Posted on 03/26/2003 1:01:17 PM PST by The Irishman
National Review’s Anathema Corner
by J.P. Zmirak
The spitball bombardiers of the imperialist "right" aren’t satisfied with imposing "democracy" abroad – they also want to stifle it here at home. The most serious attempt in recent weeks to silence discussion in American politics is David Frum’s cover story in the current National Review. If you haven’t slogged through it yet, it’s a compilation of all the most unfortunate things ever said – or almost said, or never said but possibly implied – by thinkers whom the ex-Canadian speechwriter broadly labels "paleoconservative."
Rather than refute his charges point by point – that has been done extraordinarily well elsewhere, such as here and here – I’d rather address what Frum is trying to do, and why. I’ve a certain insight into this question, since, like Frum, I was once a conservative columnist at Yale. I came in just after he graduated, and made a lot of noise in the campus papers, just as he had, so inevitable comparisons were drawn. And contrasts.
You see, Frum had made himself well-known among the amazingly intolerant leftist students of early 1980s Yale by loudly espousing Reaganite foreign and budgetary policy. He also made certain to assert over and over again that he was a fiscal conservative but a social liberal.
This was a crucial point, on a campus where liberal social attitudes were taken utterly for granted, and very few students dared to speak against them. For those who did, "social suicide" doesn’t begin to describe what they'd done to themselves. The few undergrads who advocated traditional Christian values made themselves almost radioactive. Shunned and loathed, they would eat alone, or in tiny groups of fellow thinkers, in the cavernous Gothic dining halls, as if they’d contracted some contagious, incurable skin disease. (And no, they didn’t get to date much.)
As if to publicly proclaim his distance from the misfits who were so despised, Frum led a public campaign to close down a conservative literary magazine, The Yale Lit, because – well, because "he couldn’t stand that type of conservative," as he told a friend. Enlisting student opinion, and the Yale administration’s help, Frum succeeded in quashing an exquisitely edited, beautifully produced student magazine, which was promptly replaced, under the same name, by a fourth-rate broadsheet that printed students’ trashy, confessional poems about their drug experiences and tentative erotic fumblings. Frum’s first purge of right-wing opinion was accomplished.
No ostracism for David. He went from Yale to swim among the suits at The Wall Street Journal, and write a number of mildly interesting books, en route to rising smoothly through the ranks of what was by now called "neoconservatism." He really "arrived" (or "made it" in the sense of Norman Podhoretz in his revealing, appalling autobiography) when his commentaries began to appear on that bastion of respectable opinion, National Public Radio. I listened to many of them, and found them witty. Also troubling – since their purpose was clear: To explain to America’s liberal intelligentsia why they shouldn’t be afraid of Republicans.
These urbane, chatty contributions all centered on one theme: That the social issues the Republican party had adopted were simply red meat for the rubes. They would never go anywhere, and shouldn’t stop people from voting for lower marginal tax rates and a "strong" foreign policy. Again and again Frum would patiently explain how the gestures made by the likes of Newt Gingrich, George Bush I, and Robert Dole to appease the Religious Right, the Southerners, the libertarians, and the "gun people" in their party were simply that – hollow, symbolic tips of the cowboy hat to the hapless activists whom they needed to keep in line. Cheap pizza bought for the "3:00 am" types who leave their trailer parks to volunteer at Republican phone banks. His wink was almost audible. Those people were never going to get what they wanted – any more than black voters really benefit from electing Democrats. But the rabble must be appeased. No wonder Frum got a job writing speeches for a Republican administration.
It does, however, strike me as strange that such a chameleon feels entitled to dictate the legitimate boundaries of conservative debate. I feel it’s fair to ask Frum now: Where does he stand on the social issues which matter so much to many fervent conservative voters? Is he still pulling the wool over their eyes, wrapping tax cuts for Enron in pages torn from the New Testament?
