SUNDAY, APRIL 10 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B5
soil. But I’ve stopped counting how many
times they just “poop out.” I expect it. I hate
them for it. Why can’t they just do this one
thing for me?
My friends and family are pregnant, having
babies, getting pregnant again, talking non-
stop about their kids, their child care, their
eating patterns, the ups and downs of their
lives. I think, Please, please just grow some
fruits. When I wake up tomorrow, I want to see
that you’re doubled in size. B ut I know I won’t,
because things don’t thrive with me.
I look in the mirror, and I am growing older.
I’m looking rather droopy, pallid and spent
myself. I’ve nothing to show for my e fforts after
more than four years of trying. I have no advice
to give, no joyous commentary to make about
childbearing or child rearing — and none of my
friends need it. They o nly want to know when I
think they should sow their fava beans.
Whenever you want, within reason, I tell
them. Your choice is not really a choice when
you’re gardening. It will probably work out for
you; it’ll probably sprout, even if it’s a b it small
or leggy. If it really doesn’t work out, just try
again next season. Honestly, I’d try not to think
about it too much.which follicle was “dominant,” or likely to
release an egg. The nurse practitioner then
told me nothing had changed between the first
and second visits: The follicles had just “kind
of pooped out.”
That was that for the cycle. No amount of
sperm will m ake a bit of difference if there's n o
egg to fertilize. I just had to wait.
Here are things that I believe: Everyone is
worthy of companionship, of being loved, of
loving others, of caring and being cared for. No
one is obligated to reproduce, to create a
family or to otherwise arrange themselves in
relationships that resemble one. No one is
made more relevant or more meaningful in
this world just because they had a baby.
But it’s a more difficult philosophical exer-
cise to identify why, then, it’s so bothersome to
not be able to do these things if we so choose.
Why don’t things thrive with me? I don’t think
it’s the lack of choice itself that wreaks havoc
with a person’s psyche in the fog of infertility. I
think it’s something else. I think it’s a conflu-
ence of factors social, cultural, psychological,
gendered and biological. I think it must be
different for everyone.
I eventually became upset and angry at my
garden. I tried to stop caring, but I can’t not
care. I always get very excited when I see those
little monocots and dicots poking out of thethe egg retrieval?
You can take a class or read a book on
reproduction, but I find that with every such
action to increase your odds of getting preg-
nant, there’s a precipitous decline in the ben-
efits of that knowledge. Knowing more might
make you want to try harder, but trying harder
seems to have, at best, a prayerful relationship
with the probability of having a b aby. You can’t
educate yourself out of the problem.
That bothers me. It bothers me in exactly
the same way that taking another gardening
class or reading about thrips on the Master
Gardener website does. Maybe you will be
empowered by tweaking the ratio of nitrogen
to phosphorous or by introducing lady bugs to
eat the aphids, but this is a level of commit-
ment most didn’t sign up for. It should come
naturally, and if it doesn’t, well, maybe you
need to take up some other pastime.
I want to just plant the seed and let it do its
thing. I want to just have well-timed sex, see a
double line and move on. Soil, sun, water.
Anguish is in the details. I went through a
few fertility cycles in which I t ook a medication
and then had an ultrasound to check the
growth of follicles, which is an indicator of
whether and when you’re going to ovulate.
Once, I had to return for a second ultrasound
in the same month, because it was unclearC
ontinetti seems less interested in the
numbers of politics than in its ideas,
and the tension between them is the
driving force of “The Right.” If Kazin’s Demo-
cratic Party is trapped between the rhetoric of
equality and the practicality of centrism, Con-
tinetti’s conservative movement is similarly
caught in an “endless competition” between
populism and elitism, a battle between claims
for liberty, however awkwardly defined, and a
commitment to institutions, however easily
jettisoned.
Over the past century, the conservative es-
tablishment coalesced against what it per-
ceived as existential threats: the New Deal at
home and communism abroad. Though con-
servatives proved unable to dislodge the do-
mestic pillars of the FDR era, anticommu-
nism came to serve as a sort of Mos Eisley can-
tina for the right, bringing together libertari-
ans, cultural traditionalists and cold warriors
who aligned themselves with the mid-century
Republican Party. “As fears of Communist
subversion grew,” Continetti writes, “ the
American Right began to feel in sync with ma-
jority American opinion.” Yet even as Conti-
netti contrasts the Cold War conspiracies of
Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-Wis.) with the “cau-
tious, gradual, consensus based, and interna-
tionalist” conservatism of President Dwight
Eisenhower, it is not a politician but an editor
and intellectual who is the protagonist —
though not always the hero — of his story.
