The Daily Show and now Steven Colbert have taught a generation of college students that Republicans are ridiculous, absurd, hopelessly past it. And their work has had an effect: today’s 20-somethings are more Democratic than any equivalent cohort since World War II. ~David Frum

Don’t give the comedians too much credit.  I’ll wager Mr. Bush has done the lion’s share of the work in scaring off the next generation from the Republican Party, and he deserves acknowledgement for that accomplishment.  It’s not every day that a politician ensures the defeat of his party in the present and the future as well as Mr. Bush has.

Roosevelt had a special appeal to immigrants, and as one congressman put it this week, “Immigrants are the lifeblood on which this country is built.” Well said! ~Joseph Sobran

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich believes it is and he has developed a compelling approach to new and better politics not seen since the days of Abraham Lincoln. ~Cal Thomas

He believes in illegally raising large armies to kill his enemies and occupying their lands?  Or perhaps he believes in imprisoning his critics and shutting down opposition newspapers?  Or perhaps he is in favour of dissolving dissident legislatures by force of arms?  All of those would indeed remind us of the heady days of Lincoln.  Such might be the “new and better politics” that would appeal to the likes of Cal Thomas.

Oh, actually he means holding a series of debates.  How predictable and dull!

My once and future blogging colleague Paul Cella writes in defense of Pope Paul XII.  Taki offers an account of the achievements of Nixon and talks about Andy Warhol.  Chronicles‘ managing editor, Scott Richert, has one item on Keith Ellison and Muslims in America and another on the possible use of “tactical” nuclear weapons in the Near East.  Robert Spencer wrote on the Christians of Iraq, Justin Raimondo takes on the “homintern” over homosexuality and civil rights legislation and Richard Cummings offers the following poetic interpretation of neoconservatism:

“How do you do, Mr Podhoretz?”
“Quite well, Mr. Frum and you?”
“And where might you be going, sir?”
“I’m looking for a war, how ‘bout you?”
“Well, let me help you find it,
for I’m looking for one too.”

Together:
I’ve never seen a war I didn’t like,
the bombs, the guns, the tanks and all the planes,
and soldiers shooting everywhere and landscapes now all bare,
they tell you that the losses are not losses but are gains.

No, we’ve never seen a war we didn’t like,
with cities going up in brilliant flames,
and all the carnage and the killing and the maiming,
the battle field all strewn with human brains.

No, we’ve never seen a war we didn’t like,
the torture and the raping and the dead.
But don’t ask us to be in it, ‘cause we’ll be gone in just a minute,
and no one will know exactly where we’ve fled.

But with all the blood and gore,
the corpses all alike,
we’ve never seen a war,
no we’ve never seen a war,
no, we’ve never seen a war
we didn’t like.

One Eric Kenning also has an amusing take on Cheney:

Cheney’s strict adherence to militant Islam has also caused problems with his fellow neoconservatives, most of whom are equally devout, but adhere to a rival sect, militant Bedlam.

Late in January, Dr. Trifkovic weighed in on D’Souza’s book, touching on themes that I have been talking about recently:

It is noteworthy that D’Souza is condemning our writings as “Islamophobic” without further elaboration. Like the term “Islamophobia” itself—a classic product of the Hate Crime Industry—his technique is characteristic of the totalitarian Left. I remember reading, as a teenager in Tito’s Yugoslavia, similarly worded condemnations of dissident writers and their “tracts” in the communist-controlled press. Once they were defined as “anti-socialist,” “reactionary,” or “nationalist,” no further elaboration was needed and no debate allowed.

That D’Souza’s invocation of Islamophobia is of a piece with other invocations of anti-Semitism, homophobia or racism to silence political opponents and force through the conclusions of the person wielding these terms should be quite clear, but Dr. Trifkovic goes on to explain just how all-inclusive D’Souza’s use of this term is intended to be.

Early last month Dr. Trifkovic had this to say about Abe Foxman and the ADL:

What it does in practice has very little to do with its stated objective. It has a radical political program and social engineering agenda that goes way beyond “fighting discrimination.” It insists on America’s total demographic and cultural transformation into something that it is not, even when that transformation is manifestly detrimental to the interests of the Jewish community itself.

