A Few Tasteless Words about Irving Howe

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The slush about Irving Howe is ankle-deep. Tributes have run in The New York Times (Michael Weinstein, the salesman of "managed competition"; also Leon Wieseltier), The New Republic, Newsday, The New Yorker and The Nation itself, by Ted Solotaroff ("He leaves the vivid air around him, in Stephen Spender's words, signed with his honor"). This is not to mention a column on Howe in The Washington Post by E.J. Dionne, surely the most overrated political commentator of the late twentieth century, except for Sid Blumenthal, Joe Klein, Michael Kramer, Mark Shields and Charles Krauthammer, who, be it noted, is against intervention in Bosnia.

Howe's prime function, politically …