The American Conservative

Just as the problems of filling several vacancies to the U.S. Senate highlighted the need to repeal the 17th Amendment, so too has President Obama’s failure to find someone, anyone, to be Secretary of Commerce highlights the utter worthlessness of the entire department.

The Commerce Department, originally known as Commerce and Labor, is a Progressive era creation (1903) which more or less was created to enforce all the new business regulations and departments created by Congress and the Theodore Roosevelt administration. Today, it’s basically an umbrella grouping for any number of different agencies handling patents, international trade, economic statistics, the National Weather Service, the U.S. Census, etc. that could all stand on their own without a super structure of bureaucracy over them. Indeed, the Obama Administration proposed to do just that with the Census which supposedly triggered Jud Gregg’s reconsideration of his appointment as Secretary.  (No, I don’t believe that explanation either. Gregg’s reconsideration actually embarasses him more than it does Obama. What Administration did he think he was joining, Bush I’s?)
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Dennis makes a good point about the Geert Wilders ban. As soon as “hate” becomes illegal, as it is in Britain, liberty doesn’t stand much of a chance.

But Wilders is a vulgar and nasty hate-merchant. I object to him being refused entry to the UK about as much as I oppose a bar refusing entry to a loud and rude drunk. (My opinion is not worth much, but this is what blogging is all about, right?)

What about free speech? Forget it. Britain has, since even before its inception, been a master of silencing dissent while posing as a bastion of freedom. In New Labour UK, police have been locking up and kicking out Muslims — often British citizens, unlike Wilders – who preach “hate” for some time now, and not all of them have been directly inciting violence.

The most convincing argument against the Wilders ban, surprisingly, is the one made by George Osborne, who said: “My personal view is by banning him [Wilders] in such a public way, he has been given far more publicity than would have been the case. I am not sure how thought-through this really was.”

Osborne has been attacked on the Right for not going far enough, but his tone is moderate and his language fair, which is more than can be said for the red-faced blustering of the Daily Telegraph. It is true that “Fitna”, Wilders’ petty-minded hate film, which can be watched on line, has been viewed far more in the last two days than if the Dutchman had been allowed to show his terror-porn in the House of Lords.

So when Wilders’ says that it’s a “sad day” for British democracy what he really means is that it’s a great day for Gert Wilders. And nobody wants that.

Did someone in this arena blaspheme diversity? Scott McConnel’s last came to mind when I learned that British immigration officials barred Dutch MP Geert Wilders from entering Britain (at the invitation of a member of the House of Lords) to attend a screening of his anti-Islamic (and by all accounts awful) film (watch here) on the grounds the filmmaker’s presence in Britain might cause anti-Islamic violence. 

My first reaction was to assume that the Brits were more afraid of that which they didn’t mention–Muslim backlash (and what delicious irony to think their silence regarding Muslim backlash was due to a fear of, yes, Muslim backlash).

But after bouncing about the British papers a bit I’m convinced it’s primarily political grandstanding on the part of Home Secretary Jacqui “Jackboot Jacqui” Smith. Secretary Smith, after first running for Parliament as part of an “all women shortlist”, earned her nickname promoting greater police powers, including the right to hold terrorism suspects for 42 days without charge.

It would behoove us to note how readily combined are old-fashioned authoritarian measures with newer, Left-inspired limits on speech and assembly (revealing them as not all that “new” and not very distinct from what is typically thought of as Rightist authoritarianism) and how the percieved “need” for these things results from tensions caused by That Which Shall Not Be Questioned–diversity. Of course, if some have their way questioning diversity will itself soon be criminalized “hate speech.” Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we set out to appease.

The day before Richard Holbrooke arrived in Kabul, eight suicide bombers and gunmen attacked the Justice and Education ministries, killing 26 and wounding 57.

Kabul was paralyzed, as the Taliban displayed an ability to wreak havoc within a hundred yards of the presidential palace.

The assault came as President Obama is both conducting a strategic review and deciding how many additional U.S. troops to send.

Earlier, there was talk of 30,000, bringing the U.S. total to 63,000. Now, there are reports Obama may commit no more than the three brigades promised in 2008, and only one brigade now.

Clearly, the United States is checking its hole card. Can we draw to a winning hand? Or is this hand an inevitable loser — and we must cut our losses and cede the pot? No longer, anywhere, is there talk of “victory.” Read More…

Sam Tanenhaus’s thoughtful Conservatism is Dead in The New Republic (and the responses to it) has ignited an interesting debate here and elsewhere (as it should). I’m not interested in nitpicking Tanenhaus’s writing on the future of the conservative movement. But I’m a bit confused.

In his recent piece which calls on conservatives to return to their “Burkean” roots while preserving the foundations of the New Deal — marrying the political instincts of Disraeli with the institutional legacy of FDR — he seems to suggest that the neoconservatives were/are part of the reactionary radical right.

