The American Conservative

The new issue of The American Conservative features an exclusive excerpt from Ron Paul’s forthcoming book End the Fed. You can read it on-line right now in PDF form by subscribing to TAC.

Also in the new issue: Michael Brendan Dougherty profiles Peter Schiff, the economic mastermind who predicted the crash and is now contemplating a move into politics; Andrew Bacevich examines our increasingly Soviet strategy in Afghanistan; one important philosopher and conservative thinker considers another as Kenneth Minogue discusses Michael Oakeshott; Patrick Allitt reviews John Derbyshire’s forthcoming We Are Doomed; and much more.

If you’re already a subscriber, consider giving the magazine for thinking conservatives to a friend or family member — it makes a great gift for Constitution Day.

I finally found a subject on which I can agree with Robert Stacy McCain. We both disdain National Review. But the similarity ends immediately. McCain doesn’t hate NR because it’s the home of dishwater-dull rightwing apparatchiks like Kathryn Jean Lopez and Jay Nordlinger. Instead he thinks that it’s a hotbed of intellectual snobbery.

Oh, the stories that D.C. conservative journalists could tell you about their dealings with National Review! Since I cannot breach any confidences, let me just ask you to imagine a D.C. press conference or discussion panel.

Mingling around the danish-and-coffee table in the back of the room, you’ll see representatives of all the various Right-side media: Washington Times, Human Events, American Spectator, CNS, etc., etc. Camaraderie and conviviality are the prevailing spirit — a spirit of which the National Review representative does not partake.

The National Review man is not a mere reporter, you see, but an intellectual! . . .

. . . the insufferable snobbery of the NR crowd is notorious, and even the most down-to-earth of them cannot resist succumbing in some degree to this esprit des snobs.

. . . the magazine’s repeated blunders under the Lowry regime — remember, it was Lowry’s NR which deemed Rod Dreher’s “Crunchy Cons” deserving of a cover story and later gave Dreher his own separate blog to promote that ridiculous philosophical cul-de-sac — have become an embarrassment.

I don’t attend D.C. rightwing gatherings and thus I never feel the sting of being snubbed by snooty NRniks. I do regularly check the Corner and occassionally scan articles on NRO. I acutally bought a copy of the magazine recently to see Jonah Goldberg’s remarkably thin article on energy. The only genuinely interesting piece in the issue was a review by Terry Teachout of the book What America read.

Back in the pre-Lowry days, NR occasionally featured writers such as Chronicles editor, Thomas Fleming. Prior to the Iraq war, it sometimes published Andrew Bacevich. They have been replaced by the likes of Victor Davis Hanson and Mark Steyn. Nothing to get snobby about there.

What do you know: Commentary summer intern, Adam Hirst, opens his Yale course catalogue, finds Mearsheimer & Walt’s “The Israel Lobby” (London Review of Books version) in a course syllabus and decides to blog about it – unfavorably, of course. The Israel Lobby does not belong in PoliSci 169, “Classics of International Relations,” Hirst contends, or in the course unit “Contemporary Realism.” First, The Israel Lobby isn’t a classic. Second, it isn’t realist. Third, there are more noteworthy realist texts that the professor should have chosen. Commentary readers will doubtless infer from Hirst’s post that left-wing Yale academics are busy glorifying the hated Walt & Mearsheimer duo.

Of course, neither Hirst nor anyone else has any clue why the professor, Bruce Russett, included The Israel Lobby in the syllabus. As it turns out, however, there is no reason to believe that the he thinks of “The Israel Lobby” as a classic or even as realist. A leading exponent of “democratic peace theory,” Russett is in fact one of Mearsheimer’s fiercest critics. (See their exchange here.) Rather than celebrate Mearsheimer, Russett may be including The Israel Lobby as an excuse launch into a withering critique of Mearsheimer’s work.

