The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, never knew of Anthony Bourdain, I’d guess, but he understood his type well. Bourdain, who died in 2018, was an oversocialized leftist. A man who, to avoid a deep sense of guilt and worthlessness, overidentified with the system and presented conformity with its values as a kind of rebellion. That might sound complicated, but it’s really not.

“Generally speaking,” Kaczynski once wrote, “the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society… Leftists, especially those of oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming… that society is not living up to these principles.”

Everything Bourdain sold as edgy and punk was indistinguishable from the spirit of our age

Everything Bourdain sold as edgy and punk was indistinguishable from the spirit of our age

Everything Bourdain sold as edgy and punk, the mark of a free thinker and a free spirit – traveling the world, drinking a pint at 4 p.m. in an empty bar, eating an oyster, having that extra slice of French toast, mass immigration as a way of brightening up our pale, stale, male countries – was indistinguishable from the spirit of our age.

Bourdain was never apolitical: we just didn’t see or hear his political views that much. When the Tea Party came around during Barack Obama’s first term, Bourdain had plenty of disparaging things to say about it, but they weren’t in his early books or TV shows. That came later.

Bourdain was a working chef in his mid-40s at New York’s Brasserie Les Halles when he released his memoir-cum-exposé Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, in 2000. The book, an expansion of a hit New Yorker........

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