How to krauthammer
Charles Krauthammer, the Washington Post columnist, announced last week that he is stricken with terminal cancer and has only weeks to live. Since then, the tributes have poured forth, and rightly so. Charles taught generations of readers and fellow writers how to reason, persuade, live—and now how to die.
These things are all connected because wisdom and goodness are entwined and, deep down, perhaps identical. Of Charles’ goodness— his qualities as a father, friend and colleague; his courage and resilience as a man—the tributes from people who know him much better than I do richly testify.
Of his wisdom, we have 38 years’ worth of columns, essays, speeches and spoken commentaries. If you lean conservative, as I do, the experience of a Krauthammer column was almost invariably the same: You’d read the piece and think, “that’s exactly it.” Not just “interesting” or “well written” or “mostly right.” Week after week, his was the clearest and smartest expression of the central truth of nearly every subject: a bad Supreme Court nomination, the joys and humiliations of chess, the future of geopolitics.
And if you don’t lean conservative? Then Charles’ writing served an even more useful purpose. Since I’m not aware of any precise antonym to the term “straw man,” I hereby nominate the noun “krauthammer” to serve the function, defined in two ways: 1. as the strongest possible counterargument to your opinion; 2. a person of deep substance and complete integrity.
There might be a verb in this too. As in: “Frank Bruni’s column this week totally krauthammered Robert De Niro, Samantha Bee and the rest of the rage-against-Trump machine.”
Still, this falls short of explaining Charles’ achievement. Whether you agreed with him or not, Charles’ column taught. There is a style of Beltway columnizing that specializes in reporting, sometimes usefully but rarely profoundly. That’s not teaching. There’s also the data-heavy column, also occasionally useful, but those too generally mistake information for insight.
But nobody turned to Charles’ column for actuarial data on Social Security or the latest dubious leak from Devin Nunes. Smaller subjects he left to smaller writers. Charles could write political columns with the best of them, but the game for him was philosophical, not partisan. His conservatism was never about getting Republicans elected in the fall. It was about conserving the institutions, values and temper of a free and humane world.
How? By getting his readers to raise their sights above the parapets of momentary passion and parochial interest. This didn’t mean that all of his calls were right—columnizing isn’t clairvoyance, especially under deadline pressure—but he did get readers to think carefully about the great things so frequently at stake in seemingly small questions. To read Charles was to be invited into a running conversation about the meaning, foundations and aims of politics in the grand sense.
Also important were the decencies Charles was prepared to defend, and the risks he was prepared to run—not least to his own popularity with his own side. That brings to mind one of his last columns, about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer: “Bungled collusion is still collusion.”
“It turned out to be incompetent collusion, amateur collusion, comically failed collusion,” he wrote. “That does not erase the fact that three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play.”
This may seem self-evident to many readers, but given Charles’ place in the conservative world it was some much-needed and even gutsy truth telling. Too bad the same can’t be said of most right-wing pundits whose former convictions have gone the way of Groucho Marx: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them, well, I have others.”
Finally there’s the question of tone. The dominant mode of social-media political opinion is snark. Of cable TV: sneering. Of talk radio: shouting. A good deal of opinion writing today seems to involve no effort at persuasion, but merely the dull repetition of a political catechism comforting to the already converted. Trump voters are all racists! Conservatives are all dishonest! Liberals hate America!
Charles never wrote that way. Beliefs firmly held in his mind seemed to mingle with bemusement tickling his gut. If the great theme of his work is the defense of what we proudly used to call Western civilization, the great theme of his life is the cultivation of a civilized mind. With every commentary, he taught us how such a mind worked.
Charles’ parting letter is, appropriately, about gratitude. “I am grateful,” he writes, “to have played a small role in the conversations that have helped guide this extraordinary nation’s destiny.”
Not so small, Charles. To those who read, watched, knew, or felt they knew you—we’re talking about millions of Americans here—you showed what it means to be a man of independent mind and sound judgment, up for the defense of the things we hold dearest, the things that matter. It’s what you might call the democratic vocation.
Lowercase d, of course, Charles, and thank you. Bret Stephens is a New York Times columnist.