William F. Buckley, founder of National Re-
view, believed that long-term political influ-
ence for the right hinged, as Continetti puts it,
on “intellectual ascendancy and mainstream
credibility,” so he aimed for both. Continetti
revisits Buckley’s greatest hits: how he
pushed out the fringe elements of mid-
-century conservatism; how he helped usher
in “fusionism,” the blend of economic and cul-
tural conservatism that Frank Meyer articu-
lated in National Review; and how he “main-
streamed” American conservatism, helping
propel the right from Barry Goldwater’s dog-
matic defeat toward Ronald Reagan’s encom-
passing victory.
Yet to his credit, Continetti does not canon-
ize Buckley. He lingers on the editor’s “dis-
trust of the democratic process,” particularly
around civil rights. Continetti quotes Buck-
ley’s “infamous” 195 7 editorial, “Why the
South Must Prevail,” which argued that White
discrimination against Black Americans was
warranted “because, for the time being, it is
the advanced race.” He also notes Buckley’s
sympathies for the junior senator from Wis-
consin (today, we might call Buckley an anti-
anti-McCarthy). In a small-bore yet prophetic
detail, Continetti notes that conservative
writer Whittaker Chambers refused to blurb
Buckley’s 1954 book, “McCarthy and His En-
emies,” warning him that the right was mov-
ing “away from reality.”
Continetti contends that the end of the
Cold War robbed conservatism of its organiz-
ing principle — anticommunism — propelling
the movement in more inward-looking and
nationalistic directions. But by the author’s
own admission, the movement had long been
headed there anyway. The New Right, uncon-
cerned with “elite validation,” as Continetti
archly puts it, was waging culture wars over
busing, abortion and gay rights well before
the Reagan presidency. The Great Communi-
cator himself had a “major stumble” in 1980,
Continetti acknowledges, when he invokedWar, the party was so divided that it held
competing national conventions and ulti-
mately ran two presidential tickets. (Talk
about Democrats in disarray.) Even in the
FDR era, Kazin writes, party leaders “resisted
defining their party as a multiracial one; they
feared alienating the white South and could
not imagine retaining a durable majority
without it.”
When Democrats moved toward a more
just position on race — pressed by figures
such as Rep. Adam Clayton Powell of New
York and Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minne-
sota — their coalition began to unravel. The
landmark domestic legislation of Lyndon
Johnson’s administration came to be viewed
as providing “benefits to poor and mostly
non-white Americans,” Kazin contends, mea-
sures that others in the liberal coalition
should support out of duty, not true solidarity.
“It was a sincere appeal to the better angels of
the nation, but it was not effective politics,” he
states bluntly. The labor movement, which
had supported major Democratic initiatives
since the New Deal, struggled to make com-
mon cause with the “countercultural tastes”
of young, college-educated, anti-Vietnam War
activists. The AFL-CIO remained neutral in
the 197 2 presidential campaign, Kazin notes,
“the first time since the 1920 s that a body rep-
resenting most union members failed to en-
dorse the Democratic nominee.”
Kazin has respect for politicians, such as
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who recognize
that victory must precede policy. “Ideological
ardor, for her, always paled in comparison to
doing what she deemed necessary to win
power and hold it.” Yet, when he looks back on
the late 20th century, Kazin’s preferred presi-
dential candidate is one who did not come
close to winning. Dismissive of Jimmy Carter
(“an absolutely wretched politician,” he
scoffs) and frustrated by Bill Clinton (“even a
retrograde liberal nominee might have won
that year”), Kazin praises Jesse Jackson for
developing “the most ambitious platform for
moral capitalism any major candidate had es-
poused since the heyday of the New Deal.”
But the Democrats could recapture and re-
tain the White House only by preaching the
end of big government and privileging oppor-
tunity over fairness. Clinton’s election
“seemed to prove that the centrists had been
right all along,” Kazin admits. Throughout the
1990 s, the progressive left had “neither the
ideas nor the numbers” to sway the Demo-
cratic Party in its direction. Kazin recalls play-
ing poker with Clinton aide George Stephano-
poulos in 1996 and asking him how to push
Clinton further left. “I wish we had a left to
push us,” he replied.
