Whenever I am among people discussing politics and the discussion begins to turn contentious, I generally remind my companions that “I have never lost a political argument” and, after a brief pause, add, “but, then, neither have I ever won one.” The reason for this seeming paradox is simple: To win an argument you need reason, and, when it comes to politics, you cannot, as Jonathan Swift had it, reason someone out of something into which he or she has not been reasoned. 

Consider how one came to one’s own politics. Many among us have adopted the politics of our parents. Others have come by their politics in direct opposition to their parents’ politics. Some take up the politics reigning among their social milieu; still others, seeking to distinguish themselves, choose a politics of nonconformity. For some people, politics is of trifling interest; for others, politics dominates their lives. Still others, bored blue by the subject, scarcely have any politics at all. 

Aristotle thought politics, which for him meant the governing of the polis, contributed to the cultivation of virtue and thence to the good life. In such novels as The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Nostromo, Joseph Conrad made the case that politics was an obsession that often quickly turned into an illness, bringing out the worst in its full-time practitioners. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann concludes that politics can do little to assuage the human condition. 

Michael Oakeshott thought politics “an inferior form of human activity” that was about nothing more than the struggle for power, and as such “an uninteresting form of activity to anyone who has no desire to rule others.” Oakeshott viewed “politics [as] the art of living together & of being ‘just’ to one another—not of imposing a way of life but of organizing a common life.” He contemned those who in the political realm thought they had all the answers, which many strongly politicized people do. 

Michael Oakeshott’s were the politics of conservatism, but of a kind that entailed “the propensity to use and enjoy what is present rather than to wish to look for something else.” For him, to be conservative “is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.” Conservatives, in Oakeshott’s view, do best to “inject an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile; not to stoke the fires of desire, but to damp them down.” 

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I grew up in a household in Chicago, during the strongest days of the Irish political Mafia—Kellys, Kenellys, Daleys everywhere—where all politicians were judged guilty until proven innocent, which none ever was. My father was strongly for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, because he wanted the United States in World War II, in the hope of saving the lives of Jews then being massacred by Hitler. So strongly did he feel this that he would not permit Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune, with its isolationist policy, in our apartment. He used to tell the story of his car stalling off Lake Shore Drive, when a driver in a Tribune truck pulled up to help him. My father told the man he didn’t want his goddamn help. “That,” he concluded the story by saying, “shows how stupid politics can make you.”

My own first political utterance came in 1943, in the playground of Eugene Field Grammar School when I was six years old. It was: “We want Roosevelt. / Where, where? / We want Roosevelt in the White House Chair.” Pause. “We want [Thomas] Dewey. / Where, where? / We want Dewey in the electric chair.” If there were any Republicans among the parents of my Jewish contemporaries, I did not know of them.

I thought my father a lifelong Democrat, but when I asked him whom he planned to vote for in the 1952 presidential election, Eisenhower or Stevenson, he replied, “I think I’ll wait to see which way Walter Lippmann goes.” The columnist Walter Lippmann, it turns out, went for Eisenhower, thinking him in a better position than Stevenson to block the disruptive antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy. My father voted for Eisenhower again in 1956, noting, “He’s pro-business, and I’m a businessman.”

I don’t believe I had a single political thought through four frolicking years of high school. The University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, when I was a student there, was not a very political place. A small number of students formed an organization for A Sane Nuclear Policy. I, never much of a joiner, did not sign on. I thought of myself in those years as a radical, and a radical, as Daniel Bell used to say, was someone who went to the root of the matter. Reading Sidney Hook cleared me of any interest in Communism, though neither was I great booster of capitalism, viewing it, as Churchill viewed democracy, as the worst form of economic systems except for all the others.

My first presidential vote was in 1960 and, as with most of my presidential votes since, was a lesser-evil vote in favor of John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon. I never believed in Kennedy’s idealism and still don’t. He may in fact have won the presidency owing to Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley’s finagling the vote count in Illinois. (A Chicago political motto in those years: “Vote early and vote often.”) My low opinion of Nixon derived from my believing that his rise in politics came from a McCarthy-like anti-Communism that elevated him to Congress and thence on to the Senate and the vice presidency. 

Not long out of school, I began writing for the New Republic and COMMENTARY. For the latter in those days, under its new and then-left-wing editor Norman Podhoretz, I wrote takedowns of Henry Luce and Adlai Stevenson. When Norman’s thinking took a rightward turn into neoconservatism, I did not follow him and in fact wrote an emphatic put-down of neoconservatism for Irving Howe’s magazine, Dissent. In my put-down I accused Norman, Irving Kristol, and other neocons of the ultimate intellectual sin, that of “selling out.” I also wrote for Dissent a strong attack on William F. Buckley Jr. Norman and Irving Kristol later became friends I much admired, and Buckley 30 years later praised a book I wrote on snobbery, calling me “perhaps the wittiest writer (working his genre) alive, and the funniest since Randall Jarrell,” which showed an impressive gift for forgiveness.

