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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2007
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.
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.
