Readers of The American Conservative might be interested to hear that we will be at this year’s CPAC. Some of our staff will be at booth 1915 with subscription information and copies of this month’s magazine, as well as some past issues — plus exclusive TAC pens and notepads.

Some events of note sponsored by our friends at the Committee for the Republic include the following;

Thursday

- 9am in the CPAC Theater: Eisenhower’s Farewell to the Nation, a presentation of President Eisenhower’s farewell address, introduced by his granddaughter Susan Eisenhower, with Q+A to follow.

- 10am in the Truman Suite: More Defense For Less, featuring COL Douglas Macgregor, USA (Ret.).

- 2pm in the Virginia Suite: Too Big to Fail: A Quadrillion Dollar Exposure!, featuring Peter Wallison, The Honorable Boyden Gray, John Henry, and John Prout.

Friday

- 2:30pm in the Jackson Suite: Founder Roundtable: Where did we go Wrong?, featuring Mark Skousen, Bruce Fein, Bill Nitze, Tom Whitmore, John Henry, and James Henry all portraying a selection of our Founding Fathers.

Saturday

- 10am in the Truman Suite: America & Its Wars: John Quincy Adams vs. James K. Polk, featuring Bruce Fein and Roberty Merry as John Quincy Adams and James Polk.

Image: Shutterstock/razihusin

Novelist Graham Greene called The Spectator “by far the most elegantly written weekly in the English-speaking world” and went as far as to invite one of the most notorious drunks of London’s bohemia, columnist Jeffrey Bernard, to stay with him in Antibes. Both Greene and Bernard are now gone, but the Speccie has recently reached an all-time high in circulation—over 85,000 copies—which seemed to grate with our literary editor, Mark Amory, upon hearing the news. “I remember when our circulation was 12,000 and everybody used to read it.”

Actually, I joined the magazine as a columnist back in 1976, when it sold around 8,000 copies per week, but it seemed that everyone one knew did read it. Everyone that is at Oxford and Cambridge, in Westminster, in Kensington and Belgravia, as well as in London’s St. James’s clubland. Now at 85,000 copies, owned by the Daily Telegraph group, and a big money-maker, the Speccie’s sometime reactionary ethos is not as profound as it once was—who can forget its early support of the postage stamp and its prophetic thoughts on the motor carriage: the invention seemed likely to catch on.

Back in 1976, the Speccie’s headquarters were a Bloomsbury Georgian house next to the home of Charles Dickens. We have since moved to yet another grand house in a quiet street fifty yards as the crow flies from Parliament. As before, there is a large garden in the back where our annual summer party takes place on the first Thursday of July. These parties are notorious for the scrum they produce, an overflow of every writer, hack, politician, and London character imaginable. Prime ministers, at least since I’ve been there, attend regularly, although royals are never invited. Except for lunch.

Lunches at The Spectator used to be notorious for the mix they produced. They are held in the elegant dining room and such diverse characters as Spiro Agnew, Prince Charles, Dame Edna Everage, Alger Hiss, Albert Speer, and Dame Maggie Smith join in the frivolity. (I sat next to Dame Maggie a couple of years ago—her first words to me were “what in heavens is that pink thing you’re eating?”) Drink flows uninterruptedly, and when the legendary Village Voice editor Clay Felker came to lunch, he asked me how was it possible to produce the magazine after all the drinking. But produced the magazine has been, more than 9,000 consecutive issues and running.

The Spectator’s detractors—there are very few—complain that it’s elitist and edited only by old Etonians. Well, our answer is that there’s nothing wrong with elitism. I’ve served under seven editors, and only five of them had gone to Eton. The present editor, Fraser Nelson, was the first to ring me when he was appointed. “I’m sorry to tell you that I haven’t received a single call asking me to fire you,” was his opening. (Most past editors had received such requests, especially from the Israeli embassy.)

Needless to say, great names of literature and journalism have always gone hand in hand with the Speccie’s masthead: poet laureate John Betjeman, theatre producer Kenneth Tynan, playwright John Osborne, and novelists Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh, and Graham Greene were all contributors. Paul Johnson, the greatest living historian, was a columnist and now writes regularly about religion, gardens, fashion, and of course, history. Former editor Boris Johnson is now the mayor of London and tipped to be the next prime minister “if he can keep his pants on,” as a recent Speccie article warned.

