Talking To The Wall (II)
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Nothing could better demonstrate the truth of this assessment of the state of internal conservative debate (or lack thereof) than the tiresome Mark Levin fracas. This will be my first and last post on the subject. In the original post, I said:
There is relatively limited engagement between the two because dissident conservatives have increasingly come to the conclusion that their mainstream counterparts have little or nothing of interest to say and that the mainstream conservatives have no interest in learning from any of their errors, and because the mainstream conservatives have concluded that the dissidents are crypto-leftists (or something else undesirable) who want to destroy America precisely because of most of the critiques Will mentions. To the extent that they refer to anything we say, it is usually to repeat this sort of trash as if it were a serious argument. The latter tends to reinforce the dissidents’ assumption that they are correct that the mainstream has nothing of interest to say, which is otherwise confirmed on a daily basis by a quick browse of the mainstream outlets and re-confirmed by their near-absolute deafness to any significant criticism from the right. Put another way, it is very difficult to talk to people who live inside a multi-layered cocoon and never want to come out.
The thing to take away from this Levin business is that his defenders would have found some way to rally around him no matter what he said. For Dan Riehl, this is done by invoking the high quality standards of Howard Stern, which probably ought to give Riehl pause, but I suppose whatever is at hand will do. After all, one reason why Riehl and others are defending Levin is not to say that they approve of telling women that their husbands should kill themselves (though apparently they do approve–it’s “hilarious,” you see), but to make clear that they are on the side of the popular and relatively powerful figures on the right and to show their devotion to the cause, which is demonstrated all the more by the embarrassing lengths to which they will go in concocting defenses for prominent members of the movement. In a perverse way, the obnoxious nature of Levin’s comment is a gold mine of sorts for those who wish to demonstrate how reflexively tribal they can be. It is one thing to go to the wall defending a controversial but legitimate view on policy, and quite another to give no quarter in defense of loudmouthed ranting. By the sad standards of the movement, a willingness to defending the latter is the true measure of loyalty.
P.S. One last point needs to be made. In a response to Conor, Levin says, “My purpose was not to win over converts or represent the Republican Party.” This is the dodge that these radio hosts use when they are in a bind: “I’m just an entertainer running my own show–I don’t work for the Republican Party!” Of course, should someone turn around and say, “Yes, you are an entertainer, and your views on the future of the party should carry as much weight as those of any celebrity,” this will be considered a grievous insult and an attempt to diminish the role of these venerable “teachers” on the right. These are people who want and wield influence, and who assume de facto leadership roles and take actions that have political consequences, but who take no commensurate responsibility for those consequences.
Filed under: politics
Things are getting to the point that the, “conservative, for lack of a better term,” label I’d taken to using to describe myself in unsophisticated political conversations is going to have to be abandoned. Better to be thought pretentious by using terms more accurate, but unknown, than to label myself a fool.
I always thought it was strange that Dreher and Frum were linked in tirades of this type.
Frum (as his very website name indicates) is someone who cares about political power and very much wants to get back into power, so claims that he is a careerist and is currying favor with the Georgetown cocktail party circuit have some plausibility.
Dreher, on the other hand, is proudly a representative of an idiosyncratic minority, lives far away from Washington or New York, admires few if any living politicians, and flirts with the belief that our whole culture is on the brink of a collapse that will make squabbles over political power and patronage obsolete. Whether he is right or wrong, he hardly seems to care about Georgetown cocktail parties, yet that accusation is made at him just as much as at the more deserving Frum.
“conservative, for lack of a better word”
IMHO the single biggest intellectual error that Daniel and others make here is the word ‘conservative’. So much of the current and recent behavior of the GOP become less mysterious if one replaces ‘conservative’ with ‘right-wing’. Radical increases in executive power, ruinous economic policies which enrich the elites, numerous and continual war…all are standard *right-wing* joys.
I remember back when Billmon was depressed and quitting blogging, he left a post saying that he couldn’t really answer the question, and ended up saying something along the lines of “I guess I’m a libertarian, but ‘anti-fascist’ would probably be the most accurate.” It’s a good quote, although claiming to be only oppositional isn’t too much of a political philosophy.
I’m starting to come down someplace where anarchist and paleo-con meet, I find. I think power is the main problem, and eliminating and diffusing power will lead to a better world.
Daniel, I hope you noticed my contributions to the two RSM threads on this subject at AmSpec. Levin and his defenders certainly do not make it easy.
I wonder if Levin really doesn’t get the difference between Dreher and Frum and is therefore ignorant, or if he does and is simply conflating the two in order to ostracize all critics right or left which would make him not ignorant but dishonest and low down.
At first I figured the latter because Levin is surely bright. But now I actually think he is the former. His rant displayed absolutely no nuance which would be difficult to fain. He really seemed clueless as to who Dreher was. This is not just life inside the bubble because there was much talk about Crunchy Cons inside the bubble. He obviously missed that. (How did he miss all that Crunchy Con discussion at the NRO blog?)
Levin is an ignorant loudmouth who needs a remedial course in Conservatism 101. But my main point all along has been that folks like you and Dreher need to be very clear where your criticisms are coming from so that well meaning but uninformed gut level conservatives couldn’t possibly mistakenly lump Dreher and Frum together. No one would mistake criticism from Buchanan or Ron Paul as coming from the same place as Frum. I know that Dreherism and paleoism in general is not easily reduced to sound bites and talking points, but we have got to make it easy for the masses who don’t read blogs every day.
“But my main point all along has been that folks like you and Dreher need to be very clear where your criticisms are coming from so that well meaning but uninformed gut level conservatives couldn’t possibly mistakenly lump Dreher and Frum together.”
