American Conservatism's Original Sin
New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus put his finger on American conservatism's original sin inadvertently last month at the American Enterprise Institute. He noted that while conservatives once chafed under the soulless leftist managerialism of the New Deal, they let ex-leftist conservative guides such as James Burnham and Irving Kristol lead them on a long march through the institutions they despised to build a managerial class of their own.
In Tanenhaus' telling, Kristol showed conservative business and political leaders that New Deal managerialism had bred a liberal "new class" of academic, think-tank, and media experts who trafficked in words more than in deeds or missions accomplished. He counseled conservatives to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy for the kind of capitalism and politics conservatives can profit from and enjoy. They might even restore virtue that way to Progressives' necessary reforms and secure the enlightened "national greatness" conservatism of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose American admirers would soon include Kristol's son Bill, David Brooks, and Tanenhaus himself.
Kristol's auditors took his advice seriously, reenacting American conservatism's deepest contradiction and, yes, its original sin -- its inability to reconcile its yearning for ordered liberty with its obeisance to every whim and riptide of the gobal capitalism that's destroying the nation, republic, values, and customs it claims to cherish.
Through lavishly-funded initiatives such as those I encountered in New York City's Manhattan Institute and on college campuses, and in vast private ventures such as Rupert Murdoch's "journalism," conservatives generated a parody of the liberal "new class," an on-message machine of talkers, squawkers, power brokers, and greedheads which Slate's Jacob Weisberg dubbed "the Con-intern." Their social ideas resemble Margaret Thatcher's more than Disraeli's, driven by a corporate capitalist materialism that's as soulless as the Marxist dialectical materialism of their elders' nightmares. It deepens social anomie and liberal relativism, giving an eerily false ring to right-wing rhapsodies about its contributions to civic-republican virtue.
So far, the conservative "new class" has excused the displacement of the liberal counterculture with a degrading over-the-counter culture; of the New Deal's oft-lampooned make-work programs with the public non-response to Katrina; and of the dreaded "Vietnam syndrome" with the worst strategic blunders in American history. Beneath their civic chimes and patriotic bombast, the spirit of republican vigilance writhes in silent agony, forsaken by conservatism itself.
Tanenhaus knows all this, and at AEI he hinted that Irving Kristol knows it but has become cynical and followed the money: "One could look over the trajectory of Mr. Kristol's brilliant career and see that he's in a different place in the 1990s than he was in the 1970s," Tanenhaus said, recalling that Kristol used to cite Matthew Arnold's cultural visions against Milton Friedman's vindications of greed.
Tanenhaus' wistful pleas for a politics of decency made me wonder what conservatism can do now besides push profits and disgrace itself by spewing guns, God, racism, sexism, and war to distract us from the heartbreaking consequences for the civic-republican ethos. TPM blogger "sphealey" characterized that ethos as "a fundamental allegiance to getting along, and specifically to handling losses without developing longstanding grudges" that could be undermined "if a small group had ever gotten together and made an agreement to subvert the system and behave destructively in a coordinated manner." By the time "the rest of us figured out what was happening," sphealey concludes, "our only alternative would have been to terminate the system. If trust had been destroyed it could not have been replaced. Strong as our Constitutional system is, I don't think it was ever intended to resist a large-scale, long-term, tightly-organized effort to subvert it from within."
Without question, the Con-intern has destroyed a lot of trust. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, Republicans will be the party not of memory or hope but of hate: The only mystery is how and in what breathtakingly vicious ways it will try to swift-boat Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards. That should be the main general-election campaign issue for all Americans, who should wear buttons and prepare themselves to say, "There they go again." The Democratic nominee's campaign should dedicate itself, as another TPM blogger put it, to "stand against the agit-prop and brass knuckles of the Right... by calling it out for what it is, loudly and clearly and repeatedly in terms so unmistakable that they slice through the media filters and reach into the culture."
Tanenhaus stopped short of saying this, for many conservatives of reputed discernment and high purpose have been sucked into the maelstrom, including the Kristols (Bill edits Murdoch's Weekly Standard), the Podhoretzes (Norman and Norman's son John), the humiliatingly honor-obsessed Kagans (Thucydides scholar Donald and his sons Robert, the grasping power historian, and Frederick the Great AEI military strategist), the sophistical David Brooks. It has compromised even Tanenhaus, biographer of the ex-leftist conservative zealot Whitaker Chambers and of William F. Buckley, Jr., who doubted recently that conservatives should have let in neo-cons in the first place.
In his AEI lecture Tanenhaus did plead for a conservatism of virtue and moral poise. He credited "my hero Bill Buckley" for reading anti-Semitic and other extremists out of the movement, as he rightly wished leftists would, too. He cautioned against a conservatism of revanchism and revenge that tries to destroy liberalism with "a language of accusations,.... of treason at home and of leftists who have the same values as Osama Bin Laden." He called for a culturally textured, sophisticated conservative critique and assailed "magazines I used to write for, such as Commentary, which accused the New York Times magazine, my newspaper, of violating the Espionage Act because it published an article exposing a surveillance program. That's revenge," he said.
But I find no such moral poise or textured critique in the preponderance of liberal-bashing book reviews Tanenhaus has run. And certainly not in the pieces he himself has written, some of which really bear noting. The person in his AEI audience with whom Tanenhaus seemed most engaged - he referred to him respectfully at least four times - was David Frum, a tribune of those who do want to roll back the welfare state and even a "national greatness conservatism" that would care for both rich and poor. Perhaps we will be reading more of Frum in the Times' Week in Review section, which Tanenhaus will now be running along with the Book Review.
Tanenhaus invoked Lionel Trilling's distinction between honorable sincerity, which is anchored in faithfulness to a culture, and a phony, individualist "authenticity" that betokens the selfishness and narcissism of modern liberalism. But he didn't mention Trilling's observation that, against even the vapid liberalism of his own time, American conservatism was mainly a set of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." And Tanenhaus never explained what conservatives should actually affirm. He professed himself a "sympathetic observer" of the movement who follows the "tonality and atmospherics" of politics, not policy. In response to a question from AEI vice president Henry Olsen, Tanenhaus mentioned Whittaker Chambers' observation to Buckley in 1970 that, as he paraphrased it, "You can't build a clear conservatism out of capitalism because capitalism disrupts culture."
Well, what about that? To its great glory and unending consternation, America will remain capitalist, but markets have to be honored in their place, and the best of those New Deal managerialists (John Kenneth Galbraith?) knew that that sometimes requires a republican vigilance which profit-maximizing corporations inevitably try to subvert. Asked by historian Michael Kazin to explain the prospects for a small-government conservatism that's still tied to big government, including a military operation that's a virtual welfare state for its millions of participants, he responded, "I'd be interested to hear what David Frum has to say on that," and mused a little about the Marshall Plan and a New Deal for the globe, confessing himself a "total ignoramus about globalization issues."
The poignancy of Tanenhaus' predicament reminds us that conservatism's original sin lies not in its bombastic and noxious neo-conservative interlopers, accelerants of republican decay though they may be, but in the tragic nature of conservatism itself. Please indulge three short paragraphs of propositions about the trap in which conservatism is caught, not least because it is a liberal trap in which most of the rest of us are caught, as well.
First, when conservatives vow to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy from liberals, they mean sincerely to defend a classical, 18th-century liberalism that balances individuals' rights to life, liberty, and property with those same individuals' responsibilities as republican citizens who rise sometimes above narrow self-interest, to act on shared moral commitments and sentiments that sustain the republic. Conservatives know that a balanced society, like a whole person, strides forward on both a left foot of social education and security -- without which conservatives' cherished individuality couldn't flourish -- and a right foot of irreducibly individual freedom and responsibility -- without which even the best social engineering will turn persons in to clients, cogs, or worse. Society protects and nourishes the individual flame but cannot light that flame -- or extinguish it. One's readiness or failure to light it originates in faith or natural law, which even a covenanted society may honor but cannot itself create or, ultimately, control. Conservatives charge that liberals have lost sight of this sublime truth and have over-emphasized public provision, swelling the left foot and hobbling everyone's stride.
Second, elite liberals haven't a credible answer to this. They've done too well by the system as it is to attack its growing inequities with more than symbolic, moralistic, or "money" gestures. Yet they can't bring themselves to defend it very wholeheartedly, either. Sensitive to individual rights and sufferings, they want to strengthen the left foot of social provision without prescribing social responsibility. For that they rely on outside incubators of virtues and beliefs which the liberal state needs desperately yet cannot itself nourish or even enforce.
Finally, however, since we're talking about swollen left feet and other maladies, most of the obesity and social mayhem rising around us is driven by the seductions and stresses of corporate consumer marketing and employment and, more broadly, of a capitalism that forgets or only opportunistically invokes John Locke's Christian strictures, Adam Smith's theory of the moral sentiments, and a civic-republican nationalism that might reasonably be elevated by serious "liberal education." Instead of taking these things as seriously as they claim to, conservatives careen incoherently between conflicting loyalties to a national-security state and a post-nationalist global capitalism that dissolves republican virtues far more than terrorism has done. Call Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton insufferable scolds, if you wish, but there is such a thing as "economic violence" that does eviscerate the villages that raise the children. Wall Street does subvert Main Street and morals.
The many follies of Marxist ideologues left us with a taboo against criticizing capitalism, whose twilight they announced too often. But aren't we now in a relationship to capitalism analogous to that of American colonials to the British monarchy early in the 1760s? Then, colonials still ardently professed their affection for and dependence on the crown and empire even as they began to sense that British sovereignty and dignity couldn't be reconciled with their own. They wound up risking their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to rearrange matters.
Similarly, something basic will have to change relatively soon in how we configure and charter the vast profit-making combines that are not just degrading social equality and the rhythms and security of our daily lives but are also incapacitating us as cultural actors and, hence, as free citizens. Like most Americans of 1763, we would rather not face this daunting challenge, so we tolerate a growing burden of destructive distractions and distempers, eroticizing our pain or projecting it violently, and expending tremendous energy on false solutions.
Sam Tanenhaus, for example, tried fruitlessly in his lecture to square the circle of deceit drawn by the yawping brigades of conservative opportunists and partisans spawned years ago by Irving Kristol and others. At AEI he presented himself - a bit disingenuously, considering his job at the Times -- as a learned, unassuming fellow who would lead no one anywhere. No wonder that other conservatives think that ex-liberals and their progeny, who came to conservatism promising strategic savvy and rhetorical cover for excellent adventures, have only worsened its plight.
Don't both conservatives and liberals need to rediscover the American civic-republican tradition and to sacrifice certain comforts to revive it? A year ago I sketched that challenge in an essay about a long-forgotten uncle of Ned Lamont. On December 11 I have a long review essay of an important book about the "tough liberalism" of Albert Shanker in www.democracyjournal.com that takes up another aspect of the challenge.
Don’t both conservatives and liberals need to rediscover the American civic-republican tradition and to sacrifice certain comforts to revive it?
And anyone who can "rediscover" the humanity at the core of Allan Bloom is just the guy to start the ball rolling.
December 6, 2007 7:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, Allan Bloom had his appropriators and his misappropriators. Here are the letters to the editor which the Times published in response to the piece you linked:
LETTERS, as published Editor, New York Times: Jim Sleeper was once an interesting social commentator, but of late he has increasingly become a cranky and unreliable political ideologue. In his article “Allan Bloom and The Conservative Mind,” (NYT September 4, 2005) Sleeper singles out Roger Kimball and myself as representatives of the latter. Sleeper claims that my Academic Bill of Rights “would force professors to teach scholarly work opposed to their own.” This statement is totally false, as Sleeper knows because I have written literally tens of thousands of words on the subject, while the Bill itself is posted at www.studentsforacademicfreedom.org. The legislation based on my bill is not statutory and cannot be reasonably interpreted as forcing anyone to do anything. Moreover, the text of the Bill of Rights says (in so many words) that “teachers are and should be free to pursue their own findings and perspectives,” but suggests that “they should consider and make their students aware of other viewpoints.” Who can argue with that? And of course this applies to conservatives teaching free market economics. In an ad hominem smear, characteristic of the new Jim Sleeper, the article closes by insinuating that because Swift Boat veteran John O’Neill is on my board I can’t have much regard for the truth. John O’Neill has more integrity in his big toe than is to be found in Jim Sleeper’s entire writing body. David Horowitz (On the Horowitz letter: I didn’t reply in the Times but should note that he’s been traveling the country lobbying more than a dozen state legislatures, which hold the purse strings of many universities, to pass a "Bill of Rights" that, he now tells us, isn't really a bill of rights at all, or even a statute, but merely a platitudinous affirmation of good scholarship and pedagogy. Not all coercion has to be statutory, however, as veterans of other eras in our politics since WW II can recall.) To the Editor:As a friend and colleague of the late Allan Bloom, I was pleased to read Jim Sleeper's essay ("Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind"). Bloom did not consider The Closing of the American Mind to be the manifesto of any mass movement or the programme for any political party or partisan ideology, but a plea for liberal education and an analysis of current obstacles to its serious practice. I would add only that it is helpful to recall that the initial reception of the book was sparked by rave reviews from what would be considered liberal sources: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the daily New York Times (March 23, 1987) and S. Frederick Starr (then president of Oberlin) in The Washington Post Book World (April 19, 1987).
Bloom himself said it clearly in "Western Civ," the lecture he gave at Harvard in the wake of the success of Closing printed in his Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960-1990: "There is a desire to make me into something other than what I am so that I can be more easily categorized and demolished. In the first place I am not a conservative--neo- or paleo-. Conservatism is a respectable outlook, and its adherents usually have to have some firmness of character to stick by what is so unpopular in universities. I just do not happen to be that animal. Any superficial reading of my book will show that I differ from both theoretical and practical conservative positions....Further I am also not the leader or member of an educational reform movement or any movement whatsoever."
Nathan Tarcov
Committee on Social Thought
The University of Chicago
December 12, 2007 3:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes; how does an apparatchik such as David Horowitz manage to get published in the New York Times? Tanenhaus?
December 12, 2007 6:57 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mmm... my point precisely: Tanenhaus published Horowitz here. But give him a little credit; his letters operation has been pretty balanced (he recuses himself from most of it). And Tanenhaus also published my essay, although he was uncomfortable with it and did it mainly to accommodate another editor. And of course "he" did also publish Nathan Tarcov's letter, which implicitly dispatches Horowitz does rather more than Horowitz and others of Bloom's varied celebrants and detractors to to rescue his "humanity."
December 13, 2007 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
An interesting post with much food for thought. There is so much wrong with society in general and modern conservatism specificaly that it's difficult to know where to begin. First and foremost we must wrest our public media away from the corporate influence that has so completely captured the flow of imformation in this country that Americans have become the least informed in the world. I think this is the keystone to a more rational and productive dialogue. It will continue to be impossible for the kind of discussion that is needed in this country as long as one side of the debate is ignored, marginalized or shouted down by the other side. As has been the case for at least the last two decades. I fear, however, that because of the utter dishonesty and corruption of what passes for conservatism today that it will take extreme measures just to accomplish this goal.
December 6, 2007 7:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Couldn't help yourself, could you? Just had to get in the obligatory Clinton bashing, didn't you?
Greg Anrig has written the book on the failure of conservatism, everyone should read it.
December 7, 2007 7:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
Placing capitalism and communism in opposition is a fundamental error. This because communism in fact works, sort-of, its problems being mainly explained by poor accountability process. (Also because capitalism is not a political system, but the imagined absence of one.)
Democracy is not the opposite of communism, either, since elections could maintain the communist structure.
If money, or some other form of capital, is allowed or encouraged to accumulate, it will of course affect politics. But most forms of capital require a state in order to be realized. Given that capital is actually hostage to the state, it should be easy to keep it subordinate.
It is useful, like looking for seagulls circling over a school of fish, to let capital do most of the heavy lifting in an economy. But the conservative triumph was in substituting freedom of capital for freedom of politics.
December 7, 2007 7:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
So, communism works except for the fact that it is not accountable?
So is does your seagull analogy imply that you advocate allowing an accountable capitalist system to establish productive systems that the state can then swoop in to nationalize?
December 7, 2007 11:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
A simplistic and paranoid question.
As I said, communism sort of worked, while capitalism cannot exist free-standing, that is, absent a state or other regulating body that establishes currencies. I do not say it is better than liberal-democracy economies.
Also, as I said, private enterprise should do most of the heavy lifting, meaning provide food and shelter in peacetime, etc. I don't propose a nationalization program. But I am not dogmatic on that, not wanting to further privatize some things here, and not wanting to force privatization in other countries.
Let's remember that many large enterprises were begun by government, with the expectation of handing off to private enterprise, and sometimes in partnership. Examples include hsipbuilding, surveyiong, railroads, aeronautics, and the space program. Also in this mix are health sciences, such as MRI and DNA sequencing, vaccine research and epidemiology.
December 7, 2007 12:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tom,
I think the Holy Grail of Capitalism is Unbridled Capitalism, and that's as bad in its own way as Naziism (minus the Holocaust), Socialism, Fascism, etc.
Capitalism has to be tempered with social programs.
December 7, 2007 12:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Capitalism that escapes regulation can buy the regulators, and the result is fascism. Note that few companies will encourage competitors to join the market. Competition is always a threat to businesses that are already in a market.
