No Liberals Need Apply Here

By John Elson

To anyone who has seen the mini-hit film Metropolitan, the setting will be instantly familiar. This large, chastely furnished library, in a town house on Manhattan's Upper East Side, was where the callow preppies of "Sally Fowler's rat pack" were filmed during their postdance gabfests. On a Wednesday evening the place is filled with grownup baby boomers, many of them huddled at a small bar near the door. But the talk, for the most part, isn't about Hamptons and debentures. A petite blond writer in an electric red dress speculates for a guest about what might happen at National Review now that Bill Buckley has retired. A tweedy editor of the critical monthly New Criterion has some delicious gossip about faculty problems at Duke. A lanky novelist asks if anyone else plans to catch the lecture on Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain at the Opus Dei center next door.

Welcome to the Vile Body, an informal collective of youngish (25 to 40) conservative and libertarian intellectuals; liberals need not apply. Anywhere from 20 to 60 or more of these best and rightest meet for cocktails once a month at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, to schmooze, network and, above all, exchange ideas and witticisms. The name of the group, proposed by Metropolitan's writer-director Whit Stillman, echoes the title of a brittle comedy by Evelyn Waugh, an author much admired by many Vile Body regulars. Says Terry Teachout, 34, who writes editorials for the New York Daily News: "Waugh was effective in imposing himself on a hostile ethos -- very much of an in-your-face attitude."

The Vile Body is largely the creation of Teachout, a Missouri-born polymath who plays jazz piano, reviews records and ballet, and is gearing up to write a biography of H.L. Mencken. When he moved to New York from the Midwest three years ago, Teachout was dismayed to discover that the city was, as he puts it, "hostile to civilized friendship." There was little opportunity for people of his age and ideology to coalesce for intellectual sustenance. "Conservatives and libertarians exist in an adversary culture," he explains. "You need a community where you don't have to be arguing first causes all the time." Teachout and George Sim Johnston, 38, who has quit investment banking to be a writer full time, decided to set up a kind of salon, in the European sense, where they could meet with like-minded friends on a regular basis.

The Vile Body has no dues and no agenda, and it does more than just promote chat and nurture. Views and attitudes of 15 of its adherents are on display in a new anthology of essays called Beyond the Boom (Poseidon Press; $18.95), edited by Teachout and with a sprightly introduction by Tom Wolfe. The book is not so much a group manifesto as what Teachout calls a "core sample" of opinions by these right-of-center urban yuppies. Beyond the Boom's contributors can boast of having 14 books produced or in the works.

As journalists, they tend to preach to true believers: their names can be found on the mastheads and in the bylines of such periodicals as Commentary, National Review, the American Spectator, the Wall Street Journal, the New Criterion and NY: The City Journal, a new quarterly of urban affairs. "We're not a unified sect," insists Teachout, adding that they do have one tenet in common: "The political and intellectual legacies of our older brothers and sisters, the baby boomers of the '60s, were a flop, a failure, a disaster." He sums up those legacies as "stale '60s romanticism, wan '70s disillusion, tedious '80s whining."

The essays in Beyond the Boom vary considerably in quality. By far the liveliest is David Brooks' "Portrait of a Washington Policy Wonk," a dead- on, deadpan satire about how legislative aides and assistants to Cabinet secretaries can rise above their lowly station. Johnston, in "Break Glass in Case of Emergency," effectively skewers yuppiedom's jejune New Age spirituality. And Teachout, in "A Farewell to Politics," argues plausibly that the great ideological battles of the '90s will be fought over culture, a word he defines broadly enough to include abortion; family policy; and "sensitivity fascism" in American academia (which he describes elsewhere in the book as "a thoroughly uncongenial intellectual retirement home for tenured radicals of the '60s").

As that lofty jape suggests, Beyond the Boom's writers are not above a few slap shots and kidney punches. The anthology's contributors, for the most part, are stronger on aphorism and assertion than on analysis. They also indulge in an awful lot of navel gazing, often in a tone of self-satisfied righteousness; witness Dana Mack's account of being brave and lonely as a student at San Francisco's Lowell High School. The book's two essays on film, by Bruce Bawer and John Podhoretz, seem tendentious and repetitive.

Teachout frowns at the charge of smugness. "We would agree that we're all more or less on the side of the angels," he says. "We all took a deep breath when the Berlin Wall fell. But then we turned to other things." Among them is whether the Vile Body has any future in a city teetering on the brink of terminal decay. It's not a prospect that cheers the salon regulars. New York may be a city under enemy (read: tired old liberal) aegis. But it is also the center of a vernacular culture that makes the U.S., in Johnston's sardonic phrase, "the most amusing place to live in the history of the planet." And there is no doubt in the minds of Johnston and his friends what room offers the best view, if only once a month.