Frum’s ascendancy doesn’t surprise me. You see, one of the most dominant motives in any socially stigmatized group – such as conservatives were at Yale and still are in the opinion-making circles Frum now inhabits – is self-purification. One tries to wash away the taint that your opponents have attached to you by finding someone within your own movement who is more distasteful, more extreme, more socially maladroit, then denouncing him. Best of all if you can lead the chorus of ostracism. That renders you yourself ritually pure, at least for a while – and joins you securely to the community that has now been purged. Anthropologist Rene Girard analyzes this social phenomenon brilliantly, tracing its operation from the ancient world, through the death of Christ, up to the present. It was frequently the motivating force in anti-Semitic uprisings, as social misfits whipped up the crowd to persecute the "evil," loathsome Other. As Justin Raimondo points out in Reclaiming the American Right, this liturgy of anathema has been the rite of choice for decades in "movement conservatism." Self-hating conservatives conduct such a ritual every few years – are duly applauded for it.
How easy to relieve one’s own anxieties, demonstrate one’s own "good will," and win general approval by finding an alternate focus for opprobrium, then leading the mob that drives out the evildoer! Bill Clinton (remember him?) was engaging in this tactic when he denounced Sistah Souljah. Moderate black leaders do the same when they dutifully denounce Louis Farrakhan – a point made brilliantly in Warren Beatty’s worthy film "Bullworth." Countless conservatives joined in such fun when Trent Lott shot off his mouth. I must confess that I’ve done it myself. There’s a certain glee, a sense of cleanliness and virtue that arises when you discover that there is someone – anyone – in the world who’s further out on a limb, then you righteously saw it off. "I may be conservative (or liberal, or antiwar), but I’m not like…" Fill in the blank with your favorite extremist, the person with whom you’d least like to be associated. The gay writer David Sedaris described the phenomenon brilliantly in a radio essay, explaining how in high school he’d find someone more effeminate than he, and lead the chorus of taunts, to help redirect the social abuse from himself, and affirm his place in the mainstream.
Of course, there are ideas that must be refuted. But the unseemly eagerness with which today’s political police latch onto and denounce perceived dissidents betrays something dark at work. When you realize that someone in your own political camp has taken your own principles and perverted them beyond recognition, the appropriate emotional response is sadness, a grim sense of necessity, and a determination to be fair. That’s also the spirit in which sane men approach the prospect of starting a war.
Instead, too often, the self-anointed members of a given "mainstream" movement (whatever it is) respond with an ugly glee. John Podhoretz boasted on NPR of the role warbloggers had played in bringing down Trent Lott. Podhoretz spoke with as much bravura as if he’d personally captured Osama bin Laden, and dragged the murderer to prison by his beard. It’s the very same spirit that Frum displays in his preening piece in National Review. With an almost papal solemnity, he declares opponents of the current war virtual traitors, and employing the papal "We" he pronounces anathema: "We turn our backs on them." My first reaction to this was simply to laugh, and mutter, "Be glad there’s an American soldier watching your back, chicken-hawk."
But upon reflection, I think I was being a little too harsh, expecting too much of a political ghostwriter. Man is a social animal, and it’s only natural for men to wish to move amongst the principalities and powers, to ascend socially, to consume rubber-squab at election parties with Republicans, then kick back and drink Barolo with the Democrats. It’s only human. But it’s not particularly admirable. It doesn’t take courage – just the instinct of a dog to stick with its pack. The lone wolves Frum presumes to exile – serious, flinty, sometimes wrongheaded and mostly crotchety, unclubbable thinkers such as Peter Brimelow, Lew Rockwell, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Justin Raimondo – have each added far more to the stock of interesting arguments on the Right than Frum ever will. They have each, in different ways, helped blow away the cloud of rhetoric, demagoguery, and lies that passes for political debate in this country. They each write with careful reference to history, reverence for the Western tradition, and an understanding of our country and its Constitution – instead of spewing mindless, provocative slogans such "Axis of Evil," or "Nuke Mecca." They each provoke serious thought among their readers. But then, that isn’t what Frum cares about. As far as I can tell, it never was.
Copyright © 2003 LewRockwell.com
That is a matter of opinion.
Francis and Buchanan, whatever you may say about the substance of their screeds, write beautifully.
So did Marx. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post writes beautifully also. I qualify their ramblings as incoherent, not the writing style.
If you find them "incoherent", I suggest it is you who may be deficient. Maybe a remedial class in reading and/or writing at the local community college might give you the boost you need.
