Different Viewpoints on the TAC Blog
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We had an e-mail from a visitor to the TAC blog, which has made us think about what the purpose of the blog is and where we should be going with it. The e-mail is below followed by my comments on it.
Our visitor wrote:
I am a recent subscriber and have enjoyed a good many articles from your archive. I was just entering high school when Reagan was elected and became a “Reagan Republican” during the country’s resurgence in spirit during the 80’s. I have been disillusioned for many years at the direction the party has taken with huge government spending and national programs that left wingers from past generations would envy. However, I’m primarily a one-issue person in these times…as a conservative Catholic…and that is on the issue of life and mainly on abortion, euthanasia, and stem cell research. A society that fails to protect its young from premeditated killing, much less one that encourages it, is a dying society.
From reading the blog on your website, it appears to me that your magazine isn’t so much about putting forth a solid, real conservative message on current events as much as it is to snipe at neo-conservatives. Now, I have no use for the Sean Hannity’s of the world, either spiritually or intellectually, but your tone strikes me as pedantic at times and often fails to address current events from the “first principles” perspective of Russell Kirk. You seem instead to simply, like an 8th grader taunting one of his classmates, exult almost exclusively in the missteps and failings (real or perceived) of the group called the “neocons”, who would appear at times from the tone of your writing to be responsible for every wrong that exists in the world today. You also seem to have quite a following from a cadre of sneering adolescents who seem to be more “anti-neocon” than actual conversatives.
All of this leads me to my question. Is there a middle layer of thought that I was supposed to have to get all of this? I suppose I am a former “neocon” who tacitly rejected many practices over the years that led me to believe that I was either no longer conservative or that there was a different sort of conservative tradition. I found Russel Kirk and others and somehow found you. I suspect there are many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people like me who need to hear that message so they don’t think that post-modern liberalism and libertarianism are the only viable vehicles for political expression in this country besides the dominant norms of those who currently control the “conversative brand”.
You might try to reach out a little bit to folks that are struggling with all of this and articulate that the “neocons” AND the liberals are wrong, and most importantly, WHY. And when they’re right, be respectful of the truth, as a good conservative is primarily interested in truth.
You seem to do this in your articles, though they can be needlessly shrill at times, but the blog…it’s like a silly inside joke in middle school that’s meant to keep everyone else out. Maybe some more of us want to embrace what you’re saying..and perhaps you could respond to my email with a reasonable explanation of what you’re trying to communicate.
I’m just asking because I care about what’s happening and what you have to say.
My response:
I think I became a conservative in 1966 when, in my second year at the University of Chicago, I noted just how much fun Bill Buckley was having compared to the dour Trotskyites and sanctimonious Liberals who surrounded me. Buckley was not above laughing at himself and delighted in tearing apart conservative orthodoxy. I saw him speak on a panel at the university and I am convinced (a) that he was drinking scotch from his water glass and (b) that he actually fell asleep after a particularly vicious bon mot relating to John Lindsay. The point of my story is that taking oneself and one’s beliefs very seriously might be an intellectual exercise compelling to some but boring to many others, particularly in a blog. Sermons on conservative pieties could drive readers away in droves. What could a blog item on abortion possibly say? I for one fall asleep immediately when confronted by something written by Russell Kirk or Sam Francis but can read with delight anything written by Joe Sobran, who is quite willing to stick the knife in and twist it.
Which is just to say that there are all kinds of people who call themselves conservatives. To me, conservatism is not so much a cerebral exercise or philosophy as a proper way to govern – sanctity of life, small government, low taxes, limited government intrusion in one’s privacy, rule of law, and most of all strong defense but no wars unless the nation itself is threatened. Which leads me to why the neocons are as important as they are. First of all, they have hijacked and perverted the conservative name and must be held accountable for that. Second, they are indeed responsible for nearly everything bad that has happened in the past seven years, including destroying our economy and military, starting unnecessary wars that they cannot finish, and taking away many of our fundamental liberties. It is necessary to attack them again and again until they are completely discredited and consigned to history’s dust bin. If we back off, they will be starting a new war against Iran within six months. I do think our reader’s point that we attack the neocons (and McCain-Palin) regularly but don’t go after the liberals nearly enough is very well put. Apart from Pat Buchanan’s articles, that is almost certainly true.
We obviously have a product to sell and an audience to reach, so it’s undeniably helpful to understand how the blog readers are perceiving our efforts. Now that the TAC blog is interactive I for one hope that we will be getting a lot more feedback from readers.
Filed under: Books, Culture, Election, Uncategorized
Hi, yeah I read your blog and enjoy. IMHO it doesn’t really matter “reagan republican” or whatever label. Just have an intelligent POV instead of hardcore fundie idiocy.
