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domingo, 10 de marzo de 2013

Books: Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, by Michael Szalay

Dudes and Democrats



Fred Siegel


When liberalism became conquered by cool

Michael Szalay’s unusual book, Hip Figures, is largely an account of that moment in the 1960s when, in the words of Gore Vidal, “politics and literature officially joined forces” by incorporating the black conception of “cool” into the critique of conventional middle-class morality. Though written in the obscurantist jargon of postmodernism and saddled by Szalay’s attempt to show how the novels of the 1960s instantiated Marx’s pre-modern labor theory of value, the book offers some valuable insights.

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Szalay argues that the work of novelists such as Norman Mailer, John Updike, E. L. Doctorow, and William Styron made them “the most important political strategists of their time.” 

They paved the way, he rightly argues, for the creation of the contemporary liberal lifestyle of upwardly mobile people who, in their twenties and thirties, are square by day, swingers by night. 

Today, we might call them hipsters. 

By the time they settle into genuine adulthood, they’re no more capable of defending the bourgeois virtues that propelled their careers than a Communist commissar would be. 

But Szalay’s thesis also entails considerable overstatement: the sixties novelists, he asserts, cleaved the ties between economics and culture that Daniel Bell identified in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.

A writer less attached to antique Marxist categories would have noted that the split between culture and economy was, in large measure, a matter of unprecedented affluence undermining the self-discipline and social relations that had long buttressed economic prosperity.
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Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, by Michael Szalay (Stanford University Press, 336 pp., $24.95)

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Read more: www.city-journal.org

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