The Burkean moment was dissipating, and not only because of New Right populists. In 1975, the same year Phillips’s, Buchanan’s, and Rusher’s manifestos all were published, Irving Kristol, the onetime elegist of the non-ideological “reforming spirit,” identified a “new class” of liberal enemies. They were “not much interested in money but are keenly interested in power,” Kristol wrote. “Power for what? Well, the power to shape our civilization–a power, which, in a capitalist system, is supposed to reside in the free market. The ‘new class’ wants to see much of this power redistributed to government, where they will then have a major say in how it is exercised.” And who, exactly, populated this new class? “[S]cientists, teachers and educational administrators, journalists and others in the communication industries, psychologists, social workers, those lawyers and doctors who make their careers in the expanding public sector, city planners, the staffs of the larger foundations, the upper levels of the government bureaucracy.”
This formulation mirrored “the antinomianism and anti-institutionalism” Bell had attributed to the countercultural left. The right, it appeared, was nursing its own version of anti-Americanism. In fact, it had been festering for many years. As Garry Wills, who broke with the movement in the 1970s but continued to call himself a conservative, observed: “The right wing in America is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy of ‘conserving’ an actual order it does not want to conserve.”
The attack on the “new class,” rooted in cultural hostility, dominated movement conservatism for the next 30 years, up through the administration of George W. Bush. On one side, as Rusher described it, were “businessmen, manufacturers, hard-hats, blue-collar workers, and farmers.” On the other: “a liberal verbalist elite (the dominant media, the major foundations and research institutions, the educational establishment, the federal and state bureaucracies) and a semipermanent welfare constituency.”

Or here:

The right, which for so long had deplored the politics of “class warfare,” had become the most adept practitioners of that same politics. They had not only abandoned Burke. They had become inverse Marxists, placing loyalty to the movement–the Reagan Revolution–above their civic responsibilities. In 1995, the time of Gingrich’s ascendancy, Kristol buoyantly spelled out the terms of revanchist strategy: “American conservatism is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Though, inevitably, most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win votes. This movement is issue oriented. It will happily meld with the Republican party if the party is ‘right’ on the issues; if not, it will walk away.” By this calculus, all the obligations flow in only one direction. Parties are accountable to movement purists, while purists incur no reciprocal debt. They determine the “right” position, and the party’s job is to advance it. Kristol does not consider whether purists might be expected to maneuver at all or even to modify their views–for the good not only of the party but also the larger polity.
Kristol went on, in this essay, to extol the contributions of two movement subgroups, the neoconservatives and the evangelicals. It was of course this alliance that most fervently supported George W. Bush during his two terms and remains most loyal to him today.

But then, in late 2000, in what could be described as a song of praise and worship for neoconservativism, When Left Turns Right, It Leaves The Middle Muddled, in The New York Times, Tanenhaus’s narrative about the conservative movement and the neoconservatuves sounds very, very different. He appaluds what de describes as the Republican party and the conservatiive movement being taken over by the neocons and celebrates “the fusion of left and right, a legacy of 1970′s-style neoconservatism.’”

It was the tension between liberal sentiments and conservative analysis that gave the neoconservative movement its distinctive flavor. Its first wave of thinkers — people like Irving Kristol (often referred to as ”the godfather of neoconservatism”), his wife, the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, the sociologist James Q. Wilson and the art critic Hilton Kramer — often sided with traditional (or paleo) conservatives on policy questions but offered strikingly different lines of argument. Where paleos decried ”Godless Communism,” neocons framed the issue in terms of global totalitarianism. Where economic conservatives protested that antipoverty programs amounted to ”creeping socialism,” neocons pointed instead to evidence that the programs only worsened conditions for the poor. Where old-line conservatives equated affirmative action with Big Brother-style social engineering, neocons said that a system of quotas violated the spirit of the civil rights movement and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of a color-blind society.

Several of the neoconservatives rose to highly visible positions in government: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick as ambassador to the United Nations; William J. Bennett as secretary of education. Others achieved influence mainly as writers, editors, teachers and publicists. But after so many years at center stage, does this aging band still deserve the prefix ”neo”? Many, both inside the movement and out, think not.

The main villains in that storyline are the paleo-conservatives and a few neo-liberals who resist what is seen — and being applauded — as the inevitable hegemony of the neoconservatives, their agenda of National Greatness, and their favorite politicians (Bush W., McCain, Lieberman) over American politics.