ADL’s immigration policy illustrates the point. For decades ADL has been advocating more or less unrestricted Third World immigration into the United States, on the grounds that a restrictive policy was inherently discriminatory and that a more diverse population would make the Jews more secure. In November 1965 it hailed the abolition of national origins quota system and stressed the “educational role” it played in helping to bring this change about. For the ensuing four decades it became strident in equating any advocacy of immigration control with “discrimination.”

But as many American Jews now realize, ADL’s agenda was driven by its leftist ideological blinkers, not by its concern for the community.

Dr. Clyde Wilson had a fine series of posts on “The Lincoln Fable.”  He concluded the first with these words:

So one aspect of the proliferating Lincoln fable was the cynical use far into the future of the fable of a martyred leader of supreme virtue for emotional ammunition to keep the Republican party in power. Another aspect of the fable is far more troublesome—the creation of Lincoln the Christ figure. It can be and has been thoroughly documented that this icon was created in post-assassination sermons. As a historian two generations back put it: “That the Lord had sent Lincoln to earth as his mysterious representative, to die for his people, was a belief that rose from many Easter sermons and grew with time to blend into the faith that the humble backwoodsman had been by some miracle the savior of the Union.” The literature that created the Lincoln/Christ is vast and stomach-turningly blasphemous. And, of course, it is never asked just what made saving the Union such a divine cause.

The Lincoln thus imagined and propagated was a fictitious narrative which has long been proclaimed to contain the true account of American history and the essential meaning of America. The fable gained its purchase in the midst of war, revolution, assassination, violent and vengeful self-righteousness, and most important and worst of all—religious disintegration. Lincoln the Christ figure was thrust into the vacuum created by the erosion of belief that had been steadily undermining Northern Protestantism in the previous decades. Out of public anxiety and near hysteria was created the religion of Americanism: America The Father, Lincoln The Son, and Democracy The Holy Spirit.

 

To this day and to the immense peril of our souls and bodies, many of our fellow citizens are incapable of distinguishing between God and “America” or comprehending that one who occupies the throne of Lincoln and uses the hallowed terms that Lincoln used can be capable of wrong.

In the second, he wrote of the fable’s distortions of Lincoln’s pseudo-religiosity:

The fable presents us with a pious, praying, saintly Ole Abe, a rail-splitter of humble birth, rather resembling a well-known Carpenter of similar background, and who also was martyred on Good Friday and wafted to Heaven by flights of angels. So far as we know the real Lincoln was an agnostic who was a prolific retailer of dirty stories and who cynically made his political speeches sound like the King James Bible. One of the few evidences of belief he showed was in the Second Inaugural when he blamed the war on God, for whom Humble Abe Lincoln was but an innocent instrument.

In the third he wrote a telling assessment of the evils Lincoln unleashed on America:

One hardly knows where to begin in dealing with this rampant balderdash. Who appointed those generals? General Sherman himself observed that many of Lincoln’s appointments looked like they had been made to purposely lose the war. In fact, Lincoln’s conduct is understandable only if you perceive the real pattern of consistency—that his primary objective was to keep himself and his party in power and that the war was the instrument for that objective. This was the tender-hearted leader who auhroized ruthless terrorism against women and children, refused generous offers of prisoner exchange while declaring medicine a contraband of war, accepted Grant’s costly policy of losing three men for every one Confederate killed, was not above keeping his own son out of harm’s way, and invited his own fate by clandestinely organizing the attempted assassination of Jefferson Davis.

