IS TOM WOLFE A RACE REALIST?
Nelson Rosit
Perhaps it is a product of his Southern heritage — born in Richmond in 1931, B.A. Washington and Lee, 1951. Perhaps it is due to his academic training, Ph.D. in American studies from Yale, 1957, completed before the neo-Marxist hegemony over the humanities and social sciences. Perhaps it is a result of his years as a reporter developing the New Journalism that seeks to tell the larger story.
But most likely it is a consequence of his dedication to social realism that has led Tom Wolfe to become the closest thing we have to a mainstream race-realist author.
What is race realism? Ideological labels are often difficult to delineate precisely, but generally a race realist is one who acknowledges the physical reality of race and the significance of human biodiversity in the development of past and present human societies.
This is in contrast to the establishment’s position that insists upon the primacy of the individual while minimizing the importance of race. Races are not naturally occurring phenomena, but merely social constructs grouped around, perhaps, a few superficial physical characteristics. Yet, the inclusion of and advocacy for multiple “social constructs” within White homelands has become a social/political obsession and the basis for the civic religion of the West.
Race realists can also be distinguished from their more radical cousins, racial nationalists, by their embrace of conservatism grounded in patriotism (e.g., American exceptionalism), Christianity, and/or libertarianism. The nationalists are less enamored of Christianity and capitalism, and paradoxically, tend toward internationalism (“our race is our nation”) while advocating for homogeneous ethno-states. Race realists are not separatists, believing instead that a vigorous pursuit of identity politics within a multiracial state is enough to safeguard their people’s interests.
At 82 Wolfe has been writing for over half a century so he has a very lengthy bibliography. By looking at some representative writings we can see if Wolfe fits the race realist mold. Here I will discuss six nonfictions books: Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), The Painted Word (1975), The Right Stuff (1979), Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine (1976), From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), and Hooking Up (2000); plus three novels: Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), A Man in Full (1998), and Back to Blood (2012).[1] Because Wolfe spent the first 30 years of his career as a journalist and social commentator, we will first consider his nonfiction works in thematic rather than chronological order.
One measure of a writer is his influence on language. William Shakespeare is the gold standard for effect on common usage. While no Shakespeare, Wolfe has coined or popularized a number of terms: “the me decade,” later morphed into “the me generation” (i.e. baby boomers), having the “right stuff,” “pushing the envelope,” being a “good ol’ boy,” ‘mau-mau’ or ‘mau-mauing’ used as verbs, and “radical chic.”
Written at the height of the Black Power movement Radical Chic begins by describing a February 1970 fund-raising party given by Leonard and Felicia Bernstein for the Black Panther Party at their Park Avenue penthouse. The Bernsteins’ party was not a unique event within their circle. Wolfe notes that Sid Lumet, Andrew Stein, Jules Feiffer, and Ellie Guggenheimer, among others, had previously given fund-raisers for radical causes.
This brings up the issue of Wolfe’s relationship to Jews. It appears he has ambivalent feelings about them in keeping with a race realist perspective. Whether it is radical chic politics, modern art, or contemporary literature Wolfe dislikes many Jewish creations. The Virginian, born and bred, however, is a long-time resident of New York and has been part of the city’s culturati for decades. His wife Sheila is described as, “smart and attractive, but… a tough Jewish girl from the Bronx.”[2] Well, several men in the race realist cause have non-White spouses. And while Wolfe is willing to discuss Jewish influence explicitly in a somewhat negative context, he also maintains a rather detached view regarding their injurious influences. So Wolfe makes the Jewish connection to radical chic explicit, but sees nothing really malicious about Jews embracing radical causes.
Wolfe concedes there is an element of Jewish resentment toward the older establishment, but not just “out of resentment, but also for sheer self defense, even wealthy Jews tended to support left-wing political parties. They had no choice.”[3] Wolfe suggests that it was not until the 1960s that the Jewish, “New Society,” became New York’s social elite. This is a later date than many social historians would give. He notes the influence Jews have on the press through advertising revenue; again this was a decades-old phenomenon even in 1970.
