A former editor at the New York Times Book Review who read my remonstrance here about its war-hawkish bent referred me to something I’d missed: In July, Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus took to the literary section of The New Republic to pen his second elegy to American conservatism in those pages. His meditation on the allure and dangers for writers of false promises of politico-moral clarity could have been an elegy for his own stewardship at the Times. And maybe it was.

Reminding us that the anti-Communist crusader Whittaker Chambers eventually escaped the "haunted air" of ideological crusading in his later years, Tanenhaus decides that were Chambers alive today he would dismiss the Bush Administration’s zeal to rid the world of Evil: “Not every good fight is a millennial fight. George W. Bush's worldview is precisely the one that Whittaker Chambers outgrew. It is a punishing irony, and one can imagine all too easily how Chambers himself would have greeted it: with the sly half-smile of a melancholy man who knows better.”

I think that Tanenhaus is signaling that he knows better now, too. It is too late for him to say that he knew better all along.

His earlier elegy for conservatism in The New Republic came in a twilight portrait of William F. Buckley, Jr., and it put me in mind of a younger conservative -- Scott McConnell of The American Conservative magazine -- who “knew better” what had happened to American conservatism years before Tanenhaus and Buckley acknowledged it. Regrets like theirs might have mattered in 2004 had they and other conservatives joined McConnell to oppose George W. Bush's re-election.

Blaming leftists and liberals for what has befallen the American republic certainly has been a preoccupation of Tanenhaus’ Book Review. But while it may gratify recovering war-hawks desperate to displace their responsibility (and guilt), it has become more than a little unseemly. Since 1948 (1980, if you insist) even the worst dangers of the insidious hate-America leftists and liberal fellow-travelers and apologists who leap out of the Book Review's pages have been laughable compared to other, larger dangers.

To see those real dangers probably requires leaving the left aside, clearing one’s mind and throat, and breaking deep, pervasive taboos on criticizing our ongoing brutalization by a military-mercenary-national-security complex and by the relentless, intrusive, and too-often fraudulent corporate marketing on which so many people’s increasingly stressed and coarsened livelihoods depend.

It’s a lot more fun to blame Columbia liberals for showcasing Ahmadinejad as ineptly as they did than it is to show that American national-security strategists and savants nurtured, funded, armed, elevated, and stimulated the Iranian mullahtocracy from 1953 through the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal of 1985 and beyond. Someone suggested recently that Ahmadinejad be arrested at Columbia for his crimes against humanity; why not also take that occasion to haul in such boosters of the Iranian mullahtocracy as Elliott Abrams and Oliver North?

Similarly, it’s more fun to blame silly professors in California for cancelling a speaking invitation to Lawrence Summers than it is to expose the cheap fiction that as president of Harvard he was a brave, brilliant educator martyred on the altar of political correctness. It’s easier to accuse 1960s leftists of degrading civil society than it is to show how the counterculture became an over-the-counter culture driving Americans into mazes of debt, lethal stampedes at store openings, road rage, cage fighting, violence at sporting events, school shootings, a groping pornification of private lives in public spaces, pandemic mistrust, and compensatory addictions, from gambling to Fox News.

Tanenhaus and his star reviewers still write as if the left brought on these calamities. Or they ignore the calamities entirely: Al Gore’s The Assault on Reason wasn’t reviewed. Nor was the Summers critic and former Harvard College Dean Harry Lewis’ Excellence Without a Soul. Instead we’ve had Brookhiser ruling that Hendrik Hertzberg’s time has passed, Klein coronating Beinart’s senior essay, The Good Fight, and Henry Kissinger coronating himself in his review of a biography of Dean Acheson.

One of my “favorites”, as I explained here, was a David Brooks column – in the guise of a Times book review -- lampooning a liberal academic for arguing that since Republican candidates hawk irrational fears and resentments, Dems shouldn’t scruple to beat them at it by calling them on it.

Another was the often-fatuous Paul Berman’s convoluted put-down of the former war hawk neocon Francis Fukuyama (and of The Nation magazine, for some reason), all in Berman’s faux-French, faux-simple style, the intellectual’s equivalent of “What part of that sentence don’t you understand?”

A third was Beinart’s Beltway finessing of Paul Krugman’s collection of columns, The Great Unraveling, in May, 2003. Even granting that Bush was riding high then, Beinart shouldn’t have presumed that “most Americans do not consider the Bush administration corrupt, and Paul Krugman cannot convincingly prove it is. He should stick to what he does so well: simply proving, on issue after issue, that the Bush administration is wrong.” Beinart himself believed “officially” that Bush is often wrong, of course; after all, he was editor of The New Republic, which had gone to the mat for Gore. But what kind of unearned authority prompts a young writer to pat a wiser elder condescendingly on the head for proving Bush wrong and then to caution, “Now, now Paul; let’s not go overboard….” ?