Still, if the neoconservative movement has dwindled or died, neoconservative ideas are flourishing as never before. Last year Mr. Podhoretz praised President Clinton for having ”de-”McGovernized” the Democratic Party and steering it back to the political center. And Joseph I. Lieberman, a friend of Jerry Falwell and William J. Bennett, has over the years taken positions — like his well-publicized criticisms of Hollywood culture — that come straight from the neoconservative play book. It seems that on a wide array of issues — from crime to schools to welfare reform — neoconservative thinking is not difficult to reconcile with either conservative or liberal aims. Recently Robert B. Reich, the former Secretary of Labor and a consistently liberal voice in the Clinton Administration, proposed an ambitious plan for school vouchers, which he sees as a means of achieving the classic liberal goals of integrating classrooms and improving education for the poor.
In this sense, the legacy of neoconservatism seems secure. ”Neoconservatism has had a trickle-down effect on the political culture, and its influence on both major parties is evident even today,” Mr. Podhoretz says, with considerable satisfaction. Or perhaps, as David Brooks puts it, ”We’re all neoconservatives now.”

Or apparently not, according to Tanenhaus II.

Perhaps this is one of those not-infrequent occasions on which it is prudent not to give Damon Linker any more attention than he absolutely requires, but his response to Prof. Bacevich’s articulation of his hopes for the future of conservatism seems to me to have even less going for it than Daniel and Patrick Deneen are willing to credit. What begins as a call for individual financial responsibility, cultural calls for “self-restraint and self-denial”, and an appropriately modest realism in international affairs becomes in Linker’s hands a deeply reactionary call for outright authoritarianism, a rejection of “nearly everything about modern America”, and a demand for “an almost total overthrow of the status quo in favor of an alternative reality”, “a culture in which fixed limits on human choice are set by absolute political, spiritual, and moral authorities”.

But of course this is nonsense, since nowhere in Bacevich’s essay does he call for limits on human choice to be “fixed”, nor does he insist that those limits need to be “set” by any authorities other than the choosing persons themselves. The task of conservatism, on Bacevich’s analysis, is fundamentally one of critique, a primarily apolitical (and admittedly quixotic) enterprise that encourages people to get their own lives in order, to recognize and live within the inescapable limits on what can and can’t count as responsible human behavior. Nowhere here do we find, to use what is perhaps the most ludicrous of Linker’s phrases, calls for the establishment of an “authoritarian culture”; rather, the hope is that it is precisely in the achievement of a culture of self-restraint that the culture of authoritarianism can be avoided. It is simply false, then, to say as Linker does that Bacevich finds no value in “consent and individual choice”: instead, the fundamental motivation behind Bacevich’s calls for personal responsibility is the conviction that only such responsibility can provide the sort of background conditions against which the powers of consent and choice can actually be exercised in the first place. Scan the text repeatedly and squint as you might; the authoritarianism of Bacevich is nowhere to be found.

Meanwhile, in what has become a frustratingly familiar trope, Linker embeds his criticism of Bacevich’s essay within a broader critique of a more widespread menace, a “paleoconservative sentiment that has growing numbers of champions online and may gather force over the coming years”. And so, having name-checked Burke and de Maistre (but why not MacIntyre and Wendell Berry?) and attempted to link paleoconservative “authoritarianism” and its demand for the “suicide of the critical intellect” with the phenomenon of sexual abuse among the Legionaries of Christ (no, really), Linker goes in for the kill: Read More…

Mike Tennant at the LRC blog brings our attention to this outburst from the brain of the Republican party:

If they are going to bastardize the American system, if they are going to make this government large and powerful and intrusive, someday they’re going to lose it. But they’re going to lose it after having amassed all this power.  We will control it, and we’re going to turn it right back against them.  We will build a massive army of patriots to counter ACORN.  We will defund ACORN.  We’ll defund the labor unions, and we will fund our own people to go out and zap ACORN.  And we will do everything we can to enhance anti-union employment. We will make sure that when companies lose money, that the people that get canned are union people.  We’re going to use the power of government just like the left is using the power of government.  We’re going to use the Justice Department.
We’re going to go after big unions with the Justice Department. We’re going to find all of the criminal activity. We are going to find all the lack of ethics. We are going to find every bit of corruption we can, and we’re gonna sic the attorney general and the justice department and the US attorneys on you people just as you have been doing to the people of the right and the Republican Party for 50 years.  And then we’re going to find George Soros and other concentrations of left-wing power and wealth.  And we’re going to focus our attention on him, so that the American people will finally learn just who the hell paid for the bastardization of the United States, just who the hell paid for the destruction of the American way of life.

This is Rush Limbaugh after three weeks of President Obama. Imagine how he will sound in a year; or in four years should Obama win reelection.

One of the sharpest arguments in favor of immigration restriction was made, I believe, by Peter Brimelow in his book Alien Nation. My recollection is that it was more an aside in the introduction than a developed argument, (which if correct would be a shame), but the essence of it was the multiculturalism would inhibit and eventually render impossible a fully free society.