The biggest fault Wolfe finds with the Bernsteins and their crowd is hypocrisy. Their concern for the poor is somewhat selective — poor non-Whites, yes; poor Whites, not so much — and they are determined to maintain their own wealth, power, and status come what may. As for the Panthers, although there is an element of the poseur, Wolfe believes them to be true revolutionaries. They are physically imposing, but not very articulate. In another book he describes them as one of those “exotic impossible causes.”[4]
The Bernsteins took some heat for their party, some from the establishment, but mostly from their own tribe. Leonard received death threats from the Jewish Defense League and “Jewish pickets forced a moviehouse to withdraw a film of Lenny conducting the Israel Philharmonic on Mount Scopus in celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War.”[5] It should be remembered that it had been only a few years earlier that Black Power advocates had wrestled control of the civil rights movement from Jewish hands and the Panthers, of course, supported the Arabs in Palestine.
To conclude Wolfe’s take on radical chic: Is it possible that the highly intelligent Wolfe is a bit naïve to ascribe Jewish radicalism to misguided altruism, plus self-defense? Does the familial connection slant his views? He refers to Jewish influence but not outright ownership of mass media. He does discuss the “double-track thinking” of Jews. Does this term include Jewish self deception regarding their objectivity? The core complaint of many non-Jews against organized Jewry is their double standard that promotes ethnic solidarity for Jews while promoting multiculturalism for the wider society. It is this subjectivity that makes what is best for Jews the measure of morality, thus squaring the circle.
The second half of this book is about mau-mauing — the confrontation and intimidation of persons in authority by non-Whites in order to obtain favorable government or corporate action, especially financial largesse. Mau-mauing includes demonstrations, so called street theater, confrontations at government or corporate meetings, even rioting. Sometimes not-so-veiled threats (e.g., “it could be a long hot summer,” or “no justice, no peace”) are enough to achieve the desired results.
Much has changed since the 1960s and 1970s. Most funding once gained through mau-mauing has now been institutionalized and bureaucratized. The ethnic activists have largely been co-opted by the system. Today mau-mauing mainly involves intersession with the criminal justice system on behalf of street Blacks such as Rodney King and Treyvon Martin.
Reporting from the Bay area in the late 1960s Wolfe notes that mau-mauing originated with Blacks and then spread to Chicanos, Filipinos, Amerindians, even Samoans, but not the Chinese. “They didn’t fear or resent white people enough. They looked down on whites as childish and uncultivated. They also found it somewhat shameful to present themselves as poor and oppressed on the same level with Negroes and Mexican-Americans.”[6] Wolfe adds that seeing how things were playing out, the Chinese did eventually adopt racial politics.
Viewing the Panthers and other mau-mauers from the perspective of forty plus years we can see why even so called conservatives got onboard with “civil rights,” affirmative action, and ethnically based welfare programs. These were considered, in part, to be necessary payoffs for social peace and the stability of the system. An early case in point is the Blackstone Rangers, a notorious Chicago street gang of the late 1960s. In 1968 the Rangers received a grant worth nearly a million dollars from the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, real money in those days, “The Ranger leaders became job counsels in the manpower training project, even though most of them never had a job before and weren’t about to be looking for one. This wasn’t a case of the Blackstone Rangers putting some huge prank over on the poverty bureaucrats, however.”[7] No, it was a very deliberate strategy to bring the gangs into the system.
Since 1968 the establishment has come to realize that there simply are not enough resources to buy off every “gangsta.” Law and order is the other side of the civil rights coin. So for those who are simply unwilling or unable to take advantage of affirmative action, ethnic set asides, and other social programs, the U.S. has the longest prison sentences and proportionally largest prison population in the world. It is on this margin where the last of the old mau-mauers such as “the Reverend” Al Sharpton and the young thugs of the New Black Panther Party operate.
In The Painted Word Wolfe shifts gears from social commentator to art critic. He implies that modern art is similar to the emperor’s new clothes — “believing is seeing.”[8] The viewer must accept the underlying aesthetic theory of the piece to understand and appreciate the work. But it is not simply that modern art is a con game or aesthetically unsatisfying and shallow. The visual arts have become socially destructive.
