These days we look back at the projectile name-calling and nonstop sexual revelations that defined Washington's all-consuming culture war of the 1990's and ask: What in hell was that all about? Like the reigning sitcom of the time, ''Seinfeld,'' it may have been about nothing, or at least very little -- and with a Lilliputian cast of characters to match. In retrospect, the archetypal figure of 90's Washington may not have been one of its many aspiring Woodwards and Bernsteins or a great man or woman of state (were there any?) who will some day get the David McCullough treatment, but a gossip-mongering schlemiel who is already halfway to being an answer on ''Jeopardy.''

David Brock, you may recall, was the bullying reporter for the late, not-so-great American Spectator who labeled Anita Hill "a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty" and later broke Troopergate, the pioneering expose (much of it culled from clandestinely paid "sources") into Bill Clinton's Arkansas Kama Sutra. In his latest incarnation, Brock is turning expiation for these and other past sins into a second career that has played out like a striptease over the past few years. He set out on this path in 1997 by writing an article for Esquire, "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man," in which he started to recant "The Real Anita Hill," his best-selling and often fictionalized hatchet job that duped many reviewers (including one at The New York Times) with its lavishly footnoted gossip, half-truths and slander. Next up is a new book, a memoir titled "Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative," that goes further still by serving as a mea culpa for an entire era, not just himself. In it, he not only takes back the falsifications in his reportage on Hill, Clarence Thomas and the Clintons (among others) but even offers an apologia for the over-the-top excesses of his Esquire apologia, which was accompanied by a photo of Brock in full martyr monty, lashed to a tree, his chest bared, eager to be burned at a stake.

Though I've had my own journalistic battles with Brock, I've never met him. He may be best observed at a distance. He calls his new memoir a ''terrible book'' in its very first sentence, but he's wrong about that as he has been about so much else during his bizarre, chameleonlike career. His book is terrible only in the sense that it takes us back to a poisonous time. Whatever critics may make of it when it's published next month, it may be a key document for historians seeking to understand the ethos of the incoherent 90's. It is also easier to warm up to than the rest of the Brock canon, much of which was written in spittle-spewing blind rage.

The Brock of ''Blinded by the Right'' is instead humorously circumspect. There's an Albert Brooks-in-Broadcast News'' moment when he describes how he tried, as a rising young conservative talking head, to imitate the ''magnificent half-recline'' of William F. Buckley's television posture only to ''nearly fall off my chair.'' To ingratiate himself with a conservative elite presided over by the likes of Arnaud de Borchgrave, a self-styled journalistic grandee in the toadying employ of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon at The Washington Times, Brock writes of endeavoring ''to look like an old fogy in training, donning a bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses and, ludicrously, puffing on a pipe and occasionally even carrying a walking stick.'' A Commentary action figure, in other words.

Brock's publisher has billed Brock's confession as a memoir ''in the tradition of Arthur Koestler's 'God That Failed,''' but what makes the book an apt postscript to the dim decade it describes is how little it has in common with Koestler's disavowal of Communism, or Whittaker Chambers's ''Witness,'' or the rest of the vast modern literature of ideological about-face. Ideology, like goodness, had little to do with the politics of the 1990's. The cold war was over, Clinton embraced a centrism that was echt Rockefeller Republican, prosperity was on the march and nothing serious seemed at stake (or so we thought at the time). Brock's book can't recount an ideological journey because there's little evidence he was a committed conservative in the first place -- or that many of his ambitious allies were, either -- any more than he (or the Clintonistas he now aligns himself with) is a committed liberal now. And that's the point.

His story exemplifies a decade of post-ideological drift and spitball politics in Washington: a cynical, highly pragmatic struggle over power more than ideas that opened with the Thomas-Hill confrontation of 1991, reached its climax with the impeachment drive and now seems to have been interred with so much else in the rubble of Sept. 11. It was a time of take-no-prisoners mudslinging, in which the Republican right, with no Communists to unmask, found a new kind of enemy within that it tried to bring down by means of a disingenuously holier-than-thou moral crusade fueled by a gossip machine of which Brock was an early and influential cog. The hottest partisan battles revolved around Long Dong Silver and Paula Jones, not Stalin.