Barack Obama’s presidency disappointed
Kazin, less because of policy shortcomings
than because “one of the most inspiring Dem-
ocratic candidates in history... dispirited
and demobilized his base.” And Kazin believes
that many of the record number of voters who
backed Biden in 2020 were rejecting Trump
as much as embracing the Democrat. Betting
on an emerging majority of voters of color
and coastal elites to turn out against your op-
ponent is not a long-term strategy, and will
not compensate for muddled ideas. Even in
2020, the author laments, “Democrats still
had trouble articulating with force and clarity
what kind of economy they believed in and
how it would benefit most people who
worked for somebody else."seeking to harmonize his loyalty to the con-
servative establishment he joined long ago
with the nationalist fervor that has overrun it.
Neither is an impartial chronicler. Neither
pretends to be. It’s almost refreshing.
These works are published separately yet
feel bound together. For Kazin, who began re-
searching his book the month Donald Trump
became president, Joe Biden’s 2020 victory
succeeded in fending off another Trump term
but affirmed the difficulties of fashioning a
lasting Democratic majority. “As had been
true since the downfall of the Great Society,”
he writes, “it was easier to say what most
Democrats opposed than what they stood for.”
Continetti, meanwhile, attributes America’s
current challenges to the excesses of liberal-
ism and “an out-of-control egalitarianism,”
yet worries whether a “viable conservatism”
still exists to resist — and not just troll — the
left’s cultural advances.
How the two sides arrived at these condi-
tions is the subject of the authors’ works. How
the two sides can transcend these conditions
is the work of their subjects.‘S
ince its creation, the Democratic Party
has never enjoyed a prolonged period
of internal bliss,” Kazin writes. He may
be understating matters. In the struggle to
reconcile the political needs of party leaders,
the electoral demands crucial to winning and
wielding power, and the principles the party
purports to uphold, nailing the trifecta has
proved difficult. Even two out of three is hard.
The party has come closest, Kazin argues,
when it has made the case for “moral capital-
ism,” balancing the right to launch businesses
and amass property with true concern for the
plight of the wage earner. “When Democrats
made a convincing appeal to the economic in-
terests of the many,” Kazin maintains, “they
usually celebrated victory at the polls.” He
identifies two periods — the Jacksonian era
from the 1820 s to the 1850 s, and the New Deal
and its aftermath, from the 1930 s to the 1960 s
— in which Democrats made such a case and
won nationwide power.
But in grasping that power, key principles
slipped out. “The contradiction that would
bedevil Democrats until the final decades of
the twentieth century,” Kazin writes, was that
“the party of ‘the people’ could get a chance to
govern the nation only if it acquiesced to a
realm of unfreedom south of the Mason-Dix-
on line.” White Southerners were the nation’s
— and the party’s — most reliable voting bloc,
and the price of that reliability was racism
and discrimination against Black Americans.
The contradiction was present when Mar-
tin Van Buren began building the party. It was
there during the crusades against the “money
power” by thrice-nominated populist William
Jennings Bryan. It endured in the Gilded Age,
when Democrats displayed a “cynical blend of
racial supremacy and class and ethnic uplift,”
Kazin writes. In 1860, on the eve of the CivilLOZADA FROM B1CARLOS LOZADAPartisans seek comfort,
and coherence, in history
WHAT IT TOOK
TO WIN
A History of the
Democratic
Party
By Michael
Kazin. FSG.
396 pp. $35THE RIGHT
The Hundred
Year War for
American
Conservatism
By Matthew
Continetti.
Basic.
484 pp. $32“states’ rights” during a campaign stop in
Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights
activists had been murdered in 1964. Conti-
netti minimizes the speech, insisting that
Reagan’s “ heart wasn’t in it,” an excuse that
immediately reminded me of Reagan inform-
ing the public in 1987 that his “heart and best
intentions” told him that he hadn’t traded
arms for hostages. It seems the heart has rea-
sons which reason conveniently omits.
Continetti takes issue with leftists who say
Trump is the inevitable “end point” of Ameri-
can conservatism. But his own view is not so
dissimilar: He calls the former president a
“repressed memory” of the right. The “street-
corner” populism of the Nixon era, the paleo-
cons led by Patrick Buchanan, Rush Lim-
baugh’s anti-elite, anti-everything permanent
confrontation — all were steps toward
birtherism, the wall and MAGA.‘W
hat It Took to Win” is expansive, an
American history through the
prism of the nation’s oldest mass
party. “The Right” is contained, the history of
a movement with occasional cameos by the
broader national story. They are not laments
or solutions for a polarized America, yet in
their zeal to unite and organize their respec-
tive sides, they help explain it.