Wolfe never defines modern art, but nineteenth-century Impressionists do not come in for criticism. It appears modernism begins with abstract art of the early twentieth century. Modern art grew out of the artist in the role of bohemian or revolutionary. By 1900, and especially after 1920, the task of the artist was to undermine the popular aesthetic of society. “As a painter or sculptor the artist would do work that baffled or subverted the cozy bourgeois vision of reality.”[9] Though often produced and promoted by Jews, modern art was brought to the United States in the 1920s by the Rockefellers and Goodyears as a way of separating themselves from middle-class tastes. There was some resistance. In 1923 conservative art critic Royal Cortissoz “compared the alien invasion of European modernism to the subversive alien hordes coming in by boat. ‘Ellis Island art,’ he called it.”[10]
Realizing that modernism was alienating the masses and seeing a threat from the populist Right, the Left transformed art during the 1930s. Striking evidence of the link between modern art and left-wing politics is shown in the rise of a new genre — Social Realism. “Translation: propaganda paintings. The influence of Left politics was so strong within the art world during the 1930s that Social Realism became not a style of the period but the style of the period”[11] (emphasis in original).
It was after World War II, after the challenge of the revolutionary Right had been crushed, that modernism in the form of Abstract Expressionism sought a mass audience. Wolfe explains that much more than in literature, music, or drama, taste in the visual arts is a top-down phenomenon with a cultural elite pronouncing judgment on artists’ works. This permits a small coterie of critics to dominate the art world. The two dominant art theorists and aestheticians of the late 1940s and 50s were Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Both were Jewish New Yorkers involved in left-wing politics during the 1930s who became promoters of Abstract Expressionism. Abstract Expressionism, described by Wolfe as “an abstraction of an abstraction” generally received good press. Favorable articles appeared in Life, Time and Newsweek.[12] Yet the genre was not a commercial success.
The next movement within modernism was Pop Art. Originating in 1958 with works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, it was popularized by Leo Steinberg, a professor of Hunter College along with art theorist and collector William Rubin, also Jews. Wolfe sees Pop Art as a way of overcoming popular resistance to a lack of realism in modern art. “Steinberg, Rubin and [Lawrence] Alloway had declared Pop Art kosher and quite okay to consume, because it was all ‘sign systems,’ not realism.”[13]
Wolfe goes on to chronicle several other Modernist movements: Minimal Art, Op Art, Conceptual Art, Photo Realism, but the point has been made. Modern art is not just bad art, it is alienating nihilistic art, and Jews have taken the lead in promoting this art, especially in postwar America. Wolfe quotes critic Steinberg as saying that the public should “applaud the destruction of values” brought about by modernism.[14]
It would have been useful for Wolfe to put his critique into a wider context and give his own aesthetic theory. Why is art so important to society? Is a civilization judged by its aesthetic values? Does he believe, along with Keats, that, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty”?
So plainly Wolfe does connect Jews and left-wing politics to modern art. For many years William Pierce included Painted Word in his book catalog. The catalog description reads, in part, “You don’t understand modern ‘art’? Social commentator Tom Wolfe does, and he isn’t impressed. He exposes it for the monstrous, alien-inspired, culture-destroying racket that it is.”[15] The art scene has not improved since the publication of Painted Word. Witness such uplifting works as Serrano’s Piss Christ.
Part 2 of 3
The Bauhaus in the title refers to the Bauhaus School founded in 1919 in Weimar, Germany by Walter Gropius. This school, according to Wolfe, was the genesis of modern architecture. Ludwig Mies (van der Rohe, “less is more”) taught at Bauhaus. With the ascension of National Socialism, both Gropius and Mies left Germany for the U.S.
Is there a racial angle to Bauhaus? Author and racial theorist Wilmot Robertson used to say, “There’s a racial angle to every story in 20th-century America.”
The heirs of the Bauhaus were very concerned with post-war worker housing in America. There was a housing shortage after the war so it was a legitimate issue, but the Left completely misread their clientele. Wolfe points out that public housing became known as “the projects,” and workers avoided them as if they “had a smell. The workers—if by workers we mean people who have jobs—headed out instead to the suburbs.”[3] A dramatic example was seen in St. Louis where post-war working and middle-class Whites left the city as “a vast worker housing project called Pruitt-Igoe” was being built. There is no mention of race (perhaps none was needed), but Wolfe notes that Pruitt-Igoe “filled up mainly with recent migrants from the rural South…where the population density was fifteen to twenty folks per square mile; [and] one rarely got ten feet off the ground except by climbing a tree.”[4] It took just seventeen years for the tenants to destroy P-I. The city demolished the dilapidated buildings in July, 1972. Wolfe calls Pruitt-Igoe and similar projects “American monuments to 1920s Middle European worker housing.”[5] It turns out that people are not interchangeable cogs after all.
