One man's platoons.(Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life)(Book Review)

Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life, by Michael Medved (Crown Forum, 448 pp., $26.95)

IF you want to understand how thoroughly the American elite moved from the right to the left in the 20th century, consider this: The most talked-about conversions are those that went the other way. Whittaker Chambers, Ronald Reagan, the neoconservatives, and the like are remembered not because their stories are so representative of the times, but because they are so unusual.

There is a further irony in these stories, and it is exemplified by the journey of the film critic and social commentator Michael Medved. After a small measure of success as a politically neutral writer in his twenties and thirties, Medved became prominent in the late 1980s for saying something everybody already knew: that the Hollywood films of his time were overwhelmingly left-wing, irreligious, immoral, and disturbed. Predictably, the Left denounced him as "an angry evangelist," "the magistrate of morals," and "a humorless, authoritarian mind," whose bestselling book Hollywood vs. America (1992) was "chilling." Just as predictably, the Right embraced him warmly.

In short, Medved was seen as a turncoat by one side, and as a welcome convert by the other. This characterization of his "right turn," however, is not quite accurate. Like Ronald Reagan, who always said that he didn't leave the Democratic party but rather the party left him, Medved didn't leave liberalism--liberalism left him.

Medved makes that clear in his new memoir, Right Turns, while continuing to embrace the conservative label. During the early 1970s, Medved notes, he associated the term liberal with "positive values like compassion, generosity, enlightenment, and integrity." The American Left, however, though still called liberal, had moved away from those notions, and they were coming to be more commonly associated with the Right. As a result, liberalism became exceedingly perverse and dangerous.

Medved was at the center of these changes, at Yale in mid-1960s, in Berkeley during the 1970s (where he worked for the radical-Left Democratic congressman Ron Dellums), and at the Public Broadcasting System in the 1980s on the movie-review program Sneak Previews. What he learned from all of this was that America's powerful liberal elite was increasingly diverging from both the American people of the time and the nation's historic values. Medved notes, for example, that young Americans in the 1960s were actually very different from the radically engaged hippies of the press's favored stereotype. He points out "the other voices among American youth--pro-military, conventionally patriotic, and resentful of all the countercultural propaganda. Nixon, in fact, won a majority among voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, 52 percent to McGovern's 46 percent."

Countering the received image of his Baby Boom generation, Medved openly celebrates the joys of bourgeois life, explaining that his extensive hitchhiking as a youngster paradoxically revealed to him the great decency of Middle America: "I met a stunning assemblage of kind and vital people. [The experience] protected me from the contemptuous and dismissive attitude of so many coastal elitists to what is famously known as 'flyover country.'" What makes Middle Americans so much more appealing to him than the liberal elite is their concern for individual moral choices--as opposed to mere words, which are notoriously easy to bestow. He says "one of the most depressing, dysfunctional aspects of contemporary culture" is "the focus on faraway problems over which we have no control rather than achievable aims in our immediate surroundings."