Kazin worries that professional Democrats
are disconnected from people subsisting on
small paychecks, but he also fears that recent
iterations of the left — Occupy Wall Street
protesters, Black Lives Matter activists, Green
New Dealers — failed to coalesce around a
single issue “that united its parts and inspired
its growth.” Continetti looks upon the Jan. 6
rioters and the election fraud truthers and
sees nihilism, illiberalism and a cult of per-
sonality, as if “all of the unreason and hatred
that had been silently growing in the body of
the Right burst into the open.”
Forget about easing left-right divides —
these two are most concerned with incoher-
ence under their own banners. Continetti,
perhaps imagining a redux of Buckley-era fu-
sionism and respectability, calls for de-per-
sonalization of the movement (a nice euphe-
mism for de-Trumpification) while incorpo-
rating Trumpian policy “modifications” re-
garding border security, trade policy and
hawkishness on China. He envisions a con-
servatism animated by “the principles that
have guided the movement for more than half
a century: anti-statism, constitutionalism, pa-
triotism, and antisocialism.” (With authori-
tarian-minded, postliberal thinkers gathering
on the right, Continetti might want to hurry.)
Kazin, meanwhile, looks back with longing on
the New Deal and the Great Society and calls
for Democrats to become a true “working-
class party,” a multiethnic coalition, including
labor and elites, that can air disagreements
without denouncements or purges. “We orga-
nize, we vote, and we win,” he concludes.
These authors not only write history; they
take solace in it. Their works can illuminate
the paths forward for party and movement,
though only to a point. History, after all, is not
an interested party. But it can be an interest-
ing one.
Twitter: @CarlosLozadaWPCarlos Lozada i s The Post’s nonfiction book critic
and the author of “What Were We Thinking: A Brief
Intellectual History of the Trump Era.” He won the
Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2019.M
y friends all come to me for gardening
advice because I’ve taken more classes
than their combined none. They ask
me when it’s safe to plant, if they’ll need a
trellis, how often to add compost. I keep it
simple: soil, sun and water. I think this really
speaks to people and has even helped them to
grow some very successful harvests.
These friends never seem to notice that my
own garden is an anemic, stunted and profli-
gate landscape of embarrassment. Nearly ev-
ery plant, save the herbs — and what jerk can't
grow herbs? — is locked in a state of madden-
ing potential.
In the summer, I look out the window at my
tomatoes, and I see two green orbs that are the
same size they were two weeks before. I see
leaves that started climbing but thought the
better of it and are now just dead, yellowing
weight next to blossoms that themselves
turned y ellow, then fell off. I s ee a squash p lant
that grew big leaves and flowers and a promis-
ing little green sprout, which abruptly halted
its development and is likewise withering.
Everything starts — and then just stops. Is i t
a lack of sun? To o much? Is the soil quality
poor? Is t he pot too small? Why can't I g et t hem
to thrive?
I talk to my friends on the East Coast, and
they share stories of tomatoes gone wild and
cucumbers that just “took off,” even though my
growing season here in California started six
weeks before theirs did, with virtually no
danger of frost and ample sunlight. Almost
unattended do their crops grow! It seems to
come naturally to other people, this cultivating
life thing. It doesn’t come naturally to me.
At least with flowering edibles, the stakes
are low. I was grossly disappointed, maybe
even embarrassed, by my low tomato yield a
few years ago. But no one else remembers it,
not even my husband. And no one, so far as I
know, pitied me for it.
There’s another kingdom, too, in which I
don’t have anything to show for my efforts:
producing offspring. Pregnancy, like garden-
ing, feels like an insoluble mystery. For a
woman or a man who is infertile, it’s hardly
ever just one thing that’s gone wrong. There is
a vast u niverse of things we do not know about
why a woman with no known fertility chal-
lenges doesn’t get pregnant, cycle after cycle
after cycle. Sun, soil, water: What else is there
to say?
Going from infertility to fertility has almost
nothing to do with sex. That s ounds ridiculous,
but check a fertility message board, and you’ll
see what I mean. The questions are about
virtually anything else: How big were your
follicles, what was your progesterone level,
when did you inject the HCG, did you see the
double line on your 40th ovulation test, did
you see spotting, how many mg of L and did
you start on CD 2, 3 or 5, did you cramp afterWhat my struggling vegetable garden taught me about infertility
If it really
doesn’t work
out, just try
again next
season,
says essayist
Rachel HorstFAROOQ KHAN/REX/SHUTTERSTOCKGardening may
seem easy, but — try
as they might —
some people have a
hard time getting
flowers and
vegetables to thrive.Rachel Horst l ives and gardens in the San
Francisco Bay area.