On a more positive note is The Right Stuff, Wolfe’s story of America’s first astronauts — the Mercury Seven. Though it is a “warts and all” account, it is obvious that Wolfe greatly admires the spacemen and the pool of military test pilots from which they were drawn. NASA is a civilian agency, but the space program grew out of the Air Force’s experimental rocket planes of the late 1940s. The Mercury Seven were all military pilots.
Early in the book Wolfe makes it clear that these test pilots were White men of the highest physical and mental standards. Here is a description of test pilots attending the funeral of a comrade at the Patuxent Naval Air Station in the mid-1950s: “Navy boys! … They looked so young. Their pink lineless faces with their absolutely clear lean jawlines popped up bravely, correctly, out of the enormous bellycut collar of the bridge coats.”[6]
These boys had the right stuff. Wolfe claims the right stuff is difficult to define. It is a combination of physical courage, intelligence for the skull work, grit, and competitiveness; but it’s greater than the sum of its parts.
The story begins with the X series rocket planes flown by Chuck Yeager, the prototype of the modern (postwar) test pilot —“he was the boondocker, the country boy from the back country.”[7] According to Wolfe combat and test pilots of the time as well as the first astronauts came from one of two sources—military families or rural/small town America. After the USSR launched Sputnik I in October 1957, the progress the U.S. had achieved with the X series rocket planes seemed totally inadequate. In a near panic America entered a crash program to launch satellites. It is easily forgotten how far ahead the Soviet Union was in rocket and satellite technology from 1957–1962. America’s response to further Soviet achievements was the Mercury Project to launch a man in orbit around the earth.
Seven military pilots — the first astronauts — were selected for the Mercury Project. Gus Grissom was from Mitchell, Indiana, the son of a railroad worker, raised in the Church of Christ. John Glenn of New Concord, Ohio, was “a balding and slightly tougher version of the cutest-looking freckle-faced country boy you ever saw. He had a snub nose, light-hazel eyes, reddish-blond hair, a terrific smile, and thousands of freckles.”[8] There was Gordon Cooper from Shawnee Oklahoma and Deke Slayton raised on a farm near Sparta, Wisconsin. Scott Carpenter, of Boulder, Colorado, was a Navy test pilot out of Patuxent. Al Shepard and Wally Schirra were from second generation military families.
There they were, “seven patriotic God-fearing small-town Protestant family men,” and the press couldn’t get enough of them.[9] Such a different America in the late 1950s! No worries about diversity (that would be coming soon). No need to import millions of Asian tech workers to “stay competitive.” NASA, however, was not quite all American. “Although they scrupulously avoided publicity, many of Wernher von Braun’s team of V-2 experts had important jobs at the Cape … [At times] sizzling glühwein materialized as if out of a time warp and drunken Germans could be heard pummeling the piano in the cocktail lounge and singing the ‘Horst Wessel Song’!”[10]
Except for the straight laced Glenn, the astronauts in training worked hard and played hard: alcohol, groupies, and fast cars were used to unwind. The media and public, of course, indulged and idolized them, all this before the first Mercury launch. But this was in the natural order of things, for Wolfe compares these spacemen to the champions of old—the single combat warriors. The ancient instinct of a people, their so-called folk wisdom, in the matter of the care, preparation, and recompense of single-combat warriors was indeed sound. Like his predecessors in the ancient past [the astronaut] had reached the blessed state where one was far more afraid of not delivering on his end of the bargain — having been paid up front — than he was of getting killed.[11]
The Mercury Seven came through, not flawlessly as Wolfe makes clear, but all acquitted themselves well and accomplished their missions. An example of Wolfe’s writing that contains both humor and truth is a description of a ticker-tape parade the Mercury astronauts received in New York City. “Like most military people… [The astronauts] didn’t really consider New York part of the US. It was like a free port, a stateless city, an international protectorate, Danzig in the Polish Corridor, Beirut the crossroads of the Middle East… It was a foreign city full of a strange race of curiously tiny malformed gray people.”[12]
Meanwhile, though the Mercury Project had eclipsed the rocket planes, the experimental fights of the X series continued to be flown by guys with the right stuff. Their top pilot at the time was Joe Walker. “He looked like a young towheaded version of Chuck Yeager, the country boy who loved to fly.”[13] Another product of the X-15 project was Neil Armstrong, described as “typical of the new breed … He had a close blond crew cut and small pale-blue eyes … [and] had flown more than a hundred missions off carriers during the Korean War.” [14] Neil Armstrong, of course, was selected for the Apollo Project and became the first man on the moon.