For the right, the principal means of battle was a kind of cultural profiling that slick (and entirely secular) political operatives adapted from their allies in the religious right. If Anita Hill could be painted as nutty and slutty, if the Democratic leader Tom Foley could be called gay (even if he wasn't) and if Bill Clinton could be branded as a pot-smoking libertine from Day 1 of his presidency, then liberals in general and Democrats in particular could be dubbed, as Newt Gingrich would have it, ''the enemy of normal Americans,'' responsible for every moral breach in the nation. In Gingrich's formulation, ''The left-wing Democrats will represent the party of total hedonism, total exhibitionism, total bizarreness, total weirdness.'' On his way to becoming speaker of the House, he even grandfathered Susan Smith's 1994 drowning of her two children in South Carolina into 60's hedonism, as an example of the ''pattern'' of ''the counterculture and Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.''

There wasn't much intellectual content to this debased and often histrionic line of cultural attack; it was to a serious debate over values what McCarthyism was to anti-Communism. But the triumph of Reaganism and the passing of its architects from the front lines left a vacuum that had to be filled. As Brock explains: ''Political movements arise from the spadework of intellectuals, not politicians. The older generation of conservative intellectuals who had framed the political culture that brought Reagan to power and sustained his administration -- the Norman Podhoretzes, the Charles Murrays, the theorists of supply-side economics at the Wall Street Journal editorial page -- were spent. Whatever one thought of their ideas, they were serious thinkers, and there was no one of their caliber to replace them.''

Their noisiest successors, the prominent younger conservatives of Brock's Washington generation, had little aspiration to do any intellectual heavy lifting of the sort once conducted by a Buckley or Irving Kristol, whether in book form or in the pages of small-circulation journals like The Public Interest. Rather than fight (or work hard) in the trenches of the academy whose political correctness they professed to loathe, the new conservatives preferred to become what might be called welfare deans; they collected academic-sounding titles that required intellectual output in almost inverse proportion to their financing by right-wing foundations. A Richard Mellon Scaife-financed talk-show bloviator and cut-and-paste writer like William Bennett, rather than a practicing, untelegenic intellectual like James Q. Wilson, was the role model. Even Brock, with no advanced degrees or particular expertise in the subject, was early in his career christened John M. Olin Fellow in Congressional Studies at the Heritage Foundation. The main aspiration of his Washington pack was to churn out quick, slashing character assassinations or screeds (for which ''The Real Anita Hill'' and Rush Limbaugh's ''Way Things Ought to Be'' became the ur-texts) and to achieve celebrity in the new medium of cable TV news, a phenomenon whose rapid growth in the 90's, like that of the Drudge-fueled Internet, paralleled the rise of the mudslinging right and was essential to the dissemination of unsubstantiated dirt.

By his own account, Brock has lied so often that a reader can't take on faith some of the juicier newsbreaks from the impeachment era in his book, including his portrayal of the murky role supposedly played by Theodore Olson, now the Bush administration's solicitor general, in the doomed ''Arkansas Project,'' in which The American Spectator spent millions of Scaife's dollars to try to link the Clintons to any and every sexual shenanigan, drug scheme and murder that ever happened within hailing distance of Little Rock. What makes Brock's tale effective is his insider's portrait of a political slime operation, much of it comic from even this slight historical remove, about which the facts already exist for the most part on the public record -- and sometimes on the legal record as well. (For what it's worth, his accounts of events in which I figured are accurate.)

The literary antecedent for ''Blinded by the Right'' is less ''The God That Failed'' than Julia Phillips's scorched-earth memoir of Hollywood, ''You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again.'' But Brock, unlike Phillips, can write, and he seems to have expelled much of the bile that marked his past writing. In his portrayal, there are some honorable and principled conservatives who cross his path -- John O'Sullivan of The National Review (which had the guts to pan ''The Real Anita Hill''), Tod Lindberg of The Washington Times, the writer Christopher Caldwell -- and there's a humanity to some (though not all) of the gargoyles and lunatics who outnumber them. R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., the editor who exploited Brock's ''investigative journalism'' to increase exponentially The American Spectator's circulation and then overreached to the point of losing his magazine altogether, is such a colorful, self-destructive and at times generous eccentric that it's hard to hate him even as he plays editorial muse to all the Clinton-haters. He's a nut, perhaps, but with a soft Dickensian center.

