The American Conservative

As always — but even more so than usual — I have piles of books on my desk and strewn throughout my apartment. The review pile by itself is fairly hefty, with volumes by Bill Kauffman, William F. Buckley Jr., Alan Crawford, Dan Flynn, and Paul Gottfried. Some of the reviews are for quarterlies, so it may be a while before they appear in print. (On the other hand, I have one or two pieces already queued up to appear in the next month or so. Will post details as soon as I know they’re out.)

On top of that, I have various bits of research reading ongoing at the moment. In what spare time I have left, though, the book that has my attention is Carl Oglesby’s Ravens in the Storm: A Personal History of the 1960s Antiwar Movement. Actually, I’ll review it somewhere or other eventually too, if there are any editors interested. Or maybe I’ll see if I can get a magazine interested in a longer essay on the student Left and Right in the 1960s. Oglesby was a leader of SDS, for a while its president, and he made a point to learn about the anti-interventionist tradition on the Right. He even made the occasional appeal to YAF to join forces with SDS, which earned him denunciation from his Marxist colleagues. He wasn’t apologetic about it:

If it was an error, it was one I kept on making. I even put it into print at the end of my contribution to a two-part book Containment and Change, published in early 1967. The book had grown out of a “dialogue” with Professor Richard Shaull at Union Theological Seminary in February 1966. Shaull, whose specialty was the political history of Protestant theology, had recently discovered two historians who rang my bells and had talked about them a lot at the Union session. One was the liberal William Appleman Williams, and the other was the conservative Murray Rothbard. They were both libertarians, and that is what I had begun calling myself.

That’s from page 120 of Ravens in the Storm. Unfortunately, SDS and its spin-offs kept getting pulled further and further to the left, deep into Marxism and revolutionary rhetoric (as well as some comical, but occasionally deadly, attempts at revolutionary action). The damage that did to the noninterventionist cause is still being felt to this day — not least in that the backlash against such radicalism made the Right even more militaristic than it had been before. The hawks on the Right could now always set up a cardboard sixties radical as a symbol of everything that patriotic Americans had to oppose. On the other hand, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go against the war with the activists you have, not necessarily the activists you want.

Update: I should have linked to Bill Kauffman’s interview with Carl Oglesby before now.

I’m a native of Missouri and went to college at Washington University in St. Louis, where I was involved in the College Republicans. For a time, I was secretary of the Missouri Federation of College Republicans, too. So I know how things work in the Missouri GOP, and I know that there are some utterly corrupt people in it. I wasn’t surprised when Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican, decided he wouldn’t be running for re-election. He’s a rotten egg.

Needless to say, the establishment in the Missouri Republican Party doesn’t like the idea of Ron Paul Republicans coming in and getting elected as delegates to the state convention. Ron Paul supporters won fair and square in the Show Me state’s recent caucuses, but the crooks infesting the party don’t want to accept the result, and they’re trying to disqualify the Ron Paul delegates. Here’s the Paul campaign’s press release on what’s going on:

ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA – The Ron Paul campaign has been receiving reports that Missouri GOP rules have been violated in the set-up and execution of several county Republican caucuses. Ron Paul supporters in Missouri have been attending their county caucuses and electing Ron Paul delegates to be seated at the Missouri Republican State Convention. However, there are concerns that many Ron Paul delegates to the Missouri Republican State Convention were disenfranchised and not properly seated.

On Thursday, March 20, campaign field director Debbie Hopper visited the Missouri state GOP headquarters to request a copy of the records needed to obtain the information to file challenges. She was told in front of witnesses that she could not view the report. To obtain the needed information, Ms. Hopper then used the contact information of county chairs listed on the state GOP website. On Saturday, March 22, the webpage containing their contact information had been removed.

The Paul campaign believes that a handful of GOP officials are playing machine politics and breaking their own rules to disenfranchise Paul supporters.

“The Republican party is in trouble and needs more participants in 2008, not less,” said campaign manger Lew Moore. “It makes no sense for Missouri party leaders to exclude and marginalize the new activists they badly need to work at every level this fall.”

Republican presidential candidate and Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s supporters have been highly successful in several Missouri counties. In St. Charles County (suburb of St. Louis), Paul supporters filled 241 of the 274 country Republican delegate slots. In Jackson County (Kansas City), Paul supporters filled 162 of 187 delegate slots. And in Greene County (Springfield), Paul supporters filled 72 of 112 delegate slots.

All of Stephen Walt’s 10 unpleasant truths about the Iraq War are important, but I’ll single out the tenth point for quoting:

10. The Iraq debacle reflects a broader pattern of failure among key American institutions. Although primary responsibility for the war rests with Bush, Cheney, and the neoconservatives who conceived and sold it, other important U.S. institutions performed poorly as well. Congress never debated the war in a serious way and it continued to back Bush’s policies long after their failure was apparent. Mainstream media institutions like the New York Times and Washington Post smoothed the path to war by parroting the administration’s sales pitch and giving abundant space to pro-war cheerleaders. Even more remarkably, mainstream media organizations continue to rely on the same “talking heads” and inside-the-Beltway pundits whose judgment has proven consistently wrong since 2002. The implication is deeply troubling: if Americans do not learn from this experience and hold those responsible accountable, the Iraq debacle will not be our last.

