Mark Oppenheimer begins: “I had an odd reaction to reading The New York Times obituary of Willis Carto, the tediously loathsome elder statesman of the American anti-Semitic right. He died last Monday at his home in Virginia, leaving behind a putrid little trail of defunct newsletters and failed Holocaust denial magazines, but when he was at full-strength, in the 1970s and 1980s, his literature was read not only by wackadoo Hitler worshippers…”
04/26 update: This piece is Mark Oppenheimer at his most likable and most limited at the same time.
The argument for covering extremists rather than ignoring them is strong. The journalistic consensus he describes is real, and his instinct that these figures matter and connect to mainstream politics is sound. The Ron Paul and Trent Lott observations are the kind of thing that would have made the piece genuinely useful if he had developed them. He does not develop them.
The piece is a lament that he did not write a better piece. That is an unusual thing to publish, and there is something honest and self-aware about it. But it also means the essay has no center. He is arguing for journalism he did not do rather than doing it.
The adjective problem is severe here. Tediously loathsome. Putrid little trail. Wackadoo Hitler worshippers. Plain old Caucasian crazy. These are the moves of a writer signaling to his audience that he is safely disgusted before venturing anywhere near the material. It is the opposite of what made the Suzi piece work. There he suspended judgment long enough to find out what was true. Here the judgment arrives in the first sentence and never loosens its grip.
The parenthetical about Smith and Weber having Jewish women in their lives reappears from the original series. It still reads as a gotcha rather than an insight. The implication is that their antisemitism is somehow undermined or made poignant by these relationships, but he never explains why, because the explanation would require engaging with the psychology and ideology seriously rather than gesturing at irony.
The piece is most interesting as a document of his self-understanding. He knows he wants to do this kind of reporting. He knows ignoring extremists is the wrong approach. He knows Carto mattered. He just did not do the work, and he is publishing the wish that he had as if the wish were the work. That gap between aspiration and execution, between knowing what good journalism would require and producing the managed version instead, runs through his career.
Good writing creates pressure and holds it. The pressure comes from genuine conflict, between ideas, between people, between what a person believes and what the evidence shows. Oppenheimer feels the conflict but his instinct, trained by years of brokerage, is to soften it almost immediately. He introduces a community that elite readers might dismiss, builds sympathy for it, and then releases the reader into a comfortable appreciation. The arc is always toward mutual recognition. That is a pleasant experience but not a gripping one because you can feel the destination from the first paragraph.
Related to that, he rarely puts himself at risk on the page. The memoir about debate is warm and funny but the central drama, awkward smart kid finds his tribe, resolves too cleanly. The Judy Blume biography admires its subject without pressing her on the things that would make her uncomfortable. The Squirrel Hill book chooses consolation over confrontation. Brokerage requires you to keep everyone in the room, which means you cannot say the thing that would make one party walk out. But that unsayable thing is usually where the most interesting writing lives.
His sentences tend toward the adequate rather than the surprising. He is clear, well-organized, and fair. Those are virtues. But clarity and fairness do not generate the slight friction that makes a reader feel something unexpected is happening. His prose does not take chances because his whole method is risk-management. The style and the intellectual posture are continuous with each other.
David Pinsof’s Alliance Theory adds another layer. If you sense, even unconsciously, that a writer is not telling you what he thinks because his coalition will not permit it, the writing feels slightly airless. You are reading the managed version of a mind rather than the mind itself. Oppenheimer is too intelligent for his hedging to be invisible. You can feel the places where a sharper conclusion was available and he chose the softer one. That creates a faint but persistent disappointment in the reader, a sense of potential withheld, which over the length of a book becomes tedium.
The writers I find more alive are the ones who are willing to be wrong in public, whose thinking moves somewhere unexpected, who occasionally say the thing that costs them something. Oppenheimer’s whole career has been structured to avoid that kind of exposure. He is very good at what he does. What he does is not quite what great writing requires.
