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Douthat vs. Kmiec

It is probably too late tonight to be starting a post on something this contentious, but now that I have started I suppose I should make a few points about dispute between Ross and Doug Kmiec brewing in the Slate forum on the future of the GOP.  This topic is relevant to what Ross and I […]

It is probably too late tonight to be starting a post on something this contentious, but now that I have started I suppose I should make a few points about dispute between Ross and Doug Kmiec brewing in the Slate forum on the future of the GOP.  This topic is relevant to what Ross and I were speaking about at Yale on Saturday at a very fine ISI conference on the future of American conservatism.  From time to time, I have been known to let my frustration get the better of me in blogging, to put it mildly, so I can hardly chide Ross for his expressions of frustration with Prof. Kmiec’s advocacy for Obama.  Like Ross, I find Obama’s record on abortion abhorrent (indeed, I am told that I am a theocrat on this question), and I am still unsure why Prof. Kmiec does not find it to be so, but he is hardly the first or only Obamacon who has misread Obama’s professorial style, accommodationist rhetoric and personal decency as the promise of something more.  At one point, I was as frustrated with what I considered standard Obamacon blindness to the reality of his views on civil liberties and foreign policy as Ross seems to be with Prof. Kmiec’s pro-Obama arguments concerning abortion, but the more I pondered the question the more it seemed to me that the GOP and mainstream conservatism must have suffered such a profound loss of credibility with so many serious people for a reason.  Understanding that reason may be a great deal more useful to the right than anything Prof. Kmiec has done on Obama’s behalf.   

As an antiwar conservative, I view phrases such as “useful idiot” with a certain ambivalence, as this phrase and others like it have been thrown at the antiwar right more than a few times to make scurrilous charges against us.  There has also been a tendency in certain pro-life circles in recent years to ridicule antiwar pro-life Catholics for daring to be more scrupulous concerning just war theory than their peers.  Prof. Kmiec clearly has lost confidence in the GOP, and for good reason.  The war and the torture regime, to name two things that have evidently deeply disturbed him and pushed him in the direction he has taken, were enabled not by his sort of so-called “useful idiots,” but rather by many stalwart, Republican pro-lifers who railed against abortion in one breath and in the next defended the degradation of human beings in the name of necessity.  That still does not make his argument for Obama persuasive, but I can understand why a serious pro-life Christian would very much want to find some way to break with the GOP decisively because of his convictions and not in spite of them.  Obviously, I do not see supporting the other major party as an option for conservatives, which is why I voted for Chuck Baldwin, but if the ruling party has proved itself not just unworthy but antithetical to one’s principles and it needs to be held accountable this option becomes possible.  

If I find Obama’s position on abortion to be be as disrespectful and hostile to human dignity as the right’s torture apologists, indeed more so, which therefore makes him unacceptable in my eyes, it is not so outlandish or bizarre to imagine that there are pro-lifers who understandably feel the same revulsion for the party that created the torture regime.  It is not so strange when these pro-lifers act to hold that party accountable.  Does that vindicate Prof. Kmiec’s arguments for Obama concerning abortion?  No, but it does put them in perspective.          

In fairness to Prof. Kmiec, I wouldn’t be surprised that he has his own share of frustrations with the way he has been summarily dismissed and belittled over the last several months.  Of all the Obama supporters on the right, Prof. Kmiec seems to have been on the receiving end of focused, fairly personal criticism to a degree that few others experienced.  From my perspective, his pro-Obama arguments are not persuasive, and I have said so many times, but then I do not find libertarian or antiwar arguments for Obama persuasive, either, because they consistently side-step the man’s record and actual policy views to tell us about other things–his temperament, his intellect, his purported respect for the other side, etc.  Perhaps they are right about these other things, and perhaps these other things will counterbalance what we find in his record and platform (and what we find there is terrible), but that requires a degree of trust that most of us on the right simply do not have and cannot quite understand.  Indeed, to lose trust in Republican leaders almost requires distrusting leaders in both parties, and one should not trust in princes in any case.  However, if you have to choose between the party that offers cynical lip service and one that openly disagrees with you and offers the opportunity of holding the former party accountable, it is not necessarily clear which party actually offers more.  Of course, there is scarcely any substantive common ground possible between left and right on abortion under the current regime, but this is the flip side of the frequently substance-free nature of conservative endorsements of Obama: the Republicans have failed so badly to deliver in so many areas that even pro-lifers who can realistically expect nothing but the worst from Obama support him all the same.      

I return again to my remarks from last week:

Far more important in the aftermath than coming up with new and amusing ways to mock the Obama endorsers is an effort to understand and remedy the profound failures that made this phenomenon possible before a major realignment does occur. 

Unlike Ross, I am extremely skeptical that pro-lifers have had anything to show for their support for the GOP and I doubt that they ever will have anything to show for it, except for small changes at the margins and empty praise for a culture of life that in many other respects Republican policies in recent years have done more to mock than uphold.  Perpetually deferred promises cannot sustain political loyalty forever.

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