A recent arrival—it was ten years ago, which is recent by Speccie standards—is Jeremy Clarke, who writes the “Low Life” to my “High Life.” Under the expert guidance of Fraser Nelson, Jeremy has reached super stardom as far as brilliant writing goes. The last “Low Life,” Jeff Bernard, had a play written about him and was portrayed by Peter O’Toole on stage. The play was a runaway success under the euphemism the magazine used when Jeff was too drunk to file copy: “Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell.” (Bernard died the same day as Princess Diana, and thus was deprived of the spectacular obituaries he had announced on his deathbed.)

The genius of the weekly is a simple one. Its writers continue to believe that they are communicating with a smallish, highly educated, and sophisticated audience. They write as if they were addressing their aunt Agatha, their eccentric and terrifying relation who got a 1st at Oxford at age 16 and who now lives in a crumbling stately home owned by her half-witted brother. Long may the Speccie reign.

If you begin with the idea that everyone is the same, and everyone therefore reacts to the same stimuli in the same way, you may be shaken by Eagleman’s claims. But the idea that some people are congenitally more inclined than others to crime or irresponsibility would not have been news to, say, Aristotle. Eagleman’s proposed remedy for such intrinsic lack of self-control also amounts to old wine poured into new skin. Consider:

The basic idea is to give the frontal lobes practice in squelching the short-term brain circuits. To this end, my colleagues Stephen LaConte and Pearl Chiu have begun providing real-time feedback to people during brain scanning. Imagine that you’d like to quit smoking cigarettes. In this experiment, you look at pictures of cigarettes during brain imaging, and the experimenters measure which regions of your brain are involved in the craving. Then they show you the activity in those networks, represented by a vertical bar on a computer screen, while you look at more cigarette pictures. The bar acts as a thermometer for your craving: if your craving networks are revving high, the bar is high; if you’re suppressing your craving, the bar is low. Your job is to make the bar go down. Perhaps you have insight into what you’re doing to resist the craving; perhaps the mechanism is inaccessible. In any case, you try out different mental avenues until the bar begins to slowly sink. When it goes all the way down, that means you’ve successfully recruited frontal circuitry to squelch the activity in the networks involved in impulsive craving. The goal is for the long term to trump the short term. Still looking at pictures of cigarettes, you practice making the bar go down over and over, until you’ve strengthened those frontal circuits. By this method, you’re able to visualize the activity in the parts of your brain that need modulation, and you can witness the effects of different mental approaches you might take.

Take out the technological frippery of “real-time feedback” and what you have is a prescription for building up good habits by the training of, yes, the will. Whether or not “will” is free, that’s one word for the power the frontal lobes exercise. Practice of self-control leads to greater degrees of self-control — what would we do without pop neuroscience?

If some people do lack all possibility of self-control, the policy responses that logically follow are not liberal at all. If criminals are blameless because they are powerless to check their impulses, it follows that they cannot be rehabilitated in conventional ways: barring something like the Ludovico Treatment, the most that can be done is to remove them from society for good, one way or another. There can be no hope of teaching or incentivizing them to forgo crime. Not that attempts by humane, liberal progressives to treat abnormal behavior by surgical or pharmaceutical methods are at all unheard of; the danger of pop neuroscience here is that it leads to medical and penological quackery. But Eagleman seems secure in the faith that whatever the mistakes of icepick era psychosurgery, today we possess really accurate and effective ways to diagnose and treat bad brains. Pfizer can sell us a cure.

It looks to me as if the science actually supports much older approaches to upbringing and punishment. Most people do seem to have a component in their constitutions capable of exercising restraint. Different theories have called it the impartial spectator, reason, frein vital, the superego, but whatever it is, it exercises only a tenuous control over baser impulses, which are not distributed equally among all people. Reinforcing the restraining element in the human constitution through exercise, imitation, and limited coercion is what the social order is all about.

There are hopeless cases, and perhaps science will show that there are far more of them than most of us realize. On the other hand, even sufferers from moderately severe forms of brain deterioration are not necessarily going to shred the social fabric. As Eagleman points out, “Fifty-seven percent of frontotemporal-dementia patients violate social norms.” He cites that datum to show the overwhelming correlation between frontotemporal dementia and abnormal behavior. But what about the other 43 percent? If certain illnesses could be as strongly correlated with kinds of crime, would that justify pre-emptively punishing (or “treating”) 43 out of every 100 such “suspects”? Conventional justice seems to me correct to wait for an actual infraction before meting out a sentence, even if we have an idea of what criminal predispositions certain people might possess.

