Our intelligentsia was not always so disheartening a subject. Turn the clock back to Australia 40 years ago, and this intelligentsia enjoyed much better health. Three serious, reasonably highbrow, yet generalist current affairs periodicals existed: Quadrant (affiliated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and with England's now-defunct Encounter); Nation (nothing to do with its American namesake); and Twentieth Century (Jesuit-controlled, but free from the drivel soon ubiquitous among Jesuit spokesmen worldwide). Somewhat below this level, yet recognizably literate and conscientious, were News Weekly (Cold War Catholic with a Chesterbellocian streak), The Bulletin (local equivalent of Time or France's L'Express), and the short-lived Australian International News Review (which the John Birch Society first favored and then dropped).

A dozen specialist, perfectly competent publications continued alongside these. Australia's newspapers exhibited intelligence unimaginable now. Sunday tabloids would be replete with writers like A. D. Hope, one of Australia's three or four best poets, discussing Milton or Wordsworth. Even the cryptic crosswords demanded – and would continue, till the early 1970s, to demand – impressive cultural literacy, as all of us who had crossword-addicted mothers will recollect. ("Rob?" "Yep?" "17th-century Italian composer, second letter 'A'." "Would 'Carissimi' fit?" "Uh-huh.")

Perhaps the best reason for mentioning such historical trivia is that none of it could have occurred if conventional theories of educational excellence through taxpayer-funded "diversity" were accurate. Australia in 1966 was pre-mass-tourism. Its White Australia Policy, enfeebled that year de jure, flourished de facto. Probably one-fifth, quite possibly one-fourth, of Australians openly considered Britain "home". Adelaide, then the most Anglophile city of an Anglophile nation, resembled some English cathedral town strangely planted in a blast-furnace climate. The brave new universities which veteran Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies had been persuaded, during the early 1960s, to establish still amounted to little more than a few makeshift lecture halls. Direct governmental arts funding lay almost entirely in an unseen, unwanted future.

Above all, Australia still reposed (or, if we are to believe subsequent New Class propaganda, groaned) under the most sexually repressive censorship of any Western state except De Valera's Ireland and Maurice Duplessis' Québec. Very rarely a newsagent would risk selling a Playboy issue clad in brown paper; but today's whole Cleo-Cosmo-Maxim junk-magazine ethos - "Mischa [Barton]: 'I like a bit of girl-on-girl pashing'," yelled this week's newsstands - was inconceivable. Lenny Bruce's 1962 Sydney performances had dismally flopped. We were forbidden to read Tropic of Cancer, never mind Lolita. Oh, the agony . . . yet somehow most of us we survived these barriers to the fulfillment of our collective id.

Jump forward to Australia in 1990 and the intellectual picture is still reasonably attractive, for all the intervening malignities of victim politics and broiler-house colleges. The Berlin Wall's collapse had temporarily abashed Stalinism's sycophants. While most magazines in the above list had long since died, others lived on: either entirely new periodicals or, more often, established periodicals given new strength. We Australian authors grumbled, as authors anywhere will. Yet by today's criteria, 1990 marked heaven for us. If Quadrant rejected a submission, we could try it at – and, if successful, expect tolerable payment from – The Independent Monthly, The Adelaide Review, The Sydney Review, IPA [Institute of Public Affairs] Review, Education Monitor, 24 Hours, or Australia and World Affairs. These publications, not one of which currently survives in its 1990 form (several have folded), imposed basic standards of authorial etiquette back then. Plagiarism, four-letter words, advertorials, and mere ad hominem invective were simply unacceptable. Had any Cassandra suggested that this worthwhile intellectual activity would have turned by 2006 into a smoking ruin, we would have laughed in her face and told her to join the Club of Rome's alarmists.

So, in the dying words of Steve McQueen's character in Bullitt: "What the hell happened?"

To summarize outrageously, neocons happened. (Relentlessly dumbed-down neocons at that: we are not talking imitation Gertrude Himmelfarbs.) More specifically: just as Stalinists and Trotskyists could be relied on in the Cold War to infiltrate a labor union too somnolent or simply too amiable to maintain any defenses against them, so Australian neocons have succeeded precisely where alternative intellectual establishments were too somnolent, too amiable, or too compromised by their own unreconstructed totalitarianism to offer serious resistance in any battle of ideas. These intellectual establishments have tended to illustrate two attitudes: paganism and pragmatism.

