The Debatable Land

They Knew They Were Right

There's plenty one could say about National Review's blog The Corner. If nothing else it affords a grim panorama of the decline of the American conservative movement. Decline, at least, in as much as NR is considered the house magazine for mainstream Republicanism. Here, for instance, is Andrew McCarthy on last night's debate:

Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left?  Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars?  Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon?  Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites?  Would you come away thinking, "Gee, he's proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN"?

Nope.  McCain didn't want to go there.  So Obama comes off as just your average Center-Left politician.  Gonna raise your taxes a little, gonna negotiate reasonably with America's enemies; gonna rely on our very talented federal courts to fight terrorists and solve most of America's problems; gonna legalize millions of hard-working illegal immigrants.

McCain?  He comes off as Center-Right .. or maybe Center-Left ... but, either way, deeply respectful of Obama despite their policy quibbles. 

Great.  Memo to McCain Campaign:  Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office.  You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.

McCain's problem, you see, was that he didn't froth enough. This is howl-at-the-moon madness. The weird thing is that many of these people actually seem to believe all this nonsense. They are perplexed that the rest of us don't see it. What are we missing? Isn't it obvious that Obama is a terrorist-coddling (nay, supporting!) lefty radical? A sort of Baader-Meinhof candidate?

Well, no, it isn't. Of course the genius of this plan - this conspiracy! - to elect Obama is that the plotters should have clad their candidate in such conventional clothes... Anyway, all this helps explain why I doubt that the Bill Ayers attacks will work: Obama neither looks nor talks like a counter-culture 1960s radical. Claiming that he does fails to pass the smell test. And, equally, it has no bearing on any actual issue in the campaign. (The Willie Horton ad in 1988, by cntrast, focused on a real issue: crime, even if it did so in a pretty brutal, even crude, fashion.) Punters are more likely to see this sort of attack as the diversionary tactics of a campaign that has run out of energy, ideas and promise. And they will be correct to come to this conclusion. This election is all but over, barring some cataclysmic event...

UPDATE: Ross Douthat has more.

Iraq and conservatism?

At Tapped Mori Dinaeur says no-one should be surprised by John McCain's lack of interest in policy detail. Well fine. The there's this, however:

After Iraq and Katrina, I don't think the public needs to be convinced of the link between conservatism [and] the failure of government.

Half of this, at least, is entirely wrong. The Iraq War has little or nothing to do with conservative, or governmental failure, rather it was the result, in more than just part, of an overweening, arrogant belief in the power of government to achieve anything it set its mind to. Granted, the Bush administration didn't foresee the problems that would arise and are properly culpable for that (me too, for that matter), but there's little that's recognisably conservative about the war, at least in terms of any conservatism of restraint, modesty and prudence.

As for Katrina: well maybe (and certainly I think Dinauer is right to suppose that the public blames the federal government for the debacle) but there is, of course, or at least there used to be, the question as to whether disaster relief is a matter the federal government should be taking the lead role in. That, of course, is an exceedingly old-fashioned view.

The Limbaugh Effect

Did Rush Limbaugh win Texas for Clinton? Dave Weigel crunches the numbers and finds that he quite possibly did. Hilarious.

Desperately Seeking a Tartan Sarko?

One of the most kenspeckled British political anecdotes of the last half century recounts the occasion when it was said of Herbert Morrison that he was "his own worst enemy", his great rival Ernie Bevin was quick to interject: "Not while I'm alive, he ain't!".

So when, courtesy of Art Goldhammer, I read that Pierre Lellouche, a conservative member of the UMP from Paris, had condemned the French right in these terms:

"La droite française, malgré la magie sarkozyenne à l'UMP, serait-elle redevenue, Sarkozy parti à l'Elysée, la plus bête et la plus lâche du monde", se demande le député de Paris.

my immediate thought was, no, that ain't possible. Not while the Scottish Conservative and Unionist party continues to draw whatever wheezy breath is left to it, it ain't.

"Administrative shortcomings!"