The actual syllabus for “Classics of International Relations,” which Hirst, with whom I have shared a cocktail or two at alumni functions, kindly sent me, supports this interpretation. Russett writes of one of his own books, published in 2001, that it “is too soon [to consider it] to be a classic.” (A reasonable judgment.) The essay version of “The Israel Lobby” was published just three years ago. Evidently, Russett is implying that it is not a classic either.

As for whether it is a contribution to “realism,” Mearsheimer and Walt have expressly acknowledged that The Israel Lobby is inconsistent with realism. Realism, they observe (for example here), doesn’t explain everything; in particular, it does not predict what particular follies an overwhelmingly powerful state such as the United States will choose to indulge in. A major IR theorist himself, Russett is surely aware that The Israel Lobby is not an example of realism. Likewise, Russett is surely aware that works by Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan – not to mention Mearsheimer’s own Tragedy of Great Power Politics – are better candidates as “classics” of contemporary realism.

Why then did Russett include The Israel Lobby at all? Russett writes in the syllabus that “we will try to situate each writer and work in its [sic] own political and social context.” Who knows what that means. Possibly, Russett hopes that students will learn to expose the great IR theorists as mere products of their time, with particular biases, blindspots and partisan agenda. If so – and there’s no way of knowing — perhaps he intends an uncharitable deconstruction of Walt & Mearsheimer. The reason, in other words, that his syllabus suddenly abandons the likes of Hobbes and Clausewitz in favor of The Israel Lobby is that Russett is planning a gratuitous trashing of Walt & Mearsheimer.

That explanation, however, doesn’t fit Commentary‘s narrative that sinister Ivy League academics are preaching Israel-hatred. Finding items to reinforce that narrative, no matter how implausible, is what interning at Commentary is all about.

A new issue of The American Conservative goes to press today. Don’t miss it — the September-dated issue includes a skeptical look (two pieces by Ted Galen Carpenter and John Laughland) at Americans’ love for global revolutions and protests; Michael P. Farris on what the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child means for your family; takedowns of Ben Bernanke and Lawrence Summers by the Cunning Realist and Dennis Dale; Paul Gottfried’s memoir of his father; Reid Buckley on why higher education produces bad writing; Sean Scallon on what the GOP can learn from Andrew Jackson’s war on the second Bank of the United States (hint: it involves ending the Fed); and much more, including columns by Pat Buchanan, Bill Kauffman, Stuart Reid, and Eve Tushnet.

The issue begins arriving in stores in about 10 days, but of course the best way to make sure you get all the goodness that is TAC is to subscribe. And if you enjoy the website, please donate to keep it growing. Even $10 or $20 dollars is a great help.

Dr. Rand Paul, that is. Pick up the August issue to read his essay on the army of lobbyists working to rip you off — and what can be done about them.

Of course, the best way to make sure you get this and everything else in TAC is to subscribe. Not only do you ge the print magazine, but you get instant online access to a PDF copy of the latest issue as well, plus all our archives. All for just 29.95.

Readers of this blog may enjoy Joseph Stromberg’s latest Freeman article on the land question.

The American Conservative returns to print this Thursday with the publication of our August issue — 52 pages of Pat Buchanan, Alexander Waugh, Peter Hitchens, Justin Raimondo, R.J. Stove, Kelley Vlahos, and many more, plus a Phil Giraldi intelligence scoop that you won’t want to miss. Subscribers can read the issue beginning on Monday, when it’s made available in PDF form ahead of print copies arriving in mailboxes and bookstores across the country.

In the meantime, though, all TAC fans can enjoy online exclusives from Michael Scheuer, Lewis McCrary, and, coming later this week, Jeffrey Hart (on Rick Brookhiser’s Right Time, Right Place). If you’d like to see more online content, consider dropping a few pennies into our donation page. The support we’ve received from readers has been essential to keeping the magazine going and helping us ramp up the website.

