In Theories of the Postmodern Fredric Jameson refers to those whose aim is to discredit the shoddiness and irresponsibility of the postmodern in general by way of a reaffirmation of the authentic impulse of a high-modernist tradition still considered to be alive and vital. One such person is Hilton Kramer of the New Criterion whom Jameson says contrasts the moral responsibility of the “masterpieces” and monuments of classical modernism with the fundamental irresponsibility and superficiality of a postmodernism associated with camp and the “facetiousness”. He adds:

It is, however, easier to understand Kramer’s move here when the political project of The New Criterion is clarified: for the mission of the journal is clearly to eradicate the sixties itself and what remains of its legacy, to consign that whole period to the kind of oblivion which the fifties was able to devise for the thirties, or the twenties for the rich political culture of the pre-World War I era. The New Criterion therefore inscribes itself in the effort, ongoing and at work everywhere today to construct some new conservative cultural counterrevolution, whose terms range from the aesthetic to the ultimate defense of the family and religion. It is therefore paradoxical that this essentially political project should explicitly deplore the omnipresence of politics in contemporary culture-----an infection largely spread during the sixties but which Kramer holds responsible for the moral imbecility of the postmodernism of our own period.