We would all be in a much better position if the neocons and the Bush administration really did bear sole responsibility for the Iraq debacle. But Walt is right to point to the complicity not only of Congress but also of the supposedly “liberal” mainstream media, which showed no skepticism toward the war at all. Quite the contrary: the New York Times‘ Judith Miller was indispensable in whooping up the case for war, and the Washington Post did not exactly acquit itself honorably, either. The rot in American institutions goes beyond the neocons and the Bushies — though they’re quite bad enough. And in John McCain — a longtime favorite of the mainstream media — Republicans have found a candidate who will be even worse than Bush.

I have a new piece up at Taki’s Magazine in which I take a look at the efforts of neocons Ramesh Ponnuru, Joseph Bottum, and James Hitchcock to win over the antiabortion movement — and why pro-lifers should reject them and follow the lead of Ron Paul and Benedict XVI instead. Check it out.

John McCain has the delegates he needs, but Ron Paul is still working to call the GOP back to the noninterventionist, small-government principles it had in the days of Howard Buffet and Robert A. Taft. Here’s Newsweek‘s Sarah Elkins’s interview with Dr. Paul from last Friday, in which he shares his thoughts about party unity (never at the expense of principle), Ralph Nader, and more. And here’s a report on some funny business going on in my native state, Missouri, where Ron Paul supporters showed up in force for the Republican caucuses. Jared Craighead, executive director of the MO GOP, doesn’t want to let Debbie Hopper, national field director for Ron Paul 2008, have a look at the reports from the caucuses — even though the deadline for challenging the reports is coming up on Tuesday. It reminds me of the kind of dirty tricks the Louisiana Party played.

Meanwhile, former campaign staffers are at work on some very intriguing post-campaign projects. But mum’s the word on all of that for now…

It’s amazing what you can find on Google Video. This is the Academy Award-winning (yes, really) documentary about Karl Hess, who was one of the founding editors of National Review and a key Goldwater speechwriter — and who later became a New Leftist and an outspoken (as well as tax-resisting) libertarian. A very interesting figure, though I can’t say I’m impressed with the film, which won the 1981 Academy Award for best short documentary.

I think I’ve described Hess in the past as a “crunchy libertarian.” You’ll see why in the documentary:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-574553336386396499&hl=en]

For good measure, here’s a link to Hess’s best-known essay, “The Death of Politics.”

I had no idea that the great economic journalist Henry Hazlitt was indeed related to the great essayist William Hazlitt. Turns out, according to this archival Time article about H. Hazlitt succeeding H.L. Mencken as editor of the American Mercury, William was Henry’s great-great-great uncle. I’m grateful to Scott Lahti for bringing this to my attention.

Jeff Taylor (not to be confused with Jeff A. Taylor, or other Jeff Taylors) is one of the most interesting Jeffersonian-minded political scientists/philosophers around. His review of Joel Johnson’s Beyond Practical Virtue: A Defense of Liberal Democracy Through Literature furnishes some evidence to back up my claim. Johnson’s book pits what Taylor calls “the anti-liberal, anti-democratic leanings of Thomas Carlyle, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence” against James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, and William Dean Howells — a match-up of aesthetic aristocracy vs. liberal democracy (sort of), though I might have wished Johnson were talking about “Jeffersonian republicanism” rather than “liberal democracy” (Taylor would prefer “Jeffersonian democracy,” I think.) Actually, what I favor myself is “liberal aristocracy.” But in any case, Taylor has written a thoughtful review of an intriguing book.

In addition to his Beyond Practical Virtue review, Taylor also has another new article on-line, an interview in which he talks about America’s five-years’ war (and counting) in Iraq. And his 2006 book, Where Did the Party Go?, is well worth a look in its own right.

Postcript: I should have mentioned Taylor’s endorsement of Ron Paul, which Dylan Waco helpfully reminds me about.

After drafting this post, I googled around a bit to see if anyone else had used the phrase “liberal aristocracy,” and in particular whether anyone else associated one figure I had in mind — Jacob Burckhardt — with the phrase. Not in that order, it turns out, but reverse the terms and one of the first things that pops up in a search for “aristocratic liberalism” is … a book about Burckhardt (as well as Mill and Tocqueville). In the American context, the archetype for aristocratic liberalism probably has to be John Randolph of Roanoke.

Tying in somewhat with the discussion of Jim Webb below, here’s Andrew Bacevich’s conservative case for Barack Obama.

I’m not going to join the Obamacons — 2008 seems like a good year to vote third-party — but I’m rooting for Obama against Clinton and McCain.