Is you dad a Republican? Get him The American Conservative and take him back to Goldwater, Robert Taft, and conservatism’s philosophical roots. Or is your dad a Democrat? Give the gift to TAC and show him that there’s a principled, not partisan voice on the Right. Or if your dad isn’t political at all, TAC might be just the thing to get him thinking about the state of the nation. (And if you’ve already given your father a subscription, you can extend it here.)

Books by TAC authors also make great Father’s Day gifts — and when you buy them through our bookstore, we get a percentage on every book sold, at no cost to you. (Even better, we get a commission on other items you buy at Amazon.com during a visit via a link from bookstore, too. It’s a great way to support The American Conservative while you shop.)

This week we continue to highlight some of the best writing from the American Conservative archives, with a focus on places. On the main page, you’ll find Bill Kauffman on Vermont (a great place for a front-porch republic), Peter Hitchens the happiest place on earth, Jim Pittaway on Burma’s struggles, Roger McGrath on the Golden State, and Robert O. Paxton on the neocon assault on la belle France — plus much more. Several of these pieces have not been on-line before, so be sure to check them out.

If you enjoy TAC — and especially if you enjoy it on-line — please donate to keep us going strong. Of course, you can also support TAC (and make sure you don’t miss a single article) by subscribing. Subscriptions make great gifts, too.

Next week we’ll be unveiling some new features on the website. Stay tuned.

Inspired by R.J. Stove’s article on Evelyn Waugh, I have been looking through Robbery Under the Law  again, and have come across, in the introduction, a very comprehensive credo that defined his conservatism:

“I believe that man is by nature, an exile and will never be self-sufficient or complete on this earth; that his chances of happiness and virtue, here,remain more or less constant through the centuries and, generally speaking, are not much affected by the   political and economic conditions in which he lives; that the balance of good and ill tends to revert to a norm; that sudden changes of physical condition are usually ill and are advocated by the wrong people for the wrong reasons…”

And so it continues for a page. I found myself signing up to the majority of its pledges . I throw it into the pot for two reasons: firstly it seems to be a preoccupation of Amcon bloggers to define their conservatism, and it might be helpful; secondly because I do not recognise this type of conservatism in the leader of the current Conservative Party of Britain, David Cameron. His response to popular rage at the irresponsible spending spree of our policians has been  to offer radical change and power to the people. We will be consulted over the internet, a fatal idea; we will be able to deselect sitting mps if they behave badly, a good idea in theory;  the whipping system that is used in the U.K parliament to ensure that party members vote in a block with their party will be  dismantled so that genuine debates on laws can be held in parliament. In this way laws can be scrutinized and emended before being effected. This sounds  fine but it would soon be subverted in practice. His worst and most dangerous idea is that we should be able to run local government by local referendum via the internet. If 5% of any given local population wants a referendum on some issue such as policing they can call a referendum, and we are all going to have to start pressing the buttons on our computers.  As if it is not bad enough being tyrannised over by a priggish and hypocritical parliament, a second layer of bossiness is going to be added to the burden that we carry, that of the interfering  power crazed neighbour.  This  profusion of  ideas which , if implemented, would overturn our existing constitution, would throw us Brits into a state of terrible confusion. These ideas are a smokescreen thrown up in a panic to give the impression that el Camarada Cameron is the man who can create institutions that will force our politicians to be more honest. The real truth is that our whole society needs to become more honest.

David Marquand in an excellent article in the Guardian links the petty venality of the british politicians to the economic crisis  and blames the two things on a moral turpitude in western civilization shared by all of us, rich and poor alike. This has been engendered by  a neo-liberal vision that “the unhindered rationally calculated pursuit of individual self interest in free competitive markets (is) not just economically efficient but also morally right.” this he says “bathed the flagrant disparities of reward that marked the neo liberal era in the odour of sanctity” and led directly to the greed of the householders, borrowing more than they could repay, of the bankers and their bonuses, and the politicians and their seedy house deals.