I’m far from saying that biological science cannot be helpful in understanding crime and refining punishment, but the verbalists who write laws and read the Atlantic ought to tread carefully. They possess so many unsound ideas already about the power of tolerance and reasonableness to turn every sinner into a saint that couching old truths in pop-scientific lingo may be the only way to get them to re-examine their meliorist beliefs. I suspect, however, that their brains have not been accultured to accept traditional truths and, like Eagleman, they will draw all the wrong conclusions.

Foreign policy used to be the ceiling that prevented Ron Paul from breaking into the Republican mainstream. But, whereas Ron Paul criticizes U.S. interventionism in tropes familiar to the left—anti-imperial blowback, manipulation by neocons, moral equivalence—Rand Paul merely says America doesn’t have the money. “I think we do need to go back to a constitutional foreign policy,” he told another New Hampshire voter, “which would include some savings by not being everywhere all the time.” . . .

Then there’s his position on foreign assistance. Ron Paul has raised the specter of the “Israel Lobby,” voted against condemning the United Nations for its scurrilous Goldstone Report on the 2008 Gaza war, and declared America should be neutral between Israel and the Palestinians. Rand Paul simply says sorry, we can’t afford the aid. “We can’t give away money to any country, even to our allies,” he told me.

It will be interesting to see how long this lasts. I predict it will end shortly after a Republican president moves into the White House, or perhaps when said president decides to start a war.

Mamet’s liberalism, as he characterized in in the Voice indeed sounds brain dead. “I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.” His conservatism doesn’t sound particularly compelling either. Andrew Ferguson quotes from a Mamet lecture at Stanford, in the Weekly Standard profile:

Higher ed, he said, was an elaborate scheme to deprive young people of their freedom of thought. He compared four years of college to a lab experiment in which a rat is trained to pull a lever for a pellet of food. A student recites some bit of received and unexamined wisdom—“Thomas Jefferson: slave owner, adulterer, pull the lever”—and is rewarded with his pellet: a grade, a degree, and ultimately a lifelong membership in a tribe of people educated to see the world in the same way.

I can’t imagine that the major problem with higher education these days is an excess of Dead White Male Bashing, and Mamet’s assertion makes him sound as if his conservatism is only caught up through the early 1990s when countering Political Correctness was all the rage. Give him a few months and he may be talking about Paula Jones and Whitewater. Toward the end of his profile, Ferguson notes how well thought out Mamet’s political views are.

The conversion is complete: This is not a book by the same man who told Charlie Rose he didn’t want to impose his political views on anybody. At some moments—as when he blithely announces that the earth is cooling not warming, QED—you wonder whether maybe he isn’t in danger of exchanging one herd for another. He told me he doesn’t read political blogs or magazines. “I drive around and listen to the talk show guys,” he said. “Beck, Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved.”

In other words, Mamet is imbibing the lowest of talk radio dreck and then hectoring Standfordites for their groupthink. Mamet’s Liberalism may be in remission, but the brain-death still lingers.

All contributions of any amount are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law, so this is also a useful way to adjust your year-end taxes while helping TAC continue to deliver the best in traditional conservatism (and much more). Even the smallest gift helps sustain the magazine and website and gives us the chance to bring you even more thought-provoking content in the New Year.

If you enjoyed Jack Hunter’s recent “Conservative Case for WikiLeaks” or Jim Bovard’s “Assassin Nation,” Jordan Smith’s recent essay on John Lennon or George Scialabba’s look at T.S. Eliot, make a gift to TAC so we can keep going strong.

Over the past three months, readers have been unstintingly generous in contributing to bring the magazine back into print.  Your support has been a tremendous moral as well as financial boost. Now TAC is back. The new issue will begin showing up in bookstores and subscribers’ mailboxes over the next two weeks. And it features some superb material, including Justin Raimondo’s cover story on how Obama’s abandonment of his antiwar activist base doomed the Democrats; Ed Warner on Mexico’s narco-violence crossing the border into Arizona; Jim Antle on the Paul/Frank effort to cut the Pentagon budget; George Scialabba on the political and economic thought of T.S. Eliot; Paul Gottfried on Glenn Beck’s revisionist history; columns from Pat Buchanan, Bill Kauffman, and Bill Lind; and much more.

Needless to say, this is a good time to subscribe — and to give a gift subscription to a friend.  You can also help by making a tax-deductible donation. We still greatly need, and appreciate, your support.

