continuation of laissez-faire practices. Mailer, however, argues that a line has been crossed. Unlike independent business owners, artisans, and family farmers, directors of enormous corporations tell their minions what will be produced and how it will be produced, and routinely call on the state to repress potential threats to domestic order. Furthermore, corporate leaders desire a totally predictable investment environment. Hence, they try to eliminate suppliers' unreliability, to manipulate consumers' appetites, to contain competitors' innovativeness, and to increase workers' dependence and quiescence. They yearn for a thoroughly managed society, not the unpredictable competition characteristic of traditional capitalism. In terms of its risk-averse and totalitarian ethos, “The corporation turns capitalism inside out.”Footnote 21

Several cultural diseases arise from the new economic order, according to Mailer. Bureaucratic organization of the workplace—whether it occurs in a state-run economy or in an advanced capitalist economy—numbs the minds of producers by limiting their opportunities to express their individuality through their jobs. Workers are rewarded and punished according to their ability to carry out orders with machine-like precision. Over time, heavily scripted jobs eliminate employees' spirit of independence, encourage sycophantic behavior toward supervisors, and render workers (blue-collar and white-collar) averse to spontaneous rebellion and defiance. Meanwhile, cheap gadgets (for instance, television) pacify people in their free time. Television, frozen meals, and mass education reinforce stereotypical behavior and obscure humans' capacities for inventiveness. Bland, standardized consumption leads to bland, standardized personalities.Footnote 22

Mailer uses social-psychological terms, such as “anomie,” “alienation,” and “abnegation,” to describe the passivity he detects in the United States during the late twentieth century.Footnote 23 He argues that many Americans—especially those who have experienced success in climbing career ladders within corporations—no longer take seriously their own values and beliefs about how best to live. Finding integrity unrewarded at the workplace, buffeted by directives from superiors, enduring bureaucratic runarounds in all aspects of life, and surrounded by standardized goods, citizens stop believing that their wills matter and gradually lose their desire to shape their destinies.

Mailer contends that the combination of standardized behavior and widespread diffidence provides evidence that the United States has become a totalitarian country. For him, totalitarianism is essentially a cultural phenomenon.Footnote 24 It is a social system whose daily workings dampen one's willingness to initiate or even question and thereby smother one's spirit. Totalitarian countries might also be dictatorial and tyrannical in terms of governmental limits to personal freedom. Totalitarian cultures, however, can flourish in formally democratic countries, such as the United States, where citizens have meaningful rights to assemble, speak, and publicly contest the will of the government, yet they shrink from self-assertion and refuse to use those rights.

Mailer derogatorily calls the new economic and cultural order in the United States “technology land.”Footnote 25 The phrase refers not only to labor-saving gadgets and to the mechanical, impersonal, and hierarchical arrangement of modern workplaces. “Technology land” also denotes the almost unparalleled power of enormous corporations and the evaporation in most people of innovativeness, ingenuity, and the willingness to be different. Middle-class affluence and luxury hide ubiquitous patterns of conformity and timorousness—the inevitable exhaust of the corporate capitalist engine.

Mailer despairs over the mental weaklings produced by “technology land.” He is, moreover, enraged by the imperialist foreign policies that the technological order occasions. In his opinion, government officials must comply with the international ambitions of corporations or risk a downturn in the economy and immense material suffering for citizens.Footnote 26 Meanwhile, big businesses naturally seek foreign markets where they can dump unsold inventory, obtain raw materials at low prices, and exploit organizationally weak work forces. The natural impulse in a corporate capitalist country is for ever-larger international markets.

Economic expansion, however, is fraught with danger. Other economically advanced nation-states inevitably will compete with the United States for access to foreign markets. The result is constant preparation for battle that no amount of pacifist organizing and rhetoric can quell. In Mailer's words: “I don't believe in peace conferences. They won't do any good. So long as there is capitalism, there is going to be war.”Footnote 27

Mailer warns that even when guns are silent, governments in corporate economies are preparing for warfare; and the constant preparation will, sooner rather than later, cripple the United States. To fend off external opponents, any country must become increasingly regimented, with the federal government stepping up its day-to-day surveillance and harassment of potentially disloyal citizens. On the altar of national security, traditional freedoms will be sacrificed.Footnote 28 To buy allies and to prevent rivals from achieving an advantage in weaponry, the government must extract more and more resources from its citizens and businesses.Footnote 29 “So long as there is a cold war, there cannot be a conservative administration in America.”Footnote 30 In the long run, foreign expansionism, spurred ultimately by corporations' desires, will drain the country of its wealth and, more important, will extinguish the nation's spirit of toleration.Footnote 31

Cold War rhetoric about the United States as a bastion of freedom sounds hollow to Mailer, given the absence of self-assertiveness and creativity in technology land and the country's natural tendency toward militarism. He reaches the conclusion that the amounts of personal freedom in the United States and the Soviet Union differ only slightly. “We deaden the life of millions by hypocrisy and go on to claim that we are the hope of civilization; they liquidate the life of millions and argue they are the imagination of the future.”Footnote 32 Mailer says that despite his petit-bourgeois sympathies, he prefers the welfare-state experiments of Europe to the cultural conformity within America's corporate order. “When it comes to such large government—whether private or public (for their similarities can prove closer than their differences)—I'll take socialism over corporatism,” Mailer writes. “At least the first is not slavishly dependent on market hype.”Footnote 33

Hipsters and Other Rebels

Harlem and rest of Manhattan are more separated, I'd say, than East Berlin and West Berlin.

Norman MailerFootnote 34

Mailer's grim narrative about the future of the United States contains a flicker of hope, thanks to an accident of economic and cultural geography.Footnote 35 According to Mailer, in the centers of modern U.S. cities, the poor, the dirty, the socially scorned reside. Even small-property owners who live in cities have edginess to their personalities because of experiences in tough, working-class neighborhoods.Footnote 36 Meanwhile, successful white-collar workers and bureaucratic yes-men populate the socially homogeneous suburbs.

Mailer finds hope on the urban street corners where juvenile delinquents, petty criminals, and chronically unemployed adults congregate. Despite being regularly humiliated at work, routinely ignored by the rich, and hungry off and on, many among the outcasts refuse to pity themselves and to accept with docility the hatred and discrimination they receive from wealthier property owners and suburban whites. Rather than wallowing in despair, a goodly number of urbanites bristle with pride and treat life as an exciting, endless test of wits between urban rebels and suburban masters.

