The American Conservative

According to Rod, Limbaugh loathing has jumped the shark and he may be right, especially since Rush Limbaugh will be in the soup again in the near future—he can’t help himself.  His allies, however, keep making themselves look ridiculous by trying to turn this fiasco into a positive; as in this post where Glenn Reynolds projects his own rage onto the President:

THE POLITICS OF HATE: Dems Incite Death Threats Against Limbaugh. And Limbaugh’s already had to call the bomb squad to his house. That’s their approach. Marginalize, then brutalize.

When will President Obama speak out against this hatred and extremism? Probably never. But since it’s been established that this sort of thing happens via close coordination between the White House and Media Matters, etc., there’s no denying responsibility now. I call upon the President to denounce his supporters’ hateful violent rhetoric, to promise not to engage in or encourage it again, and to apologize to Limbaugh for stirring up this cesspit of hatred among his followers. A President is supposed to lead, not incite violence

What is lacking in this post or any of the links is evidence that the president or the Democrats are inciting death threats against Limbaugh. The post from Big Government that Reynolds links cites comments from Facebook—some indeed threatening, others just nasty. It has nothing to suggest these comments result from anything other than a reaction to Limbaugh’s own bile.

Reynolds doesn’t give a link for his bomb squad claim but I assume he is referring to this story:

Palm Beach police spokesman Fred Hess says the item investigated Thursday afternoon turned out to be an electronic plaque sent by a listener of the radio talk show host’s program as a “business opportunity” for Limbaugh. It concerned the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth.

Hess says no charges will be filed against the sender because no crime was committed. He says the sender was very apologetic.

As Reynolds says; “marginalize, then brutalize.” Whatever.

I like to imagine an alternative universe where the mouthpiece for movement conservatism possesses a keen intellect and a mordant wit, instead of being a cretin like Rush Limbaugh (and I’m pulling my punches here for H‘s benefit).

My alt-universe Limbaugh would have eschewed schoolyard taunts and instead of relied on the Sage of Bogue Falaya whose Lost in the Cosmos anticipated Sandra Fluke‘s testimony. Walker Percy wrote,

Western Man is promiscuous because something unprecedented has happened. As a consequence of the scientific and technological revolution, there has occurred a displacement of the real as a consequence of which genital sexuality has come to be seen as the substratum of all human relationships, of friendship, love, and the rest. This displacement has come to pass as a consequence of  a lay misperception of the physicist’s quest for establishing a molecular or energic basis for all interactions and of what is perceived as Freud’s identification of genital sexuality as the ground of all human relationships.

A letter to Dear Abby:
I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him. (emphasis added)

If  Limbaugh had cited Percy instead of channeling any random, dull-witted high school sophomore; then rightwingers like Dana Loesch and William Jacobson wouldn’t have had to waste their energy on lame attempts at damage control.

Update: I edited out an extraneous word that I put in the Percy quote.

Matthew Spalding, reviewing Hilldale College president Larry Arnn’s The Founders’ Key in National Review, quotes him as asserting: “The way we talk, the way we stand, the way we dance or sing — all are influenced by the laws of our land and the principles behind them, and our laws and principles spring from these two documents,” meaning the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

“Influence” is a nice, vague word. Let’s be concrete: neither the Declaration nor the Constitution is meant to have anything to do with how we talk, stand, dance, or sing, and it’s absolutely false that our “principles” spring from any two documents. This is proposition nationalism of the most totalitarian — and wooly — sort.

It’s also the kind of thing that gives Straussianism a bad name. The rest of Spalding’s review is unobjectionable, but there is a serious crack in the would-be governing philosophy of anyone who thinks that the habits of daily life should be, let alone are, the product of political planning and ideas. Note well the connection between this way of thinking and the project of democratizing the Middle East through “regime change.” Change the regime and you change the life of the people, it’s that simple. All you need is a written constitution and some fuzzy notions of natural rights. Men’s and women’s souls and traditions are clay. Nothing could be less Burkean.

Today is Lou Reed’s birthday: make like Vaclav Havel and crank up the Velvet Underground to just say no to this vision of politics over life.

The great social scientist whose “Broken Windows” thesis revolutionized urban policy died today. Jesse Walker points to Reason‘s 1995 interview with Wilson as one of his “favorite cross-ideological dialogues.”

(Read more of Wilson at Unz.org and the Public Interest archive.)

