Betrayals
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Seeing as how I didn’t think there was much to Christopher Buckley’s endorsement of Obama, I can’t say much for his claim that he had offered a “reasoned argument for the opposition.” This is not intended to knock Buckley. As I have said time and again, I don’t think anyone on the right can make a satisfying, reasoned argument for backing Obama except that he isn’t the other guy, which is as true today as it ever was. You can find legions who can make extremely compelling conservative anti-McCain arguments, but Buckley didn’t much of an anti-McCain case, either. So this isn’t exactly a classic NR purge, but it seems to me that this would have been one of those moments when NR might have refused his resignation as unnecessary. At the very least, it might have given that old refrain of “we’re conservatives, not Republicans” a bit more credibility.
Then again, it’s understandable up to a point. If you believe, as most NR contributors seem to believe, that Obama is absolutely unacceptable and tied to all sorts of villains, you might find a voting preference for Obama to be equally unacceptable. One interesting thing that did jump out at me was Buckley’s references to the reader mail he received that talked of his “betrayal” of the conservative movement. To which he has responded, more or less, “There’s a conservative movement? Really? Who are they?” In his words:
While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
It is always interesting to me how the people who write these sorts of letters are moved to anger when this or that pundit voices a dissenting view because they are so concerned about treachery, but when the President or other leaders of their preferred party enact plainly anti-conservative policies they are not seen as having betrayed anything. Even if there is some consistency in the responses, it is almost as if the so-called betrayal of the pundit or writer is considered to be just as bad as that of the politician, when the failures of the latter are usually far more consequential and more deserving of scorn than anything any one writer has to say. I suppose the point is really this: on the day when Mr. Bush hands in his resignation letter and apologizes for his myriad failures, perhaps then people can talk seriously about Chris Buckley’s “betrayal” of the movement that helped empower Mr. Bush.
Filed under: politics
Count me a cynic on Christopher Buckley. He writes his grand Obama endorsement one day, and then hypes up his resignation with a few kicks at his readership, playing the persecuted heretic all along. I think he’s striving to be the next “even”, as in “Even Kevin Phillips agrees that bill x is necessary” or “Even David Gergen is behind this initiative.” This stinks of rats and sinking ships.
And where was Mr. Brave Dissent back in 2002, or even 2004, when it might have done some good–you know, when the rest of us dissenters were being labeled “Unpatriotic Conservatives” by peripatetic Canadians. Maybe he was the voice of reason, arguing for open debate, but I don’t remember it.
Derek Copold is exactly right. Way too much ink is being spilled on Buckley’s endorsement of Obama. Buckley is a typical publicity-seeking Beltway opportunist, nothing more.
The angry reaction ia partly an identity issue, and partly a product of the fear of being tongue-tied. If you have to explain yourself (“I’m a conservative, but I don’t like Bush, because . . . ” or any variant), you’re forced to articulate your reasoning and at display at least a bit of subtlety on the issues.
Most people can’t, and prefer to say “I’m a conservative,” or “I vote Republican”), thus avoiding having to explain why. The alternative, to be a political rara avis is like being the only Zoroastrian at an interfaith dinner, a bit lonely and obliged to handle more than one’s share of double-takes and questioning.
Anyone who dares to abandon the protection of the conventional and convenient labels is, therefore, more than a bit threatening.
For many years, I had a friend to argue with….everyone needs one of those. Then he acquired terminal cancer and up and died. I miss him a lot.
I have something of the same feeling about the conservative movement. Who would have thought that I would live to see CB drummed out of his Dad’s magazine? But that doesn’t shock me half as much as reading Rich Lowry assert, all evidence to the contrary, that the bank bailout “isn’t socialism”. Well, I don’t know if it’s “according-to-Hoyle” socialism or not, but I do know that within the last 20 years or so anyone who supported it would have been run out the movement with a quickness. Lowry further asserts that it’s “temporary emergency measure” – at what point did National Review start believing that government was even capable of “temporary” measures? And when did their faith in capitalism start to falter? Had Obama had the bad judgment to go first on this grab (not that I think he would have had the audacity to suggest a $700 billion figure, in any event), the RNC would be running commercial morphing him into Chairman Mao.