Mailer discerns warrior-like dignity in what he calls the “psychopathic” lives of urban ghettoes (“psychopathic” in the psychoanalytic sense of an outright refusal to incorporate society's norms into one's personality).Footnote 37 He imagines that the typical urban denizen experiences physical pleasure when violating rules of civility. Outrageous behavior—for instance, shouting matches in public, ill-advised sexual escapades, and open celebrations of violence—quickens the urbanite's pulse and releases his or her hormones. By blatantly crossing the line, the ghetto dweller becomes gleefully energetic.

Even though most members of polite society sneer at poor people's unconventional behavior and deem it a reflection of immature and warped personalities, Mailer contends that a blatant disregard for gentility—ranging from the use of discordant sounds when playing music to physical attacks on senior citizens—involves extraordinary courage, creativity, and energy.Footnote 38 He, nonetheless, finds the psychopathology of the poor troubling in its political implications. Demagogues could easily channel the resentment of the marginal populations into support for a repressive regime and scapegoat policies:Footnote 39 “[T]he psychopath may indeed be the perverted and dangerous front-runner of a new kind of personality… . For the psychopath is better adapted to dominate.”Footnote 40

Still, there is a positive spin-off to the deviant and defiant behavior of many urban dwellers. Their insolence unintentionally offers the gray, buttoned-down, middle class of suburban America a model to emulate. When the latter appreciate the vitality and creativity of the have-nots, a constructive cultural blending often takes place. Mailer calls the mixture of middle-class caution and urban deviance “the Hip.” The Hip is neither the general impertinence of a person unfairly deprived of honor and material security nor the cultural stiffness and timidity of a person who has the education and wherewithal to ascend the bureaucratic career ladder. The Hip is a complex elite counterculture that, in Mailer's opinion, “not more than one thousand men and women” in America embrace.Footnote 41

What does being hip entail? In part, it involves cognition. Hipsters, unlike squares, understand that America, underneath its glittering wealth, is boring, monotonous, and servile. They know that success in a corporate bureaucracy requires that one closely monitor oneself at work, stifling all passions and enthusiasms that may prevent professional ascendance. Being Hip means refusing to self-regulate and enjoying spontaneous, unpredictable activity for its own sake. The only relevant normative standard is the expansion of one's ability to defy. Foolhardy activities that lead to will-breaking punishment, that reduce one's confidence, or that otherwise reduce one's energy levels merit censure. However, defiant activities that intensify one's pride, that strengthen one's backbone, and that reinforce one's willingness to explore values and pursue ambitions that polite society frowns upon merit commendation.Footnote 42 Like the heroes in the popular early Westerns, a hipster refuses to internalize the dominant corporate norms and instead admires rugged individualism. Even so, the hipster thinks about outcomes and thereby differs from the vast majority of overly heedless juvenile delinquents and enraged minorities. HeFootnote 43 is not an impulsive, directionless nihilist. He intentionally avoids social conditions that can impede or dilute his independent spirit, and intentionally expands his personal space for self-directed action.Footnote 44

The suburban hipster, although a rarity, needs to be treasured and promoted, in Mailer's opinion. Bureaucratic organizations, bland architecture, and mechanized consumption have almost extinguished the self-made personality. Thanks to the economic trajectory of the United States, a once-proud nation of intrepid personalities has become a land of spineless, ingratiatory functionaries with a diminished sense of integrity. “Nowhere, as in America, however, was this fall from individual man to mass man felt so acutely, for America was at once the first and most prolific creator of mass communications, and the most rootless of countries…”Footnote 45 The intrepid culture that once made the United States important and unique in world history can survive only if hipsters multiply and flourish.

Young Tyrants Awaiting: The Wad

You're just nothing but a bunch of spoiled pigs.

Norman MailerFootnote 46

Like many of his middle-aged contemporaries, Mailer was at times intrigued and inspired by the behavior of young adults during the 1960s, but when scanning the social landscape, he saw far more than campus radicals. He also discerned a new wave of post-twenty-year-old conformists he unflatteringly labeled “the wad.”Footnote 47

Demographically speaking, the wad is the first generation of Americans to be raised completely within “technology land.” Unlike earlier waves of Americans, members of this cohort have been conditioned—at school and work and through the mass media—to take direction. They have been embedded in social situations in which their activities are carefully scripted.Footnote 48 Accordingly, they now instinctively look outside themselves for authorities who will tell them which aesthetic values, moral principles, and political goals to embrace.

Unconventionality activates contrary emotions that discomfit the wad. The wad secretly envies deviants who gleefully break the rules yet concomitantly fears the spread of anarchic impulses because of likely reprisals from authorities. Members of the wad therefore gravitate (out of habit and also out of fear) to the familiar and monotonous, and flee the unstructured encounters and risky situations where priorities are ambiguous or might clash.

The search for an unambiguous and stable social structure is, ironically, psychologically destabilizing, according to Mailer. Because humans are partly animalistic, they naturally enjoy physical challenges, risks, and thrills. In the absence of such outlets, they become anxious and restless and satisfy their feral desires vicariously. After days of obeying orders at work, white-collar Americans watch television news-reports about distant military actions by U.S. forces and the feats of fictional heroes battling on the “boob tube” and the big screen. These images serve as the functional equivalent of a high-price, orchestrated hunting trip whose nimrods fantasize that they are taking risks and testing their mettle. Mailer's characterization: “Bombs are fireworks to the sleepy.”Footnote 49 Without these bloody narratives, the guided denizens of corporate America either would succumb to listlessness, boredom, and depression or would release their frustration through mayhem.

Unlike those who idealize the Woodstock generation, Mailer categorizes the various 1960s counterculture tribes—the hippies, the yippies, the zippies, and others—as subspecies of the wad. They are members of the suburban middle class who decide to “drop out” but do not fully abandon their orientation. They seek private thrills through artificially induced means, such as drugs, and they use technological conveniences—for instance, contraceptives—to avoid the consequences of truly creative, spontaneous, and risky behavior. Hippies are not yet hipsters.Footnote 50

Hippies, nonetheless, inadvertently destabilize American politics. More conventional members of the wad, upset about the emotional emptiness of their predictable lives yet reluctant to strike out on their own, resent those who seem to gratify prohibited desires for adventure and color. Passionate music, dress, and love-making, Mailer argues, terrify most middle-class Americans (including enlightened white liberals) who see in the countercultures an obdurate desire to violate the rules.

