The American Conservative

Those are the panelists and topic for the next Robert A. Taft Club event, Monday, June 12. Paul Gottfried of Elizabethtown College and the American Conservative Union's Donald Devine have a look at whatever happened to skepticism toward government, realism, resistance to multiculturalism and political correctness (not just putting Republican spin on affirmative action and mass immigration and gay rights) and all the other old mainstays of the Right that have fallen away in the Age of Bush.

7 to 9 pm, June 12, at 1101 North Highland Street in Arlington, Virginia. I'll be there, as will a host of other staunch conservatives and libertarians of the old-school variety. RSVP to Marcus Epstein if you'd like to attend.

Clark Stooksbury lets the ludicrous Stanley Kurtz have it. Kurtz is a prime example of how certain conservatives now display all the traits of the victim mentality conservatives once despised. They find oppression in every piece of pop-culture detritus that doesn't affirm their own worldview.

Kurtz is frequently in hysterics over a television show called "Big Love," which is apparently about polygamy, or what Kurtz calls "polyamory" (a bastard neologism of Latin and Greek roots, something else I can't stand). Like most people, I have never seen this show. It's on HBO — premium cable. I don't even have basic cable. And do you know why? Because I don't like the tripe that passes for mass entertainment. I have a hard time feeling oppressed by something that I don't watch and don't pay for.

But Kurtz thinks those of us who do the sensible thing and shut off the noise boxes ought to feel oppressed — be afraid, be very afraid:

Conservatives need to face the fact that our position in this culture is genuinely precarious. If we lose our hold on power, we’ll scream bloody murder on our outlets at everything the other side does. Yet those screams may only confirm our helplessness. The deep cultural dimension of our political battles makes an ordinary transfer of political power far more consequential than it was in the days when America had a bipartisan foreign policy and a broad cultural consensus.

How the blazes does Republican control of Congress, the White House, and the Supreme Court translate into a more conservative culture? If America has suddenly become more conservative in its film, radio, and television in the age of Bush, I haven't noticed. And if Kurtz means that a.) Republican governments can censor culture he doesn't like and b.) Republican governments forestall liberal efforts to use the force of law against conservatives in the culture, I have bad news for him: any aggrandizement of the state that can achieve a.) will, at some point in the not too distant future, also undermine b.) When you make the state a censor, you give it power not only to prohibit what is wrong but also what is right.

Kurtz ought to know that, and I'm sure he does. But the culture war has become the equivalent of the old bloody shirt, a symbol to wave about to raise up the voters while distracting them from what's actually happening in government. Bush and his pet Congress are in no sense conservative — not with their Wilsonian wars, their schizophrenic and feckless immigration policy, their trashing of constitutional and traditonal liberties, and their record-breaking spending. Conservative voters should not give them a pass just because they dislike "the Da Vinci Code."

The separation of powers has taken quite a battering under the Bush administration: the president's "signing statements" alter or even negate the plain meaning of laws passed by Congress; Bush attempts to employ executive-branch military tribunals instead of courts whenever possible; he doesn't bother to observe laws passed by Congress requiring executive agencies to get a court order for domestic wiretaps; etc. You know the litany.

The Republican-led Congress has been virtually supine throughout all of this, illustrating once again how political parties can short-circuit the entire idea of separation of powers. But one thing the executive branch has done lately really has lit a fire under House Speaker Dennis Hastert: the FBI raid of Rep. William Jefferson's office. This is a separation of powers issue that Congress actually cares about. The Washington Post quotes Hastert:

"Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this Separation of Powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by Members of Congress," he said. "Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe that there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years."

It's easy to scoff at this — the constitutional right of congressmen to accept suitcases full of money must be protected! — but actually, Hastert is right. One tip-off is that the Viet Dinh, chief author of the PATRIOT Act and a man who has seemingly never met a civil liberty or constitutional protection he would not abrogate, defends the raid, as the Post reports.

The raid is just as unprecedented as Hastert says, and there's a reason this sort of thing hasn't been done before: it does indeed have the potential for abuse as a means to intimidate the legislature. The FBI didn't explicitly violate Article I, Section 6 of the Constitution — "[Congressmen and senators] shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place" – but traditionally "Parliamentary privilege" and its analogs are given a wide interpretation. University of Baltimore Law Profess Charles Tiefer has been quoted in several sources spelling out what's at stake. He told a reporter for CongressDaily:

"Congress is frequently at odds with the FBI and the Department of Justice and other investigative or security agents working with them," he said. "It must intimidate critical overseers to know that the FBI feels they have the power to seize their file cabinets without even serving a subpoena beforehand."