But some found the homogeneity of the NASA and military test pilots intolerable and their political clout was growing in the early 1960s. By January 1963 President Kennedy had decided that NASA must “have at least one Negro astronaut.”[15] The token selected was Ed Dwight. The Civil Rights Division of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department took an active role in monitoring Dwight’s progress. Despite intense political pressure NASA did not select Captain Dwight to be an astronaut. The astronauts of Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were all very much in the same mold. It was only after the success of the moon landings, with the space race essentially won, that NASA embraced diversity.
Part 3 of 3
Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine, a collection of short fiction and non-fiction, includes a very sympathetic portrait of US pilots operating over North Vietnam during the years 1965 to 1967. But by far the most notable essay in the book is, “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Wolfe’s critique of the Baby Boom generation, the Me Generation. The Baby Boomers have been rightly criticized for being self-absorbed to the point of narcissism; though subsequent cohorts have not been more virtuous. It is worth quoting at length from this essay, for Wolfe exhibits his conservative bona fides as he faults Baby Boomers for discarding what he describes as the “age-old belief in serial immortality.”
The husband and wife who sacrifice their own ambitions and their material assets in order to provide a ‘better future’ for their children … the soldier who risks his life or perhaps consciously sacrifices it, in battle … the man who devotes his life to some struggle for ‘his people’ that cannot possibly be won in his lifetime … people (or most of them) who buy life insurance or leave wills … are people who conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream. Just as something of their ancestors lives on in them, so will something of them live on in their children … or in their people, their race, their community – for childless people, too, conduct their lives and try to arrange their postmortem affairs with concern for how the great stream is going to flow on.
Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, ‘I have only one life to live.’ Instead, they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offsprings’ lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. The Chinese, in ancestor worship, have literally worshipped the great tide itself, and not any god or gods. For anyone to renounce the notion of serial immortality, in the West or the East, has been to defy what seems like a law of nature.[1] (Ellipses in original)
In chapter two, “Two Young Men Who Went West,” Wolfe chronicles the birth of the computer age and the pioneers of Silicon Valley. He points out that most of the major figures in this genesis, such as Robert Noyce, John Barden, Walter Brattain, William Shockley, Jack Kilby, William Hewlett, and David Packard, et al. “had grown up and gone to college in small towns in the Middle West and the West.”[2] Yet today we are told time and again by “our” leadership that Americans, who landed on the moon and launched the computer age, cannot compete globally without massive importation of talented, hard-working aliens. The implication is that Americans of the twenty-first century are just too lazy and/or stupid to cut it anymore. Wolfe half agrees. He sees the great achievements of post-war America as springing from the disciplined cultural values of nineteenth century Protestantism. But, “surely the moral capital of the nineteenth century is by now all but completely spent.”[3] White America is badly in need of an instauration.
In “Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died” Wolfe looks at neuroscience, Darwinism, and Edward O. Wilson’s sociobiology. He quotes Wilson as saying “Every human brain … is born not as a blank tablet (a tabula rasa) waiting to be filled in by experience but as ‘an exposed negative waiting to be slipped into developer fluid.’ You can develop the negative well or you can develop it poorly, but either way you are going to get precious little that is not already imprinted on the film. The print is the individual’s genetic history, over thousands of years of evolution, and there is not much anyone can do about it.”[4]
Wilson is a Harvard professor and, according to Wolfe, a conventional liberal. But his moderate politics has not shielded him from the ire of the Left. Wolfe relates how radicals attempted to refute findings of sex-based psychological differences. Feminists protesters invaded a conference “where Wilson was appearing, dumped a pitcher of ice water, cubes and all, over his head and began chanting, ‘You’re all wet! You’re all wet!’”[5] That was certainly a devastating critique of sociobiology and emblematic of the Left’s debating style.
