"First Shot in the Culture Wars"

"Bloom was never a movement conservative. In electoral politics he was a moderately liberal Democrat, and more liberal still in personal and social matters. Bennett and Cheney considered themselves champions of ordinary American bourgeois life. Bloom’s disdain for it runs just below the book’s surface. He was no fan of the free market or the heedless getting and striving that it encourages. He worried that the future that awaited students after 'college would be just as enervating as their dismal and purposeless education.' And he wasn’t above invoking a brand-name cliché to drive the point home. In their 'Brooks Brothers suit,' he writes, 'they will want to get ahead and live comfortably. But this life is as empty and false as the one they left behind.' Bloom preferred Armani to Brooks Brothers."

Andrew Ferguson in The Weekly Standard marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind.