Two Questions
Posted on February 24th, 2009 by John Schwenkler
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1. Can you imagine a piece like John Derbyshire’s TAC cover story on the downside of right-wing talk radio appearing in National Review or The Weekly Standard? (Me neither.)
2. What does this state of affairs reveal about the condition of the American conservative movement, its capacity for self-criticism, the likelihood of its making a political comeback in the foreseeable future, and the probability that, whenever it finally does make such a comeback, it won’t screw things up even worse than it did last time?
Earlier: Mark Thompson on talk radio dogmatism.
Filed under: conservatism, media/culture, politics
Seeing as how Derbyshire regularly writes for National Review I’m curious to know if he pitched this piece to them first.
National Review seems more inclined to conduct an examination of conservatism. They won’t ask the tough and necessary questions like TAC, but they haven’t been afraid to criticize W. in the past.
Weekly Standard is a whole different level. Fred Barnes and Bill Kristol were probably the most pro-W. pundits of the last eight years. I’d be shocked if they did anything that might upset the GOP order.
If movement conservatism were ascendant, the flagship publications’ unwillingness to scrutinize themselves would be unfortunate but excusable. Unfortunately, now’s exactly the time for self-scrutiny.
I guess the would-be movers and shakers in the written-word side of things have to stay on good terms with Rush, or he can hit them with the same East-coast elitism charge that he’s somehow figured out how to make stick. And then what happens to their financial backers/subscriber base? I think ConnScript’s right—NR could run an “examination” but not an outright complaint.
This is a bit off-topic, but I actually think the Weekly Standard does a decent job of publishing provocative, challenging articles. Take the Continetti piece Ross Douthat commented on (http://rossdouthat.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/02/the_cultural_contradictions_of.php) or their outstanding cover story on Detroit (seriously, can you imagine NR publishing something this badass? http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/945aynyk.asp).
I feel like there’s this weird disconnect between the Goldfarb-helmed blog (all red meat, all the time!), the obligatory hackery from Fred Barnes or William Kristol and the rest of the magazine, which actually publishes great long-form journalism with some frequency.
Will, I agree with that. I like some of Continetti’s work. His book, The K Street Gang, really went after Congressional Republicans and corruption.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Certainly the blog and the editors of TWS are partisans, but there are some good articles buried in there. Still, Kristol and Barnes are on Fox everyday and Goldfarb was McCain’s chief blogger, therefore they drive the mass perception of the magazine.
I imagine he has the good sense not to have bothered.
Re: the rest of the comments, one crucial distinction to make is between the online versions of these publications and their print content – in the Austen Bramwell piece on NR that I linked a while back, he made a point to argue that part of what’s driven things downhill is that they’ve put so much more energy into NRO. And people are right that sometimes both NR and TWS publish some first-rate content, in print and – less often – on the Web as well; what makes this particular piece such an unlikely fit for either of them is, however, that they tend to go after Republican leaders only after they’ve fallen – hence Bush as a lame duck, the K-Streeters as publicly disgraced, and so on. I know full well why progressives moan and complain about the slant of (“the liberal!”) TNR, but surely it’s better to have such a mainstream watchdog than to allow people to dismiss your criticisms as coming from “Pat Buchanan’s magazine”.
Man, Will – I hadn’t read that Matt Labash piece on Detroit before … badass, indeed. Thanks for linking it.
Brafford and I exchanged a few Detroit-related links a month or two ago. Another one worth reading is this offering from Mitch Albom (yes, I know his books suck, but read it anyway: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2009/writers/the_bonus/01/07/detroit/index.html).
Derbyshire’s pretty unpopular over at NR which I think is why he writes for TAC and Takimag quite a bit. You kind of are forced to publish weird, controversial, thought-provoking work if you plan on publishing Derbyshire, for better or worse.