In February 1992 a government psychiatrist, Frederick K. Goodwin, lost his job as head of the federal Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration simply for publically describing a primate study that showed “that a handful of genetically twisted young males were the ones who committed practically all the wanton murders of other males and the physical abuse of females.” The suggestion that there might be a genetic component to criminality enraged liberals in Congress. Representative John Conyers, “senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus, demanded Goodwin’s resignation — and got it two days later.” [6]
In 1993 and 1995 the National Institute of Health underwrote conferences on neuroscience that included research on a possible genetic factor to criminality. The 1993 conference at the University of Maryland was concealed after political pressure, while the 1995 conference was disrupted and effectively sabotaged by Leftist protesters.
Moving on to the subject of IQ, Wolfe believes that “the genetic component of an individual’s intelligence is remarkably high.” And he goes on to predict that the “ruckus over Charles Murray and Richard Herrenstein’s The Bell Curve is probably just the beginning of the bitterness the subject is going to create” [7]
Wolfe puts Darwinism and its later spinoffs into a larger historical context by contrasting them with two other nineteenth-century ideas — Marxism and Freudianism. It is part of the nature/nurture debate. Marx and Freud believed human beings were “completely molded by their environment.” Darwinism, sociobiology, and evolutionary psychology, though conceding the effects of environment, stress genetic influences. By the late twentieth century Marxism and Freudianism had been largely discredited, yet the two, especially Marxism, still have a malign influence on social values and public policy.
Being the conservative that he is, Wolfe is not worried about the hierarchical implications of neuroscience research. Instead he is concerned that biological determinism may undermine belief in individual free will and personal responsibility. Could it lead to nihilism?
A closer look why evolutionary psychology is accepted by much of the scientific community and popular culture yet completely rejected as a basis for public policy would have been useful. An example of this phenomenon is the No Child Left Behind program. This impractical educational plan based on neo-Marxist egalitarianism was initiated by a Republican president, George Bush. Bush was considered the conservative choice in the 2000 and 2004 elections. It seems that on the level of pop psychology genetic theories are okay, but they cannot be allowed to influence governing principles or practices.
In the chapter titled “In the Land of the Rococo Marxists” Wolfe sees both the American populace and intellectuals as lacking. He is disappointed that “Americans have no strong feelings about their country’s supremacy one way or the other. They are lacking in affect.”[8] Well, Mr. Wolfe, when a political entity is simply a propositional nation belonging equally to everyone who can slip within its borders, it certainly seems not too surprising that one may not have a strong emotional attachment to one’s country. Actually, that old-fashioned patriotism can still be found in the more homogeneous communities of fly-over country.
To his credit Wolfe reserves his sharpest criticism not for the average Joe, but for the American intellectual elite. Rococo Marxism is his term for what many call neo-Marxism. He points to Susan Sontag’s 1967 article in the Partisan Review where she declares, “The white race is the cancer of human history” as an example of what Marshall McLuhan called “indignation endowing the idiot with dignity.”[9]
Wolfe concludes that Americans “have learned to shrug and acquiesce to ‘political correctness,’ to Rococo Marxism, because they know that to oppose it out loud is in poor taste. It is … the etiquette you must observe to establish yourself as an educated person.”[10] The situation, of course, is far worse than Wolfe lets on. Being politically incorrect regarding race has ruined careers and can even put a person’s physical safety at risk.
In the autumn of 1987 Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, quickly climbed to the top of the bestsellers list. Set in New York City in the mid 1980s the chief protagonist is Sherman McCoy a White Wall Street bond trader and self-described “Master of the Universe.”
McCoy is pulling down nearly a million a year and has all the accoutrements of the affluent urban lifestyle. Yet his wealth and status are built on a foundation of sand. McCoy is a WASP, so, unlike Blacks, Jews, Puerto Ricans, et al., he has no “community” to support him when he gets in trouble. A possible hit-and-run accident involving a Black youth leads to criminal charges. In his hour of need McCoy must stand alone sans family, friends, and employer.