I do not know whether Lincoln was personally corrupt in that he made money from his office. I do know that he was politically corrupt—that he took to previously unimagined levels the use of government jobs and contracts to buy political support and by design made the government a machine for doing favors for the wealthy and well-placed that has remained the hallmark of the U.,S. Government to the present day. Historians again give Abe a free pass. He was somehow the innocent victim of the corruption of the day. Mysteriously, the Great Barbecue blossomed without his awareness or complicity. But in fact, corruption was implicit and endemic in his political platform and his political conduct. This is not noticed because we are so used to what he created, but it would have shocked earlier generations and did shock honest people at the time. Just one example: until Stanton made him stop, Lincoln freely signed and gave out to his financial supporters what were called “cotton certificates.” This gave them leave to conduct an illegal and immoral trade with the enemy. A brisk business developed on the coast of Confederate Texas where Republican industrialists traded gold, medicine and other goods for Southern cotton.

There is a simple and obvious thing which we must always remember but is almost always left out of discussion of the War to Prevent Southern Independence. What happened in American in the years 1861–1865 was, rhetoric aside, a brutal war of conquest. The South was invaded, laid waste, a fourth of its men killed off, and its people deprived by force of their American right to self-government and subjected to military rule. At the same time peaceful critics of Lincoln’s government were suppressed in fashion previously unthinkable to Americans. The Union of the Founding Fathers was not saved. It was destroyed and replaced. The Gettysburg Address covered up the revolution by a rhetorical feat of having it both ways. By religious-sounding language and evasion and misrepresentation of fact, Lincoln made his destruction of the Union seem to be simultaneously a preservation of the old and sacred and “a new birth of freedom.”

Mel Bradford was wise and correct, I think, that Lincoln is best discerned through his rhetoric. Lincoln provided the rhetoric by which the rational republican discourse of earlier generations of Americans was replaced by sermonistic verbiage of the pseudo-religion of Americanism, like “saving the world for democracy.” Perhaps the ultimate limit of this poisonous style has been reached by George W. Bush, who uses words like “freedom” as magic incantations devoid of content.

Dr. Trifkovic has two recent pieces on Kosovo and another on a State Department ventures in the “integration” of European Muslims modeled on the non-existent integration of many American Muslims.

Dr. Wilson wrote a few weeks ago:

The Australian writer John Pilger nails it: Iran has no nuclear weapons—unlike the United States and Israel. Iran has generally complied with international inspection rules—unlike the United States and Israel. Iran has not engaged in aggressive attacks on other countries in recent years. Unlike the United States and Israel.

He wrote again late last month:

Solzhenitsyn has reminded us often that despotic regimes rest upon two pillars—violence and lies. George Bush has shown a proclivity for both.

Dr. Fleming has this typically clear-eyed assessment of the recent “reporting” about HPV vaccines and related matters:

If everyone had to pay for his own treatment—or die—some of us might think twice before engaging in risky behavior. But in a country where the President describes a Lesbian as a wonderful mother, personal responsibility is unfashionable. Frankly, I don’t care much what people do. Let them kill themselves, trying to perform every act described in the Philosophie dans le boudoir. All I ask is two things: Don’t tell me about it and don’t ask me to prolong your suicide by subsidizing it.

But Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, and Brian Williams (and their writers and handlers) are probably not intelligent enough to be active promoters of the Playboy Philosophy. Even if they wanted to promote virtue and truth, they would not know how to go about it. They are too stupid to ask any of the right questions, and their stupidity is a fatal disease that has long infected the American mind and is now, from is bad reporting on medical science, infecting our bodies.

Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent. In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it’ll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as “one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset.” ~Nicholas Kristof

Actually, calls to prayer by muezzins are justly famous for their lyrical quality, though this tends to be a feature of any kind of singing or chanting done in Arabic.  Like many a language unappreciated by those with only a superficial acquaintance with it, Arabic lyrics can be quite beautiful.  Take, for instance, a favourite of mine, a CD of Byzantine liturgical hymn-singing by the Maronite nun, Sister Marie Keyrouz.  Needless to say, while fluency in Indonesian Malay and childhood Qur’an classes may go over well with columnists at the Times, most Americans are not impressed by this and will be positively worried by some of it.  Maybe that shouldn’t be the case, but it is.

