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Missing the Point (Again)

Maybe we’re not reading the same newspapers, but I could swear conservatives — and not primarily the crunchy ones — have been making a quite a fuss about issues which offend their sense of spirituality, morality, and community for quite some time. Let’s start 20 years ago. In 1987 there was the fight over Robert […]

Maybe we’re not reading the same newspapers, but I could swear conservatives — and not primarily the crunchy ones — have been making a quite a fuss about issues which offend their sense of spirituality, morality, and community for quite some time. Let’s start 20 years ago. In 1987 there was the fight over Robert Bork. Free-market economics were a pretty minor part of that fight. Ditto Clarence Thomas. Then there was Dan Quayle versus Murphy Brown. The early 1990s were largely consumed with debates over illegitimacy, affirmative action, flag-burning, and gays in the military. Bill Clinton’s character, including his draft status, came up a few times too. The Heritage Foundation — which surely must qualify as the stygian heart of Mordor in Rod’s worldview — dedicated itself back then to a restoration of civil society. In the late 1990s, we were informed by Andrew Sullivan and everyone to his left that the GOP had been taken over by “scolds” and Cotton Mathers. More recently, conservatives have expended a great deal of time and effort on gay marriage, abortion, public displays of the Ten Commandments, and other issues hard to pigeonhole into Milton Friedman’s worldview. The Republican-controlled Congress went ass-over-tea-kettle about Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, not over imposing a flat tax. Indeed, most of us conservatives have spent the last decade arguing primarily about social and cultural issues, not economic ones. ~Jonah “Lie for a Just Cause” Goldberg

As Western Lent is now upon us, and Orthodox Lent will soon be starting, let me try to respond to this as charitably as I can. After all, Goldberg chose not to write Rod out of conservatism (yet), so why spoil this outpouring of goodwill?

It may be that Goldberg and Rod have been talking past each other this entire time. When Goldberg says he doesn’t understand Rod’s “crunchies,” it could be that he somehow thinks, in spite of everything in the book and everything all of the crunchies and friends have said on the blog, that this is a book about political activism. So perhaps he thinks that Rod is saying that there are no activists banging the drum of religious values and moral order. Which is exactly what Rod is not saying.

Then Goldberg protests against the unfair caricature of the “mainstream conservative” (whose archetypes, in my view, sit on the WSJ editorial board) because, well, Republicans and movement types sure do talk and argue about morality, restraint, “social issues,” the sanctity of life and on and on all the time. Some of these people even invoke Kirk fairly often. Why, even Mr. Bush says vaguely supportive things about marriage now and again! Problem solved, right? Obviously not.

Here’s the thing: the entire point of the book is to show, from real, anecdotal examples, those conservatives who perceive the “mainstream” of conservatism as the shallow, overly ideological thing that I think without a doubt it is, find it entirely at odds with their vision of the good life and proceed to life according to that vision. They live in ways that seem counterintuitive and odd to the “mainstream” conservative precisely because the “mainstream” conservative has wandered so far from any real understanding of what his principles should imply for how he lives. It is precisely the disjunction between the increasing prominence social and moral “issues” (and the tendency to think of one’s grasp of moral truth in terms of stances on “issues”) in Republican politics and the nature of the priorities in the lives of so very many Republicans that announce in a booming voice that Rod has hit on a major problem with modern conservatives and, necessarily, with the modern conservatism that they embrace.

The crunchies represent an alternative–Rod obviously regards it as the fairly natural and sensible alternative–to the conservatism that imagines voting the right way, pushing a political program and cheering the GOP constitute a sort of political morality of their own that makes someone “conservative” regardless of how he lives. If there is anyone who has been focusing too much on the importance of conventional politics and making it a source of meaning and virtue that it almost certainly is not, it has been these “mainstream” folks. Thus Goldberg invokes all of the political activist battles of the culture wars as proof that Rod is largely missing the mark, to which I suspect Rod would say, “All of this is true, and yet has fairly little to do with what I wrote about.” Indeed, one might trace fairly closely the degeneration of living conservatism in this country with the success of conservative political activism. Rod does not go that far in his book, and might not agree with that, but that only underscores that the book and its subject have nothing to do with the activism Goldberg invokes to dispel the frightening ghost of conservatism past.

There is something seriously out of joint in modern conservatism, and it is the product of a mentality that could talk about truth, beauty and goodness and all the permanent things until the end of the world and fail to incorporate and embody that understanding in a way of life. A good indication that the problem is even worse than that is that many who consider themselves conservatives increasingly do not treasure the permanent things, nor do they necessarily even pay lip service to them. We know this because in practise they do not do these things.

People who neglect these things in their own lives are free to do so, of course, but it will be their loss and our country’s loss if they fail to remember what their original convictions actually mean. There is also no obligation that anyone has to take conservatism’s prescriptions seriously, either, but Rod seems to think it slightly more reasonable that those who call themselves conservatives should take them seriously and act as if they do.

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