Sherman McCoy represents a White America that still possesses wealth and social position but lacks collective advocacy. Thus its members have no organized defense against a hostile media, a Jewish judiciary, and the Black street. Recent events have shown the lasting relevance of Bonfire. Twenty five years after publication a comparable set of characters and social forces were in play during the Trayvon Martin – George Zimmerman case.
In his second novel, A Man in Full, Wolfe moves south to the Atlanta of the mid 1990s. Again an alpha White male is in trouble, an interracial incident incites racial politics, and political correctness influences the course of events. In addition to real estate tycoon Charlie “King of the Crackers” Croker, and the hulking Black footballer Fareek “The Cannon” Fannon, Wolfe reintroduces a classic character of American fiction — the mulatto or mixed race individual. Roger White II, aka Roger Too White, is one of the “beige brothers” trying to find his place in society. The author also adds a White working-class hero, Conrad Hensley, into the mix.
There have been disingenuous appeals by President Bill Clinton in 1998 and Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009 for a frank national discussion on race. These initiatives went nowhere because they were insincere in their call for candor and dialog. What these men wanted was a renewed propaganda campaign for multiculturalism following a prescribed script. Wolfe uses fiction to inject some honesty into the American narrative about sex, class, and especially race. So while A Man in Full was a bestseller and a huge commercial success it received mixed reviews. It appears that the book’s realism offended the sensibilities of some of the literati.
Wolfe’s latest novel, Back to Blood, revisits earlier themes — ethnicity, class, gender identity and big-city politics — this time in Miami of the early twenty-first century. Miami is driven by identity politics, the two main factions being Cuban Americans and African Americans. Anglos, Haitians, Jews, and Russians are also in the jumble. We again see the mulatto, the marginal man reappear in the person of a Haitian professor whose daughter is light enough to “pass.” Along with identity issues Wolfe reiterates his belief that modern art is a scam and incorporates his critique of the news media. Recurring motifs are not repetitious in the hands of a skilled writer.
“The Running of the Billionaires,” from an excerpt of Back to Blood in Vanity Fair.
Is today’s Miami a template for America’s future? So called comprehensive immigration reform (i.e. amnesty + immigration surge) could turn midcentury America into a boiling stew that makes present day Miami look like a model of ethnic harmony.
As in Bonfire, Back to Blood illustrates the need for community support especially in times of trouble. The two main characters, Nestor Camacho, a Cuban-American cop and his erstwhile girlfriend Magdalena Otero, a Cuban-American nurse, pay a heavy psychological price after becoming estranged from their community. * * * So what does the above evidence (admittedly somewhat selective) reveal about Wolfe’s world view? There can be no doubt that his conservatism, unlike the counterfeit conservatism of so many American politicians, is genuine. He is a cultural conservative, a paleo-con with, perhaps, libertarian tendencies, having cast a write-in vote for Ron Paul for president in 2012.[11] Being a profoundly conservative litterateur Wolfe is a rare bird indeed.
For all his sophistication Wolfe has an almost quaint patriotism and an adherence to American exceptionalism. He celebrates American entrepreneurs and warriors. But there is a note of conservative pessimism in the suggestion that these men were products of an earlier America whose ethnic-cultural milieu has now significantly changed. His conservatism is not based on revealed truths He has relatively little to say about religion. Rather, Wolfe has a naturalistic view of man. His writings are permeated with a Darwinian perspective. Although he faults evolutionary psychology for being trendy he takes seriously its antecedent, sociobiology, and its neuroscience underpinnings. His main problem with biological determinism is that it may be used to excuse bad behavior, or justify self-indulgence. Properly understood a naturalist position is compatible with a belief in individual agency.
Fundamentally, Wolfe is not a political animal, especially not in a narrow partisan sense. He is not an ideologue; he opposes isms. His views are too nuanced for a polemic. He is not a writer of political tracts or manifestoes. But his Darwinism acknowledges the significance of human biodiversity and he is willing to illustrate these differences in a politically incorrect manner. In keeping with his journalist background and no doubt a strong desire to maintain his mainstream status, Wolfe views his people’s predicament with equanimity. But looking at our multicultural, globalist, twenty-first-century world, Wolfe knows what ultimately counts: “’The Race!’ cries the whole world. All people, all people everywhere, have but one last thing on their minds — Back to blood! All people, everywhere, you have no choice but — Back to blood!”[12]
Tom Wolfe is a race realist.