Distrustful of all playful deviants, the conventional members of the wad repeatedly support legislation that restricts flamboyant and nontraditional behavior. Their motivations behind the support for conformity and regimentation are complex, an amalgam of envy, repulsion, temptation, and fear. There is, however, also an element of private pleasure. Frustrated after disciplining themselves day-in-and-day-out, the waddies seek to pummel others lower in the pecking order.Footnote 51

Mailer sees the ranks of the wad steadily growing over time, making the culture of the United States ever more intolerant and punitive. He warns that since the early days of the Cold War, police units and citizen militias—the “new phalanxes of order”—have formed to combat real and imagined opponents of the status quo. A countersubversive dictatorship, comparable to European fascism, lies on the horizon unless a new political course is pursued.Footnote 52

Even though appreciative of the valor of those who even minimally dare to be different, Mailer is profoundly aware of middle-class Americans' desire for order. He wishes that the young adults who dare to demonstrate, who publicly ridicule government leaders, and who intentionally flout decorum would anticipate backlashes. In his opinion, emotionally charged demonstrations against the status quo, especially demonstrations involving socially disruptive behavior, generally backfire: “Americans don't want their lives disturbed. That's the basic problem with protest.”Footnote 53 The young adults who dare to ridicule the values of the wad need to recognize that outrageous behavior can mobilize the “squares” behind unscrupulous politicians with authoritarian designs. “Do the activists really know what they're getting into? That's my concern,” says Mailer about the antiwar marches during the early twenty-first century, adding “we would do well to realize that on this occasion, there are more important things than a good outburst… I say, don't march right into their trap.”Footnote 54

Three Searches for Political Allies

I would ask you to use your imagination.

Norman MailerFootnote 55

When Mailer decided to adopt the label “left conservatism” in the 1960s, he was painfully aware that his political thinking did not correspond to conventional partisan divisions in the United States. “Left Conservative, that lonely flag—there was no one in America who had a position even remotely like his own…”Footnote 56 Mailer held that he shared with some leftists—including many Trotskyists—a conviction that advanced capitalism unleashes practices destructive to human life and dignity. He, nonetheless, considered most critics of “technology land” too impulsive, unfocused, and impatient to improve the country. Per Mailer, the maxim among the proverbial New Left/Berkeley types to “do your own thing” captured the nonsense in many a young radical's moral reasoning. Genuine revolutionaries do not possess internal “things” that they unquestioningly obey. A genuine revolutionary ponders the likely consequences of different courses of action, judges, and then with agony and care breaks with society's expectations and creates new institutions.Footnote 57 One can heal a morally sick country only if one respects the ease with which situations can go from bad to worse. To succeed, one must hedge all bets:

I've always been thoroughly opposed to gambling with your last thousand bucks. Especially if you have a family. That is one reason I am a Left-Conservative. That is the conservative part of me.Footnote 58

For a brief moment, Mailer thought that he might find allies in conventional political parties, but he was soon disabused of his fantasy. Mailer expressly disliked the ascending right wings of the Republican and Democratic parties: the middle-class members of the new right desired harsh punishment (if not extermination) of counterculture swingers, uppity minorities, and insolent youths.Footnote 59 To this day, Mailer distrusts the puritan impulses within the new right because, he believes, the new right is composed of waddies who illiberally seek to reinforce the conformity in “technology land” and to escalate ongoing wars against infidels abroad.Footnote 60

On the other hand, Mailer also expressed impatience about what he periodically called the “nihilists” of the left—such as black nationalists, New Leftists, and hippies. He believed that they thoughtlessly gratified sensory urges without pausing to consider whether their actions were honest attempts to redefine norms as opposed to merely acts of slavish hedonism. Too often they mechanically insisted on retribution for past injustices, as if there were a huge gulf between innocent victims and immoral aggressors.Footnote 61

Given Mailer's criticisms of the law-and-order right and the nihilist left, one might expect him to rush toward the political center. This was not the case. Mailer found little solace in the views of so-called moderate liberals of the postwar era. He was offended by the paternalism of both Democratic and Republican liberals, such as the Kennedy clan and Nelson Rockefeller. In his words, he has “always scorned”Footnote 62 liberals because of their naïveté about the complexities of contemporary social problems; their preoccupation with material safety and comfort as a summum bonum; and (above all) their infatuation with the centralization of power under the direction of a few well-intentioned and well-educated elites. Liberals are, he maintains, closet “technologues” who wish to use the power of the big government and the insights of science to reconstruct society and remove all needless economic pain, cultural deviance, and social conflict from human existence. They are benign dictators who, in the course of legislating top-down solutions to social problems, will quash the human spirit.Footnote 63

On the whole, Mailer adjudges the entire standard options in contemporary American politics—New Left nihilism, big-state liberalism, and the puritanical anger of America's far right—to be unfruitful and dangerous. Nonetheless, to escape political isolation (and concomitant impotence), Mailer, from time-to-time, has tried to convert individuals and groups to his left-conservative cause. Three of his numerous attempts to find allies deserve mention in that they suggest some practical challenges inherent in his nonpartisan political position.

President as a Model Bohemian

First, there was Mailer's audacious attempt to sway President John F. Kennedy to support Mailer's own tack. This is curious because Mailer is, on the whole, profoundly suspicious of the federal government's accumulation of power, so suspicious that he does not vote regularly in presidential elections. Mailer, nevertheless, fancied that Kennedy was a kindred free-spirit who, once in office, might courageously defy conventional corporatist expectations about the government's role in citizens' lives, and whose history of combating odds and risking his own security might lead other citizens to emulate his zestful, creative approach to life. As Mailer put it in an essay endorsing Kennedy's presidential aspirations, “I would not be surprised if he [Kennedy] believed that the health of America (which is to say our vitality) depended in part on the inventiveness and passion of its outlaws.”Footnote 64

Kennedy's mainstream behavior—especially his fervent anticommunist foreign policy—disappointed Mailer. He concluded that Kennedy too often exhibited the traits of a good company man, not those of a cultural rebel. After Kennedy's assassination, Mailer never again enthusiastically supported a presidential candidate and increasingly argued that all candidates were, in fact, defenders of corporations, “technology land,” and the regulation of citizens' lives.Footnote 65

New Left as Carrier of Old West Values

Immediately after Kennedy's death, Mailer more openly condemned the Democratic Party's mismanagement of the Vietnam War. After observing firsthand New Left groups during antiwar protests, Mailer began to see some constructive potential in the “do your own thing” crowd. He disapproved of the young adults' routine consumption of drugs and their nonconsequential approach to sex but noticed that for all of their hedonistic self-indulgence, participants in the New Left exhibited the sort of tolerance for idiosyncrasy and celebration for creative efforts that Mailer valued. Moreover, at their gatherings and in their tent cities, members of the counterculture practiced the spontaneous, noncoercive self-government that Mailer preferred to the regulations decreed by faceless bureaucrats within the federal state. With reluctance, he concluded that if one day there were a grand standoff between the forces of order and a broad coalition of reckless hippies, yippies, zippies, and other unusual suspects, Mailer would support the dissenters who preserved and practiced American traditions of individuality and rejected standardization, conformity, and meekness. As Mailer feared it would, the counterculture dissipated under the pressure of self-indulgence, dogmatic rivalries, and an otherworldly interest in spiritual matters before a standoff could take place.Footnote 66

