Wolverines!?!
Update: Riehl World View has Levin’s response. It’s fascinating.
Every now and then I have to lower myself to deal with the undeveloped minds of kooks like Rod Dreher. I don’t know Dreher and as best I can tell, most nobody does. He has a column for a Dallas newspaper and created his own blog site, from where he writes love letters to himself and wonders why his brilliance is lost on the multitudes (while, of course, claiming to represent them and speak for them).
It continues in this vein. Read it all if you have a strong stomach. (via Dreher)
Robert Stacy McCain dissents from Rod Dreher’s choice of conservative icons (all in refrence to Mark Levin’s ravings that i noted over the weekend). First McCain asks, “Wendell Berry? WTF? Since when is Wendell Berry an icon in the conservative pantheon?” Thankfully, Berry isn’t remotely a conservative in a sense that McCain would recognize—a talk-radio addled high school sports fan, marching behind warmongers and supply-siders while shrieking “Wolverines!” R.S. ought to put aside his normal reading and peruse some Bill Kauffman. It would be an education.
McCain then states:
Russell Kirk once said, in a lecture at the Heritage Foundation, no less: “Not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Only a real troublemaker, a mixer, would have said such a thing. Kirk was a cultural eccentric, a man who cherished his status as an outsider, an anachronism, disdaining all things modern and “mass.”
I can’t imagine how he equates Kirk’s statement with Levin telling a caller that “I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.” The big difference I notice is that Kirk’s statement has actual content. I also note that Kirk was addressing a conservative audience and criticizing a part of the movement. Hardly consistent with shouting “Wolverines!” as if politics were no more than a team sport.
P.S. I must admit that I liked McCain’s description of Dreher as “the bearded Church Lady,” and I’m guessing that he hasn’t read Dreher’s Becoming Barbarians.
I seem to be the only person who has not seen “Red Dawn,” for some reason.
Me, I think Berry’s more conservative–or at least more intellectual–than Levin, Limbaugh, and all those other guys put together. Give me “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community” over “Liberty and Tyranny” any day of the week!
“Liberty and Tyranny” from a guy who berated Ron Paul every chance he got. Pass.
Stacy McCain seems to epitomize the death of paleoism, that is, its reduction to talk radio jingoism minus the overt philo-Semitism. But isn’t that just Ann Coulter?
[...] #5: McCain responds to Rod. Clark Stooksbury responds to McCain responding to [...]
Not only is Levin a boor but I amazed some radio producer thought Levin, whiny, nasal New York-accent was a “radio voice”.
Berry is in the ISI Dictionary of American Conservatism. But then so are TR and Bryan; Joe McCarthy and Gene McCarthy; Abe Lincoln and Jefferson Davis; Henry Clay and John Calhoun….everyone is a conservative!
I always thought Robert Stacy McCain was what you could call a “paleosympathetic” movement conservative. He does write for TakiMag. On what was the “paleosympathetic” label based? I think he is against the Iraq War although I don’t know for sure. Was he friendly to Ron Paul?
While Levin’s anti-RINOism is helpful, he cannot be separated from his unrepentant jingoism. If RSM is a non-interventionist he needs to make that clear when he defends Levin.
Obviously McCain and Levin do not know the history of the conservative movement very well. Wendell Berry is a direct intellectual descendant of the original American traditionalist conservatives, the Southern Agrarians.
Russell Kirk is acknowledged as a central figure in the conservative movement and the dean of the traditionalist school. Kirk believed in order and tradition and hierarchy and authority and faith and was a champion of Edmund Burke and the Federalists. He has long been forgotten by the mainstream Right. Just because he dared to criticize the neocons in that speech before the Heritage Foundation (which was published by THE conservative student organization, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, in a collection of Kirk’s speeches entitled “The Politics of Prudence) and abhorred modernity his philosophy and ideas should be jettisoned? What, has Stalinism come to the conservative movement?
Rod Dreher should be commended for attempting to bring traditionalist conservatism out of the ivory tower and into popular esteem. Levin would do better to shut his mouth once in a while and read something besides Ann Coulter and Weekly Standard op-eds.