You may suggest anything you like. I don't need another college class to know that Buchanan has gone from a social conservative to a left-leaning populist. However, if I feel the need to pretend I'm in a college class, I'll just chew down one of Raimondo's 4000-word nonsensical screeds.
Do you even know what insipid means?
Lacking qualities that excite, stimulate, or interest; dull. I stand by it. I can't make it through a Raimondo or Rockwell piece without feeling that they continually re-write the same article. It is dull, boring, lacking in any real-worl intellectual argument. It is argument for the sake of being contrary.
Incomplete?
Being as none of them seem to think out their positions to the logical conclusion, yes I will stand by that too.
Frum writes a diary and Goldberg often writes columns that are a series of non-sequiturs and you're calling polished writers such as Buchanan and Francis "incomplete". Mind-boggling.
I think Goldberg is amusing. Frum I can take or leave, but in his Buchanan piece I think he was right on the money. Apparently, you do not. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Oh well, c'est la vive (I know what that means, too).
Again, congrats on being clever but you're really devoid of any accuracy here
I'll take the compliment for what it's worth. Look, Buchanan, Raimondo, et al are obviously big hits with you. Good for you. I don't agree with them and find their claim to be "conservatives" ludicrous. In your attempt to defend them you suggested I'm stupid-
I suggest it is you who may be deficient
Maybe a remedial class in reading and/or writing...
Questioned my command of the language - Do you even know what insipid means?
And re-iterated the "stupid" part - but you're really devoid of any accuracy here
I find the tone of your "argument" haughty and arrogant, with a tinge of intellectual superiority (and yes, I know what all those words mean). If I want to debate with someone whose entire argument is based on my not being intelligent enough to grasp the nuances of the discussion, I'll go find a liberal.
And since you also found the need to reply to my off-the-cuff remark about "unhinged/inhinged", I'll assume you were looking to pick an argument. I'll pass, thanks.
ROFLMAO - We've had to listen to the crap from the ever shrinking whacko right - the name calling, the snide and smug self certainty of it all for years.
The most common statement out of you losers has been to call people RINO or CINO, or "not a real conservative".
We've finally figured out that your crowd is the same bunch of electoral failures that didn't think Reagan was conservative enough, and who routinely jump ship for 3rd party boneheads (but claim you were with us all along). As a result of that, you're out. Permanently. You don't get to sit at the policy table, and you don't get to pretend you were with us all along.
You know the old term "dance with the one who brung ya"? Your date finally noticed you making eyes with others, and you can ride home with them.
In fact, Buckley did not exonerate Buchanan.
He said something to the effect that he "could not defend Buchanan against the charge of anti-semitism."
Congratulations, you have reached a level of debate I am unfamiliar with. I don't have my paleo-con language decoder with me today, so I can't even pretend to know what that is supposed to mean. Does it mean -
* You can't debate without name-calling so you are bailing out?
* You have run out of ways to call me stupid?
* I ripped up all your turgid comments and you realized you didn't really have a point?
* This is an attempt at humor, but so obscure that I need a map and compass to find it?
Help me out here.
I understand that Raimondo writes part-time for Pravda, that's the real Pravda, the one in Moscow, ummm not renowned for holding, ummm, conservative views or tolerating them. If you review his craven columns on his Antiwar.com website, it is pretty obvious that he is a phony if he claims to be part of the right. If Raimondo wants to reclaim any movement it would be one where his allies will be George McGovern and CPUSA and the Lambda Legal Defense Fund or perhaps the Rockford Institute and not anything cognizeably conservative.
War is a justifiable exercise of statecraft (even against Saddamites who steal your children to force you to shoot American soldiers by threatening to kill the kids if you don't), whether Justine likes it or not. If Zmirak (who was and probably still is a fine, principled and often misguided young man who is motivated by his idea of Catholicism) met Justine he would flee in terror.
