As if actively trying reach ever lower levels of intellectual seriousness, Sullivan quotes this “all progressives are really conservatives who are really progressives who are really…” article, which says:

Since America was founded on enlightenment liberalism, conservation of the status quo meant a vigorous defense of meritocracy, individual freedom and free markets. This stands in contrast to European conservatism, which was pushed forward by Agrarian landholders seeking to defend aristocracy from the radical concepts of democracy and capitalism.

No, not a defense against democracy and capitalism!  What could they have been thinking?  They were trying to defend aristocracy, but they were also trying to defend an entire social order and a set of moral and political values that they believed were integral to the flourishing and well-being of their country.  The dismissive tone in the TCS article is amusing, but Sullivan’s “analysis” is priceless:

Except that British conservatism in the age of Thatcher decisively broke with that tradition, and became a more American model. And American conservatism under Bush has retreated to a more pre-enlightenment, European model. Exhibit A: theoconservatism. I have no idea which party will represent the small-government, individual freedom model of post-modern society. I once thought that the Republicans would always have the edge in this fight against the statist left. Now, I’m not so sure. Which is why this election, and the many brands of liberalism and conservatism on offer is such a pivotal and fascinating one.

The bit about conservatism under Bush is just so very painfully wrong in every possible way.  They pay him to dish out these pearls, do they?  Theocons as agrarian reactionary radicals?  I must have missed the issue of First Things in which Michael Novak denounced democratic capitalism as the ruin of the mixed constitution!  But who can forget when Bush spoke so movingly of Filmer’s defense of the prerogatives of the Crown?  Who doesn’t remember Rick Santorum’s moving rendition of Wha wadna fecht for Charlie?  Aye, those were the days! 

What does “pre-enlightenment European” model even refer to?  European conservatism scarcely existed as a coherent political persuasion before the French Revolution.  Very basic “King and Church” Toryism as a political view was roughly coeval with the early English Enlightenment and the Tories became, by the time of Bolingbroke, the side interested in conserving the gains of 1688 while combating the concentration of power, abuses and excesses of the Whig oligarchy and the moneyed interest.  To the extent that Americans were following the Old Whigs and Bolingbroke together, they were attempting to conserve an agrarian and constitutionalist order; to the extent that they were following primarily Bolingbroke, they were not following “Enlightenment liberalism” but the reaction against it and its philosophical assumptions.  If American conservatism follows in the tradition of Burke, it also stands much more in the tradition of Bolingbroke than Locke; we, as conservatives, do not ever have to doff our cap and bow before pure whiggery out of some false sense of indebtedness to certain English philosophers.

How many differences are there between Chuck Hagel and Ron Paul?  Let us count the ways.

Via The New Beginning

According to the new Times poll (.pdf), support for America “changing a dictatorship to a democracy where it can” (question 18) has shrunk to a new low of 15% against 69% opposition (the highest level in the last twenty years), which is 20 points higher than in 2003.  48% favour reducing legal immigration (question 16).  Among Republicans, 48% still oppose changing a dictatorship to a democracy when possible, which means that one of the signature ideas of Bush foreign policy receives the support of barely one-third of his party, and 51% of Republicans want reduced legal immigration as opposed to 14% that want more and 31% that want it to continue at its present level.  How can a party so at odds with Mr. Bush’s policies not only continue to support him at absurdly high rates?  More importantly, how is it that they seem to be rallying to the establishment candidates who embrace the same policies in whichsignificant pluralities or majorities of Republicans do not believe?

In a sure sign of partisan loyalty and voter irrationality or sheer ignorance of the President’s own positions on the above, 69% of Republicans believe that George Bush “has the same priorities for the country as you have” (question 30).

“People should be concerned — we’ve had a tough last year and a half or so,” said Glenn Bolger, a Republican strategist. “But if you go back in time to 1991, the Democrats had a lot of the same concerns, both about the candidates running and their possibility of winning. And it turned out pretty well for them.” ~The New York Times

That’s a nice pep talk, but as the new wisdom is shaping up it is telling us that this election will not be like any other cycle before it in important respects.  The lack of an incumbent President or Vice-President in the race is a huge difference, but then so is the protracted, unpopular Iraq war.  The former might theoretically help the Republicans escape the shadow of Bush, but the latter will continue to drag down the GOP barring some near-miraculous turnaround.  Where Bushian foreign policy triumphs fed into an image of a globe-trotting President indifferent to his countrymen in 1991-92 that somewhat counterintuitively worked to the incumbent’s disadvantage, Bushian foreign policy disasters have possibly irreparably damaged the Republican reputation for national security competence and will continue to have negative consequences for Republican candidates through the next several cycles.  Since every Republican candidate except for Ron Paul supports the Iraq war to one degree or another, and the major candidates all support it to the hilt, this bad reputation will translate into a liability for almost every prospective nominee.  Unlike Clinton or Tsongas in the ’92 cycle, all Republican candidates except for Ron Paul basically see nothing really amiss in how the GOP governed in the past on most things, or they certainly don’t make a point of mentioning it very much.  Rather than adapting to the landscape and innovating in their message to respond to new realities, most of the Republican candidates for ’08 are reiterating messages, particularly on foreign policy, that have no resonance with the general electorate. 