Joe Klein is on extremist alert.  He has put together a list of characteristics he believes are typical of “left-wing extremists” and now has one for the right-wing.  (Matt Yglesias and Ross Douthat chime in helpfully.)  A “right-wing extremist” would exhibit “many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes,” of which I have selected just a sample:

–believes that capitalism creates perfect justice, and that any attempt to tax or regulate it constitutes “social engineering.” (Doesn’t believe in evolution, but does believe in social darwinism.) 

–sees transnational non-governmental groups like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as “the next threats” to U.S. sovereignty. Calls them Transies, derisively.

–believes global warming is a left-wing myth.

–believes that homosexuals are condemned to hell.

Of his list he says:

This is just a partial list, off the top of my head…but I’m sure, as with lefties, these guys simply don’t exist, either.  

Of course, the number of people who are actually as keen on capitalism as Klein sets out here is unbelievably small to the point of being almost non-existent.  Anyone as zealous for capitalism as this wouldn’t care to talk about justice, much less perfect justice, since the preoccupation of market zealots is not justice by some sort of liberty-cum-property.  The people who “don’t believe in evolution” usually aren’t hard-core market fanatics, and the people who are hard-core market fanatics typically have no problems with evolution because they are not usually creationists of any kind.  To the extent that anyone does hold these views, these views are held by radically different kinds of people.  The next time you run into a Young Earth creationist libertarian, you give me a call, because you have surely encountered a rare and endangered species. 

There may be people who refer to members of Amnesty and Human Rights Watch as “transies.”  It’s just that no one has ever met any of these people, because they exist in a Joe Klein-specific dimension.  I’m not even sure what transie is supposed to mean.  Is it short for “transnational”?  I have no idea, because I have literally never seen anyone use it, and if I am not familiar with something it probably doesn’t have anything to do with right-wing extremism.

There are people who think that certain explanations of global warming are myths and, yes, these are myths propagated by people on the left.  There are many people who are not at all convinced that the remedies proposed by certain environmentalists will either do any good or will be worth the enormous costs they will impose on society.  There are very, very few people, if any, who dogmatically insist that absolutely no global warming is taking place, since for many of us who oppose ratifying Kyoto global warming over the ages is an established reality that occurs periodically.  For the record, we are also people who are aware that it was a lot, lot hotter in the Mesozoic Era (somehow the planet managed to putter along just fine), so we are also not inclined to reject evolution out of hand. 

As for people being condemned to hell, that is, of course, for God to decide, but if Scripture can be relied on at all for understanding what God desires for man it is not that remarkable that those who believe Scripture to be inspired would assume that anyone persisting throughout his life in what would be considered mortal sin would fare poorly on the Day of Judgement.  By the way, that standard also applies to the sinners who are reading Scripture, and they know that they will be judged by an even higher standard because they were given much and knew what was expected of them.  So if this view makes believers into “right-wing extremists,” right-wing extremism is doing quite well in its recruiting. 

I think it is only fair that we have a list of traits for the “centrist” extremists (who are, I wager, far more dangerous, because people inexplicably trust them with power and influence).  A centrist extremist exhibits many, if not necessarily all, of the following:

–thinks Joe Lieberman is a thoughtful, independent-minded, moral person.

–thinks John McCain is an honest straight-shooter who wants to reform government.

–regards campaign finance reform as one of the burning issues of the day (see previous trait). 

–views religion as the cause of more bloodshed than anything else in history.

–views Christianity as potentially quite dangerous, but considers Islam to be the “religion of peace.”

–thinks any idea of one religion being superior to another in any respect is wildly dangerous and proof of extremism; presumably also thinks that all answers to all questions are equally valid.

–understands all foreign conflicts as the product of “ancient rivalries” and “centuries of fighting” that cannot be rationally understood by modern man.

–pays no attention to the religious and ethnic aspects of a society until after invading the country in question, whereupon he discovers ethnic and religious diversity and the importance of culture (he then reverts to the previous point).

–asks silly questions such as, “Where is the Muslim Martin Luther King?”

–writes things like, “the world is flat” or “I used to see the world as a landscape of rolling hills.”