And as he told the Washington Post: "The Framers, who were familiar with King George III's disdain for their colonial legislatures, would turn over in their graves."

Sorry for the light posting at the moment: I've been finished up a review of Gordon S. Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, which despite its banal title is not your ordinary Founding Fathers-fest. If all turns out well, it should be in the next TAC. Otherwise, it's one for the memory hole.

Thanks, by the way, to everyone who has left comments over the past few days (Brian Rapp, Paul Cella, R.J. Stove, and more). I'll have a few replies to your questions and remarks and whatnot soon(ish).

One of the great minds of 20th century American conservatism died on Friday. From the LA Times obit:

Peter R. Viereck, a historian, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and political philosopher who was spurned by the modern conservative movement despite his central role in its birth, died May 13 at his home in South Hadley, Mass., after a long illness. He was 89.

Viereck was the author of nine volumes of poetry, including "Terror and Decorum: Poems 1940-1948," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949, and "Archer in the Marrow: The Applewood Cycles of 1967-1987," an epic poem 20 years in the writing.

…Viereck also was a political thinker, whose provocative 1949 book, "Conservatism Revisited: The Revolt Against Revolt," defined the modern conservative movement.

"This was the book which, more than any other of the early postwar era, created the new conservatism as a self-conscious intellectual force," historian George H. Nash wrote in his 1976 book, "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America."

"It was this book which boldly used the word 'conservatism' in its title — the first such book after 1945. At least as much as any of his contemporaries," Nash wrote, "Peter Viereck popularized the term 'conservative' and gave the nascent movement its label."

Last year, Viereck was featured in a New Yorker magazine profile that renewed interest in his political writing from the 1940s and '50s. Called "The First Conservative: How Peter Viereck Inspired — and Lost — a Movement," the October 2005 article by Tom Reiss provoked heated reaction from the mainline conservative journal National Review.

"The true story is that Viereck was onstage during the creation of modern conservatism, but only in the opening scene," National Review political reporter John J. Miller wrote. "Then he walked away, never to be heard from again, except occasionally as a heckler."

That last remark, of course, speaks immensely in Viereck's favor. Though I disagree with Viereck on several points myself — his defense of the New Deal, for one — he is to be celebrated both for his humane conservatism and for his early sense of the dangers inherent in the populist-militarist spirit of the Cold War right. He wrote in the author's note to the 1962 edition of Conservatism Revisited:

Today the new conservatism has at least half way degenerated into a facade for either plutocratic profiteering or fascist-style thought-control nationalism, that same fascist nationalism against which the book [i.e. the first edition of Conservatism Revisited] had proposed liberal-conservative unity.

That liberal-conservative unity was both Lockean and Burkean. He was read out of the conservative movement for his heresies, including his criticisms of Joe McCarthy and Barry Goldwater. (Both of whom I like in some of their aspects; but the great arc of Cold War conservatism was away from liberalism — in the older sense of the word — and decency and toward bloodshed and hardened ideology.) A prophet is without honor in his own movement. See Tom Reiss's terrific New Yorker essay on Viereck from last year — "The First Conservative."

The Washington Post has an update on the declining fortunes of the House Republicans:

Stuart Rothenberg, editor and publisher of a political newsletter, now has 42 Republican districts, including [Virginia Republican Thelma] Drake's, on his list of competitive races. Last September, he had 26 competitive GOP districts, and Drake's wasn't on the list. "That's a pretty significant increase," he said. "The national atmospherics are making long shots suddenly less long."

The Dems need a net pickup of 15 seats to take back the House.

A few places have speculated on what happens if the Democrats take control this year with a slim majority. Does the GOP stage a comeback in 2008, perhaps with John McCain at the head of the ticket? My guess is that, in fact, no: despite his ongoing reinvention as a more conventional Republican, McCain's appeal to voters in 2008 will, I think, still be distinct from his party's. He would likely win on the strength of crossover voters, who will not necessarily be voting for GOP congressmen. I suspect as well — again, his reinvention notwithstanding — that there'll be enough ticked-off conservatives irritated by a McCain nomination that a demoralized base could also harm Republicans in '08 House races.