Postscript: There’s one more round of Webb blogging here.

Jim Antle responds at 4Pundits to my critique of his article on Sen. James Webb. A few quick replies of my own: Antle says that I “concede” and “agree with” him that Webb isn’t an economic or social conservative. That’s true in the same sense that I concede and agree with him that the sky is blue. Webb campaigned as a social and economic liberal; he’s voted as a social and economic liberal. The point of my original rejoinder was that there’s nothing surprising here. Antle argues that Webb is like the Daniel Patrick Moynihan of the Right. Yes, ok. But we knew that in 2006.

Jim raises several valid new points in his reply to me: why all the paleo emphasis on Webb when certain other Democrats elected in 2006 are also, like Webb, antiwar and pro-2nd amendment? Jim and I agree (or am I “conceding”?) about the answer: as Jim writes, “Webb’s past political incorrectness, stated and implied, on some of these cultural issues is a big part of the answer.” Or as I said last time, we found the “cultural” conservatism of Jim Webb appealing — understanding, as I took pains to point out, that this “cultural” conservatism actually is about culture and not politics. And in general, as Jim might agree (or concede), Webb is a more colorful, interesting figure than Tester.

Now we get into some points of disagreement. Jim writes, “After agreeing with my argument that Webb is neither an economic or social conservative, Dan finds it ‘strange’ that I would bother to cite evidence for this claim.” Specifically, what I found strange was that Jim would cite the Club for Growth and Family Research Council congressional ratings as his evidence. Jim’s well aware of the defects of both groups. And again, you don’t need to consult a James Dobson scorecard to know that Jim Webb is not a social conservative: Webb told us that himself in the ’06 campaign. Where’s the story here?

To my question, “Would Jim, or other paleocons, rather see more Santorums and fewer Webbs?” he replies, “On some issues, yes. On other issues, no.” That’s not an option we get to choose, unfortunately. As I said last time, if Pat Buchanan were running against Jim Webb, I’d vote for Buchanan. Instead, it was George Allen running against him. Did paleos makes the right choice in rooting for or voting for Webb? I think so. And I would guess that Jim still thinks so, too. There was no antiwar social conservative candidate in that 2006 race, and, unfortunately, there probably won’t be in 2012 either.

Jim makes a few accurate criticisms of Webb on the points where Webb is supposed to be strong: on the Iraq War (Webb hasn’t voted to defund it) and civil liberties (Webb supported FISA). “I don’t want to be too hard on Webb,” Jim writes, “even in those cases he tried to make the best of a bad situation and these are all complicated matters on which his predecessor would have been much worse.” That’s all fair enough; this is where Webb has not performed the way paleos might have expected. But then Jim asks, “wouldn’t it be better for paleos to focus on electing more people like Ron Paul and Jimmy Duncan … ?” I wasn’t aware that Jim Webb was running against Paul or Duncan in the 2006 senate race. Jim knows, on the basis of what he’s written himself, that one can root for Webb in a Virginia Senate race while rooting for the much better Ron Paul and somewhat better Jimmy Duncan (who has his own FISA problems) in Texas and Tennessee. There’s no conflict there. Jim hasn’t shown, or even tried to show, that paleo support for Webb detracts from support for Paul or Duncan.

(That argument can be made: paleos surely do cost themselves credibility among conventional conservatives who may not be die-hard Bushies when they support guys like Webb. Trouble is, conventional conservatives haven’t been listening to paleos in the first place.)

Jim concludes by asserting “the Democratic Congress has mostly been a disaster” (true) and “The fact that Bush and the Republican Congress were no great shakes either is no argument for us to be positively supporting these people.” But paleos were not positively supporting “these people” — we were supporting Jim Webb, who was better than George Allen on the most important issue of the day. We were hoping for divided government, but that’s not the same thing as “positively supporting” Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, except in the roundabout sense that a vote for Webb was an indirect vote for making Reid senate majority leader. Jim concludes, “If the best we can come up with in politics are people we sort of like personally, think are authentic, and have made conservative contributions to the culture until we distracted them by putting them in office, then maybe there are better things for us to be doing with our time. Like stamp collecting.” But that’s not the best we can do, and Webb was better than that in 2006, since he was right on a few issues, including the crucial issue of the war.

Jim knows as well as I do that you can’t get everything you want in real-life politics. If you get mixed up in politics at all, unless you happen to be able to vote for Ron Paul every time, you’re sooner or later going to have to make some tough choices between candidates on both sides with whom you disagree on key issues. Then the question becomes, do you vote for the Family Research Council and Club for Growth candidate or do you vote for the antiwar candidate? Paleos made their choice in 2006. Jim’s article and his response to my feedback don’t convince me that they made the wrong choice.

Is Jim Webb our Daniel Patrick Moynihan? Well, so what if he is: the neocons were right to support Moynihan, who gave them what they wanted on some of their key issues. Paleos who support Webb are making a prudential judgment, too. That’s politics.