Reaction to last week’s NR story on paleo continues to be heard. Two pieces that appeared yesterday seem to me to require some comment.
One of them appeared on the Lew Rockwell site by a writer named John Zmirak, who suggests that the secret of my politics is that I am a “fiscal conservative but a social liberal.” He does not support this point with any quotations or citations – for the very good reason that there are none to be found. In fact, the record shows exactly the opposite: that I began arguing the conservative case on issues like the defense of the traditional family from the time I began writing about politics in the early 1980s. Nobody is going to be much interested in reading through back issues of the Yale Daily News. But if interested in my background on these issues, readers might wish to take a look at my debate with Andrew Sullivan over gay rights in Slate in 1997, among many, many other examples.
The larger point is this: I don’t personally regard myself as a “neoconservative.” (The term seems to me to describe that generation of writers and thinkers who began as anti-communist liberals and moved right in the 1960s and 1970s. That’s not my biography.) Nevertheless, it was social issues – crime, urban disorder, the turn from civil rights to racial quotas, the attack on the family – fully as much as foreign-policy debates that transformed the hawkish liberals of the 1950s into neoconservatives in the 1970s.
Midge Decter’s classic essay, “The Boys on the Beach” – a critique of the homosexual lifestyle and culture of the 1970s – appeared in Commentary all the way back in 1980, before anybody had ever heard of such a thing as a “paleoconservative.” William Bennett and Terry Eastland published the first prophetic attack on affirmative action, Counting By Race, in 1979 – and then refused to institute quotas at the National Endowment for the Humanities when he was appointed chairman in 1981. Irving Kristol denounced Roe v. Wade the instant the decision was handed down. And so on and on. Whatever else the dispute with the paleos concerns, it isn't traditional morality.
A second negative comment on my piece comes from David Keene of the American Conservative Union in yesterday’s edition of The Hill, a newspaper about Congress now being excitingly transformed by new editor Hugo Gurdon.
Keene claims that “When a nation is at war, there’s a tendency among those who support it to suspect that those who opposed it before the shooting started did so either because they were secretly biased in favor of the enemy or have somehow come to hate their own country.” And he goes on to argue that I have irresponsibly besmirched Robert Novak merely because of the latter’s s “disagreement with Bush’s Iraq policy.”
I suppose one of the dangers of writing a 7,000 word piece is that you run the risk that busy people – and Keene is one of the busiest conservatives in Washington – won’t have time to read it very carefully. So let me restate for the record: I did not criticize the antiwar conservatives I discussed in NR for mere opposition to the president's Iraq policy. In fact, I explicitly praised those conservatives who questioned that policy for their valuable contributions to public debate:
“Questions are perfectly reasonable, indeed valuable. There is more than one way to wage the war on terror, and thoughtful people will naturally disagree about how best to do it, whether to focus on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah or on states like Iraq and Iran; and if states, then which state first?”
I meant those words sincerely. In the very same issue of NR I also had a back-page column lavishly praising Heather MacDonald’s new book about policing – and Heather is an opponent of the Iraq war, which she regards as unwise and distracting.
It was not for disagreeing with the president’s Iraq policy that I criticized antiwar conservatives like Robert Novak and Patrick Buchanan (whom I note David Keene does not defend), but for succumbing to paranoid and anti-semitic explanations of that policy – a paranoia which led some of them, including Novak, to move to direct and indirect opposition to the Afghan campaign as well.
Let’s remember: The very day after the terrorist attacks, Novak was already writing his first column pinning the blame for the atrocity on Israel. On September 17, 2001, he alleged that the administration would never find bin Laden and would instead attempt “to satisfy Americans by pulverizing Afghanistan.” By year’s end, he was saying on television that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.” This is something beyond mere dissent. David Keene concluded his piece with the observation that “Robert Novak was opposing this nation’s enemies before David Frum was even born.” That is true. Which makes it all the more disturbing that Novak has been so unwilling to live up to his own past record in the 18 months since 9/11.
Novak stating an obvious fact proves he has become unpatriotic? Reminds me of Canadian hate speech laws.