The British term nanny state, first used in the 1960s and popularized in the Thatcher era, describes an intrusive (usually liberal) government deciding what’s best for its citizens and restricting the choices it disagrees with. It’s a shrewd coinage, because nanny carries with it both a draconian, forcing-medicine-down-your-throat quality and a pursed-lips kind of fussiness, along with an overtone of distancing wealth and privilege.
If any leader has epitomized the nanny state for Americans, it is Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York from 2002 to 2013. Bloomberg ran as a Republican but governed as a centrist, pro-business, technocratic Democrat. Trained as an electrical engineer, he held a somewhat unusual belief (for a politician) in the transformative power of data and placed a high emphasis on results. He therefore sized up two public-health crises—smoking-related illness and obesity rates—and assessed how much leverage he had to affect them. Starting in 2003, he and the City Council banned smoking in bars and restaurants (apart from a few cigar- and hookah-centric places) and most other indoor spaces where people congregate. An enormous amount of criticism erupted, citing personal liberty, the ancient social ritual of smoking and drinking with friends, the potential effect on business, the notion that it would put off international visitors, and more. He (and the council) stood firm, and virtually no one stopped going to bars or restaurants. A dozen years later, the smoking rate in New York had fallen by more than a third, to 13.9 percent. In public-health terms, that is a profound outcome. Most significant, many cities and states have followed suit, including those with robust tobacco cultures: Rome, Paris, even North Carolina.
Then came the overreach. In 2012, the Bloomberg administration attempted to repeat its success by announcing a ban on the sale of sugary beverages—soda, mostly—in cups larger than 16 ounces. There were loopholes (like exemptions for 7-Eleven’s Big Gulp and similar grocery-store offerings regulated by the state rather than the city), but a lot of places, including movie theaters, would have been affected, and this time the forces arrayed against the ban were more effective. (They had a better case. It’s hard to argue that even a little bit of tobacco smoking is harmless, whereas the occasional big soda truly is.) Critics pointed out that Bloomberg’s own habits—extra heavily salting his fries, say—appeared hypocritical. The “nanny state” charges became overwhelming, industry-backed groups challenged the ban in court, and a judge declared it to be outside the Board of Health’s regulatory power.
By that time, Bloomberg was no longer mayor, having been replaced by Bill de Blasio (who also supported the soda ban). It might have been largely forgotten, a hiccup in a mayoralty that was otherwise pretty successful, but when Bloomberg made a brief, unsuccessful lunge at the presidency in early 2020, “the soda ban” was, for a few weeks, back on everybody’s lips. It was an easily grasped and potent symbol of annoyingly overprotective government in a country where the per capita consumption of soda is 39 gallons per year.
Troubled by Union soldiers’ lack of marksmanship training, New Yorkers George W. Wingate and William C. Church founded the National Rifle Association in 1871 to teach young men to shoot. Wingate was a Brooklyn lawyer, and Church was a journalist who’d been the publisher of the New York Sun and, for a time, a Washington, D.C., correspondent for the New York Times. Both men had served in the Union ranks during the Civil War and believed their organization should “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis.” With funding from the state, the pair purchased a farm in Queens—land that is now the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center—and built a rifle range.
In 1907, the NRA moved its headquarters to the nation’s capital. Four years later, after a grisly murder-suicide near Gramercy Park, Tammany Hall boss “Big Tim” Sullivan proposed a bill in the New York State Senate outlawing unlicensed concealed handguns. “I believe it will save more souls than all the preachers in the city,” said Sullivan. The Sullivan Act passed with an overwhelming majority. Though the NRA was in favor of gun control at the time, the organization tried for years to repeal and replace the Sullivan law with a less restrictive one, claiming it had “the effect of arming the bad man and disarming the good one to the injury of the community.” A century later, the NRA continues to have an adversarial relationship with its birthplace. In 2018, New York attorney general Letitia James, who was the city’s public advocate at the time, described the NRA as “a terrorist organization,” and in December 2019, the NRA argued before the United States Supreme Court that New York City’s gun laws were too restrictive.
Everybody agrees on where it all began: In Alcove 1, adjacent to the City College cafeteria in the late 1930s, where anti-Stalin left-wing students gathered to take their lunch and debate politics. (The Stalinists occupied Alcove 2.) Just where it all went wrong, or whether it did at all, has been a point of intense dispute ever since.