A post by Scott Eric Kaufman at Lawyers, Guns and Money links to Matt Taibbi’s acerbic sendoff to the late Andrew Breitbart and suggests it will “will demonstrate which conservatives are competent readers and which aren’t.” Chalk Aaron Goldstein at The American Spectator up as an incompetent reader. He quotes the nasty part of Taibbi’s obit but leaves out all of the nice parts and whines about how mean liberals are to conservatives:

All of which raises two questions.

1. Why do liberal pundits delight in the death of conservatives?

2. Why do liberal pundits have no shame in publicly expressing these sentiments?

You can probably give the same answer to both questions. Liberal pundits hate conservatives and their hatred of all things conservative knows no bounds. I would also add that liberal pundits aren’t very mature.

Breitbart played hardball when he was alive by, among other things, dancing over Ted Kennedy’s fresh grave a few years ago. I held no particular animus towards Breitbart and take no joy at his premature death, but I see no reason to pretend that he was anything other than a nasty character who earned his hatred.

 

Grant Havers, a professor at Western Trinity University in Canada, has an important essay in the new issue of Modern Age, “Willmoore Kendall for Our Times.” (Don’t be fooled by the date on MA‘s cover — the “Winter/Spring 2011″ issue is the current one.) Kendall was unusual among postwar American conservative thinkers for being, as Havers writes, an outspoken “defender of the principle of majority-rule democracy.” But he came to have a refined understanding of majority rule in the American context: his seminal essay “The Two Majorities” spelled out the difference between a plebiscitary majoritarianism, in which the popular will is surveyed at a large scale and the public’s preferences are given immediate expression, and the structured, federal majoritarianism that was the hallmark of the American system. In the latter, the popular will is filtered by several delays and different modes of election, with the result that a more carefully considered popular mind is reflected. The “deliberate sense” of the people, not the immediate will, is what gets expression.

Kendall had converted to Catholicism by the time he gave the talks that became the basis for the book that best encapsulates his thinking, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (his co-author, George Carey, is also Catholic), but Havers correctly points to the Protestant underpinnings of what Kendall was describing: from the Mayflower Compact to the U.S. Constitution, the titular “basic symbols” were primarily drafted by Protestants who came from traditions in which congregations had great say over church governance. Even the Anglican church in America, especially in the South, gave the laity a much greater role than was customary in England — recall how one of the bones of contention leading up to the American Revolution was fear that George III would impose a bishop on America.

Self-government in church was as entrenched an American tradition as self-government through colonial legislatures, if not more so. And it’s easy to see how men who were accustomed to managing their spiritual affairs might think that they could manage their worldly affairs without king or Parliament. The tradition — the practice — of self-government held more authority for Americans than such institutions as crown, Parliament, or Anglican hierarchy. When the two types of authority came into conflict, it was clear where the colonists’ strongest loyalties would lie. (This is one reason why many in England already considered America de facto a separate country.)

It should also be obvious what political implications losing the ecclesiastical habit of self-government could have for America. In the 19th century, Americans were prone to extraordinary paranoia about Roman Catholics on this ground: because the Catholic faith subordinates the laity to a hierarchy, wouldn’t Catholics in politics subordinate citizens to the pope or a dictator? The answer, as John F. Kennedy was at pains to assure his countrymen as late as 1960, was no.

But as Protestantism has mutated into less structured congregations — and more charismatic congregations, often ruled quite personally by celebrity pastors — and as religious practice in general apparently declines, have Americans also lost the experience that made political self-governance possible? That federalist, structured majoritarianism that Kendall valued so highly was, even as he wrote in the 1950s and ’60s, losing ground to the new plebiscitary majoritarianism, which is impatient with constitutional filters and demands a direct expression of the people’s will through the power of the president of the United States.

Rod Dreher has recently wondered whether the “Catholic moment” in American politics has passed. I’m among those who are skeptical that such a moment could ever have occurred: not only is this country quite liberal and individualistic, as Rod says, but its political structure at its core is Protestant. Catholic political theory has a hard time dealing with the American political system — despite a great many modern modifications, the Catholic Church’s fundamental understanding of how politics works was shaped by the practices of Christendom, by the existence of stable authorities who formally acknowledged the moral authority of the Church and who at least pretended to heed the Church’s teachings. The American public, by contrast, is not a stable authority — nor are the politicians who serially hold office — and neither the public nor the Constitution acknowledges the authority of the Church in anything except the fuzziest or most utilitarian terms. Presumably the mechanism by which a “Catholic moment” could be fulfilled would involve Catholic voters and sympathetic Protestants electing Christian politicians who would pass morally Christian legislation, while in the extra-political world Catholic-inclined minds would have great influence in the media and other outlets of civil society.