Ordinaily Derek Conway wouldn't interest this blog. But the Tory MP, who has had the party whip withdrawn after defrauding the taxpayer by paying his sons to "work" as his parliamentary researchers has performed a great service nonetheless. Though,

Mr Conway was reprimanded by the Standards Committee after "no record" was found of Freddie Conway doing any work for him as a researcher.

The student was paid more than £40,000 for his three-year employment period.

we should be exceedingly grateful to Mr Conway for his contribution to the Lexicon of Political Euphemism. According to the MP, using his parliamentary allowance as a family allowance to pay for his child's boozing at Newcastle University was an unfortunate case of administrative shortcomings.

Priceless.

Blair and Brown Part II: This time It's Continental

Great stuff from William Hague in the Commons as he imagines the terror of Tony Blair, President of Europe. American Anglophiles will also like it, since Hague's ability at the Dispatch Box trumps anything the United States Congress can offer.

[Thanks to the ever-redoubtable Mr Eugenides. As th eGreek says, David Miliband's genuine and unforced laughter is worth half a raised eye-brow too.]

Der Burgomeister

I guess Rudy Giuliani won't be getting many Christmas cards from the fine folk at The American Conservative. Read their comprehensive anti-Rudy package here. Read my own anti-Rudy contribution to a previous issue of TAC here.

Polly: adrift on a sea of ignorance. Who knew?

Sigh. I know we don't expect much from Polly Toynbee. But perhaps she should read some Irving Kristol before she starts referring to John Redwood as a neocon throwback to the Thatcher era. If she added some other books to her reading list she might remember that the Thatcherites were, to some extent at least, inspired by FA Hayek - a man not generally considered a neoconservative luminary.

It's too delicious, of course, that in terms of policy towards work and families and other social matters La Toynbee deeply cares about, she has rather more in common with neoconservatives than she seems to understand. They, after all, are the proponents of the "Big Government Conservatism" she says David Cameron must embrace. (In stopped clock rightness terms, of course, she may well be right to say that politically Cameron would benefit from doing so, but that's a different matter entirely.)

(Yes, I know it's futile to even try and remind folk that neoconservative has a distinct meaning beyond nasty right-wing ideas of which I disapprove but it would be nice if, like liberal, its meaning weren't entirely corrupted.)

Why vote Tory?

While Gordon Brown visits Camp David for the first time as Prime Minister (on which more later), David Cameron takes stock. The Tories have been surprised by the goodwill that seems to have accompanied Brown as he begins his time in office. The Brown honeymoon has been all sweetness and joy, prompting thoughts that Broon may go to the country early. A nine-point Tory lead in the polls has been reversed; now it is Cameron who looks shallow and opportunistic. There's time enough, of course, to change this picture, but...

Fraser Nelson asks:

Try to finish the sentence “I really want the Conservatives to win the next election because…” I certainly can’t – and to me, this encapsulates Cameron’s problem. Today’s voters want parties to do something for them, and the party without a practical purpose has no future. The good news is that, as Cameron stares at his evaporated opinion poll lead, he’ll by now realise his mistake.

Hmmm.  “I really want the Conservatives to win the next election because no  party should ever be entrusted with more than three consecutive terms in office.” Not, perhaps, the sort of endorsement Mr Cameron is looking for...

Alan Wolfe and Russell Kirk

Alan Wolfe helpfully distills his 6,000 word broadside against Russell Kirk to a single paragraph:

Here are eleven arguments I made against Kirk: (1) his decision to treat only left-wing ideas as ideological is itself ideological; (2) his characterization of leftwing ideology as marked by infallibility and universality stands in contradiction to his respect for Catholicism, which believes in both; (3) his reverence for the Constitution cannot be reconciled with the Constitution's separation of church and state, not, at least, when Kirk simultaneously insists that religion is a necessary prop of social order; (4) his conviction that Southern slave-holders were virtuous men is difficult to square with their love for and defense of slavery; (5) his dismissal of the very notion of human rights would have made it difficult for him to find slavery a moral evil even had he bothered to discuss it; (6) his notion that conservatives are pragmatists contains no explanation of why pragmatists are generally liberal; (7) his defense of capitalism is in tension with his passion for tradition; (8) his case for religion is never accompanied by an argument on behalf of any particular religion, even though he does offer a discussion of why Judaism and Hellenism are inferior to Christianity; (9) his worship of John C. Calhoun's conservatism fails to appreciate how radical Calhoun was when he opted for slavery over country; (10) his sympathetic comments on Lionel Trilling conspicuously overlook the fact that Trilling was attacking him; and (11) his skepticism toward universalism gives him much in common with forms of multiculturalism today's conservatives say they oppose.

