Good Luck With That
For some reason, Richard has penned a glowing defense of the antics of Mark Levin and Robert Stacy McCain. Richard mentions near the end:
Republicans have a tendency to sound like Ron Paul when they’re out of office, and then act like LBJ once they get elected.
The two people he defends in that post epitomize the kind of conservative that makes this possible: tribalistic in partisan loyalties, provocative without being interesting, utterly lacking in imagination and completely conventional in their political enthusiasms for pseudo-populist Republican politicians. Furthermore, to the extent that their pugnacity trumps any actual policy arguments or ideas and they embrace political organization centered on politicians that are “one of us” (e.g., Palin), pro-life welfarism, which Richard finds so intolerable, is exactly what their sort of conservatism will get you. They have little or nothing of their own to offer policymakers when it comes time to govern. They will be able to sneer at the meliorists who end up advising on policy, but they will not be able to do much else. Even when they see a foreign war to be a mistake, they will not have the conviction to oppose it openly once the war begins because of ridiculous nationalistic attachments to “strength” and projecting power. Conservatives have been caricatured as substituting macho posturing for political thought, while McCain takes pride in doing that practically every day of the week.
Richard concludes:
Whatever our disagreements, I’d take “Levin and puerile Jacksonians like Stacy” over the Crunchies any day of the week.
He is welcome to them, but he might consider that in preferring them Richard is not going to be pushing the current GOP to its doom. On the contrary, by choosing the cheerleaders and enablers of that party, he is helping to sustain the very things that he and his alt-right colleagues claim to despise.
Well Richard has shown his disdain for crunchy-cons and non Taki counter-cons before. His post a while back on the demise of C11 laid that foundation.
What I got out of Richard’s spiel was that he has a great affection for a-holes. A lot of middle-aged and younger conservatives seem to have completely absorbed the liberal counterculture values of the 60s to the point where their ideal man isn’t John Wayne or Ted Williams, it’s a right wing version of Abbie Hoffman and the other loudmouth boors of that era.
Mike
Richard is free to disdain whom he likes and he can defend his friends and colleagues as he chooses, and I don’t begrudge him his opposition to or criticism of Rod, Conor, C11 or even Andrew Bacevich and John Lukacs, much as I may disagree with his analysis in many cases. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me how one day he is willing the demise of the GOP, which McCain clings to as if it were a life preserver, and the next saying that he will take puerile Jacksonianism and the carny barkers, as Derbyshire memorably called them, over ideas that have a lot more to do with preserving and/or restoring a particular culture and way of life. Perhaps he is damning with faint praise. Since he loathes the “crunchies,” maybe his opinion of the others is pretty low but still slightly higher.
If he prefers them, I suppose I don’t quite understand what is going to distinguish the alternative right from the most annoying elements of the present-day mainstream right. It’s as if I called for radical decentralism, limited constitutional republicanism, neutrality and distributist economic arrangements, and then said that I would rather stand with Dick Cheney, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh than, say, Jeremy Beer. It wouldn’t make any sense.
Right – and I guess I wonder if it is that he’d rather stand with Levin et al really or if his disdain for crunchies is simply so high that he’d set aside even his hope for the demise of the GOP rather than take sides with them…
One of Rod’s lamer tropes is to overstate the hostility from the mainstream towards the various dissident conservatism. This episode is something of an exception since Rod and Conor are plainly right on the merits. But even here Rod and and Mark had no particular mutual animosity until Rod started it.
As Richard points out, for all its failures the mainstream Right still has inclination to fight for limited republican government. Some of our “champions” maybe aren’t quite as sharp as they used to be, or as good as they need to be. But I have no doubt what team they’re playing on. By contrast, the point of the dissident conservatives, is to repudiate any debt of loyalty to Greater Red State America. We can amuse ourself at the expense of the Hank Hills of the world if we choose, but without them there is no republic in America.
For the most part, I agree that there is not so much hostility as indifference. Even in Levin’s replies, the contempt is always expressed by saying, “I’ve never even heard of these people before.” Which he probably hadn’t.
I don’t think it’s true at all that dissident conservatives “repudiate any debt of loyalty” to what we would call Middle America. For the most part, we have become dissidents because we see how badly served Middle America has been by its supposed representatives. What we tend to repudiate are the spokesmen who pretend to serve the interests of “the Hank Hills of the world” while regularly backing policies that do no such thing. We all know who’s on which team. The problem is that the management and coaching are terrible and a lot of the “fans” regard acknowledging this as some sort of betrayal.