The Pew Research center takes a look at Americans' political leanings and, perhaps predictably, I'm horrified. 65 percent of the public "favor government guaranteeing health insurance for all"? 86 percent of those surveyed favor raising the minimum wage, including 80 percent of libertarians? Well, that last datum suggests that there's something fundamentally flawed with this study. It assigns categories to respondents not based on self-identification but on the basis of Pew's own notions about what constitutes "conservatism," "liberalism," "libertarianism," and "populism."

People were sorted into the four categories based on the combination of socially liberal (or conservative) and economically liberal (or conservative) answers they gave. To be included in one of the four groups, a person needed to provide at least two answers consistent with either the social or economic dimension and at least one consistent answer in the other dimension – while also giving no more than one inconsistent answer in each dimension.

In other words, liberals tended to give consistently liberal responses to the six questions we chose, while conservatives gave consistently conservative responses. Populists, by contrast, gave conservative responses to the social issue questions but liberal responses to the economics questions. Libertarians took the opposite approach, giving conservative responses to the economic questions and liberal responses in the social issue sphere.

The minimum-wage question was not one of the original six used to determine respondents' ideology. As a look at the Pew page will show, there are other results that are not just "surprising" but indicative of flawed methodology — only 37 percent of libertarians and 48 percent of conservatives think that Bush's tax cuts should be made permanent, for example. I'm prepared to accept that self-identified conservatives and libertarians might diverge from the picture of conservatism and libertarianism that emerges from an acquaintance with either ideology's literature — it's not inconceivable that self-identified conservatives may be less "conservative" than we think, for example. But the results are so far off from common-sense expectations on tax cuts and the minimum wage that a reasonable conclusion here is just that Pew has manufactured inaccurate categories.

It would be interesting to see how self-identified conservatives and libertarians match up against the categories assigned by Pew. My guess would be that most of Pew's "populists" would call themselves conservatives; and they do, according to Pew, self-identify as Republican or Republican-leaning by a significant plurality — as do Pew's "libertarians." I suspect the majority of the latter are actually just "moderate" Republicans, who could be expected to have "liberal" views on social issues while retaining mixed free-market opinions relative to "populists" and "liberals." Again, while allowing that self-identified libertarians might not fit the conventional stereotype exactly, it just defies reason to believe that 80 percent of libertarians support higher minimum wages and 63 percent don't think Bush's tax cuts should be made permanent.

General Hayden, former wiretapper in chief and now Bush's nominee to head the CIA, is used to giving orders and not used to such unmilitary institutions as a free press. In his confirmation hearings yesterday he said CIA officers "deserve not to have every action analyzed, second-guessed and criticized on the front pages of the morning paper." Press criticism is to be condemned, but Hayden would like to have a rapport with the American people; he wants the public's trust. And he wants Congress to sell the public on the agency's activities:

…I would redouble our efforts to act consistent with both the law and a broader sense of American ideals. And while the bulk of the agency's work must, in order to be effective, remain secret, fighting this long war on the terrorists who seek to do us harm requires [emphasis added] that the American people and you, their elected representatives, know that the CIA is protecting them effectively and in a way consistent with the core values of our nation.

I did that at NSA and if confirmed will do that at the Central Intelligence Agency.

In that regard, I view it to be particularly important that the director of CIA have an open and honest relationship with congressional committees such as yours so that the American people will know that their elected representatives are conducting oversight effectively.

I would also look to the members of the committee who have been briefed and who have acknowledged the appropriateness of activities to say so when selected links, accusations and inaccuracies distort the public's picture of legitimate intelligence activities.

Color me skeptical. We haven't seen much sign of "effective" Congressional oversight of Hayden's earlier wiretapping activities or of the various questionable methods employed by the CIA lately. Hayden assured the Senate intelligence committee yesterday that the CIA is bound by federal anti-torture statute and the Detainee Treatment Act, but when asked specifically about "waterboarding," he became evasive:

FEINSTEIN: On March 17th, 2005, Director Porter Goss stated to the Senate Armed Service Committee that waterboarding fell into, quote, "an area of what I will call professional interrogation techniques," end quote.

Do you agree with that assessment? Do you agree with Mr. Goss's statement that waterboarding may be acceptable?

If not, what steps have been taken or do you plan to take to correct the impression that may have been left with agency employees by Mr. Goss' remarks?

HAYDEN: Yes, ma'am. Again, let me defer that to closed session, and I would be happy to discuss it in some detail.

