ARTLESS DODGER. From the Know-Nothings through the Birchers through our current, degenerate crop of neos and nutjobs, one of the many signs whereby ye shall know American Conservatives is their reflexive hatred of the arts and the people who make them. As we have seen, whereas in olden times wingnuts were content to merely blacklist artists, in our day they prefer to manage them, at least in their imaginary universe, presenting themselves as shadow moguls and imperiously demanding that more conservatively-correct entertainments be produced for their pleasure tout suite.

These are for the most part the harmless, Ozymandian fantasies of folks who have much but want everything -- who already run America, and yearn also to rule its dreams. Every once in a while, though, a winger's attempt at aesthetics turns out to be more instructive than usual.

At OpinionJournal, Daniel Henninger spends a whole column in astonishment that some prominent New York City artists recall the 1970s as a Golden Age. For conservatives, of course, the celebration of anything from the pre-Reagan age is blasphemy, but the New York of that time is the stuff of Fred Siegel nightmares. Tourists were killed! Rents were cheap! There were no Home Depots or K-Marts! How could anyone like it?

Of course, the speakers are artists talking about art, and it is easy for any sentient person to understand why they liked the 70s. Speaking as one was vas dere, Charlie, well, where to begin: CBGB, Harrah's, Rollerina, Scorsese, hiphop, Twyla Tharp, concerts in the Park, the Kitchen, Squat Theatre, the Performing Garage, the Times Square Show...

None of these exemplars of the excitement of that period of New York life is mentioned in Henninger's article -- nor does he attempt to make any comparison of them to equivalents from the current era, probably because that would be highly unflattering to his Giulianified Valhalla. Even Henninger must realize that the Ramones, Paul Auster, and Eric Bogosian make the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Candace Bushnell, and Fischerspooner look like utter shit.

Seeing no winning artistic argument for the no-grafitti team, Henninger turns the whole thing into class war, Republican-style -- that is, instead of rich vs. poor, it's elites versus "average Joes." After a discussion of how bad the subways were in the 70s -- comical reading for someone whose current morning L transit is reminsicent of 50s phone-booth-stuffing, though the cars are gleamingly free of spraypaint -- Henninger asks, "But could it be that New York's great weakness... is that its leadership elites are fatally enthralled by a reputation for creative fecundity that has been conjured and kept afloat by the city's artists and writers?" While we puzzle over this vision of a City Government dazzled by the lively arts, Henninger goes further:

Many of the city's most creative people in the 1970s (as now) were high IQ boys and girls from Smalltown who fled to the Apple and had the smarts to survive and thrive in a city beset with drugs, welfare dependency and housing stock distorted by World War II rent controls. Hell has always seized over-developed imaginations. But what attractions hath hell for average Joes who can't cop a "life" in SoHo or Williamsburg? Then as now, they just took hell's hits in the neck, or left. In economic terms, much of creative Manhattan simply "free-rides" on the backs of the workers whose tax payments constrain the bankruptcy sheriff.

One might mischievously ask: is he really saying that "average Joes" are less resourceful than us arty-farties? But I guess we have the unfair advantage of "free-rides." Tell me -- what are those? Where do artists get them? I and a whole list of friends would love to know.

Henninger's "then as now" formulation is also ridiculous. In the 70s space was cheap (yes, despite rent stabilization! How'd that happen?); rehearsal spaces and performance venues were affordable enough to support a lively scene. Today it takes a ton of money to keep a band, dance troupe, or theatre company rehearsed, let alone to open even a small "alternative" space; admission prices reflect this, and limit the audiences for new works.

That Henninger can't get why Fran Lebowitz and Caleb Carr would appreciate the New York of Annie Hall and Dictators Go Girl Crazy! is unsurprising, but I do give him additional gall points for hinting darkly that their appreciation is a bad sign for the future of the City: "Perhaps we should regard the famous Times' commentators yearning for the 1970s as canaries in the gold-plated mine shaft," he writes, and mutters about "endpoints" to great cities and the only hope for New York being for "the city's best and brightest" to "use some of their 'creative' brainpower to blow the whistle on the city's irredeemably corrupt and destructive Democratic politics." (Why the quotes around "creative"? Oh, I forgot -- only markets are creative!)

That art so utterly confuses such as Henninger is just one more reason to love it -- but let us remember that this is just one of its secondary benefits, lest we fall into the same aesthetic muddle as he.