Brock is apparently incapable of confronting shortcomings for which he has only himself to blame. Egged on by promptings of the grandiose self, he has transformed his personal screwups into an epic case. "The age of reporting is dead," he writes as though his was the story of a William Randolph Hearst or a Rupert Murdoch, who could resonate with the Zeitgeist itself. And then: "There is no 'liberal movement' to which [liberal] journalists are attached and by which they can be blackballed in the sense that there is a self-identified, hardwired conservative movement that can function as a kind of neo-Stalinist thought police that rivals anything I knew at Berkeley."

This from a man whose conservative publisher accepted his final manuscript ("With my publishers blessing, I was faithful to my reporting," Brock writes without noticing the contradiction) and put out 200,000 copies of a book that didn't sell, adding hundreds of thousands to the already million-dollar loss. And this, from a man who (at the time his Esquire article was published) had a half-million-dollar contract with the American Spectator. In fact, the managing editor of the Spectator, Wlady Plesczynski, had passionately defended Brock's book to this very writer at a "Dark Ages Weekend," the big conservative New Year's bash to which the supposedly ostracized Brock was an invited panelist. Of course, as the crotchety author of a big flop, Brock was no longer quite the star he had once been, and his reception was probably less deferential than his amour propre deemed appropriate. And when Brock's contract with the Spectator was canceled, it wasn't because he had fallen out of conservative favor, it was because he had failed to deliver the number of articles called for in the contract.

Brock's problem is not conservatism, it is narcissism. But now it is politics as well. In the Esquire article, Brock declares his independence from the right, even as he reaffirms his conservative views. Apparently, he thinks he can be a free-floating journalist sans partisan baggage, accepted as a writer for the liberal media. Well, good luck with your new liberal friends, David.

Salon has already weighed in with a piece by David Futrelle with the predictable liberal response: You were a sleazebag then, and you're a sleazebag now. Jacob Weisberg in Slate goes a giant step further, tarring all conservatism with the Brock brush: "The party where humorless thought police work to enforce a rigid ideological discipline isn't made up of Democrats. It comprises Republicans ... Brock portrays a political subculture in which loyalty to the cause means everything, truth very little." Such a thing couldn't possibly happen in his political circle. "The treatment of Brock has no parallel among liberals," Weisberg writes.

Really? Peter Collier and I were bestselling authors, once editors of the largest magazine of the left, and sought-after writers by liberal magazines -- until we strayed from the party line that Weisberg pretends doesn't exist. In my own case, it took more than 10 years before an invitation came to write for a non-conservative magazine again. Ronald Radosh was literally banned from writing on the subject of Nicaragua while still a masthead editor of Dissent. The ban was triggered by his political incorrectness on the issue and imposed by the magazine's founder and icon of democratic socialism, Irving Howe.

As for the conservative lock-step, what a hoot. In the last six months, Arianna Huffington has attacked every conservative leader Weisberg could name, without noticeably diminishing her invitations to parties or service on the boards of conservative think tanks. Bill Kristol is regularly slammed by Republican leaders and Pat Buchanan was labeled a "fascist" by both the American Spectator and Bill Bennett without diminishing his presence at conservative conferences. Newt Gingrich has been viciously caricatured on the covers of National Review and the Weekly Standard, which announced his "meltdown" and ran an article pillorying him as "Political Road Kill." Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, in a survey of the Brock affair, managed to get three major conservative journalists -- Robert Novak, William Safire and Bill Kristol -- to complain on the record, in the liberal press, about other conservatives. So much for Weisberg's "Conintern."

As a former partisan of the left, I can testify to how exhilarating it is to breathe free in the conservative intellectual air. Today, in the pages of magazines that Weisberg describes as under neo-Stalinist party discipline, conservatives war over immigration, abortion, drug policy, homosexuality, openings to China, the place of religion, the credibility of supply-side economics and the sanity of Jude Wanniski and Jack Kemp.

By contrast, liberals war over how to position themselves to get elected. How many serious clashes of values are there in liberal ranks? Are there liberals who view the ending of welfare as a positive good, who would like to see the non-defense budget drastically cut, who want to reduce the capital gains tax to zero? Consider a more volatile issue like affirmative action. Anyone who inquires quickly learns that there are many, many deeply troubled liberal consciences afraid to express themselves publicly. Is there a single prominent liberal who has dared to remain publicly faithful to the civil rights principle enunciated by Martin Luther King Jr., or who has had the courage to denounce racial preferences in the '90s in the same moral voice that liberals used to denounce racial preferences in the '60s? If so, I certainly missed it.

Let's talk about the thought police. Two liberal reporters, Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson, followed "The Real Anita Hill" with a counter-volume about Clarence Thomas called "Strange Justice." The book was an unending sordid personal attack on the only Supreme Court justice who is also an African-American, a man who rose against extreme odds of poverty and racial oppression to achieve high office. The only blemish in his entire public career (how many liberal public figures can say that?) is the result of an unproven libel about alleged events in a distant past, coming from an embittered, unreliable and partisan source whose gripings never should have been given a public platform in the first place.

"Strange Justice" was promoted and celebrated by the same shameless chorus that prevented Brock's own investigation from being taken seriously outside the conservative ghetto. Was there a single liberal journalist or reviewer who broke ranks to condemn the atrocity the left committed on the public figure of Clarence Thomas and deplore the character assassination of an extraordinary African-American?

On the other hand, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime ideological leader of the feminist left, was nominated to the Supreme Court, did any conservative journalist rummage through Ginsburg's garbage and personal records in order to smear and taint her, as liberals did to Thomas? Did conservatives mount any effort to destroy her ability to be a role model to women, in the way liberals tried to destroy Clarence Thomas' public persona and keep him from becoming an inspiration to his community?

Meanwhile, David Brock has dropped his bid to become a truly independent journalist and moved on to the greener pastures of the conservative-bashing press corps. He claims that he has seen the light, and in particular that "if sexual witch-hunts become the way to win in politics, if they become our politics altogether, we can and will destroy everyone in public life." Sounds like he's been taking spin lessons from Sidney Blumenthal, the genie behind Hillary's "vast right-wing conspiracy" and inspiration of various hit pieces against the staff of Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
SALON | March 23, 1998

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