Reviewing books isn't easy. The journalist Nicholas Von Hoffman once told me he stopped doing it because “it’s not worth $250 to make an enemy for life.” Editing a book-review section is even harder: You make several enemies a week, not least because, even exercising the best judgment, you can’t review every deserving book.

You also can’t publish every deserving reviewer, but why, then, recycle so few reviewers so often? I’ll grant an editor leeway to prefer reviewers he finds congenial, if they also have expertise and integrity. I'll give him extra credit for publishing reviewers whose sensibilities differ from his: Tanenhaus did let Michael Kinsley eviscerate Brooks’ On Paradise Drive, and maybe it was good of him to publish Frank Foer’s hand-wringing dismissal of John Dean’s bashing of the Bush presidency.

Still, Tanenhaus' war-hawk politics has emerged even from behind the positive reviews he has run of liberal Times writers’ own books and the occasional “liberal” – truth-telling -- review of an Iraq book by a Times staffer such as Dexter Filkins.

He has been way too kind to Beinart, who keeps baying that Michael Moore and Markos Moulitsas are more dangerous than Bush and his minions. And he has been far too kind to Brooks, who, fresh from heralding the end of ideology and urging a new civility, demonstrated his own post-ideological civility by remarking Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont’s “vicious,” “Sunni-Shiite style of politics,” whose “flamers… tell themselves their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious, too.”

Tanenhaus has indulged too many such anthropologically perfect reenactments of the Salem witch-hunts, which enlisted the prominent opinion-makers of their day in finding scapegoats – rather like Brooks’ and Beinart’s dread netroots crazies -- for a community's unexamined sins and fears. (Brooks actually called Lamont “the scion of the Daily Kos net roots,” which, I’ve shown, was a substantial misreporting of Lamont’s real roots and supporters.)

The problem here may be that Brooks and Beinart are the last and youngest writers to have come to prominence wholly in print. They must have felt prematurely old for awhile in the internet crossfire of instant, interactive responses, links, and essays by bloggers who are wiser and more expert than op-ed oracles and have influential readerships to prove it.

Tanenhaus hasn’t only indulged ink-stained witch-hunters; he’s upheld the taboos against examining the real dangers in configurations of capital, employment, consumption, and security that are eviscerating social trust and civic republican virtue. Like the young Buckley of God and Man at Yale and the early Chambers of Witness, his book reviewers often dismiss or lampoon such challenges. The more obvious and exhausted this dodging of reality has become, the more Sam's Book Club members have kept doing it.

Now, though, Tanenhaus seems to be licking some wounds. Deciding that the Bushies have breathed too much of the haunted air of ideological and salvific certitude, he turns aside assurances by Bush apologists that the president, like Prince Hal on his way to becoming King Henry, is “breaking through the foul and ugly mists of vapours that did seem to strangle him.'' But the Prince Hal excuse has been offered explicitly by John Podhoretz, who was reviewed so sympathetically, and by the Cold War historian and shameless Bush courtier John Lewis Gaddis, who has had a splendid run in Tanenhaus’ pages.

Tanenhaus couldn’t have written his biographies of Chambers and Buckley without inhaling some haunted air himself. All honor to him for keeping his scholarly, writerly distance from the worst of it, but anyone who gives as much space as he has in the Times to filletings of a “hate-America left” has been sniffing the old fumes.

He couldn’t resist some gratuitous left-bashing of his own in The New Republic: Quoting George Orwell’s observation that English intellectuals’ attraction to Stalinism “betrayed ‘a secret wish ... [to] usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip,” he adds that

“It is no less true today. The intellectual left, most conspicuously in its Ivy League, Manhattan, and Hollywood variants, still clings to its dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the stinging cord."

In The Age of Suspicion, James Wechsler described American Stalinist dreamers of his own youth in the 1930s vividly enough to remind me how uncannily today’s neocons do resemble them. But the left has no Stalin now, thanks partly to Chambers. Dreams of brutal domination aren't remotely as common on the left as they seem to those who’ve been breathing the haunted air in Sam’s Club. Yet his gesture toward balance ("the educated right...") seems only a fig leaf for a continuing lust to catch the intellectual left dreaming of a Stalinist whip.

The real danger of our time is that American literary and political conservatism can't reconcile its keening for a sacred, ordered liberty with its obeisance to every whim of capital. It tries to escape that contradiction by exernalizing it,  calling us to wars abroad and against subversives at home, or, failing that, to a Grand Inquisitor's sacramental and sometimes consoling acceptance of whatever the national-security and corporate-consumer juggernauts are insinuating into our lives. Say what you will about the follies of the left (and I've said plenty and have the body scars to show for it), only someone living in bad faith or in deep denial about the present's real dangers would give the Times Book Review's credibility and cachet to so many who blame a hate-America left for the approaching disaster.