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What If I Used A Bunch Of Hackneyed Slogans And Worn Out Cliches?

In that case, I guess my name would be Quin Hillyer.  Hillyer at his boilerplate best: And the conservative movement of Buckley and Rusher and Tyrrell and Blackwell and Weyrich and Viguerie and Kemp and Friedman, soon to be bolstered by Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett, and allied with Thatcher and Pope John Paul II […]

In that case, I guess my name would be Quin Hillyer.  Hillyer at his boilerplate best:

And the conservative movement of Buckley and Rusher and Tyrrell and Blackwell and Weyrich and Viguerie and Kemp and Friedman, soon to be bolstered by Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett, and allied with Thatcher and Pope John Paul II and a union leader named Walesa, along with thousands of other conservatives who kept the faith, all joined behind Reagan and, yes, used their power to start the world over again.

Start the world over again?  What nonsense is this?  Have you ever read such rot?  If any halfway decent conservative had ever been under the impression that Reagan, Thatcher et al. were trying to “start the world over again” in some sort of political messianism, he would have fled in the other direction.  The conservative ideal of renovatio is not one that presumes that the world can be started over from scratch, but that what was best in the old order can be renewed and restored and given new life. 

Once you get past the hilarious opening paragraphs of Hillyer’s piece, where he trots out a series of hypotheticals with the sense of profound meaning worthy of Bernard Henri-Levy (including this winner: “What if Karl Rove re-establishes his reputation as a political genius and designs a stunning political comeback for the president?”), you come upon a string of some of the lamest attempts at saving the sinking fusionist ship that you will ever see in your life.  The virtually content-free nod to Russell Kirk comes in the same breath as ridiculous praise for Giuliani, and immediately after he has invoked the pro-gay drag queen mayor he tells us that “Judeo-Christian values” are the “wellspring of our civic tradition.”  Except in an election season, when we need to get behind someone like Giuliani, who wouldn’t know “Judeo-Christian values” if they ran over him in the street.   Then we are treated to a horrifying hybrid: the “mind of Madison”! the “exuberance” of Kemp! “the courage of Churchill”!  You can hear the hybrid speaking now: “We shall never surrender the empowerment zones in our inner cities!” 

Why does the reader get the impression that Mr. Hillyer just grabbed a bunch of well-known figures from Anglo-American political history (though what Jack Kemp is doing wedged between James Madison and Winston Churchill, I could not tell you) and made a competely incongruous and patchwork list?  Oh, because that’s exactly what he did.  It reads like the dispatch from a Party Congress that has to make sure to acknowledge all of the representatives of each faction as a way of demonstrating official approval of all of the members.  It has the tone of a wartime propaganda poster: “Don’t forget the heroism of Comrade Zaitsev!  Not one step back!”  What a dreadful pseudo-paean to the departed President Reagan on his birthday.  What a hideous exploitation of the man’s memory.    

There is assuredly some irony in the fact that Friedman and Viguerie, to take two from Hillyer’s roll call of glory, had long since repudiated central elements of the Bush administration, whose decaying corpse Hillyer is clearly trying (with great difficulty) to lift up onto the high altar of conservative veneration.  The late Milton Friedman, may he rest in peace, rejected the Iraq war as the aggression that it was, and Richard Viguerie is rather upset with a great many GOP betrayals–hence his new website and book called Conservatives Betrayed.  Somehow I don’t think either one would want his reputation and past work to be summoned to lend aid to the likes of Scooter Libby and used on behalf of an absurdly ill-conceived increase of troops in a war that one of them regarded as essentially immoral.

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