I did not in any way participate in the politics of the 1960s protest movement. Chiefly conducted out of universities, that movement provided easy sex and drugs as side dishes to its antiestablishment and later antiwar sentiment. I was spiritually disqualified from participation by being married, the guardian of four sons, and having already served two years as a drafted enlisted man in the United States Army. I viewed the movement askance, and when in the early 1970s I myself began teaching at Northwestern University, my disapproval was intensified when I witnessed younger professors sleeping with their undergraduate students, espousing a leftist radicalism that never touched their own lives, and supporting hiring policies that lapsed into an identity politics that favored women, African Americans, and other supposed victim groups over those with genuine intellectual and scholarly distinction. 

Several years ago, I gave a talk at the American Enterprise Institute on the subject of friendship. In the talk I argued that it was a mistake to look for a congruence of politics in a friend or to break up a friendship over the want of that congruence. One looks, I held, for other things in a friend—an interesting point of view, a generous nature, good humor, an ultimate seriousness—than agreement about NAFTA. At dinner after my talk, Irving Kristol remarked that he entirely agreed with what I said about politics and friendship—“with,” he added, “the exception of Israel-Palestine.”

True enough, I have no friends who are anti-Israel, and I keep a cold place in my heart for Jews who are. I am not sure that being opposed to genuine racism or misogyny isn’t, far from being political, just commonsensical. Opposition to much that travels under the banner of woke, however, is political, because the adherents of woke are out to destroy their political opponents through humiliation and ultimately cancellation and must be fended off. 

In our time, politics have more and more become about dueling virtues: with those on the left claiming themselves superior because of their struggle for justice, those on the right claiming the wisdom of their perception of the limits of the possible. And each side is intent on crushing the other. The more politics dominate a time, as Oakeshott noted, the worse that time. Ours just now is such an intensely political time: with anti-Semitism on the rise, aggressively authoritarian leaders reigning in Russia, Iran, and China, our American political parties in shambles, and Donald J. Trump using up much of the nation’s political oxygen. In such an atmosphere, skepticism has been at the center of my own politics.

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In 1985 in an article in the New York Times Magazine, I coined the word “virtucrat.” Elsewhere I’ve defined a virtucrat as “any man or woman who is certain that his or her political views are not merely correct but deeply righteous in the bargain.” A virtucrat apprehends the world’s injustice and feels obliged to set things right. He is confident that he sees through the lies and cons of the rich and powerful, which he feels must be exposed. His life becomes a mission, his view of himself that of a sensitive, serious, above all highly virtuous person. 

In today’s public life, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez & Co. are obvious examples of the virtucrat at work. Their every public utterance shimmers with righteousness. Why the rest of us do not perceive their home truths is an unending source of wonder, and of sadness if not horror, to them. They view themselves as a force for good, with those who think otherwise ignorant and insensitive, unimaginative, and finally immoral. 

Virtucrats have long been with us. Such a figure was Claud Cockburn (1904–1985), about whom a recent biography, written by his son Patrick, has recently appeared. The biography is disappointing on many grounds, not least in its incompleteness. Only on its penultimate page does its author note that it “concentrates on the first half of Claud’s career up to 1940, a period of savage conflict.” Patrick Cockburn (pronounced Ko-burn) does not say that another volume is planned, and those of us who have read the first will await a second with infinite patience. 

English, the son of a minor diplomat posted to central Europe, Claud Cockburn was sent off to a public (what Americans call a “private”) school whose headmaster was the father of Graham Greene—Cockburn’s contemporary, longtime friend, and himself something of a virtucrat, with Catholicism added. Thence Cockburn went off to Keble College, Oxford, where he read Spengler and Keynes, and identified with the defeated countries in World War I. “Claud was already sympathetic to people from the defeated powers,” Patrick Cockburn writes, “whom he viewed as victims of collective punishment unjustly inflicted by the victorious Western allies.”  

In the 250 pages of Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied, Claud Cockburn never comes alive. Patrick Cockburn tells us that his father was charming but provides little evidence. True, while working as a sub-editor at the Times of London, he won a contest for composing the dullest headline of the year: “Small Earthquake in Chile. Not Many Dead.” He also early published a story in Marianne Moore’s The Dial and later wrote novels, the best known of them Beat the Devil, which he published under the pen name of James Helvick and which was made into a movie with Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, and Gina Lollobrigida. But for Cockburn, the passion for politics drowned out that of literature and just about everything else. 