–indulges in wild swings of unreasonable optimism followed by stormy moods of disenchantment and confusion.

–thinks that free trade is good for American workers.

–thinks that mass immigration is good for American workers.

–believes that Harry Truman was a great President.

–compares every new and interesting presidential candidate to JFK.

–thinks that talk radio and its “climate of hate,” not government abuses, inspired the Oklahoma City bombing; is constitutionally incapable of criticising the government about much of anything except cover-ups, waste, gridlock and partisanship.

–never trusts in any dogmatic statement, but believes that the truth always lies “somewhere in between” two extremes, which he has conveniently pre-selected so that the happy middle matches his own views precisely.

–thinks that partisanship is the cause of nation’s political woes, and consequently thinks that bipartisanship is the solution to most, if not all, of those woes.

–doesn’t like negative campaigning.

–thinks we should have invaded Iraq and then intervened in Darfur.

–makes lists of characteristics of extremists to emphasise his own reputation for moderation.

–describes opponents as extremists to maintain the fiction that he represents the logical center of every debate.

Do my eyes deceive me, or does Stephen “Politics of the Future” Schwartz actually have the chutzpah to attack someone else’s views of the Spanish Civil War as unduly rose-coloured and propagandistic?  What did Schwartz miya have to say about the war a few months ago?  He wrote:

Spain represented a confrontation between the politics of the past, represented by Franco, and the politics of the future, embodied in a confused but nonetheless genuine Republic. 

That this person was at the same time gamely trying to downplay the civil war in Iraq by making pathetic comparisons with the Spanish conflict only made this obnoxious view that much worse.

Victory For POUM, Insh’allah

Can Schwartz miya really be so cheeky as to refer to someone else as a poseur?  But of course he can!  Look on in wonder as the old commie and neocon fellow traveler re-fights old fights over that old worry, “Who lost Spain to fascism?”  All of this might be interesting except for the problem that the Republicans weren’t fighting fascism and the Second Republic was a good example of how democracy can empower the fanatics who lead it to destruction.  Like another old commie, Ronald Radosh, who edited Spain Betrayedin the tradition of the anti-Stalinist radicals of the Republican cause, Schwartz miya is still mired in disputing over whether the Republic’s domination by the Soviets or its lack of domination and direction by them was its undoing.  It is the Soviets’ responsibility in undermining the Republican cause that so energises Schwartz miya, rather than the horrors inflicted by the Republicans in a war precipitated by their radicalism.  It would never cross the mind of this old lefty-turned-Muslim that the Republican side was itself in the wrong and deserved to lose if moral desert has anything to do with military outcomes (it doesn’t).  How neoconservatives can continue to consort with people like this and somehow pretend that they are not still at some level rehashing their old sectarian fights on the left, I do not pretend to know.

Tough is fine. Even some of Ann’s over-the-top jokes can be written off as just that– jokes. But you can’t write off every hateful, politically damaging crack as a-O.K. simply because that Ann’s a jokester. I, for one, am proud that there are Middle Easterners, gay men and women, and other minorities for whom conservatism is an ideology that empowers. Don’t they get enough crap from our lefty colleagues for “leaving the plantation?” Why should they be subjected to more from one of their supposed allies?

Ours is not the ideology of identity politics and knee-jerk, manufactured outrage that serve political ends, not people [bold mine-DL].  But it is an ideology that should seek to serve everyone, regardless of color or sexual orientation. ~Mary Katharine Ham

There are Middle Easterners “for whom conservatism is an ideology that empowers”?  Perhaps she means that there are Arab Christians and Muslims in this country who subscribe to certain conservative ideas?  I don’t know, because the statement is horribly unclear.  But that isn’t the main thing that’s wrong with this statement.  You already know what I’m going to object to: this dreary, careless use of the word ideology. 