Courting Small Business

As the Vietnam War neared its end and the youth counterculture began to fragment and subside, Mailer increasingly looked to small entrepreneurs as a source of national cultural revival. He speculated that because of their free-market induced chutzpah, small-shop owners, artisans, and farmers had the potential to see through the laissez-faire facade of corporations and to discern how their freedoms were being corroded.Footnote 67 To circulate ideas among America's petit capitalists, Mailer submitted tracts to conservative public-opinion journals and conversed with Pat Buchanan and William F. Buckley, all the while keeping his distance from the neoconservatives, such as Irving and William Kristol, who, in Mailer's opinion, do not understand that corporations and an aggressive foreign policy are incompatible with American traditions of freedom.Footnote 68

In 1969, Mailer decided to run for mayor of New York on an explicitly “left conservative” platform. During his campaign, Mailer told individuals on sidewalks, crowds of supporters, and journalists at press conferences that he agreed with the Left's critique of the excessive power of private corporations. He also, however, agreed with conservatives' emphasis on the value of individual initiative and creativity. He hoped to unite both wings against what he called the liberal center that naively believed in benign government experts ruling society for its own good.Footnote 69 In an article for the New York Times, Mailer wrote:

Our authority has been handed over to the federal power. We expect our economic solutions, our habitats, yes, even our entertainments, to derive that remote abstract power, remote as the other end of a television tube. We are like wards in an orphan asylum. The shaping of the style of our lives is removed from us … [s]o our condition is spiritless. We wait for abstract impersonal powers to save us, we despise the abstractness of those powers, we loathe ourselves for our own apathy. Orphans.Footnote 70

Mailer pledged that if elected, he would immediately organize a constitutional convention for New York City, wherein the citizens could declare themselves the fifty-first state. Within the new state, the inhabitants of every collection of adjacent households could decide if they formed a “neighborhood” in terms sharing an identifiable set of public goals or a distinctive conception of the good life. If the residents determined by a certified vote that they formed a “neighborhood,” they would be able to govern themselves as they wished and would receive modest funds from the New York City-state government to aid their projects.

Mailer argued that his neighborhood initiative, if implemented, would encourage policy experimentation and citizen involvement. Every neighborhood would be able to establish the type of school system it desired. Neighborhoods desiring a laissez-faire economy could legislate one; those that wanted more government welfare services could experiment with their public sector. Neighborhoods that wanted interracial and cross-religious harmony and integration, could pass legislation encouraging it; those favoring segregation could pass legislation promoting that mode of life. Neighborhoods that wanted a professional police force could establish one; those that preferred amateurish vigilante groups could organize themselves accordingly. And so on. “We'll have compulsory free love in those neighborhoods that vote for it,” he boldly declared, “and compulsory attendance at church on Sunday in those that vote for that.”Footnote 71 According to Mailer, once residents realized that their notions could be implemented, civic interest and involvement would naturally increase. New York City would become a hothouse of neighborhood-level experimentation, and Americans elsewhere would joyfully follow the example. “What we are running on is one basic, simple notion—which is that till people see where their ideas lead they know nothing; and that, my fine friends, is why I am running. I want to see where my own ideas lead.”Footnote 72

Mailer received fewer than 42,000 votes and came in next to last in the Democratic primary. Although disappointed, he concluded that the problem was not with the content of his left-conservative messageFootnote 73 but with the power of the electoral machines that corporate capitalism had built and with the major metropolitan newspapers that kowtowed to incumbent political powers and seldom covered his campaign.Footnote 74

Educating shopkeepers about their commonality with anticorporate hipsters remains Mailer's preferred long-term response to the crises of technology land. In his words, “It may yet take an alchemy of Left and Right to confound the corporate center.”Footnote 75 Mailer concedes that radical decentralization of political authority will cause some harmful and inefficient policies. Harm and inefficiency, however, already are with us; they cannot be avoided. The issue is not whether all social problems can be solved once and forever. That is utopian. The germane political issue is whether everyday citizens will once again attempt to direct their own fates, or whether they will abdicate responsibility and blindly accept rule by outsiders who more often than not suffer from hubris.Footnote 76

Conclusions

We're saying that people know more about running their own intimate government than experts do. And this is anathema to the liberal mentality.

Norman MailerFootnote 77

Mailer's political thought arises from fears about the loss of strong-willed personalities in America. He extols individuals who question inherited codes of conduct and experiment with their values and norms. Virtue, for Mailer, entails thinking and acting originally despite workplace pressures to conform, despite media pressures to become part of the crowd, and despite technological gadgets that generate infantile passivity.Footnote 78

Mailer places his activist moral vision within a larger story of economic change in which earlier generations of Americans are portrayed as bold entrepreneurs and hardy homesteaders who, in a situation of self-reliance, challenged inherited standards of decorum and invented new moral identities. This nation of rugged individualists is purported to be on the brink of extinction because of the rise of big business, the availability of technological pacifiers, and the subsequent spread of mass culture. Some sectors of the desperately poor, some young bohemians, and some beleaguered shopkeepers resist the cultural redirection of the United States. The future of American society will be determined by the outcome of this conflict—sometimes simmering, sometimes boiling—between a small number of anticorporation deviants and the majority wad.

Mailer's vision is exciting partly because it reminds us that more is at stake in U.S. politics than endless efforts to fatten wallets. In his opinion, before we support candidates sponsored by major parties, we should ponder the content of our national culture and the proper direction of our economy, and we should consider alternative understandings of our needs and capacities. He believes that if we do so, we will challenge expansionist foreign policies, bureaucratically run government programs, and government incentives to corporations.

Mailer proclaims over and over again that he is a “true” conservative and distinguishes his ideas from those self-proclaimed right-wing groups, such as ultrapatriots, neoconservatives, militarists, and quasi-Nazis, whom he labels “flag conservatives.”Footnote 79 Mere “flag wavers,” Mailer argues, ignore the value of cultural creativity and forget that a strong state is an enemy of (and not a champion for) self-directing individuals. Moreover, flag wavers wrongly see wars and big businesses as compatible with conservative values. A true conservative acknowledges that ongoing military preparedness, ubiquitous bureaucratic organization, and pervasive consumer culture threaten individuality. To reap future generations of rugged individualists, the United States must eschew military adventures and, above all, must declaw corporations.

