The American Conservative

On NRO the other day, the estbalishment Right's sometime immigration maven fantasized about colonizing Mexico:

Does Schlesinger actually think the Mexican War was a bad idea? I suppose we can debate its origin. As for its outcome, it seems indisputable to me that it made possible the spread of liberty over a large portion of North America. The tragedy is that the United States didn't grab even more territory back when the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed — today, Baja California could be like a southwestern version of Florida, Monterrey could flourish like Phoenix, etc. Do the ends ever justify the means? Seems to me that in 1848, they sure did. Good thing Schlesinger was not a member of the Polk administration.

But why stop at Baja California? Why not go all the way down to the Tierra del Fuego?

What Miller has given us is a good example of why Latin Americans (also Europeans, Middle Easterners, Asians, Africans, and just about everyone else) don't much like the Yanqui. In order to make the world more like Phoenix — Miller might as well have said Dallas or Houston — the United States should run roughshod over other countries' sovereignty and other people's property rights. The ends, as Miller admirably admits, justify the means. We'll invade your country and seize your land for your own good, so you, too, can have the privilege of living in flourishing exurbs.

The Washington City Paper has put together a chart showing the Washington Post's uncritical (to say the least) editorial positions toward Bush's war and intelligence-cooking. (Hat tip to James Bovard.)

David Gordon dissects it.

Is Tony Blair, who by clinging to power until 2009, as the tabloid News of the World now says he will, might just cost his party the next election.  Under Gordon Brown, now chancellor of the exchequer and Labour heir presumptive, the party could expect to coast to victory. It's certainly hard to see David Cameron, the Conservatives' Blair Lite, leading his party back to power — unless Blair ("Worse Than Bush," as Geoffrey Wheatcroft says) lingers on.

Peregrine Worsthorne offers his own vote of no-confidence in Cameron. He writes on the First Post website:

As a result of the Thatcherite revolution, men and women with the necessary qualities – trustworthiness, truthfulness, courage and loyalty – to run that kind of paternalist show no longer exist; have been bred out of the system. At least Mr Blair, the hollow man incarnate, reflects that reality to perfection, while Mr Cameron – shades of Benjamin Disraeli – rings both false and out of date.

Ironically, then, if Blair did cost Brown the election, the new Prime Minister — assuming Cameron survives that long — would be a watery Tory Blairite.  A miniature poodle, you might say.

Still in St. Louis, but I have survived my swim across an ocean of gin and should be back to normal (or at least Washington, DC, far though it is from normal) later today. 

At the dinner for the graduating conservatives / libertarians / anti-leftist types, I gave an ex tempore talk on Paul Elmer More (cribbing from this Modern Age essay), Phyllis Schlafly (another alum of Washington University), and the campus's long-running mini-Woodstock, WILD (which stands Walk In, Lay Down).  I was in favor of all three, attempting to tie them together with the theme of "tradition."  Even a mini-Woodstock, non-conservative in origin and practice, can be a tradition well worth conserving.  And so it is.

Little to report from Nellyville so far — the festivities have yet to begin.  I did get to drop by the excellent used bookstore on the Loop, Subterranean Books, and was pleasantly surprised that even though it's been a few years since I was a regular customer, I was recognized — the proprietor even made a point to ask me if I had my discount card, which indeed I did.

A well-spent $60 netted me a copy of Leviathan (my old one is in storage), biographies of Jefferson (by Gilbert Chinard), John Wilkes (Louis Kronenberger), and Lewis Mumford (Donald Miller), the Clyde Wilson-edited Essential Calhoun, and a two books on 17th and 18th century English politics.  Even the internet is no substitute for a good used bookstore.

The weekend takes me to St. Louis and back to my alma mater, Washington University (also Paul Elmer More's alma mater, I was recently delighted to discover) for the 8th Annual Ronald R. Jackups Jr. Leadership Dinner, a boozy tradition I helped institute that honors conservative and libertarian students of the graduating class. Titanic inebriation might interfere with my blogging schedule — then again, it might also produce some surprises.

I'm very fond of the Wash U environs. On the Delmar Loop you'll find a Walk of Fame with stars for Nelly and T.S. Eliot. As the website says:

Here along Delmar are all the things human beings have to have: old books, new books, hardware, good beer, arts and crafts, fresh oysters and fresh ground coffee and fresh bread, fruits and vegetables that you can pick up and shake and tap, newspapers, fresh flowers, movies, music recorded and music played live, hummus and sushi and barbecue, the delicate and colorful works of ethnic cultures and baseball cards.

