A perceptive observation. And that is a very large part of the reason why I have sometimes used the phrase "foaming at the mouth, flopping on the floor conservative" to describe myself politically: I want to make it clear to the hearer that I'm a full-blown conservative and, if necessary, in your face. There is much of this in my choice of nom de plume and avatar but, if you read my about page, you will see that it is not the whole whole reason. I hope to be larger in spirit than that.
If you grew up as I did in the Northeast in the 1950s and 60s and attended university and graduate school, you will have a personal acquaintanceship with our struggle as conservatives for intellectual respectability . From my childhood, I can recall the McCarthy days. Conservatives in those days were anti-Communists and as such we were blackguarded in school if we dared to advance that position. This, of course, is contrary to the conventional history of the times which recites that it was the anti-Communists who conducted all the witch hunts. My experience was to the contrary. Political correctness had not yet won the label but it was in effect nonetheless.
The great divide of the time was where you came down on Alger Hiss. Generations later we know that Whittaker Chambers told the truth and Alger Hiss was both perjurer and spy but at the time all the weight of the media and academia fell to the other side. Later, the Hiss matter became all tangled up with the subsequent career of Richard Nixon. His declensions or thrown up as proof that McCarthyism was wrong, Whittaker Chambers was wrong, because Richard Nixon was a criminal.
Later, conservatism was wrong because conservatives supported the Vietnam War and the Vietnam war was wrong. Before that, Eisenhower was stupid and, after that, Reagan was stupid. Now Bush is stupid. It is hard to be smart and conservative.
It was lonely in some respects being a Goldwater conservative in 1964. I recall attending a rally where those who could not get tickets could not gain admittance so they stood outside the arena in support of Barry Goldwater. In those days, of course, we got news at 7 and 11 and I was eager to see on the late news how the New York media covered the rally which I have personally attended. I was astonished to see the people whom I knew from my own eyewitness were Goldwater supporters converted by the magic of television into demonstrators against him.
The first time I heard Rush Limbaugh, I was repelled by his rondomontade but very quickly a light went on and I caught on that Limbaugh was deliberately making it okay to be conservative. This is not how you would do it in academia, but it works for him on talk radio. Limbaugh tells the left, damn your eyes, I am what I am, it is something to be proud of, not ashamed of, and, like the Gospel, it should be broadly proclaimed. I thought, just as you have observed in your post to me, my God, have we been reduced in the eyes of our fellow citizens to the place where we must rage against this intellectual Jim Crow?
The other day I was riding on a train toward Stuttgart when a woman whom I judge to be in her mid-60s kept staring at me. She was too old for me to be flattered and I eventually noticed that she was not interested in me but in my book which was Stephen F. Hayes' excellent biography, Cheney. The book bears a picture of the vice president on the cover and it was this I think which caught her eye. Finally she asked me in very high German if she could see my book. It evolved that she was a highly educated Austrian, and fluent in English.
In essence, she was curious how anyone would find Cheney worthy of studying. Her assumption was that he was the Machiavelli behind Bush who must be a borderline cretin. Whatever advances toward freedom as represented by the conservative movement which we have been able to achieve in America, such an intellectual renaissance has definitely not occurred in Europe. I have been here now almost 2 decades and I am dally surprised by the unanimity of opinion among Germans of all classes. I regret to report that this unanimity has only been solidified by the war in Iraq.
As I pointed out to this woman, there is simply no viable alternative point of view available in any media here. Indeed if you go into my local bookstore there is a great table loaded with books about America but not one of them is in support of America and certainly not in support of George Bush. You can find anything Michael Moore has written.
My interlocutor on the train was a very nice lady who was obviously possessed of cultured continental politeness. Nevertheless, I felt it necessary to tell her straight out in the beginning of our discussion that I was a "foaming at the mouth flopping on the floor" conservative. I said I know that I am regarded by most of the educated Europeans to be a primitive, an intellectual Neanderthal, merely because of my political views. I told her flat out that I was prepared to defend my views but not apologize for them. We spent an hour or more in delightful conversation and parted on very good terms at the Stuttgart Station.