This is not a very plausible vision — the public is simply too large and too multifarious in its beliefs for anything like this to be a stable configuration. I doubt it’s even possible for a moment, but if such a thing came to pass, what would prevent it from cracking up again? The Catholic Church itself would crack up if it were democratic in anything analogous to the way modern America is. Read More…

I’m looking forward to reading William J. Watkins’s Judicial Monarchs: Court Power and the Case for Restoring Popular Sovereignty in the United States, but I’m skeptical of its premise. Among conservatives and libertarians, still smarting from the sting of busing and Roe and other outrages from 40 years ago, it’s conventional wisdom that the federal courts are out of control and dangerous both to popular rule and liberty. And in fact, the courts are dangerous — but only for the same reasons that the other branches of the federal government are.

Courts do not violate popular sovereignty when they overturn legislative acts any more than the United States Senate violates popular sovereignty when it refuses to cooperate with the House in passing legislation, or any more than the president violates popular sovereignty when he vetoes a bill. This is not because courts are necessarily correct but because even when they are wrong, they are still second-order popular bodies — chosen by the people at one remove through the appointment of the executive and approval of the legislature. (Strictly speaking, the Electoral College makes the presidency itself a popular office only by proxy, but taking that into account hardly vitiates the point.) It’s not as if judges take office on the hereditary principle.

The U.S. Constitution does not, and is not meant to, reflect a single, momentary popular will. The different terms of office for House and Senate and the different basis for representation in each chamber and for the presidency already produce a modulation of the popular will. It’s thus quite common for the Senate majority to embody a different popular will from that of the House, or for the president to embody one different from Congress. The whole of the people, understood across time, is theoretically the same, and the only basis for holding office ultimately lies in the choice of the people, but the decision-making process of government is structured and diffracted. It’s true that British courts have never had the power to overturn an act of Parliament, but we most certainly do not have a Parliamentary system, whose excellence lies precisely in the expression of a momentary and complete mandate from the people.

It’s perhaps not surprising that demands to rein in the judiciary often take the form of demands for structural changes in government, including such progressive panaceas as direct elections and term limits. (Ironically, some of the same people who want to elect judges directly also want to repeal the direct election of senators.) Such structural fixes are an escape from confronting the raw fact that the people themselves are responsible for the character of every branch of our government. The American people as a whole and over time — as reflected over time and in aggregate in Congress and the White House, as well as in the federal courts — simply do not care about liberty as much as libertarians do and do not care as much about virtue as values conservatives do. If they did, reform would be unnecessary: elections would already produce legislators and executives, who together would produce judges, in harmony with the wishes of the right.

The impetus behind such radical reform movements on the right is the feeling that liberty or morality is slipping away; there is no time for gradual improvement, we must have a revolution, and that requires changing the constitutional machinery to allow more direct and fuller representation of the popular will. But once the machinery of revolution has been built, what guarantee does anyone have that wise hands will hold its levers? What kind of popularly elected judges might we have wound up with right after 9/11? What kind of legal system will we have if every change in popular mood translates into revision of the fundamental law? The question isn’t whether the people should have a say in all branches of government, but how immediate and monophonic their voice must be. Read More…

This weekend Students for Liberty hosted the Fifth Annual International Students For Liberty Conference in Washington D.C. It was the largest libertarian student event in history, featuring students from across the world and a variety of speakers. As well as featuring breakout sessions on topics such as second amendment rights, political economy, public education, Austrian economics, and social media, the conference also included an exhibition hall that included organizations such as the Learn Liberty, The NRA, GOProud, the Cato Institute, and Young Americans for Liberty. What became clear throughout the conference was that while most of the students were fiercely uncommitted to party politics they all expressed sympathy with some beliefs shared in the conservative movement. Given the ideological tendencies amongst what is a growing voting group, it is remarkable that the Republicans are not engaging younger voters more effectively. Read More…

Don’t miss this episode of Bloggingheads.tv, where TAC‘s own Noah Millman talks with Conor Friedersdorf about the controversy over the HHS contraception mandate, what Noah’s doing at here TAC, and what’s wrong with Charles Murray’s new book Coming Apart.

