A Short Introduction
Dan McCarthy invited me to contribute to this blog two weeks ago, but posting has consistently slipped my mind since then up until now. Since this is a blog that is–to a certain extent–devoted to questioning what the right is, I think it is appropriate that I explain some of my experiences with that term.
I first became politically aware (at least in any meaningful way) shortly after the election of Bill Clinton. Despite still being in grade school, I was soon a committed conservative Clinton hater. And when the so-called Republican Revolution of ’94 rolled around, I was certainly one of the most excited eleven year olds in the country. While it was always obvious that the primary animating force for the right in the ’90s was an almost rabid loathing for the Clintons, it was still evident to me that there were ideas and principles like limited government, adherence to the Constitution, and a strong work ethic informing those political battles.
As the ’90s wore on and I matured, I began to doubt that those principles mattered more to the Republican Party and the conservative talking heads like Rush Limbaugh, who were so influential to me a few years earlier, than winning elections and political power. Additionally, and without getting into specifics, during high school I engaged in a number of activities that ran afoul of what most would consider to be “conservative behavior”. By the time Congressional Republicans squandered all their political capital on the quixotic Monica Lewinsky crusade, I no longer referred to myself as a Republican (although still occasionally as a conservative) and had found a new name for myself: libertarian.
My years in college only served to cement my distance from contemporary conservatism. First, I quickly became a much more radical libertarian, adopting the anarcho-capitalism of Murray Rothbard by my second semester. Second, I opposed the Iraq war, which further alienated me from the vast majority of the right. Third, I extensively studied the modern conservative and libertarian movements (which led to this article on Murray Rothbard and the New Left) and came to believe that American conservatism since William F. Buckley has been a schizophrenic movement, dedicated to a number of incompatible goals: small government and militarism, virtue and coerced “family values”, republicanism and empire.
So I’ve gone from passionate right-winger to someone who questions whether being right wing–as it is currently understood–is even possible without a high degree of cognitive dissonance. That’s where I’m coming from; feel free to take it into account when reading my subsequent posts.
What to Read Next?
Deciding what book to read next is a consistently difficult burden in my life, as it is for many bibliophiles, I imagine. And it’s something that never ends, a literary problem that keeps recurring, like some sort of sea creature that refuses to die no matter how many harpoons are shot at its eyes.
I’m not going to get into how, but I bumped across some tips in Allure magazine (slogan: “The Beauty Expert”) on how to choose a good book. Their tips? 1) Trust the experts. 2) Open up. 3) Borrow a favorite.
The third suggestion is terrible I think–I trust very few people with book recommendations. Most people don’t read much, and those that do rarely have my tastes.
But the first two are dead on. I am great believer in the eternal wisdom and beauty of the Great Books. So that’s a contstant list to go to. But I can’t always read classics, because my brain doesn’t work that way, and I need to know something post-1950. And that’s when the anxiety begins…
Hitchens in Athens (and Denial)
(Cross-posted at The Other Right)
Via Upturned Earth, Hitchens is in Athens. I’ll leave the historical criticisms to more competent parties, but I just feel the need to kvetch about this for a moment:
Don’t let me blast on too long about how absolutely heart-stopping the brilliance of these people was. But did you know, for example, that the Parthenon forms, if viewed from the sky, a perfect equilateral triangle with the Temple of Aphaea, on the island of Aegina, and the Temple of Poseidon, at Cape Sounion? Did you appreciate that each column of the Parthenon makes a very slight inward incline, so that if projected upward into space they would eventually steeple themselves together at a symmetrical point in the empyrean? The “rightness” is located somewhere between the beauty of science and the science of beauty.
I don’t want to be trite here, or to insert polemics where they might not belong, but to reduce the Parthenon’s aesthetic appeal to scientized beauty, as Hitch does here, is to misunderstand the building and its purposes. As incredible as it is from an architectural standpoint, the building’s original purpose was just as much about accord with the rest of the polis, particularly the city’s religious andpolitical life, as it was about the pure technical accomplishment. Those congruent rooftops? The sanctuary to Athena? The large quantities of money in the basement? It would be misleading to identify this place as a church (at least until it got made into one) but it would also be a mistake to deny that it was a place where the civic and religious orders of Athenian society intersected fruitfully. Yet addressing that possibility would throw quite a wrench into Hitchens’s devaluation of religious moderates, since it suggests a social order in which muthosand logos stand in a fruitful relation to each other, rather than their permanent irreconcilability.