What makes history that seemed ugly at the time play like farce now is the almost unending hypocrisy of so many of Brock's circle in journalism and politics. Those who led the charge against the morality of Anita Hill, Bill Clinton and the rest were almost to a man and woman living in glasshouses of their own, whether pursuing sex, alcohol, abortion or some combination thereof. The checkered ''family values'' of the likes of Gingrich, Scaife, Dan Burton, Henry Hyde, Bob Livingston and The Wall Street Journal's anti-Clinton polemicist John Fund, among many others, are now part of the historical record. Clarence Thomas's history of regularly renting pornography in the 1980's -- documented by the Wall Street Journal reporters Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson (Abramson is now the Washington bureau chief of The Times) in their book ''Strange Justice'' -- also stands virtually unchallenged, now that Brock has withdrawn his previous rebuttal of it. It's particularly hilarious that The Washington Times was the paper of record (and of frequent employment) for this whole pious crowd, given that its owner, Moon, with his mass weddings of mostly strangers, probably took more direct action to undermine the institution of marriage in America than any single person in the 20th century, the Gabor sisters included.

For a political movement that wanted to police sexual ''lifestyles'' and was pathologically obsessed with trying to find evidence that Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, the New Right of the 90's was, in Brock's account, nearly as gay as a soiree in Fire Island Pines. Even before Brock publicly acknowledged his own homosexuality at the height of his fame, he tapped into a Washington subculture of closeted conservatives that seemed to hold forth everywhere from The American Spectator to the closest circles around Gingrich and Kenneth Starr. There is, of course, a long history of usually closeted gay men, some but not all of them public homophobes, on the American right, including Roy Cohn, J. Edgar Hoover and such top Reagan-era operatives as Terry Dolan, Marvin Liebman and even Jesse Helms's political consultant, Arthur Finkelstein. The same goes for such intellectual patron saints of conservatism as Chambers and Allan Bloom. But that's just the short list. When Brock revealed his homosexuality, he expected to be hit with bigotry from his publicly antigay allies, but to his surprise was at first more often hit on instead. At a party at his Georgetown home, ''the house that Anita Hill built,'' he had to eject a conservative columnist ''after he pushed me onto a bed, into a pile of coats, and tried to stick his tongue down my throat.'' There is also, among others, ''the closeted pro-impeachment Republican congressman, who had pursued me drunkenly through a black-tie Washington dinner offering a flower he had plucked from a bud vase, condemning Clinton for demeaning his office.'' It all plays like slapstick out of ''The Birdcage.''

Why would a conservative movement so obsessed with vilifying homosexuality as a subversive ''lifestyle'' contain so many homosexuals? Looking at his own past, Brock writes, ''The doctrinaire absolutism, the thunderous extremism, the wildness of expression -- these qualities were not uncommon among other closeted right-wing homosexuals I had known. . . . At the bottom of my rage there must have been a loathing not of liberals, but of myself. By giving voice to their hatred of Anita Hill, I was trying to force the conservatives to love a faggot whether they liked it or not.'' Certainly after reading Brock's account, you're left feeling that too many of those protesting about homosexuality are protesting too much -- not necessarily because they're gay themselves in the manner of the cliched militaristic neighbor of ''American Beauty'' but either because they may be angry to discover that their children are (as in the case of Phyllis Schlafly) or, most conventionally, because they may be politically jealous of the clout of the tight-knit cliques of gays on their own team. (The numerous gays in ''the seniormost ranks of the Reagan administration called themselves the 'laissez fairies,''' writes Brock.) A similarly self-destructive overcompensation -- the eternal Jimmy Swaggart syndrome -- seemed to be at work among the straight right-wing womanizers, like Gingrich, who led the charge against Democratic hedonism while engaging in their own.

