Moving Out of the Mainstream And Onto Dry Land
After reading that, I knew I would never be fit for service in the conservative mainstream again. And thank God. ~Daniel McCarthy, Reactionary Radicals
My most startling realisation that I had no place in the conservative mainstream came fairly late in spring 2002. Before then, I continued to operate in a world of delusions where all “conservatives” of every stripe were on the same side and generally wanted the same things (frighteningly and embarrassingly, I recognised my attitude in the Rupert Murdoch-like character from House of Cards, who bloviated about how “we all used to be on the same side, expanding freedom’s frontiers”). From the mid-’90s on, I was probably politically slightly to the right of the Constitution Party, but still thought that “conservatism” had something going for it. I had already been disillusioned by the Gingrich majority, but was still influenced by a lot of “mainstream” conservative sources. At that point, I had not yet converted to Orthodoxy, though I was well on my way, and was still recovering from years of breathing in the neoconservative miasma of the WSJ op-ed pages. 2002 was a year of revelations, as I slowly and bitterly discovered just how deluded I had been.
My immediate opposition to any proposed attack on Iraq started with the State of the Union speech of that January followed naturally enough from my earlier paleo leanings and my opposition to the bombing of Yugoslavia, but it had not yet translated into fervent opposition to the administration. Surely this was not George “humble foreign policy” Bush, who once seemed so much more sane than the Chechen terrorist-supporting McCain? A candidate’s position on Kosovo had been my particular personal litmus test for whether that candidate was wise or not, and Bush/Rice’s position was not nearly good enough (they supported the bombing, but opposed “nation-building”), and so I voted for Mr. Buchanan. However, I all too predictably enough welcomed Bush’s victory in 2000 when it (sort of) came. At the time, the neocons, of whom I had been aware for some time but to whom I had paid little attention, were wary of him and his rhetoric about “humble” foreign policy. This seemed to be a good sign.
Of course, I was younger and much more naive then, and this was the winter of ’02 when I was unfortunately all too caught up in the post-9/11 hysteria. 9/11 and Bush’s adequate and fairly competent response had briefly stopped the process of disenchantment with Bush that I had already had when one of his first acts in office was to bomb Baghdad; how little we realised that this was a sign of things to come. He happened to be in Mexico on his first foreign summit when he ordered the strikes, reflecting his bizarre preoccupation with Mexico that continued the disenchantment. His attachment to Mexico only grew more obnoxious, and my disenchantment was already reaching critical levels before the attacks. His obsession with Iraq resumed that process.
I was finally made to realise just how far removed I was from what passed for the “mainstream” when I applied for an internship at Heritage, managed to make the next-to-last round and spoke to someone (I’m afraid I don’t remember who it was) about my interest in the position. They asked me to send some of my writings for my college newspaper, which I duly did, not even remotely realising that my editorials lambasting NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia and interventionism in general (among other things) almost certainly automatically excluded me from future consideration at a think tank that I only later discovered was one of the centers of interventionist policymaking.
Even though the internship was not related to foreign policy at all, and the submissions were primarily meant to show my writing ability, I was sure in retrospect that these submissions had guaranteed that I wouldn’t be accepted. Put this down to ignorance and naivete (after all, the foreign policy views of Heritage were hardly a secret even then, so I should have already known better), but remarkably it was only then that it hit me that I would always be in the opposition. This did not surprise me as much as the fact that the thing to which I found myself opposed was the bulk of the “conservative movement.”
Certainly, I would not want to be part of this “movement,” even if it weren’t in such a shambles, but it was only relatively recently that it finally occurred to me that I could never be part of the “movement” and still believe as I do. The functionaries of the “movement” have made that clear on multiple occasions in their ignorant and obnoxious denunciations of others with whom I strongly agree. It is to the lasting discredit of the “movement” that it makes it impossible for someone like me to even be tolerated in its midst, and it is one mark of its continued degeneration. It is not that I have anything particular special or interesting to add, but that rejection of my sort of conservatism demonstrates the movement’s profound and complete bankruptcy and abandonment of its own inheritance.
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