Obviously, Hayden would not be deferring this question to closed session if his answer were simply that waterboarding is unacceptable and that he intends to make that clear to CIA operatives.

Hayden's record and statements on data mining, torture, and the role of the press and of Congress don't exactly inspire confidence in his assurances that as director he will respect the law and Americans' privacy. If the Senate confirms him, it will be a measure of just what Congressional oversight amounts to under Republican control.

I'm not exactly George Will's biggest fan, though I give him credit for seeing sense on Iraq sooner rather than never, but his new column is refreshisingly pugnacious, and bracing, even if I have to disagree with a lot of it:

An aggressively annoying new phrase in America's political lexicon is "values voters." It is used proudly by social conservatives, and carelessly by the media to denote such conservatives.

This phrase diminishes our understanding of politics. It also is arrogant on the part of social conservatives and insulting to everyone else because it implies that only social conservatives vote to advance their values and everyone else votes to . . . well, it is unclear what they supposedly think they are doing with their ballots.

That's a lot tougher on the values voters than we're used to seeing from conservative columnists, and Will's just getting warmed up. For my part, though, I think he's wrong to say that every voter is a values voter — ok, it's true in the absolutely banal sense that even voting for what you think will simply be a government that deviates least from the letter and spirit of the Constitution amounts to affirming certain values, but there's a real distinction between libertarians and strict constitutionalists on the one hand and the let's-use-the-federal-government-to-make-Americans-moral/tolerant voters on the other.

Will continues:

Conservatives should be wary of the idea that when they talk about, say, tax cuts and limited government — about things other than abortion, gay marriage, religion in the public square and similar issues — they are engaging in values-free discourse. And by ratifying the social conservatives' monopoly of the label "values voters," the media are furthering the fiction that these voters are somehow more morally awake than others.

Has someone mislabeled a Steve Chapman column with Will's byline? This doesn't sound like "statecraft as soulcraft." Again, though, I have to disagree with him: one can have very strong Christian conservative values — or for that matter hippie values, or any other kind — and still believe that politics at the federal level, at least, should stay out of the business of soulcraft. Bush, Cheney, Frist, Reid, Hastert, and Pelosi shouldn't be crafting souls. Leave that to families, the Church, and local institutions.

Will's still not finished. He says the Federal Marriage Amendment, "would clutter the Constitution with the definition of marriage as between a man and a woman," and then he goes further still:

Arguably, governmental actions that did much to increase freedom and happiness in the past half-century were state laws liberalizing divorce. These made important contributions to the emancipation of men and especially women from mistaken marriages. Perhaps the most important of these laws — it was among the most liberal and was in the most populous state — was signed by a divorced governor, Ronald Reagan. What do socially conservative values voters make of that ?

This has to be somebody else. This is not George Will. Wow! He's gone farther than me; I'm not a defender of no-fault divorce. (Catholics should not get divorced at all, but that's a matter for the church, not any branch of the state. Non-Catholics I'd prefer not see get divorced either, but it's not a scandal to me if they do — and again, it's no matter for the state. But that said, a marriage under the state's laws ought to be a legally binding contract, not something easily abrogated by one party or even both parties. Though ideally I wouldn't have the state involved in marriage at all — the institution is in crisis because of the way government has defined and redefined it.)

Even the more neoconservative side of the old guard — don't forget Will's involvement in the mau-mauing of Mel Bradford — seems to have had it with Bush-era "conservatism." Jeane Kirkpatrick was making noises not so long ago along similar lines:

Like other conservative intellectuals torn between their sense of moral propriety and their rejection of meddling government, Mr. Kirkpatrick is conflicted about a constitutional ban on homosexual "marriage."

"Look, I am a serious Christian. I attend a conservative Presbyterian Church," she says. "I was raised as a Baptist. No, I don't favor the constitutional amendment. On the other hand, I don't want to promote same-sex 'marriage.' "

Obviously neither Kirkpatrick nor Will is at all a libertarian, but this outspoken distaste for federal meddling in morality is something new. Not altogether on the right track, but at least it's better than the deadly belief that George W. Bush is going to save America from hell.

Daniel Larison celebrates — and gives thanks for — the success of his website, Eunomia, over the past year. If you haven't been reading it, start. It's the best traditionalist conservative blog on the web. (Which might sound like damningly faint praise considering the competition, but never mind that. It's one of the best blogs of any kind, tout court.)