In his preoccupation with matters cultural and in his profound dread about the moral direction of his country, Mailer shares much with political theorist Allan Bloom, essayists Russell Kirk and Irving Kristol, novelist Ayn Rand, historian and classicist Garry Wills, and other prominent conservatives of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.Footnote 80 They, too, believe that a cultural malaise has spread in the United States, and for the most part they agree that the malaise is a byproduct of an overly abundant and bureaucratically regulated economy. Mailer also shares with such well-known American conservatives a distrust of the deferential and dependent personality that the liberal “progressive” state promotes in citizens and, therefore, a desire for its diminution.

Mailer departs from most contemporary conservatives in his praise for cultural rebels. Unlike Irving Kristol,Footnote 81 for example, Mailer likes his citizens naughty, not nice. In his opinion, suburban hipsters, urban street toughs, and unrefined cowboys offer role models worth emulating because the greatest threat to freedom today is the soft collar of white-collar conformity and bureaucratic deference. According to Mailer, only when we are inspired by old-fashioned heroes who go against the grain, will his vision of a healthy society—in which the cultural exploration by each leads to the cultural freedom of all—be realized.

Kristol believes that since the early years of World War II, the United States has experienced a period of sustained economic growth that has benefited most U.S. citizens. Amid the affluence, few adult males have reined in their passions and carried out their obvious social duties. They instead have followed their predatory impulses (even when in military uniformFootnote 82), gratified self-destructive appetites, and ignored the needs of their families, friends, and fellow citizens.Footnote 83 The tendency toward self-indulgence has been exacerbated by a new intellectual class that, through mass media and mass education, ridicules religious thinking and celebrates self-interest as a summum bonum.Footnote 84 In hopes of staving off a spiritual calamity, Kristol recommends that U.S. citizens use their governments, schools, and religious institutions to revive older ethics of discipline.Footnote 85

Mailer, of course, would dispute that American males in the last half of the twentieth century are too unfettered. Like Kristol, Mailer despairs of modern hedonistic behavior; but he sees it primarily as a by-product of an over-regulated society guided by enormous corporations and their technocratic allies in the federal government, not the consequence of an insidious new intellectual class. According to Mailer, irresponsible consumption of drugs and ubiquitous “safe sex” provide many people in advanced capitalist societies with large bureaucracies and steep hierarchies with emotional compensation for their bland, overly supervised lives. Thoughtful, courageous, and creative adults will become commonplace only if society encourages and rewards such character traits. This will require a small-scale mode of production, a decentralized polity, and an ebbing of technological playthings—in other words, revocation of corporate capitalism and its accompanying national security state. This is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future. In the meantime, the occasional hipster is the best that opponents to the hedonism of the wad can realistically aspire to.

The thinking of Garry Wills in some ways more closely resembles that of Mailer than does the thinking of Kristol. Wills believes that if citizens of the United States are to retain social peace, it is crucial (1) that elections encourage the formation of a federal government that is responsive to the wishes of a wide range of people (not just business groups) and (2) that moral enthusiasts, whom Wills labels “prophets,” continue to use civil disobedience to dramatize injustices, such as domestic racism, discrimination against women, and unjust wars. If prophets attract sufficient sympathy when causing a ruckus in the streets, professional politicians, having to negotiate among the diverse interests in society, will give the principled protesters part of what they want. Through incremental concessions, the overarching social order will change just enough to remain attractive to most of its members; and the country can endure.Footnote 86

On first examination, Mailer's and Wills's defenses of hipsters and prophets appear strikingly similar. Both authors contend that corporate capitalism displaces older traditions, habits, and values.Footnote 87 They argue that, given current circumstances in the United States, violation of decorum sometimes can have conservative consequences. According to Mailer, a hipster's willingness to deviate perpetuates American frontier independence. The moral enthusiasts' principled disobedience, says Wills, prompts reforms that secure allegiance in a modern, heterogeneous, and mobile society.

Nonetheless, there are important differences between the ideas of the two writers, as a quick juxtaposition of Mailer's defense of Abbie Hoffman's “moxie” with Wills's frustration over Hoffman's celebration of individual action per se (regardless of consequences for social structures) reveals.Footnote 88 As does Glazer, Wills sees some attractive conservative elements in Mailer's writings. Wills, for example, finds parallels between his own desire to revitalize community in the United States with Mailer's proposals for neighborhood self-rule. Wills, nonetheless, sees Mailer's vision of individuals on their own creating their own values as incompatible with the political goals of civil peace and social cohesion.Footnote 89 In Mailer's vision, a hipster engages in politics only if it seems compatible with his private agenda of personal growth. Wills's prophets, in contrast, feel compelled by conscience to denounce a public injustice and, in the name of eliminating specific injustices, call for new collective obligations and restrictions on conduct. They wish to make society more cohesive, predictable, and safe and, therefore, wish to buttress communal authority.

Whether Mailer's vision of a society of individuals constantly creating and recreating their moral identities is desirable (and is not, in practice, a nightmare in which people constantly flee from social responsibility under the pretence of following their inner lights) is an open question.Footnote 90 One might, for example, conclude from his mayoral campaign (and especially from his call for toleration of ethnic and racial segregation if pursued voluntarily by local neighborhoods) that Mailer's celebration of the self-directing individual betrays a naiveté about humans' willingness to hurt one another and ignore one another's needs, and about the depths of U.S. racism and prejudices involving economic privilege and sexual preferences. Arguably, there are times when the empowerment of all individuals should not be sole goal or highest priority that a polity should pursue.

Mailer comes close to offering a libertarian paean. His desire for creative personalities pushes aside concern with other shared goods—from health care to workplace safety to military defense—that may require translocal authority. In the end, his stern warnings about the political consequences of corporate capitalism, “technology land,” totalitarianism, and the wad may obscure rather than help him answer a perennial puzzle: how to reconcile individual creativity with political order.

References

1 Angered at being labeled a “liberal” in the preface to a debate with William Buckley printed in Playboy magazine, Mailer categorized himself as a “left conservative” in a 1963 letter to the editor (Playboy, April 8, 1963, 8). This seems to have been the first time he used the phrase in public; Lennon, J. Michael and Lennon, Donna Pedro, Norman Mailer: Works and Days (Shavertown, PA: Sligo Press, 2000), 41Google Scholar. For other examples of Mailer's early use of the label, see Mailer, Norman, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel; The Novel as History (New York: Dutton Signet, 1968), 124, 180, 185Google Scholar; Mailer, Norman, St. George and the Godfather (New York: Signet, 1972), 58, 206.Google Scholar

2 Manso, Peter, ed., Running against the Machine: The Mailer-Breslin Campaign (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1969)Google Scholar.