Now, I've only read bits and pieces of Kirk's work. From what I know of him he's not exactly my cup of tea. Nonetheless, a moment's thought leads me to consider several of Wolfe's arguments unpersuasive. There's no need to go through them all, but...

6) This is a hilarious argument. Who says "pragmatists are generally liberal"? Now it may be that Wolfe believes anyone to his right is a committed ideologue, but, generally speaking, ideology has been a very un-conservative trait. Tories - and here I confess to arguing more in terms of traditional British Toryism than the post-Goldwater Republicanism in the United States - have always been the party of pragmatism. That's one reason why, despite the defeats of recent years, the Tory party has been one of the most successful political parties anywhere. One reason Mrs Thatcher discombobulated so many on the right was  that she did have an ideological bent that was entirely at odds with the "wets" and "grandees" who had previously dominated the party.

It's true that Tony Blair abandoned any kind of left-wing ideology in favour "what matters is what works" but that simply demonstrates the extent to which the left in Britain has, generally speaking, been more ideological than the right. Now I'm not suggesting that American liberals are less pragmatic than American conservatives, but Wolfe seems to labour under the impression that conservatism is an ideology first and foremost when, historically, it has often and for many been a state of mind first and a set of political deductions second. (To be sure, this can lead to ugly and reactionary politics, but that's far from being inevitably or invariably the case.) Right now it may seem as though the GOP is an ideological party, but the GOP is by no means a silo for all right-of-centre thought and it's foolish to forget this.

7)"His defence of capitalism is in tension with his passion for tradition". Well, yes! Of course it is. That's an important part of the history of Toryism. How do you balance progress with continuity? How do you adapt to changing circumstances without losing the best of the past? That's precisely the problem conservatives recognise and seek to solve (one might add that traditionally this inculcates a bias for pragmatic rather than sweeping policy preferences). Capitalism is good but it comes at a cost - a price often weighed in the destruction of tradition. Wolfe's accusation here, then, seems to boil down to Russell Kirk daring to be, darn it, a conservative. One might as usefully complain that a dog barks.

The conservative mind - or at least one version of it - welcomes the material progress brought by the success of capitalism even while being capable of retaining a certain wistful affection for the past. To say that is only to say that human beings can have multiple reasons for taking any given action or holding certain beliefs. Sometimes some of those beliefs may have a tension between them. But that's what makes us human. Motives are rarely purer than the purest driven snow and the human mind tends not to operate in the binary fashion Wolfe gives the impression of thinking it does.   

Of course, for a more complete response to Wolfe you should consult Mr Douthat.

The Fatal Lure of the Imperial Presidency?

Once upon a time American conservatives distrusted the idea of an all-powerful, imperial presidency. Here's Russell Kirk, doyen of the movement and the "natural things", on the danger of an over-mighty presidency leading America ever-deeper into Vietnam. Failure to resist this would

"...make the American President a virtual dictator, diminish the constitutional powers of Congress, contract civil liberties, injure the habitual self-reliance and self-government of the American people, distort the economy, sink the federal government in debt, [and] break in upon private and public morality.”

Then there's Barry Goldwater who wrote in his 1964 manifesto:

We hear praise of a power-wielding, arm-twisting President who “gets his program through Congress” by knowing the use of power. Throughout the course of history, there have been many other such wielders of power. There have even been dictators who regularly held plebiscites, in which their dictatorships were approved by an Ivory-soap-like percentage of the electorate. But their countries were not free, nor can any country remain free under such despotic power. Some of the current worship of powerful executives may come from those who admire strength and accomplishment of any sort. Others hail the display of Presidential strength … simply because they approve of the result reached by the use of power. This is nothing less than the totalitarian philosophy that the end justifies the means…. If ever there was a philosophy of government totally at war with that of the Founding Fathers, it is this one.