Except for Ron Paul, that is.  He has not had to chang or adapt, but has simply retained the same constitutionalist principles he has always had, which naturally led him to oppose the war before it became a popular thing to do.  Unlike some, he has not had to become a “convert” on questions of life, nor did he, a practicing physician, need to wait until he was in his fifties to discover the ethical and moral implications of abortion, but at the same time he manages to espouse a consistent constitutionalist view of the appropriate remedy to legalised abortion.  Unlike a third of the Republican field, he opposes illegal immigration and all forms of amnesty.  Logically, Republicans unsatisfied with the rest of the field and the state of their party should rally behind him en masse.  Who knows?  They say that this is supposedly the most open year in presidential politics in our lifetime. 

1992 comparisons cannot be encouraging for Republicans, because they are not acting in 2007 as the Democrats acted in 1991.  How did the Democrats respond to the environment of 1991?  Most of the prominent, well-known Democratic leaders bowed out, assuming that the ’92 election was almost automatically Bush’s to be had.  Back in the days of stratospheric, post-Gulf War Bush approval numbers, that seemed like the wise move.  As it turned out, a politically savvy, unknown governor was able to exploit populist discontent and the unusual entrance of a major third party challenge, but this was only possible because the opposition party had not saddled itself with an anointed establishment candidate who could be easily pigeonholed as Dukakis had been. 

None of that is happening this time around, because there is no presumptive favourite or incumbent to run against.  To the extent that there are actually any prominent Republican leaders, they are in the race.  The GOP establishment is trying to put a stranglehold on the process, making sure that only those figures most complicit in the Bush Era, whether ideologically or personally, are able to get the nomination.  This is so phenomenally stupid that it is almost too stupid even for the Stupid Party, but this is what they are doing.  They are playing this election as if it were the anointing of a nominee in 1988 when the GOP had most advantages, when it is nothing like that election. 

The frequent comparisons with 1928 are also somewhat misleading, since Hoover inherited the goodwill and popularity of Coolidge, even though he was not the Vice-President of the administration.  1920 is the most apt comparison, and in that year the administration’s party was shellacked in a historic repudiation of its war, domestic tyranny and taxation.  Like Wilson in so many things (his tiresome temperament, his self-righteous arrogance and his idealistic foreign polict nonsense), Bush has probably similarly destroyed his party’s fortunes for a decade.  Perversely, the departing administration’s party may benefit from the continuation of the war through the election, which was something that the Democrats did not have working in their favour in 1920.  Then again, the public may have already passed its point of having lost all patience with the Iraq war.

While nearly 6 in 10 Democratic voters in the poll said they were satisfied with the candidates now in the race for their party’s nomination, nearly 6 in 10 Republicans said they wanted more choices.  ~The New York Times

I’m not unsympathetic to the complaint about the GOP presidential field, since I have made disparaging or dismissive remarks about almost every one of them, but I am pretty sure that this result has to be a product of a lack of awareness of just how many Republicans are in this race.  If we were just talking about the Terrible Trio and Brownback, this 60% of Republicans would have a point, but in addition to these four there are five more officially in now that Ron Paul has formally declared.  Hunter, Tancredo, Tommy Thompson and Huckabee round out the field.  Theoretically, Pataki has not absolutely said that he is no longer running, but everyone knows he isn’t.  There are slightly reasonable expectations that Hagel may join the crowd (at some distant point in the future) and there is a lot of hype about Gingrich and Thompson, though I honestly don’t understand the enthusiasm behind the boosting for either one.  All together, that makes twelve actual or reasonably probable candidates ten months before the first votes are cast.  While there are a few reasons here or there for one faction or another to object to this or that aspect of each candidate, how whiny would Republican voters have to be that 60% of them can’t find enough satisfying in these twelve, or even in the declared nine candidates, that they need to have more?  How many more?  Five?  Ten? 

This really is unreasonable and unbelievable.  I have to assume that this is a complaint about the Terrible Trio and not about the rest of the field, since most voters have no idea who anyone else in the field is.  The GOP rank and file have declared that the candidates they know about do not really interest them and want other options besides the drab bunch they have in front of them in the mainstream and conservative media coverage.  This makes all of Giuliani’s advantages in the polls seem particularly meaningless: if a majority of Republicans are unsatisfied with the state of the field, and you, Giuliani, are the leader of the field, it is a testament to how much they really don’t want to have to endure your nomination if they can possibly help it.

Ron Paul, a nine-term Texas congressman who describes himself as a lifelong libertarian, formally announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination today.

Appearing on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Paul said he was at first reluctant to run, but that “a lot of people want to hear my message and I’m willing to deliver it.” ~The Houston Chronicle

This is very good news.  Here’s the video of the announcement.  Here is Ron Paul’s campaign website.  His CNN interview is here.  In that interview, he says of the Iraq war, “We should come home as quickly as possible.”  Amen to that.