“For the most part, we have become dissidents because we see how badly served Middle America has been by its supposed representatives. ”
This is only secondarily true, if at all. The primary motivation was to get escape velocity from the intellectual gravity of the Bush Administration and Fox News. Accepting that motivation as legitimate (as I do), they’ve been blinded or coopted into the surgical removal of lower case republicanism in America.
With emphasis on coopted, by the way. I was on the StairMaster reading Time magazine a couple of weeks ago, and they published a symposium of 100 Important People in the World, the typical hagiography/conventional wisdom you’d expect from a newsweekly. In any case JK Rowling wrote the item for Gordon Brown. She praised the PM for refusing to scapegoat single mothers or people on the dole. I thought for a moment: that seems awfully dated. I don’t recall seeing much of that in public circulation for at least ten years or so. Then realized the reason why is pretty clear. The intelligentsia are all collecting their own forms of welfare, or under the Obama Administration, bailouts.
There’s several topical strands of dissident cons. Most of them are interesting and have important things to say. And the various groups don’t necessarily agree with each other all the time. But their primary loyalties toward their intelligentsia friends, who at this moment are as naked a class interest as any 19th century rail baron.
Spencer is right about one thing. There is a tendency among certain unaligned conservatives, represented by Conor, Dreher, Brooks and – most of all – Andrew Sullivan, to give the impression that the meanness of talk radio is some major obstacle for the incubation of a decent right. This analysis is not totally without merit, but it can be a problem insofar as it fixes our attention away from the central and onto the peripheral. The problem with Limbaugh and Levin and Hannity is not that they are too mean. Effective, well-placed meanness can be enjoyable and fun. Mencken was mean. Vidal is mean. Hell, Larison can be mean. The problem, as Derbyshire (no softy himself!) accurately explained, is that talk radio reliably stuck behind the travesty that was Bush. This is because talk radio heads, for all their whining about “cocktail party” RINO’s, actually crave relevance. (a point which RS McCain continues to overlook) They cannot break with the Republican party at all. No chance in hell. In fact, all this RINO talk is actually pro-Republican and therefore pro-establishment propaganda, because it locates fault in a politician or intellectual deviating from some mythically pure conservative vision which the Republican party has always upheld and defended.
I share some of Spencers reservations about the crunchies, but the idea that this leads to some solidarity with Levin strikes me as a false-antithesis: “I don’t like the crunchy con’s…ergo, Im becoming sympathetic to Limbaugh and Levin!” The final line, where he say’s he will
take Levin over Dreher, is totally meaningless, because Levin is not going to take him, or any other critic of military adventurism.
Nrmurra, I agree. Tone can be important, but it is what these people say, and what they don’t say, that matters. Take the episode in question as an example. Had Levin calmly, bemusedly declared (baselessly, from everything I can gather) that the caller hated America and then told her that her husband would be better as a suicide, it would have been no better. Indeed, had he not said these things in a fit of anger, it would have been far worse.
I don’t object to combativeness, and I have written on several occasions on why it is sometimes legitimate to express anger. At the same time, I think it is fair to say that I have been at my least persuasive when I have been overtaken by anger, and in the process I have not advanced my ideas as well as I could have done. There are several debates over the years where I failed to curb my anger, and as a result the other side in the debate was able to dismiss my claims more easily, and persuadable people were very likely lost along the way. The question shouldn’t be whether decent people can employ snark, sarcasm and biting criticism–I believe they can–but whether they are using these methods in the service of anything substantive and whether they know where the line between legitimate mockery and obnoxious vulgarity is.
Agreed. My use of the word meanness was meant
to be ironic as well as complimentary, which
may be hard to detect through written text. In
any case, my main point was that anti-talk radio
briefs should be either A) more precise or B) slightly less
priggish. Limbaugh and Levin fail because
they are too witless and conventional to honor the noble tradition of “snark, sarcasm and biting criticism”, not because
they adhere to it. Calls for a purified discourse frighten me, frankly. (McCain/Spencer does have a point about Russel Kirk, whose attacks against libertarians were pretty harsh).
There are lots of good ad hominem polemicists whose work is admirable. The greatness about Mencken was that he pissed off practically everyone at one time or another, whereas these talk radio clowns surround and armor themselves with a reflexively adoring audience, which no misfit or renegade of any appreciable talent would do.
[...] been sure I’d had the final word on Mark Levin, but with Daniel and Richard Spencer [UPDATE: and Clark Stooksbury] now falling on — and firing across — [...]