So, things are not good today on Planet Michael Brendan Dougherty — you did read his excellent TAC piece, didn’t you? — for Jon Huntsman has abandoned his quixotic presidential campaign. Why did he flop, given that he’s very conservative on most things conservatives care about? I can’t sum it up better than Byron York:

A number of Jon Huntsman’s core positions were deeply conservative.  His pro-growth economic plan was nearly everything the Wall Street Journal editorial page could have wanted.  He was strongly pro-life.  Strongly Second Amendment.  Yet conservative Republicans stayed away from his candidacy in droves, and the few people who were attracted to the Huntsman campaign were moderate Republicans, independents, Democrats — and the media.

Why?  Huntsman’s problem was that, whatever his position on some key issues, he sent out political and cultural signals that screamed NPR, and not Fox News, that screamed liberal, and not conservative. Even though conservatives agreed with Huntsman on many things, they instinctively sensed he wasn’t their guy.  It wasn’t hard for them to figure out.

After reading MBD’s piece, I thought, “This Huntsman sounds like a guy I could get behind.” But every time I saw him on TV, it was all-meh-all-the-time. He doesn’t have the shiny glaze of pure smarm that Romney does, but he does have the Romney aloofness. That’s not a deal killer for me — but hey, I’m a right-winger who listens to NPR — but I can see why it would have done him no good among GOP primary voters.

More seriously, as MBD has tirelessly pointed out — check out his Twitter feed today — Huntsman’s actual record, and his actual policy positions, are very conservative! His image, however, was as a coastal-friendly moderate, something he did nothing to dispel. Plus, as I said, he was a dud on the stump, and that’s nobody’s fault but his own.

I don’t want to let Huntsman off the hook for the crappy campaign he ran, but this is an opportunity to grinch about something that ticks me off. Sometimes the cultural politics and the image politics of contemporary conservatism can be so frustrating. Why does it count against Huntsman that he’s a proven conservative, but one to whom liberals and moderates will listen? Why do we seem to love our candidates only insofar as liberals hate them? Why do we place so much value on candidates who hate the right things, who make the right enemies? Why are we embarrassed by, or at least suspicious of, certain accomplishments?

For example: I find that I am more bothered than perhaps I should be by that fathead Newt Gingrich’s crude assaults on Mitt Romney for his ability to speak French. I know, I know, he’s appealing to prejudice by painting Romney as a la-de-da, and besides, you will never fail in American (or British) politics by trashing the French. This is embarrassing, though. Admittedly, I engaged in some frog-bashing in the run-up to the Iraq War, and however much I regret that now, I hope that I respected the difference between disagreeing with the French government’s position, and despising France. Granted, I’m one of the small but dedicated number of conservative American Francophiles — bonjour messieurs Manzi, Frum, et Murray! — and I do come from south Louisiana, so take this opinion for what it’s worth, but here it is: I hold hating France and the French to be a sign of cultural backwardness. Much like hating Jews, I find hating the French to be not really about hating specific traits in the French, but rather hating excellence, especially in cultural matters. It’s about hating elitism, by which I mean despising excellence and achievement of a certain kind, usually cultural. Yes, of course the French are proud people, but they have so much to be proud of! Charles Murray decided he admired the French because they are the Americans of Europe. Excerpt:

As time went on, something struck me (besides realizing what a good time I was having). I have loved Europe everywhere I’ve been, but there was something oddly different about the French, and I finally figured it out: The French are Europe’s Americans. Describe the French, and you’re usually describing Americans.

Take the notorious French attachment to their own language. The French aren’t like the Germans, Dutch, and Scandinavians, whose English is often so perfect that their corporate executives can (and sometimes do) conduct their work in English even among themselves. The French think that the French language is special and helps define who they are, and want to hear French spoken in their own country. As an American who goes silently berserk whenever I hear “Press one for English,” I have no problem with that. Do you?

We complain that the French are infuriatingly certain of the superiority of things French. True–and it is a kind of pride that is rare in today’s Europe. A few years ago I published a book called Human Accomplishment that was largely a paean to the brilliance of the European legacy. When I lectured on the book before European audiences, I discovered that my listeners did not enjoy hearing me recite their story; but were embarrassed. They had bought into the notion that Western civilization–i.e., European civilization–has been a source of evil rather than a font of the greatest achievements in human history. I have never given that lecture in France, but I bet you wouldn’t catch a French audience reacting that way (except, perhaps, for an audience of intellectuals). The French are just as chauvinistically proud of their artists, scientists, and inventors as the stereotype has it. And as the stereotype of Americans has us.

We complain that, in foreign affairs, the French go their own way, ignoring the interests of everyone else when it suits their purposes. Well, yes. Like us.

I probably shouldn’t have mentioned geopolitics, because I’m talking about French people and American people, not about the policies of de Gaulle or Chirac. But after reading non-French accounts saying that French counterterrorism units are the best in the world, and seeing the scarily kick-ass troops who patrol the grounds of the Louvre, I am no longer laughing at jokes about French fecklessness in the war on terror. And after seeing a few of the World War I cenotaphs that may be found in almost any French town, and having counted the names of the dead and estimated just what proportion of the town’s male population they must have represented, I am no longer laughing at jokes about French courage.

