Week of Dec. 31, 2007

What idiot thought up the idea of putting studio art and art history together in one university art department? It seems unlikely that it was either an art historian or an artist. Neither would merge voluntarily. It must have been a dean trying to save some money....

Yes, there are some great, generous, contemporary-art-or-artist-loving art historians walking the halls of many a combined university art department. They’re a genuine pleasure for professors of studio art to be around. Alas, there aren’t enough of them to make the pedagogical marriage work. Their field, moreover, has steadily become more and more about matters putatively broader than “art”: politics, sociology, theory, and epistemology. In short, art history these days is more about “history” than “art.” So I say to all you great and honorable history departments out there: “Take our art historians … please.”

It’s gone. The breakup of what was the Reagan coalition — social conservatives, defense conservatives, antitax conservatives — it doesn’t mean a whole lot to people anymore.

His politics were at once profoundly libertarian and profoundly authoritarian. Most libertarians harbour a naively benign view of the human condition: Goldwater’s view was more jaundiced. Human freedom demanded external control. It necessitated the expansion of police powers to curb the excesses of those who might trammel others’ freedoms. The future that Goldwater saw was a country at once stripped of nearly all of its regulatory powers when it came to business activity but with a strong military ready not just to contain but to trample its Communist enemies, a strong police to put down unrest in the streets, and a defended national border.

It has taken the paradoxical presidency of George W. Bush to bring the paradoxes of Goldwaterism to the surface. Bushism is Goldwaterism on steroids, but also something radically different. More than his Republican predecessors – even Reagan – Bush has reorganised the economy to favour the Republicans’ corporate base. The near abolition of estate taxes and the appointment of judges like Samuel Alito and John Roberts who are committed to dismantling the regulatory state fulfils Goldwater’s dream of strict constructionist judges burying the New Deal.