When I saw the cover story on right-wing chic among the young in The New York Times Magazine of February 12, I was reminded of Philip Larkin’s famous lament about having been “just too late” to have caught the beginning of “sexual intercourse” in 1963:
Cool conservatives began
In nineteen ninety-three
(Which was rather late for me)
Between the Hillary health-care plan
And the Newt-led G.O.P.
James Atlas, the author of the piece and coiner of the term “counter-counterculture,” actually interviewed me for it, but, unlike our dashing managing editor, I was not young or beautiful enough to have made the final cut. He did not even ask me if I was a fan of Smashing Pumpkins or 10,000 Maniacs (it would have done no good to lie, I suppose), and my ostentatious smoking of unfiltered Camels turns out to have been pretty routine behavior on the right these days. Moreover, he could probably tell at a glance that, even in a picture gallery where Bill Kristol is made to look like Mussolini and Richard Brookhiser like Savonarola, my own forbidding exterior would have brought into question the idea of even the fleetingly charming fascist.
For the overexposure of Joseph Pluchino’s photographs, which washes out the features not only of Kristol and Brookhiser but of all his subjects, is not to discredit them, I think, but to make them look chic to New Yorkers, who may never have seen a conservative before. Like biker