The denizens of Alcove 1 were largely though not exclusively Jewish by religion and Trotskyist by philosophy. (That is, they supported the Bolshevik revolution in the Soviet Union but believed it had soured somewhere on the way to Stalin’s gulag.) From that point of departure, nearly all of them moved rightward to varying degrees, and many went on to occupy prestigious jobs in academia and intellectual journalism. But ultimately, the most famous product of Alcove 1 was an oppositional, reactive political ideology, or sub-ideology, often applied situationally, that formed the basis for what decades later would be called the neoconservative movement. In contrast to traditional, small-government conservatives, its adherents would approve of some massive federal interventions such as the New Deal, and, far from being isolationist, would espouse, often to the point of fanaticism, the use of military force abroad. Undergirding such decisions were a strong belief in American-style democracy and conventional morality.
Perhaps the most politically influential early neocon was Irving Kristol, who graduated from CCNY in 1940. Over the next twenty years, he abandoned Trotskyism for New Deal liberalism, and in 1965, he and fellow alcove veteran Daniel Bell founded The Public Interest, a highbrow journal of domestic policy devoted to what were at first friendly critiques of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. The founding ethos of The Public Interest was hardheaded realism and a respect for rigid, empirical inquiry. But Kristol soon wandered from these moorings; he grew annoyed, then perhaps obsessed, with the New Left and its attacks on traditional morality and the moral legitimacy of American foreign policy. Bell (still a liberal) quit the journal, and Kristol began to attract a large collection of disillusioned former liberals and leftists.
In 1973, the socialist Michael Harrington called them “neoconservatives,” a coinage that may not have perfectly described their political orientation but did perfectly predict it. By then, the movement had attracted such names as Norman Podhoretz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Nathan Glazer, and the neoconservatives at first directed their energies toward defending the old, New Deal faction of the Democratic Party against the insurgent New Left. After Hubert Humphrey—the old liberal who had been alienated from antiwar liberals by his association with President Johnson and the Vietnam War—lost the 1968 election to Richard Nixon, they founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority in 1972 and tried, unsuccessfully, to nominate the anti-communist senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in 1976.
The neocons found that their revulsion for the left on culture and foreign policy overwhelmed their residual domestic-policy liberalism, and by the 1980s, almost all of them had joined the Republican Party. And since the GOP was enjoying a political ascent, the neocons seemed to embody a major source of its appeal (a sense that Democrats had veered too far left on culture and foreign policy) and to have supplied the party with the brainpower necessary to govern. The successful end of the Cold War made neocons appear prophetic, even though in reality they had hyped up Soviet power and dismissed the possibility that the USSR might disintegrate on its own. By the second Bush administration, the movement had so thoroughly permeated Republican doctrine that it was difficult to separate it from old-fashioned conservatism. This culminated in the political and cultural pinnacle of neoconservatism: the Iraq War.
Strictly speaking, the war was not a purely neoconservative brainchild. Several of its architects—Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George W. Bush—had only loose connections to the movement, and many moderates and liberals also endorsed the war. Still, the neocons argued for regime change in Iraq more fervently than they had ever argued for anything, jingoistically cheering on the greatness and goodness of American military might and dismissing its hand-wringing skeptics. The war demonstrated that the neocons had, at minimum, massively overlearned the lessons they had drawn from the Cold War. The Republican Party’s bright young minds were now its sinister masterminds.
It took until 2016 for the price to finally come due. Donald Trump ushered into the party a new faction of “nationalists” who openly disdained the neoconservative program of crusading military intervention. Trump’s nationalists also carried more than a whiff of anti-Semitism and racism. And neocons were disproportionately represented among the conservative intellectuals who refused to support Trump (John Podhoretz, Bret Stephens, David Frum) or even left the party altogether (Max Boot, William Kristol). By the Trump era, the political standing of neoconservatism was as uncertain as it had been since the phrase was invented. Last in, first out.
