The End of an Era
Remembering Lewis Lapham
By John Foster
The death of Lewis Lapham feels like the passing of an era, not simply in the rarified world of America’s literary elite.
For decades, Lapham was one of the country's most insightful critics of public life. His passing is indissolubly connected with the end of a mode of politics in Europe and the United States.
European readers might be forgiven for being unfamiliar with Lapham’s life and work. He was the longtime editor of Harper’s, the most consistently interesting of America’s high-brow magazines.
A prolific writer, Lapham originally came to prominence as a practitioner of the ‘New Journalism’ of the 1960s, along with such literary luminaries as Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, and Joan Didion.
Lapham’s forte was political essays that powerfully alloyed fact and criticism.
By the time of his death, he was arguably the most significant English language political commentator of the second half of the century, perhaps the only essayist for whom comparisons to H. L. Mencken or George Orwell would not be simple flattery.
Lapham was born in San Francisco in 1935, the son of a banker and grandson of a former city mayor. He attended a prestigious Connecticut prep school and then went to Yale.
He then spent a year at Cambridge before pursuing a career in journalism, first in newspapers and then writing longer pieces for monthly periodicals.
The length and breadth of Lapham’s work are too enormous to be surveyed effectively in the space available here. He developed a penchant for acute and uncompromising political commentary, especially after becoming editor at Harper’s in 1976.
Lapham made no secret of his political perspective, a moderate left-liberalism that inclined him to skewer the pretensions of the Republicans and the Democrats. The former took it more personally.
Lapham also had little sympathy for the radicalism of the 1960s, which he viewed as extremist.
There is an arc to be traced in Lapham’s work. In the 1990s, he was a persistent critic of the political establishment, undertaking a critique of the society he was a part of.
With the catastrophic events of 9/11, Lapham became a writer of jeremiads lamenting the transition from a politics that failed to live up to its ideals to one that lacked rationally attainable ideals altogether.
In the months before the attacks, Lapham had written several pieces cataloguing George W. Bush’s many flaws and how he attained the presidency.
These were written under the sign of Mencken’s famous comment that “[o]n some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron”.
In the wake of 9/11, Lapham’s prose took on a new, more urgent tone. He had little sympathy for the attitude of shocked disbelief adopted by many Americans in the wake of the attacks,
I don’t wish to argue the rights and wrongs of American foreign policy, but how do we find it incredible that other people might not have noticed the planes in the sky or the corpses in the street? No fewer than 62 million civilians died in the twentieth century’s wars (as opposed to 43 million military personnel). Buried in mud or sand or broken stones in all seasons and every quarter of the globe – in London and Paris as well as in Sarajevo and Baghdad. Why not New York and Washington.
To offer any overt criticism of American exceptionalism while the ruins of the World Trade Centre were still smoking was a distinctly unpopular position. But Lapham was always willing to tell the truth, regardless of whether the pearl-clutchers of the chattering classes agreed with him.
Lapham’s columns tracked America’s response to the attacks. In the aftermath of the attacks, he hoped that a spirit of public-mindedness would prevail in the United States and that there might be a serious discussion of this country’s role in the world and the sources of hostility toward us.
“By mid-December,” wrote Lapham in Harper’s in January 2002, “I knew I’d been barking at the moon.”
Lapham tracked the stages of what ensued like a man watching believers track the stations of the cross. Instead of increased seriousness, the US led its allies in a fantasy campaign in which Saddam Hussein played the role of the empty signifier, congealing all the negativity toward the United States in the person of a conveniently disposable Arab bogeyman.
Worse was to follow. The shock of the attacks and the cynicism of the American establishment’s responses gave rise to a politics of fantasy, the consequences of which are at the root of the colonisation of the Republican Party by irrationality.
Lapham recognised earlier than any other prominent journalist exactly what sort of danger Donald Trump represented. Describing Trump’s run through the Republican primaries, Lapham zeroed in on the qualities that differentiated him from what had constituted normalcy among American politicians.
Trump was worse than an embarrassment; he was a disaster, laying waste to the Republican pretensions to political and socioeconomic coherence, likely to roust out of the party any potential voters who weren’t card-carrying bigots. The man was a preposterous self-promoting clown, a vulgar lout, an unscripted canary flown from its gilded cage, a braggart in boorish violation of the political-correctness codes…
Republicans realised all this but played the game anyway, taking advantage of Trump’s metapolitical momentum to reclaim the social power they felt that they had lacked during the Clinton Administration.
As Lapham made clear, the key factor was not so much Trump himself but the disintegrating political order that made his mode of politicised self-promotion viable. His final labour, so to speak, was to chronicle its collapse since the end of the Second World War.
There is a strong element of tragedy in this story. Lapham is the sort of person with whom one does not always agree but always has good reason for whatever view he espouses. To this day, major media outlets in the United States seem reticent about calling Donald Trump’s lies what they are.
By the same token, the politics of unreality that Lapham diagnosed in the United States post-9/11 have infected Europe as well. It is hard to see the fantasy narratives surrounding Brexit as anything other than an expression of the far-right imaginary.
The passing of Lewis Lapham marks the end of a political era. It was flawed, and many injustices passed unnoticed and unremarked on it. But what it has given way to is far worse and far more dangerous because it is based on lies.
If Lapham’s journalism stood against anything, it would be against this breed of political imagination run wild.
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Photograph courtesy of US Army Korea. Published under a Creative Commons license.