This was still more outrageousness, given that, even if legend has it that Jews stifle discussion, the discussion of America’s Jews and their relation to Israel had, by then, been noisy and contentious and entirely public for nearly a century, ever since the days of Louis D. Brandeis. Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, took particular umbrage, if only because, at his own magazine, he had spent more than thirty years publishing endless discussions of precisely that one point. Not to mention whole sections of World of Our Fathers! How was it possible, wondered the editor of Dissent, that Victor Navasky, a decent and humane person, could possibly have written those foolish words? And Howe concluded that, at The Nation, the defense of Gore Vidal had been written, instead, by Uriah Heep. This, of course, was the point.

Vidal was surely serious, in his manner, about the white race and its Asiatic and Jewish enemies, as revealed by his subsequent enthusiasm for Timothy McVeigh and 9/11 conspiracy theories. But his purpose in writing these things was ultimately to bring about public demonstrations of his own aristocratic status. And this he achieved. The grandest of his triumphs naturally came at the expense of the editor of The Nation, whom he reduced to obsequious servility. But the red-faced hollering by the editor of Commentary, the fist-banging by the admirers of Commentary in other publications, the earnest distinctions offered by some of us on the democratic left in one publication or another, even the letters to the editor at The Nation—these, too, represented triumphs, from a standpoint like Vidal’s. For there was not a doubt in the world, once everything had been said and done, that all the other parties in the affair, in their servility or table-thumping fury or earnest indignation, hailed from humble regions of ordinary American life, and he alone dwelled in fabulous-land, where one is indifferent to the little niceties. This sort of attitude was, to be sure, the cause of the French Revolution.

I suppose that even Vidal’s admirers, the loyalists of the white race, would concede that his later provocations proved to be less effective. Vidal’s fate in later years was to descend as if into the zones of online advertising where you are supposed to click to find the answer to the question, “He said what?” Still, it has to be acknowledged that Vidal’s Nation tirades established a vein of modern political writing, which you could follow in later years through the columns of still other Nation writers, the late Alexander Cockburn and the late Christopher Hitchens (during the period before Hitchens admirably threw off the combined Vidal-and-Cockburn influence), with their habit of puzzling the left-wing masses in one publication or another by praising the virtues of the American militia movement or Marine Le Pen or the philo-Nazi historian David Irving. This was the world of red-brown hipsterdom, which, now that Vidal, too, has passed from the scene, appears to have been eclipsed for the moment in its English-letters version. But it survives and even flourishes in the turgid continental-philosophy version of Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou, and therefore will be flourishing for years to come in the American universities.

Are Vidal’s literary essays as wonderful as everyone says? I used to admire his appreciations of early twentieth-century writers such as Dawn Powell and Isabel Bolton, together with an essay on Edmund Wilson and one or two other pieces. When I look back on those essays today, they still seem to me have a virtue, for reasons faintly related to his ridiculous political views. Vidal served in the Second World War, but the lessons and meaning of the war and of America’s wartime achievements and failures passed him by, in favor of the lessons of the Spanish American War of 1898, when people really did speak about the white race and the merits and demerits of imperialism. Vidal the political thinker was a white-race anti-imperialist of 1898 (and since a good deal of classic Marxist theory comes from the same era, there will always be people who continue to mistake him for some kind of progressive).