3 Mailer, Norman, “Searching for Deliverance,” Esquire, August 1996, 54–61, 118–27Google Scholar; Mailer, Norman, Why Are We at War? (New York: Random House, 2003), 50–53, 79–81, 97–98Google Scholar; Mailer, Norman and Mailer, John Buffalo, The Big Empty: Dialogues on Politics, Sex, God, Boxing, Morality, Myth, Poker and Bad Conscience in America (New York: Nation Books, 2006), 38–40, 163–64Google Scholar.

4 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 185. Mailer's statement about respecting the political wisdom of Burke and Marx is not surprising as he periodically borrows insights and epigrams from both authors. See Mailer, Norman, “In the Red Light: A History of the Republican Convention in 1964,” in Cannibals and Christians (New York: Dial Press, 1966), 6–45, and footnote 11 belowGoogle Scholar.

5 For studies on how specific aspects of Mailer's thinking have changed over time, see Adams, Laura, Existential Battles: The Growth of Norman Mailer (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976)Google Scholar; Leigh, Nigel, Radical Fictions and the Novels of Norman Mailer (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In contrast to the work of Adams and Leigh, this article explores continuities in Mailer's political assumptions and logic.

6 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 158.

7 Norman Mailer, “At the Village Gate,” in Manso, Running against the Machine, 61.

8 Scholars who believe that seminal ideas of Marx and Engels lie at the heart of Mailer's thinking (although Mailer always distrusted the vanguard arguments of Bolsheviks) include Adams, who contends that “the earlier study of Marx laid the foundation” for Mailer's thinking (Growth of Norman Mailer, 59). Mark Schechner disagrees and argues that whenever Mailer portrays his reasoning as partly Marxist, he in fact is concealing a flight from Marxist beliefs. Mailer, allegedly, had undergone a “deconversion” from Marxism during the early 1950s and “mistook his sexual frustrations, his social irritations, and his Faustian ambitions for signs that he was a Marxist, bred in the bone” (Schechner, , After the Revolution: Studies in the Contemporary Jewish-American Imagination [Bloomington: University of Indian Press, 1987], 44–45, 160)Google Scholar. Diana Trilling contends that Mailer increasingly expressed ambivalence about standard Marxist ideas, even though he retained profound respect for them. “Of Marxism,” she writes, “he speaks like a man of honor who would not disavow a once-precious love” (Trilling, , Claremont Essays [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962], 180Google Scholar). Jean Radford, splitting the difference between scholars who see Mailer as deeply indebted to Marx and those who see Mailer as repudiating Marx, argues that Mailer is ultimately a “Marxist anarchist” who uses the Marxist notions about the logic of capitalism to explain social and political conditions in the United States, but who endorses anarchist values and distrusts all centralized states. Radford, , Norman Mailer: A Critical Study (London: Macmillan Press, 1975), 43–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In interviews, Mailer sometimes admits admiration for the writings of Marx but unease with later interpretations of “Marxism” by disciples. This may explain why classifications of his political thinking are difficult to make and sometimes diverge. As Mailer put it in 1961, “I wouldn't like to say that I'm no longer a Marxist—I don't like the connotations of saying it. And since I happen to have got more from Marx than from anyone else I've ever read, I wouldn't want to jettison Grandfather. But I'm not orthodox” (Lennon, J. Michael, ed., Conversations with Norman Mailer [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988], 66–67Google Scholar). See also Mailer's interview with Christopher Hitchens in “Norman Mailer: A Minority of One,” New Left Review 222 (March/April 1997): 115, 118–19.

9 Mailer, Norman, The Fight (Boston: Little, Brown 1975), 221Google ScholarPubMed.

10 Norman Mailer, “Just the Factoids,” New York Times, January 9, 2000, BR4.

11 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 185. Mailer's interest in the extent of market expansion, the speed of technological change, and the scale of cultural upheaval in twentieth-century capitalist societies (and in the personality structures that indirectly result from rapid economic expansion) is evident in almost all his fiction, from The Naked and the Dead (1948) to The Castle in the Forest (2007). In his pre-1970 novels, Mailer's characters sometimes paraphrase sections of Marx's “Preface to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’,” “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” and “The German Ideology.” See, for example, Mailer, Norman, Barbary Shore (New York: Dell Publishing, 1951)Google Scholar. In later novels, Mailer began to focus almost exclusively on conflicts between factions of the bourgeoisie and between representatives of old landed wealth and new industrial and corporate wealth. See, for example, Harlot's Ghost (New York: Random House, 1991), 98, 159–62, 165, 173, 181, 358–9, 441–42, 730–33, 786–89, 804; and The Castle in the Forest (New York: Random House, 2007), 237–53, 371–73, 407–8, 413–29. For illustrations of Mailer's use of economic history to illuminate national party politics, see his description of clashes of interest between main street and Wall Street at the 1964 Republican convention in Cannibals and Christians, 1–45; the opening comments about Chicago economics and urban politics in Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago (New York: World Publishing Company, 1968), 85–90; and his essays for George magazine on the economic underpinnings of the Clinton and Dole campaigns, reprinted in Norman Mailer, The Time of Our Time (New York: Modern Library, 1998), 1136–74.

12 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 56.

13 On Mailer's patriotic sentimentalism, see Cowan, Michael, “The Americanness of Norman Mailer,” in Bundy, Leo, ed., Norman Mailer: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 143–57Google Scholar.

14 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998), 157Google Scholar; Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in American Historical Association, Annual Report for 1893, 199–227; Mailer, Norman, Why Are We in Vietnam? (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967)Google Scholar.

15 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 56.

16 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 288.

17 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 77.

18 Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 188.

19 Mailer, Norman, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” in Mailer, Norman, The Presidential Papers of Norman Mailer (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), 49, 51Google Scholar.

20 Mailer's argument about a fundamental transformation of the U.S. market economy is hardly unique and matches a chronology used by many established scholars. See for example, Porter, Glenn, The Rise of Big Business, 1860–1910 (Arlington Heights, IL: AHM Publishing Company, 1973)Google Scholar.

21 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 56, 212. See also Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 62–63; Mailer, St. George, 33–34; and Mailer, “Searching for Deliverance.”

22 Mailer, Why Are We at War? 54, 89–93; Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 56–57, 128, 149; Mailer, Barbary Shore, 247–48; Mailer “Superman” and “The Debate with William Buckley—The Real Meaning of the Right Wing in America,” in Mailer, Presidential Papers, 32, 43, 165–67.