As to Australian paganism, one wonders if any American can really appreciate how deep it runs. Accustomed as he is, at home, to what might be called a low-level Spanish Civil War (where the Foxmans and Dershowitzes at least pay Christianity the compliment of hating it rather than despising it), he usually finds it hard to envisage a land like Australia, where most people are at least as profoundly indifferent to Christianity as to Shinto. Prime Minister John Howard, for all his reverence towards the Bush Administration, would no more imitate Bush's public praise of Christ than he would glorify Calvin. And if this queasiness over invoking religion afflicts Howard, who by his colleagues' standards is positively heart-on-sleeve about his Christian belief (he is a mainline Protestant), imagine how much more absurd such belief seems to compatriots on his Left, whether or not they support America's Iraq intervention.

It is symptomatic that even educated Australians can usually cherish only one American public intellectual at a time. Once it was John Dewey. Later the golden boy was Edmund Wilson, occasionally relieved by Lionel Trilling. Today, surprise surprise, it is Christopher Hitchens (except on the hard Left, where it is Chomsky). Christophobia is, in other words, the crucial résumé item. You could fire water-cannon into any Australian university department and be sure of not even sprinkling a student who had been taught of Russell Kirk's, Allen Tate's, or Richard Weaver's existence. Hey, Kirk, Tate, and Weaver were not only Christians, they were Christian elitists: how could an undergraduate possibly be allowed to study them?

As regards antipodean pragmatism: this too is hard for Americans to appreciate. TAC readers are familiar with the overall genealogies by which numerous American neocons can trace their intellectual descent from Trotskyism; but few if any Australian neocons have a similar ideological background. For every ex-Trot or ex-Maoist now cheering on Bush in Iraq, there are half a dozen pundits whose intellectual lineage is of the most exiguous sort. When a man can be appointed Quadrant's editor – as was incumbent editor P. P. McGuinness in 1998 – on the strength of a career whose apex consisted of laboring for the Moscow Narodny Bank during the Brezhnev epoch, one's own idiocy in opposing Communism becomes manifest.

Maybe the best-known among Australian neocons is Andrew Bolt, of Melbourne's tabloid Herald Sun. Bolt began as a staffer for retired senator Bob Collins, last heard of in connection with 2004 accusations of repeated sex crimes. There is no evidence that these accusations are connected with Bolt's shrill censure of his hate-objects (from Mel Gibson down) as "homophobic". When not thus occupied, Bolt – once a talented thinker – basks in applause from that well-known cradle of Christian civilization, Turkish Cyprus. The preface to Bolt's 2005 book, Still Not Sorry, risks almost universal Bronx-cheers by extolling Rupert Murdoch's steadfast championship of free speech. Contemplating such gaffes makes newly relevant a prayer by Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga: "Let us always hope that our adversaries are stupider than we are."

If Bolt is the neocon your nearest knitting circle would invite to tea, Sydney's inexpressible chickenhawk blogger Tim Blair is the neocon your mother warned you about; he acquired his intellectual credentials by editing the pornographic magazine Melbourne Truth. Blair is determined to cram into his prose more obscenities than a gangsta in rut. Presumably he craves the linguistic equivalent of Madeleine Albright's attitude to weaponry: "What's the point of all these four-letter words if we can't use them?" Rather than engage with Robert Fisk's books regarding Lebanon and other Middle East countries, Blair, whose own experience of Middle Eastern physical peril stops with the local shish-kebab diner, described Fisk on October 14, 2002 as "the f--king dumbest dumb f--k of them all."

Blair combines his sewer mouth with paranoid defensiveness about the pubescents who supply most of his blog's comments, hailing them on March 14, 2005 as "intelligent and discerning." Anyone who trawls through these pubescents' threads – eager to learn what such "intelligent and discerning" savants might be like – encounters more smutty allusions than any half-dozen South Park episodes will disgorge. If these scribes are among Blair's "intelligent and discerning" readers, heaven preserve us from the stupid and undiscriminating ones. The possibility exists that Blair cannot be bothered to read his own blog. If true, this would be creditable to his literary taste; but it seems decidedly self-defeating, not least when so much of his blog's content parasitically relies on neocon sources in America.