I take the point, and I am willing to acknowledge that I haven’t always made this clear, especially in the last few months. I know this has been a source of frustration for you and some others here, and I will try to be more clear in the future. One of the reasons I have not made a point of doing this is that I have assumed, probably wrongly, that there could be no way for a Ron Paul-backing blogger at a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan to be mistaken for a Frumian. Damon Linker may not understand us all that well, but at least he had the decency recently to call me a reactionary, which is a fair description by my own admission. I tend to take for granted at this point that this is already known, and I have been mistaken in this.
“No one would mistake criticism from Buchanan or Ron Paul as coming from the same place as Frum.”
I might qualify this a little. No well-informed person could mistake their criticism as coming from the same place as Frum’s, but what we’re talking about is a lot of willful misunderstanding of what Buchanan and Paul have been saying. Not to beat a very dead horse, but how else can we understand Jonah Goldberg’s dubbing Buchanan a “right-wing progressive” supposedly cut from the same cloth as George W. Bush? When it suited their purposes, Frum was useful to conventional movement types in encouraging such misunderstandings.
So I suppose my point here is that even when you have Buchanan himself being very explicit about where is coming from you can still end up with a lot of nonsense about his supposed progressivism (in large part because various neoliberal economic ideas are routinely treated as the necessary “conservative” views). People for whom reheated classical liberalism is conservatism will often have difficulty understanding why Red Tories and Buchananites are coming at them from their right, because they tend to have an impoverished understanding of political thought in which all questions are framed in terms of individual vs. the state. The language of subsidiarity, solidarity and community sounds to them like codewords for state socialism, even though they could not be farther removed from this, and so automatically lump in anyone who does not cheer individualism and all its works with the left. I agree that we can do better, and I will be trying to do that, but there are a lot of the audience’s assumptions that have to be questioned along the way.
On a tangential note, I wanted to add another observation: whether it is Levin or RSM or one of the others on that side of the debate, there is this constant appeal to popularity, ratings, book sales, traffic numbers, etc. When did it become commonly accepted that the broadly popular thing was therefore good or that popularity was necessarily indicative of quality? It doesn’t follow that unpopular things are therefore best, but since when have we been measuring excellence by the approval of the crowd? This seems to me to be the American Idolization of conservative thinking.
By the way, yes, I did see your contributions to the thread at AmSpec, Red. They are much appreciated.
If you want an example of all that is wrong with modern conservatism read “Dan’s” reply in one of the RSM threads. You see conservatism is all about Natural Law don’t you know? And that is the problem with Frum. He rejects Natural Law. I didn’t even bother correcting that. Such ignorance is not remediable.
What authentic conservatism needs is popularization and hence popularizers. But since most people aren’t wonks who read a lot of blogs, it has to be simplified and formularized for the masses to the degree that is possible. Conservatism should be the natural inborn instinct of most because conserving the things that got us here makes sense from a survival standpoint, but we have been so brainwashed by liberalism (in the first sense as you say) that the masses are acting counter to their self-interests. We need deprogramming.
One reason I was somewhat defending RSM in particular is that I thought he was “paleosympathetic.†Antle certainly is. RSM does write at TakiMag. On what grounds did RSM get identified as “paleosympathetic†and get a gig at TakiMag? I assumed he is against the War.
Excellent post, but I will just add this general observation. This quote stood out:
As a general rule, when you find yourself writing things like that, you are probably losing the debate.
“I’m starting to come down someplace where anarchist and paleo-con meet, I find. I think power is the main problem, and eliminating and diffusing power will lead to a better world.”
I’m not quite there myself, but I find myself much more in sympathy with this sort of thinking every day.
Still, the antidote to my increasing libertarian tendencies isfive minutes in the comments section at Reason. Curiously, even though I am, in many ways, much further politically from the paleos than I am from the libertarians, the comments section here doesn’t have that same effect on me.
It’s funny, though, despite being much, much less of a conventional “liberal” than I was a few years ago, I find myself despising “movement” conservatism more than ever. And, speaking of comments sections, one doesn’t have to go any further than the comments section on Conor’s various posts to see just how poisonous and irrational the movement has become.
“I wonder if Levin really doesn’t get the difference between Dreher and Frum and is therefore ignorant, or if he does and is simply conflating the two in order to ostracize all critics right or left which would make him not ignorant but dishonest and low down.”
Of course, that’s not completely unfair. It shouldn’t be too controversial to assert that Frum, Dreher and Larison are all rebelling against the perceived intellectual sterility of the mainstream Right, which is represented by the likes of Mark Levin. In fact that’s the whole point of this particular exercise. Of course Levin is still wrong on the merits of his point, but still.
LMaggitti, I’m not sure that comments sections on blogs anywhere should be taken as too representative of anything. Comments here are better than most primarily because, I think, Larison is a dense writer who doesn’t immediately fit into categories. And dumb luck/lack of critical mass, and forcing people to register to comment.
Though I do agree, and didn’t call myself libertarian because, well, they can be rather annoying in the way that most True Believers can be.
Levin is intelligent. But what I find unforgivable about him is his manipulation of conservative distress at current events into a shtick with which to make a buck. His provocative, emotion laden rants are the antithesis of outreach and a naked appeal to base emotion. I just heard a recording of the Nazi Judge berating and bullying the defendants in the Hitler Plot of 1944. It sounded shockingly like Levin.
We have much to resent but that doesn’t mean we need a huckster like Levin aping and stoking our resentment for his personal gain.