Still, it still is odd. If Coulter had accused Edwards of Treason nobody on the right would have batted an eye. ~Matt Yglesias

More on the book in a moment.  Interestingly, I actually had a similar reaction to the Republican blogger reaction to Coulter’s failed joke.  Perhaps that’s because many people on the right whom I admire have been accused of treason and/or lack of patriotism, as have implicitly all antiwar conservatives and libertarians been declared to be in league with the enemy, so it seems obvious to me that it is much worse and much more obnoxious and poisonous to question so baselessly and cavalierly someone’s loyalty to this country than to bluntly question his heterosexuality.  Similarly, to cavalierly call someone a racist or anti-Semite in the course of a policy argument, as supporters of the Iraq war have done unapologetically numerous times, is actually infinitely worse than taking a shot at Edwards’ masculinity (which is, of course, the point of every Coulter shot at some Democratic politician’s sexuality, be it Clinton, Gore or Edwards–it is aimed at reinforcing the “Democrats are weak” idea).  That many of these people would then twist themselves into knots and make all the right PC noises about how offensive Coulter’s latest remark is, while being perfectly happy to recycle the most disgusting and vile accusations against their political opponents, says volumes about these people who claim to speak on behalf of conservatism.  Any on the left who continue to use the same labeling tactics against conservatives or their fellow progressives while expressing their shock and outrage over Coulter’s latest shot would also have to be the most stunning hypocrites.  

Nonetheless, when Coulter declares large portions of the country to be godless traitors, most of the very same people on the right who are shunning her today have cheered loudly.  This seems to be the thinking of the Hordes of Hewitt: they begin with the axiom that opposition to a bad government policy or law (e.g., invasion of Iraq, PATRIOT Act, the “surge,” etc.) undermines Vital and Necessary measures for national security (even though they have not demonstrated that these measures are either vital or necessary or that they will even achieve the stated goals), and therefore no one can persist in opposition to these things without a willful hatred not only of the government but of the country itself.  Therefore, to call these opponents traitors is not inflammatory or inappropriate, because the Hewittians believe it to be self-evident.  This is, of course, lunacy on stilts.  The reason why charges of treason seem to fall from the lips of Republicans so much more readily these days is a combination of reheated abstract nationalism and an abiding conviction that they have a monopoly on political virtue.  In other words, the neo-Jacobins are acting like neo-Jacobins. 

But even throwing the treason accusation around has its limits on the right, as the case of D’Souza has shown us.  Weirdly, D’Souza somehow managed to find himself on the wrong side of the acceptable treason-accusing line, too, since he suggested not only that cultural decadence had inspired terrorism against the U.S. (which you might initially think would satisfy two Republican preoccupations in one go) but that, at least at some level, decent people everywhere should want to respond to cultural decadence with the same kind of indignant response, if not necessarily with political violence.  Worst of all, he called for solidarity with “traditional Muslims” against the “radicals”–a proposal I consider meaningless because it assumes a meaningful distinction and opposition between the two not in evidence–which is what really set off his former allies.  D’Souza has made an argument charging the cultural left with civilisational treason of a sort (an argument with which, in its broad outlines, I actually do not really disagree), but here he has violated the Ultimate Rule of Republican PC: thou shalt never attempt to explain, understand or rationalise the actions of jihadis, because they are inexplicable, incomprehensible and irrational.  Any attempt to provide an analysis that accounts for “why they hate us” that does not return the result “they hate us for our freedom and all our many virtues and maybe even Wal-Mart” is clearly an attempt to “blame America first” and to treat jihadis as political actors whose motives and goals can be understood and therefore potentially addressed by means other than cluster bombs.  For all kinds of obvious reasons, this is entirely unacceptable to significant numbers of Republican pundits and a large part of their audience.

In fairness, I should say here that the generic habit that Coulter, Hewitt, Frum and others have of imputing disloyalty and treason to their political enemies at home (a habit that is, by the way, quintessentially identitarian and leftist, to use Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s taxonomy, and therefore quite natural to democratic politics) is somewhat distinct from at least some of the specific arguments in Coulter’s Treason itself, particularly as they relate to McCarthy and Hiss.  In laying out Hiss’ actual treason and thus alluding to the decades of liberal apologies for Hiss (which continued up until his guilt was finally confirmed beyond all doubt) and in showing the extent of actual communist infiltration in the government that McCarthy made his pet cause, she could show that there were huge blind spots on the left to communist infiltration in the Cold War.  With the rise of the New Left, these blind spots became in some ways even more vast.  Absurdly, because of the idiocy of the two-party system, the name McGovern became inextricably tied in Republican collective memory with New Left radicalism in all its worst extremes, when no one could have better represented the mainline Old American contempt for foreign wars, such that McGovernite “isolationism” became, like America First “isolationism” before it, tainted by associations that it either did not have or that were entirely incidental to it. 

So, Coulter takes some concrete truths and overgeneralises from them so as to make them almost meaningless.  At some level, I strongly sympathise with the view that there is something inherent in left-liberalism that attenuates and undermines patriotism, and I would go so far as to say that whiggery in general is guilty of this disease of disloyalty to one’s own country, but in many cases what Coulter is talking about is not a lack of patriotism but a lack of zeal for statist activities overseas. 

In conflating loyalty to this or that state policy or loyalty to the government generally with loyalty to country, Coulter makes a typically nationalist move that would rephrase Clinton’s phrase this way: “You can’t love your country and hate its government’s wars.”  Actually, very often you can, but such is the wretched state of conservatism today that doing so as a conservative earns you the hatred of most other “conservatives.” 

While someone like me might regard an internationalist foreign policy that privileges the independence of other nations that have virtually nothing to do with us over American lives and liberties as fairly unpatriotic, an interventionist jingo such as Coulter holds herself out to be can really have no complaints whatever about most pre-1968 Democrats during the Cold War.  These were her kind of people in their zeal to meddle overseas, invade other countries and, when the occasion called for it, kill foreign leaders (or acquiesce in the locals’ killing of those leaders).  The kinds of policy preferences she despises are the sorts of policies that Republicans used to pursue and advocate during much of the first two decades of the Cold War.  Conservatives weren’t usually the ones who spoke crazily about “rollback,” though they did on the whole embrace containment, which at the time was pretty much a forward strategy that seemed unnecessary and unwise to the remaining figures of the Old Right and a few of the earliest figures in the conservative movement.  With Vietnam, the American right increasingly fell into reflexively defending what was really a misguided liberal interventionist war because they did two things rightists should never do but often wind up doing: they trusted the government, and they assumed that what the government was trying to accomplish in the war would actually benefit the United States.  These two things will always yield disappointment and sorrow, because government fundamentally cannot be trusted and foreign wars have rarely, if ever, benefited the United States over the long term.  But when countercultural radicalism and opposition to the war began to be intertwined, this only reinforced the idea that supporting the war had something to do with affirming traditional American values.  To be a hawk then was, perversely, to align oneself with normal America, because so many of the doves seemed tobe in favour of sacrificing the normal to the abnormal (to borrow from Chesterton’s famous dictum on the modern mind).  Thus was born, I think, the unfortunate link in the minds of many conservatives between opposition to pointless wars and what they saw as contempt for America, which has since morphed into an all together insane militarist litmus test: failure to endorse maximal war powers claims of the executive and maximal hawkishness in foreign policy questions is proof of one’s “weakness” and in engaging in such “weakness,” if you persist in these “failures,” you demonstrate your disloyalty.  I don’t hesistate to say that there is something more than a little Soviet about this kind of thinking.