Conservatism is not an ideology, or rather it should be said that the conservative mind rebels and casts out every ideology.  There is undoubtedly some sort of ideology masquerading as conservative thought in this country, and Townhall’s bloggers routinely give it expression.  Anyone who wants to know why the rising new generation is fleeing the right as if they were fleeing the plague needs only peruse the ramblings of Hewitt and Co. to understand why so many Americans are running away from the proponents of the cult of the Presidency and reflexive endorsement of military action.  More than that, any sane person would be right to flee from any group of people that speaks quite openly about their “ideology,” since there is no surer sign of dangerously mindless politics than a politics governed by an inflexible ideology.  Nothing could be more alien to the conservative tradition, yet such is the low state of conservatism that many of the prominent outlets for supposedly conservative opinion will have no difficulty speaking of “conservative ideology” as if it were the most natural thing.  In the end, it is that habit of mind, which Coulter shares, that is far, far more damaging to conservatism and to the reputation of the political right in this country than any crude joke that Coulter could tell.  Predictably, in spite of the movement’s far more egregious problems of groupthink and often shocking automatic deference to President, the blog right has bestirred itself to declare that it is horrified by Coulter’s latest bomb. 

The people who wanted to go to the wall for Danish free speech, because it poked a finger in the eye of Muslims who presumed to dictate to other people what they could and couldn’t say and draw about Muhammad, are the same people who now feign or, worse, genuinely feel ashamed by Coulter’s joke.  This is pathetic.  I would be absolutely in favour of nothing but polite political discourse in which no one ever used ad hominem attacks and slurs (which would mean that many  columnists would suffer drastic reductions in output), but since we have nothing like that discourse this precious cherry-picking of this particular use of a slur is simply ridiculous.    

In rushing about denouncing Coulter these Republican bloggers legitimise every attempt to control and regulate speech through stigma and ostracism, even when the entire edifice of modern speech taboos exists solely to declare certain quite traditionally conservative convictions automatically unacceptable.  You don’t get to talk about states’ rights except in highly qualified ways, because otherwise you might be a racist.  Don’t say anything favourable about Germans in any context ever, and don’t question the absolute necessity of entering WWII, because if you did you might be an anti-Semite.  Whatever you do, don’t suggest that the successes of European civilisation had anything to do with the Europeans themselves, or you will have really gone where no one is supposed to go.      

Every conservative is compelled by the force of social stigma to speak about things he regards as morally repugnant, such as homosexuality, while using only the most vague euphemisms.  He feels obligated to qualify every statement of opposition to, say, same-sex “marriage” by declaring his lack of “homophobia” (which, literally, means “fear of the same,” which is a nonsense), when it is obvious to everyone in the debate that one of the first reasons why same-sex “marriage” seems so objectionable is that it is an endorsement of a kind of sexual relationship that most conservatives regard as fundamentally disordered and immoral.  That most conservatives can only rarely or meekly say this in public is a sign of how cowed by these speech controls many of them have become, and the more prominent they are the more submissive they become, lest they jeopardise their growing audience with anything so offensive as giving their true opinion of something.  In this respect Coulter is slightly unusual among the national pundits, since much of her appeal is in being deliberately provocative by saying things that she and everyone else knows are now “off limits.”  Who agreed that they should be off limits?  Primarily, people on the left decided that they should be and the right went along with all of them to remain “respectable,” because so many on the right had already bought into the self-loathing view that they really had held disreputable opinions in the past that needed to be excised from the discourse–along with any of their colleagues who made the mistake of making the wrong kind of statement.  Such are the repressions of an “open society” that is open to one, bland, generic consenus view from which you dissent only at your social, political and professional peril.  The conservative feels compelled by these same stigmas to refrain from calling homosexuality an abomination, which is what any honest Christian conservative has to call it, and to never on any account lend any substance to the impression that conservatives object to anything related to homosexuality because it is related to homosexuality, but always for some other reason.  Mitt Romney objects to same-sex “marriage” “for the children,” where a much more honest statement would make an objection because of the nature of the relationship itself.     

