Holding o÷ the barbarians
Robert Philpot on a posthumous publication
Crown Forum, £22.50 Reviewed by Robert Philpot
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER’S death from cancer in June robbed America of one of its foremost Jewish public intellectuals. Thankfully, Krauthammer — a weekly columnist for the Washington Post for the past 30 years — used his illness to work on a posthumously published collection of his writings. Edited by his son Daniel, The Point Of It All demonstrates the breadth of the subjects the author tackled and the depth of the knowledge he brought to them.
This collection is a companion to his 2015 book, Things That Matter, which was concerned with the struggle between liberal democracy and the “three great ideologies of totalitarian nihilism” — Nazism, Communism and radical Islamism — and its central thesis was politics as “the moat… beyond which lie the barbarians”.
In The Point Of It All, Krauthammer turns his attention to the nature and future of liberal democracy and offers a sustained attack on the “politics of certainty”, those ideologies which claim to hold absolute truth. More broadly, Krauthammer brings rare moral clarity to a range of domestic and foreign issues. Of the Arab-Israeli dispute, for instance, he writes: “Complex it is, but the root cause is not. Israel’s crime is not its policies but its insistence on living.” He is similarly contemptuous of the West’s perpetual and misguided search for “moderates” in the Iranian regime with which to engage.
A principled conservative, he has little time for Donald Trump, his “infantile hunger for approval and praise” or “America First” (the “antithesis of American exceptionalism”). At the same time, he maintains a welcome level-headedness, cuttingly dismissing the self-styled “resistance” to the President with the admonition: “as if this is Vichy France”.
Krauthammer writes warmly of the Charles Krauthammer, one of America’s foremost Jewish public intellectuals, who died in June of this year was skilled in ‘gentle but eloquent nudging’
He brings rare moral clarity to a range of domestic and foreign issues
“courage and conviction” that enabled Ronald Reagan to win the Cold War. And yet he correctly predicted nearly three decades ago that the “miracle” of 1989 would give way to disillusionment. The only original piece in this
book — the long essay, The Authoritarian Temptation, written last year — attempts to tackle the consequences of that disillusionment. Its gallery of villains — Erdogan, Putin, Le Pen, Orban, Chávez and Corbyn — is well-chosen.
In a 2013 interview, Krauthammer quoted approvingly the words of Tom Stoppard: “You put words together all your life and every once in a while you get them in the right order and give the world a nudge”. As this collection demonstrates,
the world is poorer without Charles Krauthammer’s gentle but eloquent nudging.
Robert Philpot’s books include ‘Margaret Thatcher: Honorary Jew’