Bottum was known for pieces like “The New Fusionism,” which proposed that pro-lifers should make common cause with pro-war neoconservatives. “There may be several ways to convince Americans to reject Roe v. Wade–but one of them is by remembering that the nation’s founding ideals are true and worth defending against the enemies of freedom around the world.” A silly idea, considering how many Americans believe that abortion rights are consistent with those “founding ideals”; also an evil idea, since an unjust war cannot be excused on account of any salutary developments it might foster at home. Consider the case from the other direction: would Bottum or any other pro-war pro-lifer say that abortion was justified as long as it helped prosecute the War on Terror? Until the justice of a war is determined, there can be no question of religious pro-lifers joining the bandwagon.

First Things has published some good pieces over the years, and lately several of its contributors have taken a turn against interventionism. A new editor could give the journal a clean break from the errors of the Bush years. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

I’m tempted to recite an old Stephen Tonsor quip, but I’ll refrain. What is significant here is that NR is providing what its readers want, and that evidently no longer includes celebrations of democracy as America’s greatest export. Whether any of the editors have come around is another question, but it’s worth considering that even the most devout apparatchik eventually had to face up to the Soviet Union’s collapse.

For years, the USSR embodied our worst fears—though after six years of service at the Moscow Embassy, including extensive travel around the Soviet Union, the wonder to me was that the Soviet system lasted as long as it did. Ronald Reagan only got it two-thirds right. Evil, check. Imperial, check. But the key factor in the Soviet collapse was irrationality. The Soviet system was structured to make people behave contrary to their rational self interests. The “new Soviet man” had to violate the norms of the system every day in order to survive. The contradictions were pervasive and understood by everyone. The system was structured on lies. When people began to speak the truth openly, the gig was up.

One feature in China’s favor is the comparative realism of Beijing’s leaders. The Chinese are a deeply proud people, and rightly so. But Chinese elites—both in public statements and in closed meetings—are remarkably candid about their country’s shortcomings. They note that two-thirds of China’s people live below the UN poverty line, and many still live below the UN extreme poverty line. This actually represents a stupendous achievement because, under Mao, most of the country was in the extreme poverty category. The fact remains that in GDP per capita China is not in the top 100 countries of the world.

Read on.

Also recently added: Patrick Deneen turns What’s the Matter With Kansas on its head and discovers the cultural roots of class war (“When Red States Get Blue”), while Jack Hunter argues that matters of war and peace mark the essential dividing line between neocons and traditional conservatives (“Why Foreign Policy Matters Most”).

If you enjoy these articles, consider making a tax-deductible donation so we can keep bringing you more.

The Republican base may not include very many philosophical non-interventionists or committed peaceniks, but there are plenty of “to hell with them hawks,” who may believe in punitive wars but don’t have much tolerance for prolonged nation-building adventures. Reaching these Americans is crucial to blunting the neocon agenda — they were with Pat Buchanan in the 1990s, will they listen to gravitate to Rand Paul today?

Also new at TAC, courtesy of our friends at TomDispatch.com, is William J. Astore’s essay on the overflowing sources of militarism and what we can do to cap them. And don’t miss yesterday’s spotlighted article from our August issue, Chase Madar’s report on how Obama has turned Guantanamo Bay from a single place into a state of mind.

If you enjoy these articles, please make a tax-deductible donation to support The American Conservative.

– Phillip Blond makes the case for Red Toryism. Drawing from Wilhelm Roepke, Hilaire Belloc, and the traditions of British conservatism, Blond offers an alternative to corporate capitalism and state socialism alike

– A symposium on Blond’s ideas and their applicability to the U.S., with contributions from Patrick Deneen, Nicholas Capaldi, and myself

– Philip Jenkins explains why there’s nothing uniquely Catholic about pedophilia scandals

– Steve Sailer on Joel Kotkin’s multicultural futurology

– Chase Madar on how liberal legal guru Harold Koh learned to love bomb power

– Jeremy Beer and Gregory Wolfe discuss the art of conservatism

Plus columns by Pat Buchanan, Bill Kauffman, and Stuart Reid, reviews by Patrick Allitt, Claude Polin, and Eamonn Fingleton, and much more.

Don’t miss out — subscribe to TAC. (And spread the word by giving a friend a gift subscription.)

If you haven’t done so already, subscribe today — or give a gift subscription to a friend.

On another occasion, a student complained that I “discriminated” against her because she did not offer sexual favors. When the department ombudswoman—a sensible lady of impeccable radical credentials—investigated, it emerged that the complainant resented not being invited to join my seminar: she assumed that women who took part must be getting (and offering) favorable treatment. I explained that it was because they were smarter. The young woman was flabbergasted: the only form of discrimination she could imagine was sexual. It had never occurred to her that I might just be an elitist.

The rest of the story is that the student was none other than Sarah Palin. OK, I made that last part up.