Clearly, George Scialabba has caught post-liberal realignment fever, that fusionism from the Left that asks if it is “possible that economically vulnerable blacks would prefer to have more black and white allies in their desperately unequal struggle for economic fairness than more Broadway theaters named for blacks and more black actors, directors, and book reviewers,” and comes to the conclusion that “J.K. Rowling’s views on transgender rights … can hardly produce as much suffering as an obstetric fistula.” The master stylist and critic’s new essay collection, Only a Voice, may be the post-liberal Left’s most thorough and measured articulation. Never mind that the collection comes in the middle of a Democratic presidency, when sympathetic ears are far fewer in number, or that he rubs salt in the wound by insisting that Ralph Nader did nothing wrong, or that his nods to “cancel culture” read like editorial pellets. The style is the gold standard for anyone who wants to write or think about ideas. Greater misgivings abound anyway, mainly the implication that America in 2023 is a vast intellectual wasteland.
In this latest dystopian rendering of our present condition, one of countless by this point, Scialabba has homed in on aversion to intelligence as its greatest crisis, as it aids and abets all the others. We neglect economic justice and sacrifice our very planetary stability to engage in vain gestures of identity politics and culture warring. Argument alone may not have “moved the world,” but when carried out honestly, it maintained a healthy democratic life. Alas, “the raw greed and colossal financial power of the energy companies are impervious to argument.” Yet in a moment when it seems all but useless, Scialabba finds argument, and by extension, the intellectual, all the more necessary. “All we have is a voice,” he writes. “But if there were ever a time to lift it in defense of our lovely, perishing planet and our sometimes lovely, endangered, self-destructive species, this is it.”
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In that spirit, Only a Voice seeks to be something more than an assemblage of one exceptionally erudite and lucid book reviewer’s best pieces over nearly 40 years. It is a textbook, of a rarified quality to be sure, not so much on how to argue as to what any intellectual worth the distinction should argue for. It is criticism not simply as a craft or a vocation but as a public service. This notion extends from Scialabba’s critical niche: intellectual journalists, essayists, and social critics, typically based in New York City and typically working in the 20th century, imbued by the sagacious eminence of universities and print media.
Scialabba opens the introductory essay with a question: “Do intellectuals matter?” Intellectuals, he admits, have an unprecedented amount of freedom in the 21st century. But freedom is not the same thing as relevance. Indeed, what good is intellectual freedom in a society whose “members … are tired and stressed,” are stretched for cash and leisure, are bombarded by “gaudy and often sexualized advertisements,” who lack “high-quality education,” and who prefer their “society’s dominant ethic of competitive individualism rather than cooperative solidarity”? Such freedom, Scialabba concludes, is “not worth much.”
All the familiar names are accounted for. On the side of good argument, there is Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, Dwight Macdonald, Edmund Wilson, Randolph Bourne, and Christopher Lasch, among others. While the bad arguers include Isaiah Berlin, Leszek Kolakowski, Leo Strauss, Philip Rieff, and the New Republic. Only a Voice employs a classic rock radio approach to its contents. The 20th century was America’s cultural and intellectual zenith. It eclipsed all that preceded it and was never equaled by anything that followed, not even Infinite Jest. (Scialabba may “spend hundreds of blissful hours a year” listening to Bach and Mozart, but he quotes from Bourne’s A War Diary like it’s the solo from “Free Bird.”)
But just because individual autonomy has been degraded in our era does not mean it does not exist. Scialabba is right that few 21st-century thinking people care much about Kolakowski — they prefer Solzhenitsyn. Interest in Ellen Willis has dwindled amid a revival of her nemesis Andrea Dworkin. Whatever wisdom lies within the work of Matthew Crawford or Wendell Berry is just as easily found in Ted Kaczynski. This is to say nothing of the otherwise anarchic landscape of pseudonymous pamphleteers, podcasters, newsletterists, and other digital scenesters. It is difficult to comprehend 20th-century thinking in a 21st century that’s adopted an 18th-century mind.
For Scialabba, bad argument is that which shores up top-down consensus at the expense of bottom-up political reform, whether that is the intent or not. Scialabba does not go as far as Christopher Hitchens did in dismantling Berlin’s integrity as a scholar; rather, Berlin’s repeat conflation of Karl Marx with the atrocities of the communist regimes is a regretful error that put him in good stead with NATO country intelligentsia and all their Prize committees. “Berlin will not, I’m afraid, win the Scialabba Prize.” Similarly, Kolakowski’s polemics against socialism, though learned and trenchant, get lost in Cold War liberal proclivities and fail to “have anything to say about 21st-century America.” (Their peer Trilling, by contrast, earns the Scialabba Prize simply by amending his skepticism with “Yes, but …”.) While the New Republic never knew a war it couldn’t champion and pacifists it couldn’t ostracize.
Scialabba has plenty else to lob against more confirmed right-wing-adjacent figures such as Strauss, Voegelin, and Edmund Burke. Yet his strongest contention is against what passes for liberalism in American political discourse. If the “New Right” and neoconservatives, two different and utterly confusing terms in this age, are the dismantlers of New Deal-style progress, liberalism was their chief enabler. Liberal thinkers waved away left-of-center ideas and rendered “utopian” a pejorative term, while the liberal principle of individualism has reduced personal agency to servile consumerism. Whether this has created a material and intellectual void or a cornucopia is something readers may disagree with Scialabba over. If they do, in that debate, they will not find someone more vividly and stylishly persuasive to disagree with.
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Chris R. Morgan is a writer from New Jersey. His Twitter handle is @cr_morgan.