This country has gone very anti-intellectual and to the fundamentalist right since late ’90s. Gay marriage isn’t going to destroy this country as much as endless wars, freezing wages and running up our debt. There has been a willful ignorance that has governed to long…. hope it is not too late!
oh well, keep up the good writing
I subscribe to two political magazines: The American Conservative and Chronicles. Each, I believe, has strengths, but what I have always appreciated about TAC (I am a charter subscriber) has been its willingness to let contrasting ideas manifest themselves in one place, sometimes generating heat but always shedding light. Keep up the good work.
I find the distinction drawn by Mr. Giraldi’s correspondent between “liberals” and “neocons” to be rather specious. Quite a few prominent “neocons” espouse “liberal” positions on social and economic issues, e.g. Frum and Brooks, while quite a few “liberals” espouse “neocon” positions on foreign policy, e.g. Dennis Ross. Even “neocons” like GW Bush and John McCain who are nominal social conservatives have demonstrated time and again that foreign policy trumps social policy in their eyes. Neoconservative, for better or worse, has simply become shorthand in paleocon circles for the aggressively interventionist foreign policy that has become rampant in America’s political establishment, regardless of political party.
The organs of the “mainstream” right, such as the National Review and Commentary, have mostly been hijacked by apologists for this foreign policy, but in this regard they aren’t much different from many journals of the “mainstream” left, such as the New Republic. To the extent that the American Conservative devotes itself to criticizing America’s ruinous New Imperialism, and the centralization of power in the hands of the President that has followed therefromt, it is simply providing a much needed balance to a national political discourse that has gone deeply astray.
sanctity of life, small government, … , limited government intrusion in one’s privacy
This is probably not the time or place to start a debate about abortion, but since this site and Culture11 are the only readable righties I can find, I’ll try anyway.
Looking at the quoted material, one of those things is not like the other two. After 15 years of practicing law, including a small amount of lobbying, I’ve learned that the more intrusive a law, the greater popular support it must have. Unpopular laws kept in place by a determined minority can be profoundly corrosive. Witness the Abolition era.
We know that women have practiced family planning and abortions since time immemorial. We know that abortions have been legal in the US since the early 1970s. We know that flat bans of abortions are unpopular. We know that IVF, including techniques that create multiple viable lives, is popular. We know that it’s very difficult to impossible to tell the difference between an unfertilized and fertilized egg.
Few people appear to want to talk openly about a post-Roe world. Would family planning buses recapitulate the Freedom Riders? What would be the political consequences of rich women being able to travel to California (or Montreal, assuming a federal ban), while poor women would be forced to carry an unwanted fetus? (On the federal issue, note that the US is now prosecuting people for engaging in acts overseas that are lawful in those countries. Extraterritoriality is apparently no bar to the reach of Uncle Sam.) Could DAs get injunctions against pregnant women preventing them from travelling? What would be the penalty for an illegal abortion? Prison? For the doctor only or the mother too? If a fetus is declared to be a life, wouldn’t the commonly accepted rape/incest exception have to fall?
None of these issues appear to be consonant with the ideas of “small government” or “limited government intrusion in one’s privacy”.
Cheers.
I am “Mr. Giraldi’s correspondent” and was graciously responded to by Kara Hopkins. I really just wanted an answer to my question. I struggle as much as the respondent might with Kirk’s dialog (since I’d rather watch baseball or a good college football game or be coaching one of my kids in baseball or football or drinking a good Irish whiskie, as I am now ). So now my implied distinction between liberals and neocons is being called “rather specious”? Actually, my concern is that we’ve “progressed” as a society to the point that the economics and imperialism expressed by the major parties are so close together that the life issues, with the consequent Supreme Court appointments at stake, have become for me the defining issue of presidential elections. We need to quit picking fights with other countries, we need to quit killing our children, we need to quit believing that the national government is our solution for everything, we need to quit believing that our faith in God doesn’t matter, we need to recover the constitutional principles on which our country was founded…these are some of the things that occupy my thoughts. Therefore, I was just asking….
I have to say that I agree with some of what Mr. Boyd had to say in his original missive. While it would certainly be boring to read repeated pronouncements of “paleo” orthodoxy, I sometimes think that some of those who post on this blog are too zealous in their attacks on the neocons, to the exclusion of all else.
The neoconservative corporatist, statist, and internationalist world view is an abomination which needs a stake through the heart. But we should not be happy about the general public replacing them with a corporatist, statist, internationalist, SOCIALIST cabal…which is what we will be getting soon.
The fact that some of us are cheering this as a repudiation of the neoconservatives is very gross. I will go into the voting booth and cast my vote for Chuck Baldwin, but I cannot celebrate the election of Barack Obama.
@Francis
Great post, very lucid