Gene Healy explains how all this happened - and why Republicans changed their mind (not just because they started winning!), at Cato's excellent blog.

You mean apart from the social and religious conservatism?

National Review's Andy McCarthy complains about an Amir Taheri op-ed in the New York Post:

One line, though, really rankles: "Since 1960, the Turkish army has staged a coup once every 10 years, either to curb the radical left or to stop the Islamist right from seizing control of the state."

I hate to see Taheri buy onto this mainstream media template. What is right-wing, as in conservative, about Islamists?  A revolutionary movement that wants to overthrow the secular system and impose sharia is hardly conservative just because the interpretation of Islam it follows is a fundamentalist one.  This seems to me close to the opposite of being a movement of the Right.  Taheri implicitly suggests as much in his next sentence:  "A new coup could trigger a bitter power struggle and push the more radical Islamists toward violent, even terrorist, methods."  What is conservative about that?

No, I can't think of anything either. You need not buy into Andrew Sullivan's "Christianist" thesis to find this nonsense and wilful confusion entertaining. There are many strands of conservatism, for sure, but it's loopy to pretend that a religious fundamentalism is not one of them.

On a less fanatical level, many Muslims in Britain would, I suspect, be rather more comfortable were societal norms in terms of personal conduct, family breakdown, sexual mores and general licentiousness more like how they were in the 1950s than the 21st century. In other words, they'd share something with National Review. Indeed, what could be more conservative - even in its mildly reactionary way - than this yearning for the benefits (real and rose-tinted) of the past: so near yet frustratingly so out of reach?

UPDATE: Daniel Larison, who knows vastly more about Turkey than I do (and rather more than Mr McCarthy and Mr Taheri too) explains it all here.

Come friendly bombs and fall on NRO?

Oh please. Rick Brookhiser thinks it wrong for John Derbyshire to adapt John Betjeman's most famous line - Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough/To make it ready for the plough - and, even more remarkably, that it was wrong for Betjeman to even write his poem, complaining about:

"...the sheer bad taste of calling on bombs a few years before the Battle of Britain, and during the Terror War when cities have already been bombed. (Betjeman didn't know exactly what was coming, but aerial bombardment was widely feared in the late thirties)."

You gotta love that "exactly", don't you? Still, presumably we can now add the poet to the ever-lengthening list of appeasers who invited the Luftwaffe to do their worst/best. Also: clearly Mr Brookhiser has never been to Slough.

What is it with this tedious literalism at National Review these days? Jonah Goldberg was at it only yesterday, still pretending - or perhaps, if one is to be charitable, believing - that anyone who suggests that many conservatives will indulge in the "stab in the back" theory once the United States withdraws from Iraq is explicitly comparing conservatives to Nazis. That's piffle of course, not least because the "Stab in the Back" explanation for Germany's failure to prevail in the First World War actually predates the foundation and rise of the NSDAP.

Putting that to one side, Mr Goldberg complains that there's no "there" there; that the "Stab in the Back" explanation for defeat is unpersuasive. Which does make it rather odd that he should then go ahead and, well, produce a version of that complaint:

This is not to say that I think blaming the liberal media is a particularly persuasive explanation on the merits for failure in Iraq (if we fail), but it's far from clear that an American defeat in Iraq helps those Democrats who seemed, fair or not, determined to make failure a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Can I make it clear that I don't think Jonah Goldberg is a Nazi? Good. But in as much as the "Stab in the Back" theory that proved appealing in Weimar Germany can be compared to the looming conservative fury and resentment over failure in Iraq, it's in the sense that failure can be attributed to a lack of will and the corrosive impact of internal dissent that weakened the state's ability to see the mission through and prevail rather than to any sense that the war was a mistake from the start or that, post-1916, the chances of German victory reduced considerably.

Mr Goldberg complains that Ross Douthat embraces the "Stab in the Back" theory "uncritically" and wonders why he does so. Perhaps because it's not very difficult to find evidence of conservatives' willingness to blame defeat upon domestic fifth columnists? Presumably those conservatives do not consider themselves Nazis, and it seems equally unlikely that Ross could be so described, so perhaps Mr Goldberg should rethink his oddly literal interpretation of the comparison with German reaction to the armistice in 1918?