All of which may be rather beside the point… This is an article about Athens, not Atheism. Still, you got to get your jabs in where you can, especially when the pickins’ is this easy.
Saint Pius XII
Here we go again. “Jewish groups”, answerable to no one but themselves of course, are apparently trying to block the beatification of Pius XII. As with the partial rehabilitation of the Lefebvrists, this is their business how, exactly?
Anyway, as someone once said, “Tell a lie big enough…” In fact, Pius XII was first ever called “Hitler’s Pope” by none other than John Cornwell, in his 1999 book of that name, a thinly disguised liberal rant against John Paul II with the ‘thesis’ that the future Pius XII, while a diplomat in Germany, could have rallied Catholic opposition and toppled Hitler. Pure fantasy, like the origin of the whole “Pope supported Hitler” craze: the 1963 play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth, who was later successfully prosecuted for suggesting that Churchill had arranged the 1944 air crash that killed General Sikorsky.
Pius XII directly or indirectly saved between 8500 and 9600 Jews in Rome; 40,000 throughout Italy; 15,000 in the Netherlands; 65,000 in Belgium; 200,000 in France; 200,000 in Hungary; and 250,000 in Romania. This list is not exhaustive, and the Dutch figure would have been much higher had not the Dutch Bishops antagonised the Nazis by issuing the sort of public denunciation that Pius is castigated for failing to have issued.
After the War, Pius was godfather when the Chief Rabbi of Rome became a Catholic, and was declared a Righteous Gentile by the State of Israel, whose future Prime Minister (Moshe Sharrett) told him that it was his “duty to thank you, and through you the Catholic Church, for all they had done for the Jews.” When Pius died in 1958, tributes to him from Jewish organisations had to be printed over three days by the New York Times, and even then limited to the names of individuals and their organisations.
All of this is contained in works of serious scholarship by Margherita Marchione, Ralph McInerny, Ronald J Rychlak, and others, most recently the superlative Rabbi Professor David G Dalin.
Colonel Claus Schenk, Count von Stauffenberg, recently given the full Tom Cruise treatment, was a devout Catholic, with close dynastic connections to the Bavarian Royal House of Wittelsbach (whom the Jacobites would have on the Thrones of England, Scotland and Ireland), to the family of Saint Philip Howard (martyred Earl of Arundel), and so on.
In Austria, Hitler had murdered the Chancellor, Englebert Dolfuss, who in fact defended, on the borders of Italy and Germany, Catholic Social Teaching and what remained of the thoroughly multiethnic Hapsburg imperial ethos (to this day, numerous German, Magyar and Slavic names are found throughout the former Austria-Hungary) against both the Communists and the Nazis.
Yes, he was authoritarian. But look at his neighbours, and look what he was up against domestically. Imagine if a Fascist putsch in Canada or in the Irish Free State (where at least one was attempted) had coincided with very serious Communist and Fascist threats in America or in Britain. The American or British Government of the day would have been authoritarian, too. While the emergency lasted, it would have been right. In the same tradition was Blessed Franz Jägerstätter. Google him, people. Google him.
Examples of Catholic anti-Nazism could be multiplied practically without end. The more Catholic an area was, the less likely it was to vote Nazi, without any exception whatever.
Oh, and the present Pope’s Maths teacher sent him to get the Hitler Youth form, and then just kept it on file for him. “Thus was I able to escape it.” In other words, he was never in it. Whatever lie on the matter the BBC may have succeeded in planting in almost every media outlet on earth.
Sanctus Pius XII, ora pro nobis.
Time To Face Up
I have the dubious pleasure of finding myself in agreement with Nicolas Sarkozy. Face-covering (not head-covering, but face-covering) is incompatible with the conduct of British, as of French or American, social and cultural life.
Onwards in sympathy for opposition to usury, but also in total opposition to any according of legal status to Sharia law, to Muslim schools here (where my own Catholic schools have existed since a good thousand years before any other kind did), to polygamy, to male no less than female genital mutilation, and to the building of mosques with domes and minarets, which are triumphalistic manifestations of an Islamised society, culture and polity, and which were in that spirit added to former churches during Islam’s forcible overrunning of the Eastern Roman Empire. Halal meat, however, is a serviceable weapon in the armoury against the animal rights lobby.
Will Sarkozy, among so very many others, now also see the light over Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Xinjiang, Turkey…?