So, much to my surprise–for I did laugh at those jokes before–I’ve become a Francophile. But it’s not as if I’ve fallen in love with some exotic foreign culture. The French are stubbornly independent, think theirs is the world’s greatest culture, do the things they do best better than anyone else, are irritatingly proud as a people but warm and helpful as individuals.

Remind you of anyone we know?

OK, look, I’m not asking you to admire the French, or the British, or the Irish, or anybody else. What I’m saying is that knee-jerk hatred of the French is a sign of anti-intellectualism, and anti-elitism of the worst kind. Conservatives are supposed to admire elitism, not in the sense of endorsing privilege for the sake of privilege, but in the sense of admiring excellence. Granted, crude Francophobia is far from the same thing as Jew-hatred, which has had incomparably worse historical repercussions for Jewish people and for civilization — please be clear that I’m not making an equivalence here! — but still, as a thought experiment, imagine how disgusting we’d find it if Gingrich trashed Romney for speaking Hebrew? For that matter, imagine how offensive it would strike us if Gingrich featured a clip of Romney speaking Spanish (as George W. Bush actually can do, and did do in public) as a sign of that he’s Not One Of Us.

It’s safe, I guess, to piss on the French, because no Anglo mobs are going to storm the La Madeleine chain in strip malls nationwide. Here in Louisiana, though, within living memory (though just barely), anti-French prejudice had real and deeply damaging cultural effects. In the 1920s, the state constitution was changed to forbid teaching in any language other than English in public schools. There are lots of stories of Cajun children being punished for speaking French. Knowing the history of what was done to French speakers, and French people, in this state by the English-speaking majority ought to make one bristle at contemporary Francophobia.

If we were living in the aftermath of the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars, I could easily understand Americans, especially American conservatives, having negative feelings toward the French as a people and as a nation. But today? Really? What do we have to fear or loathe from Bernard-Henri Levy’s pelt?

In this post, Peter Lawler explores the types of Francophobia and Francophilia in America today. For me, admiring France and French culture is almost entirely about admiring people who have mastered the art of living, and savoring, in ways that we Americans ought to aspire to do. But it’s a bit of this:

There’s a second kind of French envy that’s much less common: It is found among certain very admirable American traditionalist Catholics, many of whom are shaped in some measure by the “after virtue” philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre. Only the most individualistic currents of European thought, beginning with the Protestant dissenter Puritans, got to America. So from the very beginning America lacked what it takes to have genuine political or spiritual community. And then America morphed into being the most imperial of the modern nation-states–out to dominate the world with its particularly brutal form of capitalism. Lately we’ve been unjustly invading countries to protect our oil and to make everyone become democratic individualists just like us. There’s little to no hope for America. But Christendom–the way of life that existed in the Europe prior to the nation-state–might rise from the ruins of Europe. There’s even hope, in Europe, in what’s left of the Christian Democratic parties and in the universalistic, postnational aspirations of the EU.

This is overdone. “Little or no hope for America”? And I know of no conservative, traditionalist or not, who looks to the EU for a workable future, in large part because its mechanisms do tend to suppress the local and the particular, which is France’s glory, for the sake of the universal. But I take Lawler’s general point, in the rest of his post, that American trads who look to France and French Catholicism as a model are making the same mistake as American Evangelicals who read Lewis and Tolkien and mistake their views for the reality of life in contemporary Britain.

I do not therefore want to make a defense of the specifics of French politics and the French way of life. I don’t have enough knowledge to do so. I would only say, as someone who has visited France on a number of occasions, and who learned a lot about God from French cathedrals, about aesthetic excellence from French art, architecture, and food, and about the good life from French joie de vivre, that the knee-jerk French-hatred one often sees on the American right is cheap, embarrassing, and foolish, as is hysterical anti-Americanism in France. Still, one can hardly imagine that a French presidential politician would be seen as culturally inauthentic and unworthy of leadership because of his ability to speak English. Even hardcore French anti-Americans aren’t that stupid.

UPDATE: Thought experiment — it’s Saturday night in Louisiana, you’ve got a pocket full of money, and are ready to hit the town. Would you rather be in Monroe or Lafayette? Explain your choice.

UPDATE.2: Don’t miss this comment from the thread below:

I think our politics have become irrational and unexplainable because there is really no difference between the mainstream factions in both parties, but we desperately want to believe there still is to avoid cognitive dissonance. So we invent all of these ridiculous claims (like Obama is a socialist who is soft on terrorism) to keep the dream alive. And this has been happening for decades, but perhaps we are nearing the crescendo of this post-modern political theater of the absurd? Which president eliminated/reformed the old welfare system? Which president repealed the key regulation that paved the way for the current mess in the banking system? Which president signed NAFTA into law paving the way for destruction of middle-class jobs? Clinton, Clinton, Clinton. Who has dramatically increased drone attacks? Who killed Bin Laden? Who has watched-over the ever decreasing civil-liberties of American citizens? Who appoints Wall Street insiders to all high profile positions of influence in his administration? Obama, Obama, Obama, Obama. The fact is that recent Democratic Presidents (Clinton and Obama) have been better conservatives than the recent Republican presidents. It is all very confusing. Real conservatives don’t like Romney because he isn’t one. Quite frankly, I have no idea what he is. But if I had to guess he is and will be a corporatist, just like Obama. And what I mean by that is Obama, like Romney, know full well who controls the power in this country and they will act in their interests (not ours) to maintain their positions in a self-serving way. The only thing that will change if Romney beats Obama is the skin color of our president.