As a left-wing journalist, Claud Cockburn is said to have lived by the shibboleth “believe nothing until it is officially denied,” which gives Patrick Cockburn his book’s title. Cockburn had three marriages and many lovers, among them Jean Ross, the model for Christopher Isherwood’s character Sally Bowles (eventually the central figure in the musical Cabaret). Never a faithful lover, Cockburn put his politics before his personal relations.

Claud Cockburn worked at what he thought of as guerrilla journalism. The guerrilla journalist does journalism outside the mainstream, even though he might sometimes work for a large establishment journal, as Cockburn did for a spell for the Times of London. Before he was done, Cockburn also worked for Fortune, the Daily Worker, and Pravda. He also privately published the Week, which was what today we would call a newsletter. What qualified Cockburn as a guerrilla is that he always strongly asserted his own point of view, one that went against the grain of standard opinion and was invariably left-wing. (Closer to our day, I.F. Stone was an American guerrilla journalist; so, currently, is Seymour Hersh.)

Patrick Cockburn sets out his father’s two core beliefs as a journalist: “The first was skepticism, to the point of unalloyed cynicism, about the doings of all in authority, high and low. But, secondly, he also believed that decision makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand, and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.” Claud Cockburn the guerrilla journalist, in other words, supplied readers with the lowdown, the true gen, on how the world really worked. Or at least confidently believed he did. 

Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied takes up in detail three main events in Claud Cockburn’s journalistic career: the rise of fascism in Germany under Hitler, the stock market crash and the Depression that came in its wake, and the Spanish Civil War. Cockburn got one of the three right. Commendably, he early sensed the threat of fascism and the monstrousness of Hitler, and through his one-man journalism fought off the strong movement toward appeasement in England and Europe and America. The stock market crash and the Depression that followed it he greeted, ideologically, as good news, for it confirmed him in his belief that capitalism was defunct. As for the Spanish Civil War, which Cockburn was confident the Republican side would win, his views were without the complex subtleties of George Orwell’s in the latter’s Homage to Catalonia. Orwell in fact accused Cockburn of being under the control of the Stalinists in Spain and of falsely reporting many aspects of the war. Later writers also viewed Cockburn as functioning as a Communist propagandist in Spain.

In 1934, Claud Cockburn joined the Communist Party. “If there were things to disagree with the Communists about,” he wrote in his memoir I, Claud, “what I felt at the time was that they were a lot nearer being a creative force in British politics than any other that I could see. Also they were a force that was small, poor and adventurous, and the distance between their thoughts and their actions appeared to me to be a lot shorter than it was when you came to the Labour people, the ‘progressive intellectuals.’” Claud Cockburn eventually departed the Communist Party, but he left three sons—Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick—to perpetuate in books and journalism their father’s virtucratic ideas. Alexander became a mouthpiece for Palestinian terrorists. Andrew became a documentary filmmaker cataloguing the supposed evils of American foreign policy and its intelligence services. Patrick wrote this book. Claud Cockburn left quite the legacy.

Politics perhaps offers an easier outlet for displays of virtue than any other realm. In politics one can register one’s deep desire for equality, great regard for minorities, immeasurable sympathy for underdogs—all at no cost to oneself. Those who have a rigid hatred of capitalism harbor it because they feel it stands in the way of universal equality. Those ready to believe that racism in America is “systemic” do so because it comports with their notion that African Americans would otherwise by now have risen out of their crime-ridden ghettoes. Those who find themselves siding with the Palestinians against Israel do so in the belief that the former are the true underdogs in the Middle East. The virtucrat not only believes all these things, but also believes anyone who doesn’t is a right-winger, a barbarian, and clearly part of the problem. 

Politics are often required to counter the brutal politics of others. Such was the case in the past century, when Communism and fascism murdered millions and millions. Yet such towering intellectual figures as Nietzsche, Stendhal, Proust, Kafka, and others felt politics was not of primary or even secondary interest. In The Possessed, Dostoyevsky wrote the ultimate take-down of the virtucrat, setting out the falsity, hypocrisy, and even danger of the type. In his Pensées, Pascal, anticipating the virtucrat, held that man was neither an angel nor a beast, and argued that those who pretended to be angels were soon likely to act like beasts. 

The old adage has it that virtue is its own reward, yet in politics the pretense to virtue has all too often brought not reward but the severest punishment to those societies—Russian, German, Chinese—whose leaders promised that under their plans virtue would flourish as never before.

Photo: Getty Images

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