23 Mailer, Norman, “Excerpt from a Speech at Berkeley on Vietnam Day,” in The Time of Our Time (New York: Modern Library, 1999), 545–46Google ScholarPubMed; Mailer, Fight, 21–22; Norman Mailer, “Mayoral Candidates' Debate,” in Manso, Running against the Machine, 84; Mailer, “Debate with William Buckley,” 165, 167; Mailer, Armies of the Night, 153–54, 257–58.

24 Norman Mailer, “The Ninth Presidential Paper—Totalitarianism,” in Mailer, Presidential Papers, 175–86; Mailer, St. George, 179; Hitchens, “Norman Mailer,” 124, 128. For an extensive discussion of Mailer's cultural approach to totalitarianism, see Wenke, Joseph, Mailer's America (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 8–50Google Scholar. For Mailer's theories about processes of cultural manipulation within the United States, see his novel about the Central Intelligence Agency and the Cold War, Harlot's Ghost, 122, 343–44 and parts 5, 6.

25 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 15, 78, 93–97; Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 13, 63, 65.

26 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 56.

27 Quoted in Dearborn, Mailer, 71. See also Mailer, Barbary Shore, 368–77.

28 Mailer's warning—that a permanent war economy endangers domestic liberties—appears in both his fiction (The Naked and the Dead, Harlot's Ghost) and his essays and speeches about current events (“Debate with William Buckley”).

29 Mailer, “Debate with William Buckley,” 170–71; Mailer, “Speech at Berkeley,” 548–49.

30 Mailer, “Debate with William Buckley,”170.

31 Mailer, Why Are We at War? 58–59, 75.

32 Norman Mailer, “An Open Letter to John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Fidel Castro,” in Presidential Papers, 71.

33 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 212.

34 Norman Mailer, “A Speech to the Time-Life Staff,” in Manso, Running against the Machine, 76.

35 The following discussion draws extensively from Mailer's essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Time of Our Time, 211–30. Mailer uses fiction to express his notion of the hipster through the story of Rojack, Stephen in An American Dream (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1965)Google Scholar. He also sought to clarify his philosophy about the energy and action through allusions to African philosophy in Fight, 38–43. For criticisms of Mailer's vision, see Baldwin, James, “The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy,” Esquire, May, 1961, 102–6Google Scholar; Saul, Scott, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain't: Jazz and the Making of the Sixties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 63–76Google Scholar.

36 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 257–58. Norman Podhoretz speculates that Mailer's fascination with urban “street smarts” grows out of his childhood in Brooklyn. Podhoretz, , Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2000), 189–90Google Scholar.

37 Shortly before Mailer composed his essay on the hipster and black criminal behavior, Robert Lindner published a widely read essay about individuals' inability and unwillingness to internalize their superego. Mailer may have borrowed some of Lindner's psychoanalytic ideas (including Linder's technical term, “psychopathology”) when formulating the theory about black criminals and white hipsters. For more on Lindner and his notion of psychopathology, see Medovoi, Leerom, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 31–34, 179CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a discussion of Mailer's familiarity with Lindner and his work, see Schechner, After the Revolution, 174–77, 252. For journalistic passages that reveal some of Mailer's ambivalence about the use of psychopathology in the treatment of juvenile delinquents and other recidivists, see Mailer, Norman, The Executioner's Song (New York: Vintage Books 1998), 796–802, 830–32, 934Google Scholar.

38 Mailer, “White Negro,” 219–20; Mailer, “Speech to Time-Life Staff,” 66–77.

39 Mailer's ambivalence toward rebellious African American street toughs (because of their potential for reactionary politics) echoes warnings by Richard Wright a quarter of a century earlier. See, for example, Wright's comments about the appeal of authoritarian politics to young black males in Native Son, Restored Text (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), 115, 446–47. Podhoretz, who oddly conflates Mailer's notion of the hipster with his separate discussion of street toughs, misses Mailer's explicit warning about the authoritarian propensities of urban youths. Podhoretz, Ex-Friends, 183–87.

40 Mailer, “White Negro,” 217.

41 Mailer, “White Negro,” 216.

42 Mailer, “White Negro,” 222–24.

43 Although Mailer occasionally suggests that women can be hipsters (see some of the female characters in Executioner's Song and Harlot's Ghost, for example, as well as his interview of Madonna for Esquire magazine, reprinted in Time of Our Time, 1114–35), for the most part he associates hipsters only with men. This has several implications for gender politics that cannot be discussed fully here because of space limitations. For an introduction to some of the issues, see Germaine Greer, “My Mailer Problem,” in Esquire, September 1971. For a general discussion about the logic of gender stereotypes in post-war literary, musical, and cinematic art about young rebels, see Medovoi, Rebels.

44 Thomas Hill Schaub interprets Mailer's emphasis on a hipster's “prudence” as a sign of the underlying conservatism of Mailer's vision; its celebration of traditional capitalist values, such as deferred gratification; and its congruence with the ideological needs of the post-war U.S. economy. Schaub, , American Fiction in the Cold War (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 73, 154, 160–62Google Scholar. I partly agree with Schaub's thesis because Mailer does, in fact, praise prudence in both small-scale capitalists and hipsters. Yet, I also at times diverge from Schaub's line of reasoning in that I find it difficult to discern in the notion of a prudent hipster an ideological defense of U.S. economic arrangements during the late twentieth century. Mailer, after all, continually contrasts the calculated risk-taking of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs with the standard operating procedures of twentieth-century corporations.

45 Mailer, “Superman,” 39.

46 Mailer, “At the Village Gate,” 59–60

47 Mailer, St. George, 53, 60. For a precursor of Mailer's argument about the wad, see Mailer, “In the Red Light,” 8–11, 16–17, 21–26, 44–45.

48 Mailer, St. George, 53, 176–79, 200–2.

49 Mailer, St. George, 165, 64–65. See also Mailer, Why Are We In Vietnam?; Mailer, Harlot's Ghost, 922–26.

50 Mailer, St. George, 200, 223–24; Mailer, Armies of the Night, 86–87, 94–96, 139–41; Dearborn, Mailer, 263–69. Matthew Grace argues that Mailer's distrust of hippies is rooted in his Marxist preoccupation with “true” historical knowledge, which hippies allegedly lack. Grace, , “Norman Mailer at the End of the Decade,” in Will the Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up, ed. Adams, Laura (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1974), 13–14Google Scholar.

51 Mailer, St. George, 53, 60–61, 138, 143–44, 165.

52 Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 15, 140–41, 174–76, 223; Mailer, Armies of the Night, 284, 286; Mailer, “Searching for Deliverance,” 20–21.