In years past, while you might not know what a Republican would do, you could be pretty sure what a conservative of either party would say on a whole host of issues. Goodbye to all that, I guess.
My reply to the interesting comments would be that I don’t care about Buckley, whether as opportunist or would-be persecuted dissident. His case serves as an interesting one because it shows what people value and what they are willing to define as betrayal; it is a useful reminder of how empty party loyalty is.
To answer Mr. Copold, I think we would agree that there has been no brave dissent here. It takes little courage to endorse someone who is about to win a landslide, and it is not much of a dissent when your endorsement says, “I agree with nothing he stands for, but goodness he writes well.” Of course he’s getting off the sinking ship.
Sirs:
Pray tell, who is the Buckley chap and what is this thing called the National Review? Should I care about either?
Yours,
Lord Peter
Christopher Buckley is a genuine wit and a charming fellow, author of “Thank You for Smoking,” among other comic gems. (His father also had talent, although as a novelist, the son is much funnier.) The right-wing opinion journal to which he once contributed found clever little ways to slight his work and minimize his defection, but regardless of his political opinions, he’s just the sort of talent the right needs to be taken seriously among the upper-crust. The Limbaugh crowd may not care about that, but if the so-called conservative movement can’t keep its best and brightest on board, it will find itself pandering to the know-nothings…a dead-end street if there ever was one.
“It is always interesting to me how the people who write these sorts of letters are moved to anger when this or that pundit voices a dissenting view because they are so concerned about treachery, but when the President or other leaders of their preferred party enact plainly anti-conservative policies they are not seen as having betrayed anything.”
Pointing, I think, to the fact that what is foremost to the movement is loyalty to the tribe or “family,” which at its core stays largely the same, and not to its ideological trappings, which are apparently subject to rapid change.
Well, I’ll offer a conservative defense of Obama: his plans add less to the debt than McCain’s, he came out in opposition to stupid wars whereas McCain began agitating to invade Iraq on about 9/13/01, he has consistently voted against government torture, he has no allegiance to the lunatic dogma that cutting tax rates always reduces deficits, and, while it’s debatable, I think he’s less likely than McCain to embrace the Bush security state.
Those positions would all have been recognized as conservative by Eisenhower, and maybe even by Reagan, but as NickM points out, the Central Committee of the Party may have decreed them to be politically incorrect. They might come back into vogue among tribal Republicans if there’s a Democratic president, though.
That’s not a bad attempt, but I think there is a difference between saying, “Obama is more conservative than McCain,” which I might grant you, and “conservatives should vote for Obama” or “there is a positive conservative case for Obama.” There are some things conservatives can find in Obama that they might prefer over McCain, but I don’t think a conservative qua conservative can make a positive case for why he is backing Obama, except that Obama is not McCain. Even an “Obama is the lesser of two evils” case is another way of saying Obama is not McCain, and against almost any other Republican this “lesser of two evils” argument would not hold up nearly as well. Some will say that this is enough and the case has been made, but if that’s so the case was made before you began.
There are also some flaws in the case you’ve made. For example, you say “he came out in opposition to stupid wars,” when he has, in fact, come out in opposition to exactly one stupid war since entering public life. One of the stupid wars he endorsed, or at least acquiesced in supporting, was the Israeli campaign against Lebanon, which most everyone, especially the Israelis, now sees to have been a fairly stupid, counterproductive war. So at best he’s batting .500, and the direction of his Pakistan policy is not reassuring. I’m not going to say that he’s more belligerent than McCain, because I don’t think that’s humanly possible, but I would say that things are a bit more complicated than the phrase “he came out in opposition to stupid wars” suggests.