So now there is great moaning and lamenting about Ann Coulter’s joke on the “respectable” right.  Somehow the blog right cannot summon up similar anguish for all the other things about so much modern conservative commentary that are even more off-putting to reasonable people who are just coming to the world of political ideas.  They will continue to write off, shun or exclude any number of their colleagues, whether or not these colleagues are particularly valuable contributors, and wonder how it is that they lost the culture wars in the process.  Of course, the people who define and control language control the debate and thereby control the outcome of the debate.  Each delimiting of what is acceptable and unacceptable is an exercise in power, and each time the right cedes control of that delimiting and definition to its foes the more likely it is that the right will lose more and more of the debates that have already been rigged by all of the things that they will no longer be allowed to say.      

Turning to another questionable claim, let us look again at what Ms. Ham wrote:

Ours is not the ideology of identity politics and knee-jerk, manufactured outrage that serve political ends, not people.

I know it is one of the standard talking points on the right to say that we are against “identity politics.”  Identity politics is what other, bad people do.  Yeah.  Of course, all political mobilisation against this or that statement or event is “manufactured” to some extent and the outrage that this mobilisation produces is always to some degree “artificial,” because any effort to organise politically is something artificial.  It doesn’t just spring out of the ground or come together through some organic process of congealing.  People align themselves with one another, identify with one another and rally around cherished symbols and institutions when they are attacked because they see these things as being part of their identity.  People are political animals, but that does not mean that all political action is a purely spontaneous expression of our nature.  People will form political associations and create political cultures that are more or less in accordance with human nature, and those that are most in harmony with our nature will tend to flourish by encouraging human flourishing, but the work of making a political culture is very much one of artifice and construction.  For at least one good reason and at least one less coherent reason, conservatives have tended to reflexively react very negatively against anything that smacks of postmodernity and deconstruction.  The good reason is that deconstruction and most pomo efforts are aimed at subverting and overthrowing the norms of Western society that conservatives wish to preserve, starting with the meaning of words and moving on from there to criticism and dismantling of entire institutions and habits of thought.  The less coherent reason for objecting to this is the idea that if this or that identity is constructed it is therefore not real or not important and can therefore be dismantled and chucked onto the scrapheap.  It is as if we were to embrace the pomo view that no one before the pomos ever knew that identity and meaning were constructed, as if people for thousands of years could have missed their own constructions of identity, and insist that we must defend full-on essentialism or embrace total critique.  But this is silly.  Once something is constructed, it exists and has significance, and to believe that identity is constructed is to believe that collapsing cultures can be reconstructed and reinvested with meaning.  To engage in identity politics is to attempt to make use of the identity to which you have adhered yourself as part of the ongoing process of construction.    

Everyone practices identity politics.  When Christians, including myself, went after Marcotte for her bigotry (which was bigotry), they were engaged in identity politics.  When Southerners defend the battle flag as a symbol of their heritage and identity as Southerners, they are engaged in identity politics just as surely as black politicians are engaged in identity politics when they demand slavery reparations.  This myth of people who are not engaged in such politics or who are not motivated by their attachments and loyalties simply has nothing to do with real human beings and how they interact with each other.  Some kinds of identity politics are obviously worse and more destructive than others.  Eliminationist nationalisms are clearly evil and premised on finding meaning for themselves only through the annihilation of other peoples, while there can be cultural and constitutive nationalisms that generally provide meaning and solidarity for people who may desperately need it.  However, to “object” to someone’s position because it is a form of identity politics is like objecting to a writer’s book because he uses words.

In the past, I’ve defended her, even as her rhetoric got worse, as a “gateway conservative”– an entertaining act that pulled in folks who are ticked off at the modern liberal movement, but not necessarily ideological conservatives.  However, once those people start reading her, I argued, they generally migrate to other conservative writers like Thomas Sowell and Charles Krauthammer, which I felt was a net win for conservatism. ~Mary Katherine Ham

So these people migrating from Coulter (who at least occasionally stumbles across something true in her flacking and spittle-laden diatribes) to the less sensational, but far more reliable War Party hack that Krauthammer is represents a win for conservatism?  I have never seen a more succinct summary of why people should be against Ann Coulter’s writings than their function as a path that leads the innocent and naive into the dark underworld of Krauthammer columns.