For those interested in the travails of neoliberalismand the New Democrats, Jim Antle has a smart piece in the latest American Conservative (March 12 issue) on their present political decline.  Unlike some of us, though, he is not ready to count the New Dems out just yet.

Try to picture a work of contemporary literature that exhibits a faith in the global free market, that understands exurbs as the latest manifestation of the American dream, that exposes wasteful social programs and presents sympathetic Republicans struggling to stand by their principles. Admit it: it’s tantalizing. ~Benjamin Nugent

I shouldn’t have said in the last post that Nugent asked the wrong question or the question that misses the point, but simply that he asked the far less interesting question.  He really is primarily concerned with finding people who will write a specifically Republican novel, to which I would have to reply: “Who cares?”

Ross points us to this interesting Benjamin Nugent article, which asks the question, Why Don’t Republicans Write Fiction?  Of course, as phrased, the question already misses something important, and this is that party men qua party men almost never create anything worth remembering (not even parties).  If I were to write the Great Paleo Novel, for example, it would not be credited to the lists of Republican fiction-writing, since the Great Paleo Novel might very well throw down the idols of Red Republicanism from the high places and, like Phineas, drive a javelin through the bodies of adulterous ideologues.  The real question ought to be why conservatives generally don’t write fiction. 

The answer is actually much more straightforward: the sorts of grand conservative thinkers who were scholars of literature (Weaver, Bradford) and writers of ghoststories (Kirk) are sadly no longer with us, they have not found worthy replacements and the importance of imagination is much, much less in the thinking of most self-styled conservatives than it was in theirs. 

Part of the problem is indeed an excess of optimism, and optimism on the American right is one part Yankee, one part capitalist and one part Reagan.  Whatever else you want to say about these three, they are not generally regarded as the fathers of great writing.  Optimistic people typically are not the best artists, and I don’t just say this because I prefer the pessimists among us.  Their frame of mind does not allow for real tragedy or real failure.  For the optimist failure is not only unlikely, it does not ultimately, truly exist.  The best days are always yet to come!  But without a sense of nostalgia for a lost age or a lament for your people or even a full appreciation for the petty indignities of life combined with reverence for sacred mysteries (and sometimes, if a writer is really wise, he knows how to find the mystery in the petty indignity–see Dostoevsky, Solzhenitsyn), I think it is very difficult to write really captivating, good fiction.  Just consider how little of the best poetry is an expression of contentment and joy in love compared to dissatisfaction, betrayal, loss and yearning.  Optimistic people can’t even tell the story of that most depressing sci-fi novel, Solaris, properly.  For optimistic people there is always a silver lining, when sometimes there are no silver linings, life is filled with suffering and all that man can do is endure.  This sounds grim, and Americans generally do not like to sound grim and they do not like grim-sounding things.  This is why Americans usually ignore the more serious thinkers who tell them hard truths and embrace the charlatans who fill them with vain hopes. 

Understanding the role of suffering in life and taking it seriously, perhaps almost too seriously, are vital to great literature.  Good literature can probably get by with fine phrases and a nicely-structured story, but the great works capture something more elemental.  This is why the Russians have produced the finest literature on earth, because they have not simply endured suffering (every people in the world has, at some level, endured it), but the best of them have actively embraced it as essential to their cultural worldview.  I do not write off the great accomplishments of other literary cultures, but, in my admittedly limited experience, I am convinced that the Russian achievement is far superior.  Americans either recoil at the sight of this Russian view, or they simply find it depressing, which may again explain why even the figures Nugent cites among Old Right writers come from England and not from here.  The English, Scots and Irish are also all capable of perceiving something about life and the old ways of life that have vanished, as can most any people with a collective memory that extends more than a few centuries, but this was something that we, as Americans, have either not fully inherited or have pretty thoroughly purged from our system–and we tend to be proud of this.  The nation that produces phrases such as “We can do it!” and “We shall overcome” is not a nation that will understand the overwhelming bulk of human history and all of the examples through the ages in which there was failure, defeat and no overcoming anywhere to be seen.  Even American railings against various injustices assume that injustice can be to some large extent “fixed” and is not built in to the structures of our existence and unavoidable here below.  “We will never forget” and “history is bunk” are mutually exclusive views, and most Americans functionally embrace the latter most of the time (while watching the travesty that is the History Channel and considering themselves amateur historians).  This is also why, I suspect, the greatest efflourescence of worthwhile American literature comes from the South, the only region that has fully known and incorporated the sense of the tragic into its sensibility (a sensibility that the New South has attempted to throw to one side, not entirely successfully, with its internal improvements and progressivism), and why most of the last, greatest right-leaning writers in the English-speaking world come from the pre-WWII period.  The therapeutic has driven out most of whatever remained of the tragic.  The spirit of Atlee has spread like a poisonous cloud over the green fields of Logres, and the purpose-driven life has driven us into Babylon rather than leaving us to remember Jerusalem at the edge of her waters.

I wish we knew more about the theological differences between the historic American Muslim groups and Sunnis. ~Mollie