Ames on Naipaul at the Jacobin: As usual, Ames pulls no punches.
"The American right only needs “team players” — shameless, cynical hacks who can be counted on to churn out whatever rank propaganda ordered up by the Heritage Foundation. For that, you need a Rotary Club nihilist like Dinesh D’Souza, someone totally devoid of a literary ego, intellectual curiosity, or a gag reflex."
"If Naipaul wanted to pick up that check from the American right-wing, it wasn’t enough to have fought on the front lines of the ideological battle of the 1970s against the literary Marxists. He’d have to become a lobotomized, conquered version of himself, an Eldridge Cleaver. He’d have to give up everything interesting about himself.
Instead, Naipaul essentially banished himself to the whispered margins of the American right ..."
"At some point, it just couldn’t be ignored: these people were scum; mean, sleazy, boring scum. It became impossible to be near them. They — we — dropped out of the Right, and wanted nothing more to do with it all. But by ruining everything in this country — economically, culturally, intellectually, militarily — the Right essentially chased us wherever we went, poisoning everything they could get their hands on. Until finally there was nowhere to go but leftward. A hardened, mean left."
"Naipaul’s career developed at a time when Western reactionary intellectuals could still be formidable, dynamic and unpredictable; there was space carved out on the Right for reactionary talent like Naipaul. "
" ... the American right has no need of unpredictable talent like V. S. Naipaul, so they’ve driven his species into extinction as well ..."
"Naipaul always despised facile thinking. It was because Naipaul was so committed to merciless observation that he allied himself with reactionary intellectuals of the pre-Reagan, pre-Thatcher era — it was the Left that wore the rose-tinted glasses back then. What Naipaul didn’t realize was how much worse, how much more intellectually stifling America’s right-wing intelligentsia would turn out to be once in power. "
Read the whole thing, even if you disagree:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/v-s-naipaul-and-the-american-rightsidd