Bush Derangement Syndrome: the Conservative Version

There's a lot to like and just as much to ponder in the current issue of The New Republic, however for a spot of horrifying entertainment it's hard to beat Johann Hari's account of his time aboard a National Review cruise last November.

National Review partisans will doubtless complain that it's a partial account and they will, for sure, have a point. But Hari's piece gets to the guts of what a certain type of American conservative really does think. It's not a pretty picture.

[Norman] Podhoretz and [William F] Buckley now inhabit opposite poles of post-September 11 American conservatism, and they stare at wholly different Iraqs. Podhoretz is the Brooklyn-born, street-fighting kid who traveled through a long phase of left- liberalism to a pugilistic belief in America's power to redeem the world, one bomb at a time. Today, he is a bristling gray ball of aggression, here to declare that the Iraq war has been "an amazing success." He waves his fist and declaims, "There were WMD, and they were shipped to Syria. ... This picture of a country in total chaos with no security is false. It has been a triumph. It couldn't have gone better." He wants more wars, and fast. He is "certain" Bush will bomb Iran, and "thank God" for that...

...Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."

The audience cheers Podhoretz. The nuanced doubts of Bill Buckley leave them confused. Doesn't he sound like the liberal media? Later, over dinner, a tablemate from Denver calls Buckley "a coward." His wife nods and says, "Buckley's an old man," tapping her head with her finger to suggest dementia.

Two charitable interpretations of this lunacy occur: either Podhoretz is an old man losing his mind or he is simply feeding the animals at the zoo what they want. Such charity would be misplaced however, since Podhoretz subsequently tells Hari in private that "nobody was tortured in Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo" and Bush is "a hero".

Just as illuminating is the conservative certainty that Europe is doomed:

Topic A: the billion-strong swarm of Muslims who are poised to take over the world. The idea that Europe is being "taken over" is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles' cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most responsible for this insight is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn. He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt. Steyn's thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The "European races"--i.e., white people--"are too self-absorbed to breed," but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be "large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015" as Europe is ceded to Al Qaeda and "Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia." He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures--he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping--to "prove" his case.

But facts, figures, and doubt are not on the itinerary of this cruise. With one or two exceptions, the passengers discuss "the Muslims" as a homogenous, sharia-seeking block--already with near-total control of Europe. Over the week, I am asked nine times--I counted--when I am fleeing Europe's encroaching Muslim population for the safety of the United States.

What is striking here, is what one might term a psychological desire to be proved right about this, as though conservatives welcome Europe's gotterdammerung. This would have the happy consequence of leaving the United States magnificently alone; not merely mankind's last best hope but it's only chance to save something from the ashes. Hell, it's as if the conservative movement - or this part of it - is working itself into a rapturous millenarian frenzy. Does it have to be said that this is madness?

It's not just National Review's readers either. A search of the magazine's blog for "France" and "Intifada" brings a mere 961 results. Still, the absence of any French civil war cannot be allowed  to colour one's opinions can it?  Just because it isn't there doesn't mean you can't find it if you're only wise enough to believe what your imagination creates.

Which is, of course, rather how we got into this mess in the first place. 
 

Small government? A nice, charming, old-fashioned idea...

Ezra Klein says, vis a vis Fred Thompson flying to London last week:

The small government movement appears increasingly, if quietly, cognizant of the utter failure of their ideology, and is resorting to ancestor worship instead.

Am I allowed to borrow the old "if it hasn't been tried properly how can it have failed?" line from the Communists' fellow-travellers and ask when exactly it was that America was governed according to the principles small government types favour? Not any time recently as best I can tell.

Mr Klein is correct about the ghoulish "ancestor worship" however. The notion that the answer to any given problem can be found in asking "What would Reagan/Thatcher have done?" is an inadequate, if predictable, response. We still await any real sign of fresh or halfway original thinking from any of the major contenders for the GOP nomination next year. Nothing we've seen in the campaign so far should encourage one to think that may change any time soon.