53 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 31.

54 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 16–17, 31–32, 58.

55 Mailer, “Time-Life Staff,” 70.

56 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 180.

57 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 76–77.

58 Mailer, Why Are We at War? 98.

59 Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 65–66, 213–14.

60 Mailer, Why Are We at War? 50–53, 80–81.

61 Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 140–41, 184, 214; Mailer, St. George, 220, 223–24; Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 16–18, 30–33.

62 Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 185.

63 Mailer, Armies of the Night, 14–17; Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 37; Norman Mailer, “Why Are We in New York?,” Norman Mailer, “On Accepting the Pulitzer Prize,” Leticia Kent, “Shoot-for-the-Moon Mailer: An Interview,” and Jane O'Reilly, “Diary of a Mailer Trailer,” in Manso, Running against the Machine, 8–9, 13, 15, 57, 256–59, 286–88.

64 Mailer, Presidential Papers, vi.

65 Mailer, “Superman,” 25–61; Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 24–26. Mailer endorsed Bill Clinton in 1996, but the endorsement was highly qualified (Mailer, in fact, said that he preferred Ralph Nader to Clinton, but Nader's name was not on the Massachusetts ballot) and lacked the enthusiasm that Mailer exhibited during the Kennedy campaign. Mailer's reservations about Clinton intensified after Clinton entered office and (in Mailer's opinion) diluted welfare policies while supporting corporate welfare. See Mailer's essays on Clinton for George magazine, reprinted in Time of Our Time, 1136–74; Norman Mailer, “Clinton for Pres.: No, not you, Bill; Hillary, your country needs you,” The Observer, Feb. 8, 1998.

66 Mailer, St. George, 217–19; Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 214; Mailer, Armies of the Night, 280–81.

67 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 56, 152; Mailer, Siege of Chicago, 62–63, 79; Mailer, Armies of the Night, 180.

68 Mailer, Why Are We at War?, 50–53, 79–107; Mailer, “Searching for Deliverance”; Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 7–8, 38–40, 53, 80, 163–64.

69 Manso provides a selection of speeches, policy papers, and observers' reports from the Mailer mayoral campaign in Running against the Machine. For a concise history of the campaign, see Dearborn, Mary V., Mailer: A Biography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 260–72Google Scholar.

70 Mailer, “Why Are We in New York?” 8–9.

71 Norman Mailer, “Speech at the John Jay College of Criminal Justine” and “At the Village Gate,” in Manso, Running against the Machine, 49, 64, 116.

72 Dearborn, Mailer, 267.

73 During the campaign, Mailer declared in an interview: “None of my ideas is the least bit visionary. They're all very practical.” He has not diverged from this assessment. Leticia Kent, “Shoot-for-the-Moon Mailer: An Interview with Norman Mailer on the Literary Life and Practical Politics,” in Mason, Running against the Machine, 260.

74 For a sympathetic criticisms of Mailer's vision of neighborhood democracy by journalists and local commentators, see William Reel, “The Bore Buster,” Tom Wicker, “In the Nation: Mailer with His Hair Combed,” and Gloria Steinem, “Notes from the Cancer Ward,” in Manso, Running against the Machine, 124–34, 302–13. For a less generous assessment of Mailer's ideas, see James A. Wechsler, “An Odd Couple” and “Victory in Defeat,” in Manso, Running against the Machine, 109–11, 135–37.

75 Mailer, Why are We at War? 101.

76 Mailer, “Time-Life Staff,” 65–80

77 Mailer, “On Accepting the Pulitzer Prize,” 57.

78 Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 143–45, 176–81, 185–87; Mailer, Armies of the Night, 24–25, 280–81; Mailer, St. George, 187.

79 Mailer, “Debate with William Buckley,” 161–73; Kent, “Shoot-for-the-Moon Mailer,” 256–58; Mailer, Why Are We at War? 50–53, 63, 80–81; Mailer and Mailer, Big Empty, 38–40, 53, 163–64.

80 For criticisms of the moral poverty of liberal consumerism by other twentieth-century American conservatives, see Bloom, Allan, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)Google Scholar; Kirk, Russell,The Conservative Mind (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953)Google Scholar; Kristol, Irving, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Boston: Free Press, 1995)Google Scholar and Two Cheers for Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1978); Rand, Ayn, Atlas Shrugged (New York: New American Library 1957)Google Scholar; and Wills, Garry, Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1969Google Scholar) and Confessions of a Conservative (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979).

81 Kristol never systematically discusses Mailer's political vision, although another influential neo-conservative, Nathan Glazer, discerns genuinely conservative elements in Mailer's small-scale and non-statist approach to politics and society. Glazer, , “On Being De-Radicalized” reprinted in The New York Intellectuals Reader, ed. Jumonville, Neil (New York: Routledge, 2007), 394Google Scholar.

82 Kristol, Neo-Conservatism, 13, 483.

83 Kristol, Neo-Conservatism, 58–71, 92–105, 123–35; Kristol, Two Cheers, xi, 18.

84 Kristol, Neo-Conservatism, 106–47, 205–10, 220–23.

85 Kristol, Neo-Conservatism, 359–85. 216–30, 257–91.

86 Wills, Confessions, 164–69, 173–74, 181–84, 202–7.

87 “Capitalism is of its nature expansive, risk-taking, wanting new markets and materials and products. It has wrought more change in the modern world—often senseless change—than any revolutionary force. It overturns and runs on. It has of itself no sense of tradition” (Wills, Confessions, 212).

88 Mailer, “The Best of Abbie Hoffman,” in Time of Our Time, 1063–64; Wills, Nixon Agonistes, 336–37, 340, 355.

89 Wills, Nixon Agonistes, 337, 542–47; Wills, Confessions, 209–19.

90 For a thoughtful discussion of the escapist tendencies implicit in Mailer's vision of moral freedom, see Shulman, George, “Race and the Romance of American Nationalism in Martin Luther King, Norman Mailer, and James Baldwin,” in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Dean, Jodi (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 209–27Google Scholar. Sean McCann, in contrast to Shulman, sees Mailer's vision of freedom as fairly benign. Allegedly, Mailer ultimately advocates mutual respect among citizens and thereby resembles communitarians and civic republicans, such as Robert Bellah, Alasdair MacIntyre, Michael Sandel, and Charles Taylor, who call for candid yet empathetic forms of political disputation. See McCann, , “The Imperiled Republic: Norman Mailer and the Poetics of Anti-Liberalism,” ELH: English Literary History 67 (1): 296–97, 310–16, 325–29 (2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.