Tom Wolfe always said Gay Talese was the first to figure it out. Talese may agree, but he dislikes the term. You can argue that Joseph Mitchell beat them both to it, and John Hersey, too, and Lillian Ross, and maybe Nellie Bly. No matter: The arrival of the so-called New Journalism happened when the tired conventions of feature writing were abruptly and unexpectedly blown up. Around 1962, a select few writers at the New York Herald Tribune, Esquire, and occasionally The New Yorker and Playboy and a couple of other outlets began adopting devices formerly confined to short stories and novels—vivid scene painting, emotional richness, pop-culture awareness, the unapologetic presence of the writer, lots of dialogue—and applying them to nonfiction articles. The groundbreaking piece, according to Wolfe, was Talese’s profile of Joe Louis, which ran in Esquire in June 1962; Wolfe was knocked flat by how much more vivid it was than Talese’s work at his home paper, the Times. (You couldn’t really write at the Times then, when its joylessness was not only accepted but encouraged; see also NEW YORK TIMES, THE.) Wolfe’s own breakthrough came a year later in Esquire with a feature about the car-customizing culture of Southern California. As he told it, he’d been stuck on deadline; told his editor, Byron Dobell, that he’d deliver his notes for someone else to write up; and drafted overnight a wild, stream-of-consciousness 49-page memo. The next day, Dobell told Wolfe that he was striking “Dear Byron” from the top and running the rest of it in the magazine.
Wolfe was the showiest of the writers in this clique but was hardly alone, especially as a certain one-upmanship started to kick in. Joan Didion, on the West Coast, began delivering reports from the edges of the counterculture and Hollywood that incorporated references to her own ragged mental state into her paradoxically vigorous prose. Talese’s massively reported 1966 profile “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” whose subject had refused the writer any access, became an avatar of the form. Truman Capote turned a thrill-killing murder in Kansas into the 1965 “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. In 1968, after the Trib had folded and its Sunday magazine carried on as New York, its editor, Clay Felker, continued to treat it as a showcase for the New Journalism (see also NEW YORK MAGAZINE). Nora Ephron absolutely dismembered the fussbudget culture of what she called the Food Establishment in a story for New York, “Critics in the World of the Rising Soufflé (or Is It the Rising Meringue?).” Jimmy Breslin wrote for Felker, hilariously and pungently, about blue-collar New York politics, and in 1969, he and Norman Mailer mounted a half-joking mayoral campaign of their own. Wolfe’s 1970 story about the Black Panthers’ fund-raiser at Leonard Bernstein’s apartment, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” took a blade to the era’s radicalism.
The flamboyance of the New Journalism pissed people off, and some (though not all) of its practitioners got a little too close to writing fiction. Often it wasn’t a case of wholesale fabrication but instead a “composite”—a character drawn from several people’s lives and words. Others were known to condense, enhance, or similarly mess with quoted dialogue. Nik Cohn, writing in New York in 1976, completely manufactured the central character of a piece about a disco in Brooklyn, a story so compelling it became the basis for Saturday Night Fever. You could argue that these were just lapses as a new form got on its feet or that they were worth the trade-off, that being more truthful could come from being less factual. You could also argue that, in less capable hands, these “techniques” served as an excuse to be lazy and shoddy. By the 1980s, the term “New Journalism” carried with it a stain of disrepute. Inevitably, though, the old journalism subsumed the new, imbibing its vigor while rejecting its less conscientious aspects. Most of today’s magazine writers (print and digital alike) are far more careful about their quotes. But they absolutely aspire to write vivid scenes and longer, richer stories than most newspapers can run, and the best of those stories endure because they have the sweep and power of great fiction.
1 The Essential New Journalism Reading List
From Charles Whitaker, dean of the Medill School of Journalism
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold, by Gay Talese, Esquire (1966): “While most people acknowledge that this piece would never hold up to today’s fact-checking standards, it’s one of the legendary pieces in the canon. A lovely study of an uncooperative subject.”
Hiroshima, by John Hersey, The New Yorker (1946): “Still holds up as masterful writing and reporting.”
The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, by Hunter S. Thompson, Scanlan’s Monthly (1970): “It’s Thompson at his snarkiest, poking fun at the bourgeoisie.”
Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s, by Tom Wolfe, New York (1970): “It drips with Wolfean condescension and disapproval.”
Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case!, by Garry Wills, Esquire (1968): “Not only a revealing portrait of Dr. King in the wake of his death but also an illuminating portrait of America.”