Trent Lott is mixed up with "paleoconservatives" like the atheist Sam Francis, fired by the Washington Times for addressing Holocaust Denial groups favorably. Francis now earns his daily bread editing the monthly rag of the "Conservative Citizens' Council" in Missouri, the lineal descendant of the White Citizen's Council of Mississippi of which Lott's uncle is a leader. Lott contributed a monthly column. As many have noted here, Lott was also a spineless wimp as Majority Leader and good riddance to bad trash as Dr. Frist is far better regardless of any remarks by Lott, who is so dim that he could not remember who the other candidates were in 1948 whom Strom stood against.
Racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia, homosexuality, eccentricity, curmudgeonliness, utter obsolescence of views circa 1935, isolationist neo-ostrichism, a few snobby tastes shared with the culturati, terminal nerdiness and a willingness to associate with an antiwar neo-Americong that includes International A.N.S.W.E.R, the National Lawyers' Guild, Ramsey Clark, Michael Gun-grabbing Moore and the usual gang of anti-American suspects is not the description that first comes to mind when one hears the word "conservative." And, hopefully, it never will.
Frum is attacking the Rockford Institute in a city near me. Access their website: Chroniclesmagazine.com and read for yourself the looney tune ramblings offered in the column "Hard Right" by the eccentric in chief, Tom Fleming. Special prizes for anyone who can find two correct assertions in his scribblings on the outhouse wall.
Pro-Serbian instead of pro-American, he writes in a recent column that France ought not be criticized by mere Americans (yahoos that we are) because France is a far greater country than ever America will be (puts away full barf bag and returns to keyboard) and that it is a lie that we bailed them out in WWII (and I think he also said WWI, but check for yourself the column America's Flailing Francophiles).
Fleming also doubts the crimes of Milosevic (not that we should have intervened there but Milosevic's status as a second generation communist boss does not phase Fleming in the slightest since Milosevic is anti-American and therefore an ally unlike Bill Buckley or the late Frank Meyer or Norman Podhoretz or William Kristol or the late James Burnham or anyone associated with National Review. Also, Joe McCarthy, according to Fleming, was no more than a drunken lout who (read any leftist attack to fill in the rest) ruined people's reputations as sensitive intellectuals without scruple.
As Frum pointed out in his article, Fleming has brought his mini-magazine all the way from a readership of 20,000 in 1987 to a readership of 5,000 today as he advances ever deeper into Serbophilian inanity. Can anyone come up with a single reason why any-non-Serbian grownup cares a feather or a fig over Serbia? Serbia? He should get a life. At that rate, his dimwitted anti-American magazine and Institute will be gone in about five more years and not a moment too soon. Buh-bye!!!!
Read the websites of these "paleoconservatives" and note their extreme allergy to Jewish people who are involved in making foreign policy and military policy. If the bad habit of ascribing all the decisions of those Jewish folks to some sort of dual loyalty problem is not anti-Semitism, neither is the seldom seen (nowadays) routine about Catholics not being fit for the Senate or the presidency because they might favor the Vatican anti-Catholicism.
When another "paleo", Joseph Sobran, who has devastated what might have been a brilliant career by not refraining from such stupidities as referring to conservative hawks (who happen to be Jewish) as "kosher conservatives" before Holocaust Denial groups, he is hailed in these circles of "paleos".
Those of us who have devoted decades to the authentic conservative movement that elected Ronald Reagan resent the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" handful of malicious malcontents and plain offensive characters who would ruin conservatism and our country by going where no decent person will go again into a sewer of racism and bigotry.
Paul Gottfried was also criticized in the Frum article but Frum has no reputation for bashing Jews, assuming that Gottfried ius a Jew which he may not be. He is a pal of the Rockford Institute crowd, however which is the only negative that I know about him.
Bill Buckley read the John Birch Society and Ayn Rand out of the movement many years ago. He simply delivered the anathemas through his magazine (where Whittaker Chambers did the honors on la Rand). Today, David Frum is doing similar honors in the same venue on the curious crew who call themselves "paleoconservatives" and live on attacking the actual conservative movement. Frum is right. To attack antisemitism or racism or xenophobia, much less to attack Justine's pantywaist "antiwar" efforts (worried as he/she/it is about all those lost romantic opportunities) is not to attack anyone for insufficient liberalism. Au contraire: just insufficient conservatism and, in most cases, insufficient manhood and insufficient patriotism.
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