What's clear now is that David Brock's mea culpa for this era may also be its epitaph. The holier-than-thou cultural profiling used by Gingrich, Brock and their peers in the Hill-Thomas-Clinton era is in serious decline as a political tool. The proximate causes of its demise can be found in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. The televised testimony by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to the effect that America was attacked in part because it gives safe harbor to ''the pagans and the abortionists and the gays and the lesbians'' was renounced by virtually the entire country, up to and including Rush Limbaugh and President Bush. Cultural profiling took an equally dramatic hit when the first leader to emerge in the postattack aftermath proved to be a walking compendium of the attributes that horrified the lifestyle police of the Clinton years: Rudolph Giuliani, a married man who publicly abandoned his wife for a mistress and chose to live in the household of a gay couple. He was a Republican, besides. So was one of the attack's first heroes -- Mark Bingham, a gay rugby player believed to be one of those who fought the hijackers for control of Flight 93 before it crashed in Pennsylvania. Suddenly the pre-Sept. 11 game of ''gotcha'' with Gary Condit (another hypocrite who piously supported the impeachment inquiry) seemed to belong to a vanished age.

In the months since the attack on America there have been some efforts on what remains of the Brockian right to revive the old culture wars. The biggest push has been to turn John Walker Lindh into an exemplar of the 60's, much as Gingrich did with Susan Smith. But as the effort to pin Smith's murders on the left failed -- it later turned out that she was the stepdaughter of a Christian Coalition official (and Pat Robertson-for-president supporter) who had molested her from age 15 -- so the pin-Lindh-on-liberals effort has waned.

The case was most prominently laid out on The Wall Street Journal editorial page, a knee-jerk home to cultural profiling of this sort, by the conservative Hoover Institution scholar Shelby Steele, who said the American Taliban recruit exemplified ''a certain cultural liberalism'' to be found in Northern California -- never mind that Steele also lives there (the Hoover Institution is at Stanford University), as did a hero like Flight 93's Mark Bingham (who was from San Francisco). To drive his point home, Steele also invoked Cornel West (though he misspelled his name) and noted that Lindh was a child of divorce, was named after John Lennon, had read ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X'' and went to an alternative school. Unfortunately, to make his case, Steele had to glide by the reality that the anti-American creed of the Taliban was as far removed from San Francisco liberalism as one could imagine -- an antiwoman, antigay fundamentalist sect. Steele also had to ignore the fact that Lindh had spent the first and more formative half of his childhood not in Marin County but in Takoma Park, Md., a Washington suburb, where he and his family were then regular Catholic churchgoers.

It shows the arbitrariness of Steele's case that he would probably have had an easier time arguing that Catholicism turns Americans into traitors -- since at least he'd have another example to go with Lindh in Robert Hanssen, the F.B.I. mole who was one of the most effective spies in American history and a rigorous member of the conservative Catholic sect Opus Dei. But of course that argument would have been as silly as the one Steele did make. Post-Sept. 11, choosing cultural profiling as a political weapon can lead to incoherence, if not absurdity. In a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, for instance, one article tried to pin Lindh's defection to the Taliban on the alleged homosexuality of his father (while carefully ignoring the boy's Catholic background) while another tried earnestly to examine Hanssen's defection to the Soviet Union by focusing on his Catholicism.

Most Americans believe that Lindh and Hanssen are each sui generis -- anomalous case studies that cannot be pinned on any particular cultural influence, family constellation, religion or sexual history. That's why the efforts of the last practitioners of 90's cultural profiling fall flat. Most Americans also know by now that for better or worse both Thomas and Bill Clinton are going to be judged by history for what they did in their official capacities, not for what porn they watched or enacted.

This isn't to say that witch hunts ever become extinct in American politics; they only go into remission. But in the meantime, we're so removed from the political fisticuffs that made a star out of David Brock that the landscape is at times unrecognizable. As you watch those on the right look the other way at Rudy Giuliani's sex life, it almost seems as if they are flirting with what they used to hate most -- touchy-feely cultural relativism. You know the ground has shifted when the one prominent legal lion to feel ''empathy and sympathy'' for John Walker Lindh -- and to argue that he be treated not as ''a Benedict Arnold'' but as a ''young kid with misplaced idealism'' -- is Kenneth Starr.
 

Frank Rich is a columnist for The Times and a senior writer for the magazine.