As a grad student I lived halfway between the university and the Loop, within about a five minute's walk of each, in a building built as a hotel in 1904 that still had an old-fashioned elevator with a folding iron door that had to be opened and closed manually. To me, that's civilization at its best.

A blistering op-ed from Craig Shirley in today's Washington Post, "How the GOP Lost Its Way":

The immigration reform debate has highlighted a long-standing fissure in the GOP between the elitist Rockefeller business wing and the party's conservative populist base. Whether the two groups can continue to coexist and preserve the Republican majority is increasingly doubtful as conservatives begin to consider — and in some cases cheer — the possibility that the GOP may lose control of Congress this fall.

He outlines the populist vs. establishment tensions in the GOP that this blog has been yammering about for a while. He also illustrates one of the perennial weaknesses of the populist Right — wishful thinking. "The revolution of 1994 has been killed not by zeal but by a loss of faith in its own principles," he says, but that isn't true. The revolution of 1994 was always less than it seemed — Newt Gingrich had little in the way of principled objections to big government, and those of the Republican freshmen class of '94 who did were swiftly sidelined, defeated in their re-election races, or co-opted. From the start, power was its own top priority.

I suspect that Shirley is right, though, when he says that "The tragedy is not that we are faced with another fight for the soul of the Republican Party but that we have missed an opportunity to bring a new generation of Americans over to our point of view." It's no tragedy, but the Republicans certainly have lost the goodwill of a lot of intelligent young conservatives — many of whom are now ex-conservatives. I'm often surprised to come across the blogs of casual acquaintances who were once program officers at conservative youth organizations and have now become trenchantly critical of the GOP's ways. (Eric Langborgh, for example, was a program officer with Accuracy in Academia; Gideon worked for the Leadership Institute's student publications division.) This shouldn't worry the GOP too much, though. There'll always be careerists and opportunists enough to replace critically-minded defectors.

The numbers still show an uphill struggle for the Democrats if they are to retake the house — they need a pick-up of 15 seats, which is a pretty tall order. National Journal suggests that the Dems have done better than expected with recruiting candidates for second-tier seats, though — and expresses some surprise that approval ratings for Congress now are lower than those for the last Democratic Congress were at this point in 1994. I thought that part was pretty well known; and of course, while Clinton was tremendously unpopular in many parts of the country then, his ratings were still above the 33 percent that Bush now claims. (Clinton was at 47 percent nationally in November 1994.)

The National Journal story explains what the Democrats' second-tier success might mean:

In our current list of the top 50 House races, we've had a hard time ranking slots 20 through 50 because of the relative success of the Democrats' tier-two recruiting.

From Ohio-15 and Arizona-05 to Pennsylvania-07 and Florida-08, the number of solid second-tier Democratic targets is growing.

At some point, if the GOP numbers get worse, none of us will be calling these second-tier races. But flash back one year and not one of those four was seriously on anyone's radar.

A new book has come my way that reproduces in one of its appendices a table of conservative and liberal credenda from James Burnham's 1959 work Congress and the American Tradition. Take a look at Burnham's last two items:

12. Conservatives hold that the private life of the individual, as opposed to the destiny of the nation or of society, should be the focus of metaphysical, moral, and practical interest.

12. Liberals feel that an expanding sphere of government invovlement — in social and cultural life as well as in the economy — results in the best mode of life for people. Thus, expansion of governmet activity aids in the attainment of a good life.

13. Conservatives favor Congress over the executive branch of the government.

13. Liberals favor the executive branch, with its administrative bureaucracy, over Congress

Even at the time, quite a few conservatives would have objected, and surely did, to the wording of point 12, but Burnham — who was no libertarian himself, not by a long shot — was being descriptive, and the conservatives of the late '50s retained a good deal of the anti-statist flavor of the Old Right. "Individualist," understood in opposition to "collectivist," was still the self-designation of choice for many on the Right. It was what Bill Buckley called himself, and the principle youth arm of the nascent conservative movement was the Intercollegiate Society of Individualists (now called the Intercollegiate Studies Institute).

Hardly anyone could object to item 13 — the roots of modern conservatism lay in opposition to FDR's presidency, and committed conservatives remained enemies of executive power even with Eisenhower in the White House. National Review began, in part, as an organ for conservative opposition to Ike and did not endorse him for re-election (though it didn't endorse anyone else either — even then, NR liked to equivocate). And of course the John Birch Society warned of Communist infiltration of the executive branch — JBS founder Robert Welch suggested that Eisenhower was a conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy — and counted a few congressmen among its members. At almost all levels, from the most respectable insiders to the periphery, there was profound suspicion among conservatives toward the president and executive branch.