Among the few intellectual vices of which Blair stands guiltless is that of coddling storm-troopers. Quadrant's McGuinness can no longer claim even this modest innocence, happy though he has been to bawl out others for insufficient background checking. The March 2005 Quadrant included an article on Solzhenitsyn, harmless in itself, by one Michael Brander. What McGuinness, almost uniquely among Australians in positions of media power, never realized was that Brander is a convicted, unrepentant neo-Nazi, who during the 1990s acquired national prominence for assaulting Adelaide's Asian element with – wait for it – a flagpole. (Brander's purported justification for doing so was that Asians comprised "Hepatitis B carriers", "gooks", and "prostitutes"). Member of Parliament Michael Danby keelhauled McGuinness in the House of Representatives on March 13, 2005: "What kind of a magazine or magazine editor publishes an article by someone without checking his background or sources – something, to quote Mr. McGuinness, which only takes one minute on Google? . . . I ask Mr. McGuinness: what should happen to people in glass houses who throw stones?"

McGuinness is fortunate in his Australian residence. At an American publication, such folly would have rendered him unemployable.

Yet it would be unfair to call McGuinness's editorship uniquely dire. Hardly had IPA Review recovered from a nationally famous plagiarism case, than it suffered further humiliation from a front-page exposé in Melbourne's Sunday Age broadsheet (August 10, 2003), which revealed federal government kickbacks the IPA had obtained for its "objective" NGO-related research. The Adelaide Review has turned into a yuppie restaurant-lifestyle guide. As for News Weekly, it has devised a recent, original contribution to the trahison des clercs. Through processes chronicled in 2005 by Greg Roberts, a reporter for The Australian, News Weekly has consigned editorial control to the Lyndon LaRouche brigade, with purges of contributors publicly hostile to this brigade. How this strategy can be reconciled with News Weekly's previous role as a predominantly Catholic publication – since the LaRouchies are forever condemning Belloc and Chesterton as "pro-fascist" – is obscure.

To look for intelligent, genuinely independent commentary from such compromised organs is, predictably, to ask for the moon. Take the whole brouhaha (amply covered in the U.S.) concerning Professor Andrew Fraser of Sydney's Macquarie University, who dared to question the national multiculti consensus. This cause célèbre has attracted almost no discussion in Australian print media, with two courageous exceptions: The Australian's education supplement, and remarks by Sydney Morning Herald columnist Michael Duffy. Even historian Keith Windschuttle, who has himself experienced the sharp end of rent-a-mob umbrage, felt compelled to denounce Fraser by rehashing all the "race does not exist" cant he had procured en bloc from Franz Boas, Ashley Montagu, and suchlike Marxian-egalitarian liars. One really hoped Windschuttle, when attacking Fraser, would avoid such commissar-speak as "deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history" (The Australian, September 29, 2005). One hoped in vain.

Are promising signs perceptible amid the gloom? A few. Annals Australasia, hitherto concerned exclusively with Catholic teaching, has during recent years broadened its approach to include la culture générale, thereby taking up the intellectual slack which Quadrant, especially, has left. Quadrant itself does not actively prohibit all autonomous thought; it merely rations it out these days with Soviet-type stinginess. When The Australian's features editor Tom Switzer can still print serious analyses of Iraq by Scott McConnell, Leon Hadar, and other names familiar to TAC audiences, all is not lost. Indeed, when erstwhile National Interest editor Owen Harries can deliver to Melbourne's Australian-American Association a coolly piercing speech entitled "The Short Unhappy Life of the Bush Doctrine" (July 5, 2005), cautious optimism might be in order. Harries said:

Doctrines deal in broad categories and general principles, not in particular circumstances and differences – and circumstances are usually vital in international politics. Doctrines are strong on connections but weak on distinctions, bold in assertion but weak on qualification. They tend to lump together what both precision and prudence dictate should be treated separately. . . . When a doctrine is couched in moralistic terms, as tends to be the case, the criteria of "loyalty" and "betrayal" tend to replace those of wisdom and prudence, success or failure.

Then again, temporarily fortified by such sober commonsense, one returns to Quadrant and examines its March 2006 issue. Whereupon the first words to leap from the page are a supercilious comment from former Reader's Digest editor Frank Devine. Addicted to the royal plural, and effortfully explaining why Australia must forever relish the prospect of more and better beach-side jihad, Devine intones:

We are embarrassed by white supremacist aspects of our past . . . it's a healthy sign that we are discomfited by the misjudgments and excesses of our forebears and that to most of us, a White Australia Policy now seems as bizarre as cigarette smoking.

Gentle reader, in that one quotation you have seen the future of Australia's intelligentsia – and its name is Marie Antoinette. To adopt the famous establishmentarian threat hurled at troublesome Hollywood starlets: would you really want to eat lunch in this town again?

R. J. Stove lives in Melbourne.

© The American Conservative, 2006