I Give It A Year
The British Tories have managed to cobble together their new group in the European Parliament. Well, I give it a year. And that is only because I am feeling charitable today.
Take the Dutch Christen Unie, the latest manifestation of a long tradition of overtly Calvinistic politics in the Netherlands. It may be a bit Green and a bit pro-immigration, but it supports the one-earner model, so that one parent, usually the mother, can stay at home and take care of the children. It wants to leave Sunday a day of rest. It is opposed to abortion and euthanasia, and instead supports adoption and palliative care. It would end the Dutch policy of toleration towards drugs, pornography and prostitution. It would enable civil servants to refuse to conduct same-sex “marriages”. It defends church schools. It would limit the use of genetic manipulation. It supports the public services, in the public sector. And it wants to increase spending on international development.
In other words, it is too good for Cameron’s Tories. They all are.
Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again
Kevin Baker has a piece in this month’s Harper’s making a compelling if flawed argument that Obama is more comparable to Hoover than FDR. (The full article is not available online, but History News Network has a good excerpt summary in the above link).
As someone who rationalized his eagerness to see Al Gore make a comeback throughout 2007 by drawing an elaborate analogy between him and Hoover, I welcome much of Baker’s thesis. He deserves enormous credit for dealing with the true Hoover both good and bad, indeed more than he should deserve in light of the shameless Arthur Schlessinger pablum peddled at the height of the recession by Jonathan Chait.
Baker’s argument is essentially that like Obama, Hoover was a progressive who believed in conciliatory approaches to big problems, who understood the magnitude of the crisis he faced better than the political elite around him but believed too much in “bringing people together” rather than fostering class warfare and social upheaval that was necessary to create big changes, a la FDR.
Baker believes that Obama is doomed to fail for this reason. The jarringly spot-on item he marshalls to make this case is his analogy between Hoover’s reliance on such architects of the 1920s bubble as Andrew Mellon and Obama’s apparent fealty to the architect of financial deregulation Lawrence Summers. Still, Obama has some adults in the room like Paul Volcker and Austan Goolsbee.
But the major problem with Baker’s argument is that, for all his admirable honesty about Hoover, he premises too much of his argument on romantic ideas about the New Deal. In the 1930s we probably needed the CIO to knock some heads together for the sake of addressing our society’s inequities, but we are a vastly different society today. The kind of radical reorderings which Baker admirably upbraids the Washington establishment for disregarding, such as the expansion of mass transit and fundamental health care reform, are not goals that cry out for sit-down strikes and chasing moneychangers out of the temple.
This brings us also to the glaring oversight of the article, which is that it has no discussion at all of the world situation. Indeed all discussions of the economic crisis evade the obvious answer which Pat Buchanan has been virtually alone in emphasizing repeatedly, that we must dismantle the empire to bring our fiscal house back in order, shore up Social Security and Medicare, and even then have a peace dividend to pay for some of Obama’s proposed extravagances.
If his recent foreign policy pronouncements, and the vicious neocon response to them, are any indication, Obama seems to be proving himself our first President since Hoover who was truly, in his heart, a man of peace. The Quaker President who aggressively pleaded for the lifting of the Versailles regime when it could have still prevented the rise of Hitler and then just days after Pearl Harbor wrote to the isolationist firebrand Lawrence Dennis lamenting “the impending triumph of Wilsonian democracy” – mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again!!!!!
The Disappearance Of “c” and the Young Cons
(Cross-posted at The Other Right)
I know I’m a bit late to this, but I’ve been ruminating on something that was said in the Conor/Riehl debate… As Conor later summed it up:
As best I can tell, Dan thinks that Ronald Reagan was a conservative, that people who favor an economy free of government interference are conservatives, and that religious conservatives who dissent from the Club for Growth orthodoxy are perpetrating a fraud if they call themselves conservative. Never mind that these folks don’t actually hide their supposedly heretical views, and are very upfront about where they stand on any specific matter you ask them about. They are still somehow being duplicitous or at least misleading if they invoke the c-word as a general descriptor.
Seconded. But on top of that, there’s another aspect of Riehl’s definition that’s worth exploring. If the meaning of “conservative” is to be explicitly political, and any variance from that political definition is duplicitous, then the door is closed, not only to political reform, but also to the broader cultural sensibility that supposedly underpins the political dimension. That kind of small “c” conservatism, the conservatism that calls our attention to the small inescapable givens of life, must of necessity have a larger field than politics. This is because there is no simple political answer to the questions we face daily, be it how we treat ourselves, our families, our surroundings, our traditions, or those we are in community with. Conservatism at its best is about how we square these questions with the big picture, but denying their complexity by over-politicizing them them drains the politics of ideas and the ideas of vibrancy. This all but guarantees a hidebound ideology, not a vital force in the culture.