We’ve seen plenty of evidence of Europe’s myriad difficulties reconciling multiculturalism and freedom of speech– from the vociferous reaction to publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, to the Danish cartoon controversy, with many stops along along the way and more surely to come. I had assumed that America, with its vigorous First Amendment culture, would be much more resistant to the temptation to restrain speech.

I don’t pretend that the issues are simple: as I recall, both Pat Buchanan and Paul Johnson, neither knee jerk multiculturalists to say the least, wondered whether it was unduly provocative to publish Rushdie’s work.

The question raises its head again in a column in the New York Daily News by Dolores Frida. She launches into an attack on Marcus Epstein, whose paper for the immigration restriction group The American Cause had already drawn the ire of the New York Times editorial board. (TAC will have more to say about this later). But note this passage from Ms. Frida:

Immigration reform advocates, particularly Latino activists, are falsely characterized as advocating “open borders” and “blanket amnesty.”
These comments constitute “hate speech,” as defined in a preliminary report on a pilot study conducted by UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center.
Hate speech leads to hate crimes. No argument about that. Violence against Latinos has increased by 40% in the past four years — sometimes with deadly results, as evidenced by last year’s murder of Ecuadoran immigrant Marcelo Lucero on Long Island.
Based on this and other reports, the National Hispanic Media Coalition has filed a petition with the Federal Communications Commission, asking it to examine the extent, nature and effects of hate speech, the role of the media and possible options to counterbalance its negative impact.
The economic hardship the country is experiencing can only lead to more instances of Latino-bashing when fewer and fewer jobs are at stake. Therefore, let’s hope the FCC takes this petition seriously and promptly.
Freedom of expression, protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution, is the main reason many immigrants come to the U.S., and we cherish it as much as anyone.
Certainly, no one wants to inhibit anyone from expressing his opinion, regardless of how vile it may be, but a fair, safe, middle ground must be found.

Now, Epstein’s argument is surely not to everyone’s taste, but you have to live an almost unimaginably sheltered life to regard it as “hate speech.” So, a question for Ms. Frida: what alterations in the US Constitution does she recommend as the “fair, safe, middle ground” to deal with such threats as Marcus Epstein?

At the University Bookman site, Joseph Duggan, Austin Bramwell, James Poulos, Lee Edwards, and I also respond to Tanenhaus’s New Republic essay. A number of us broadly agree with him. Take a look.

Damon Linker at TNR attacks Andrew Bacevich’s recent response to Sam Tanenhaus’s essay on the demise of conservatism, and more broadly various iterations of what he calls “paleo-conservatism” (including, I’m somewhat honored to note, a link to my site “What I Saw in America” as well as to the writings of Rod Dreher and Daniel Larison). In particular, he seeks to warn of the dangers of authoritarianism that he detects lurking at the heart of this radical philosophy.

Linker engages in no little amount of misdirection and sleight of hand by attempting to link arguments by Bacevich – including his critique of American irreponsibility in the realms of personal morality, finance, and militarism – exclusively with aspects of Catholicism that, for him, represents the end station on the road the “paleos” propose we travel. The attempt to forge this link is so strained that it really doesn’t deserve much further comment. That he thinks a critique of moral, financial and military irresponsibility – aimed at conservatives and liberals alike – can be dismissed by attempting to paint on it the facade of Church scandal reveals most deeply Linker’s fears that he can’t really argue with the substance of Bacevich’s points.

Still, there is an important point in Linker’s argument that does bear consideration – namely, that “paleo” conservatism (a term I don’t at all like, in large part because it suggests something that was large, lumbering, is now extinct, and had small brains to boot) has at its base an authoritarian dimension. It is peculiar to be painted with this brush, particularly given the widely shared mistrust toward centralization and “bigness” that pervades the thought of the arguments that Linker points to. Critiques by Bacevich, Larison, and others against the pervasive military mobilization and imperial ambitions of America hardly seem an endorsement of authoritarianism. Arguments for fiscal responsibility, for thrift and living within one’s means may strike some as “authoritarian,” but I think most would conclude that it would be preferable to our current financial situation. Linker’s fears of authoritarianism would seem to boil down to his fears that someone will seek to restrain him from exercising personal moral (and, based on his examples, specifically sexual) license. This is an argument always certain to rally liberal forces, as certain as demands to rein in “judicial tyranny” are sure to energize conservatives. But it really, really misses the point.

The three examples – not exhaustive – offered by Bacevich are deeply connected. Each of them speak to the modern American inability to govern appetite. They rest not on a call for the imposition of authority – how could one demand authority to suppress the imperial impulse? – but seek the encouragement of self-government and self-control. Such arguments rest on a fundamentally different conception of liberty than that assumed by Linker: not the absence of restraint, but self-government resulting in freedom from the self-destructive slavery to appetite.

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