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Goldberg and Oakeshott?

Intellectual honesty is more important than conservatism, so if you think leftists are right about something, you should say so. But I don’t think you should automatically conclude that what the leftist says is conservative. Individuals will always deviate from any orthodoxy or ideal. What we should not do is narcissitically label every deviation a […]

Intellectual honesty is more important than conservatism, so if you think leftists are right about something, you should say so. But I don’t think you should automatically conclude that what the leftist says is conservative. Individuals will always deviate from any orthodoxy or ideal. What we should not do is narcissitically label every deviation a new orthodoxy or a truer expression of that ideal. Conservatism needn’t demand total obedience. I think Michael Oakeshott would get my back on this one. ~Jonah “Lie for a Just Cause” Goldberg, Crunchy Cons

He really does make it too easy. Now that he is out of conservative ammunition, Goldberg has started playing the “You cite leftists!” card. This is an interesting window onto what’s really baffling Goldberg about this whole enterprise: Rod is articulating a conservatism completely different from Goldberg’s “ideal” (but remember, according to Goldberg, that Rod’s description of the “mainstream” as ideological and party-line is a strawman) and where it deviates from Goldberg’s “ideal” it must not be authentically conservative. That is, to put it mildly, a big leap.

His proof for deviancy (notice the language he uses there) is that Rod has sometimes cited men conventionally aligned on the left. He also cites Russell Kirk, who was originally a socialist and someone who never had much use for the “ideal” Goldberg seems to be defending and from which Rod is so terribly deviating. Moreover, when Rod claims these ideas as conservative (which seem to be entirely in agreement with things Kirk and the Agrarians might say), this is supposed to be narcissistic, because…well, I can’t quite make out why. As far as I can tell, it is narcissitic when Rod labels something conservative, but orthodox and proper when Goldberg does.

The last two sentences are the most bizarre. After dressing down Rod for his deviancy, he grants that such deviants will always crop up. But they are not allowed to say that their deviant beliefs are conservative–that is something that the big tent of Goldberg’s “ideal” conservatism will not allow. My guess is that this sort of miserable browbeating would have made Oakeshott ill, but I will leave that to others to judge.

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