intellectuals, James Atlas observed that young right-wingers "are hip to a pop culture many liberals think of as something wholly their own." Describing a party celebrating the Republican Congressional victory of 1992, Atlas noted that the strains of Smashing Pumpkins and 10,000 Maniacs could be heard amid the drinking and laughing while young speech writers and journalists compared "Newt sightings." No wonder Irving Kristol, the elderly godfather of neo-conservatism, worries not only about "the hedonism of our popular culture" but also the related "libertarianism of so many of even our politically conservative young people." It is not just twenty-something video-addicts we have to watch out for. Movies and pop music have been around long enough to corrupt everybody in North America, except perhaps a few Amish families squirrelled away in Southern Ontario and Pennsylvania. Bill Bennett, before his career as a virtuecrat, grew up loving rock music and once almost dated Janis Joplin. Even Pat Buchanan, surely our loudest critic of "filth" in the mass media, used to slick up his hair as a teenager in imitation of Elvis. We all have our guilty pleasures, but conservatives, because of their ideological hostility to pop culture, must feel guilty about nearly all of them. The hypocrisies and contradictions created by the right's assault on popular culture can best be seen in the pages of the New Criterion , a small but highly influential New York cultural magazine. Started in 1982 by Hilton Kramer and the late Samuel Lipman, the New Criterion