(originally published at Antiwar.com)

CORRECTIONS BELOW*

Contrary to what some outsiders might believe, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is not a big happy tent for conservatives. Rather, think of the vaunted “CPAC” as a veritable planet of partisan uniformity, to which its predominantly college-age participants instinctively flock each year, their behavior, language and dress code all working off the same operating system they would be the first to proudly brand, Reagan 4.0.

Take gay Republicans. In year’s past, the gay rights group GOProud was a sponsor and had a booth and a tolerated, albeit strained, presence in the conversation. The American Conservative Union, which built CPAC over its 39-year existence, took GOProud’s sponsor fees gladly, as part of the full spectrum of Republican interests within the movement. But when the whining in the hive hit media saturation point last year, the ACU responded by shoving GOProud back into the closet, disinviting the group for the 2012 confab. No more debate about whether free speech and equality means gay Republicans at CPAC anymore. Door closed.

A lot of folks would like to see the same fate for the anti-interventionist strain of their conservative kin at CPAC. Especially those who can’t seem to get their heads or their backsides out of 2001. For them, the recession is just another justification to armor-up and keep the war machine humming forever, not to mention rattling the sabers at Iran and Syria and against what one CPAC panelist called an “Iranian Revolution 2.0” across the Arab world.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a fellow at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, the same think tank that has hosted hawks Richard Perle, Fred and Kimberly Kagan, Charles Krauthammer, Michael Rubin, Danielle Pletka and Bill Kristol, spent her opening remarks on a CPAC panel whining that there were conservatives in their midst who actually want to cut defense spending. The horror!

“If there was a liberal political action conference — let’s just call it ‘LPAC’ — I doubt there would be a panel discussing ‘Social Security cuts, bad or good for America,’” Mackenzie lamented, referring to the faint beat of dissent among the war drums at this year’s CPAC (that’s exactly five panels and/or speakers sponsored by the Committee for the Republic about reining in spending and intervention, out of the nearly 200 other events scheduled at the three-day conference.)

“We’re at war with ourselves on this issue,” she charged. “It’s one thing we need to be aware about as a family — a family of conservatives,” she added portentously, as though it were time for some Corleone-style tough love against their wayward kin, presumably those who read The American Conservative and Antiwar.com and support Ron Paul and just plain don’t “get it.”

According to a source who has his ear to the ground on these matters, CPAC organizers felt their social conservative base had been losing control over the conference in recent years (read: gays and Ron Paulites). They may have had a point — with the infusion of hundreds if not thousands of students bused-in by* supporting Campaign for Liberty and other libertarian groups, Ron Paul not only won the much-anticipated straw poll in 2010 and 2011, but last year his supporters were able to boo, shout, heckle and rattle both Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld as they took the main stage together. It was an unprecedented moment, taking place a day before Paul made a rousing speech, where he called for an end to overseas interventions.

This year, Paul came in fourth in the straw poll. Campaign for Liberty was noticeably absent, their usual full-of-hipster-swag presence leaving a huge gap in the libertarian element that kicked up all the dust in recent years. Seems they wanted to pour all their energies into Paul’s primary campaign* (a Campaign for Liberty reader tells us it did not skip CPAC to support the Paul campaign, but to put “all its resources into federal and state legislative fights and educational efforts, as well as to plan for the next LPAC”). Paul, who has not won a primary so far, skipped, too, citing his busy travel schedule, though the campaign trail didn’t stop the other Republican hopefuls still left from speaking at CPAC on Friday. Sen. Rand Paul, R-KY, Paul’s son, delivered remarks on Thursday, but he generally kept away from defense issues and instead focused on supplying the usual anti-Obama red meat.

So what was left? One could say a very unsophisticated, if not completely hackneyed, supercilious approach to foreign policy and national security harkening back to the old post-9/11 days. Here the muscular meets the fear-mongering, leaving little by the way of constructive conversation struggling for oxygen somewhere in everyone’s afterthoughts. Evidence of this could be seen in the straw poll, where national security issues were so low on voters’ priorities they barely registered.

I asked Christopher Lawton, a self-described Paul supporter, if he felt out-numbered this year in his non-interventionist views. He was manning a booth in the cavernous basement exhibit halls at CPAC (nearby, The American Conservative and Committee for the Republic bravely competed with rows and rows of slick corporate kiosks and tables draped by scrubbed-faced twentysomethings hawking military prowess and American exceptionalism). Read More…