So if we’re looking for an explanation for the horrendous Young Cons, this would actually be a good place to start. Making a conservative piece of culture in America is hard for a lot of reasons, but under the current conditions, when the movement has fatted itself on Happy Meal talking points, it shouldn’t be surprising that the best it can come up with is basically more of the same.
A Prince Among Men
It is a complete fantasy that the British monarchy is supposed to be neutral in all matters. What would be the point of that? If, for example, it could not intervene to prevent the despoilment of our built environment, then there really would be no purpose at all to it. But such is not the case.
Leaving aside the mistakes and misfortunes of his own life (which have absolutely nothing to do with the institution as such), Prince Charles is either on the wrong track or just plain wrong when it comes to syncretism, and Greenery, and “alternative medicine”, and the Dalai Lama. But he is right about an awful lot more. And that makes him the voice of huge numbers of people who have none in the supposedly more legitimate parliamentary process, of which the monarch, complete with a power of veto in the defence of certain interests not exactly dear to the hearts of New Labour or the New Tories (and therefore now impossible to defend by means of voting), is properly, but not currently, an integral part.
“But we don’t want to go back to the Divine Right of Kings, do we?” You can’t go back to something that never existed in the first place. Didn’t Charles I believe in the Divine Right of Kings? No, he did not. Or at least he certainly expressed no such view at his grotesque “trial” pursuant to a Bill of Attainder, and before eighty of his carefully selected parliamentary and military enemies under a second-rate lawyer, John Bradshaw, created “Lord President” because all the proper judges had fled London rather than have anything to do with the wretched proceedings.
There, Charles declared repeatedly that, by denying the authority of the “court” to try him, he was simply upholding the law as it then existed, including the liberties of the English people and the parliamentary institutions of the English State. No law permitted the trial of the monarch, he argued. On the contrary, the law of treason then in force provided for exactly the opposite, namely that any attack on the monarch’s person was itself an offence. Simply as a matter of fact, he was right.
And the subsequent behaviour of the Cromwellian regime fully vindicated him. In sillier circles, Cromwell’s imposition of the greatest tyranny in English (never mind Irish) history is termed “the English Revolution”.
In fact, of course, it long preceded the emergence of any industrial proletariat and is wholly inexplicable in Marxist terms, just as is the very existence of any Marxist movement in, say, the Russia of 1917, or Albania, or China at least until very recent years, or Korea, or Vietnam, or Nepal, or Bengal, or Sri Lanka, or Ethiopia, or Zimbabwe, or Uganda, or Rwanda, South Africa, or Cuba, or Peru, or Bolivia, or … well, make your on list. At their respective heights of Communism, certainly Spain, and arguably also Italy and even France, were standing contradictions of the whole theory. If there is any truth at all in the Marxist analysis of history, then these things simply cannot be. I think we all know what follows from the fact that these things are. Which brings us to the fact that, as the culmination (at least so far) of the coup that began immediately upon the death of John Smith, Tony Blair’s tragically lost predecessor as Labour Leader, this country is now being run – really, literally run – by the wholly unelected and unaccountable Peter Mandelson of the Young Communist League and by his wholly unelected and unaccountable former boss, an utterly unrepentant old Maoist who went on to become a rabidly “free”-marketeering and pro-Bush Prime Minister of Portugal before being wafted into the Presidency of the European Commission.
Give me Prince Charles, and in due season King Charles III, over them any day.
The Gay Mullah
Michael Goldfarb, former McCain campaign staffer and now the Weekly Standard‘s go-to-guy in the anti-Semitism police, has hit a new low by accusing Andrew Sullivan of being an anti-Semite on par with Ahmadinejad because he dared call the Washington Post op-ed page exactly what it is, “hackneyed AIPAC boilerplate”.
Left unacknowledged is that Sullivan is being put in the docket for speaking of “Zionists”, not Jews per se. One should not have to belabor that the two are not synonymous nearly a decade after the start of the Second Intifada and three years after Walt-Mearsheimer, but for the record go here, here, here, here, here, here, and here to get just a taste of the incredible multiplicity of Jewish anti-Zionist voices.