So society (government) has to sometimes enforce access for newcomers ("Let Bobby play with you, girls!"). Then again, sometimes government establishes a monopoly, as the telephone and rail. It has usually been done as an incentive to get things going, not a permanent charter.
December 7, 2007 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tom:
You may find this essay of mine from a few days ago similar to what you are trying to express.
Capitalism and Democracy
I try to separate ownership of the means of production from governance. Capitalism, socialism and communism (in their economic sense) are about ownership. Democracy and dictatorship are about governance.
The propagandists have conflated the economic and governance aspects since the days of the Russian anarchists. They've been quiet successful at it, too - remember the red scare or the Palmer raids.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
December 7, 2007 4:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
.
sPh
December 7, 2007 7:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
You know, sphealey, I have read and reread your comments, and I believe you have encapsulated the true essence of conservatism today. Conservatism hasn't been co-opted by opportunists and the self -interested - it is opportunism and self-interest. What difference does it make that some act remorseful now? The people they killed are still dead, aren't they? They can't rehabilitate conservatism now anymore than anyone can rehabilitate totalitarianism or nazism. They've caused too much suffering and misery for it to be rehabilitated and they destroyed it themselves.
December 7, 2007 8:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
Apart from the racism that drives much of today's Conservatism, the problem is that there is never enough, there is always a search on to make a few more bucks.
To say Conservatives don't like big government is laughable, simply look at what happens when they control this 'big government', rather than reduce the size, they loot it.
Well, maybe they reduce some, like the enforcement arm of the IRS, or the EPA, the CPSC, OSHA, FEMA, FDA, etc.
There also may be conservatives today that like to live vicariously as tough guys, warriors who are quick to "kick ass" around the world, show the planet how tough "we" are. They're like little kids playing with toy soldiers, only the Conservative's soldiers aren't toys.
As a self described liberal I've always had the notion that we needed responsible Republicans in government to keep people like me from going too far left. Its obvious this didn't happen in the Republican party as the Bush gang and the bulk of the Republicans in Congress has them so far right they're almost off the edge.
December 7, 2007 12:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
The unasked question is why does such obviously elitist and self-serving thinking get traction? The neo-cons like to claim that it has to do with the power of their ideas, but this is part of the con job. The answer is to follow the money.
There has been a real "right wing conspiracy" in this country for almost 40 years and it has been funded by a small group of extremely wealthy, libertarian leaning, conservative families. It is their continued support that allows places like AEI, Cato, Heritage, Hoover, etc. to exist. Without the life support this group supplies their paid pundits would not have the platforms they need to push their master's agenda.
The lack of money is why similar groups on the left are smaller, less visible and get less notice. If you own a newspaper, like Scaife, and also fund some think tanks you can be sure that the ideas you support will be featured frequently. Leftists also think that they are involved in a fair fight where the best ideas will win out. This is a delusion, the right is not interested in a debate, only in promoting their agenda.
The left also is reluctant to believe that a group of, perhaps, 50 families could really be so influential. That's why Hillary Clinton was scoffed at when she claimed that such a group exists. This group also had done its best to stay out of the public eye and, until recently, has been quite successful at this.
Do you know who the Dorrance family is? How about the Koch brothers? Do you know that it was Charles Koch who set up Cato and has provided over $20 million to establish a libertarian economics department at George Mason University? Others in the group include Coors, Mars, Walton and Olin.
Both Source Watch and Media Transparency are good sources for the connection between this group and the various libertarian and conservative entities.
This political philosophy didn't just happen it was bought and paid for by those who stand to gain the most personally.
The amazing thing is that so many, apparently intelligent, neo-cons could be bought so cheaply (say a job at at think tank) when what they are promoting is actually against their own self interest as a member of the working class.
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
December 7, 2007 7:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: There has been a real "right wing conspiracy" in this country for almost 40 years and it has been funded by a small group of extremely wealthy, libertarian leaning, conservative families.
You may be right that this is how it started, but modern "conservatism" (a very bad name for something that has become profoundly radical) has long since slipped the leash of its creators and become a sort of Frankenstein monster that may well turn on it creators. Indeed, we are already seeing a small but perhaps growing exodus of corporations and their head honchos toward the Democrats. The moneyed elite did not bank on the Religious Right becoming such a challenge to their hegemony (most of them, as you note, are libertarian, and don't give a damn about abortion, gays etc.) nor was NeoCon imperialism and the Iraq War something they ordered up. They've gotten a good deal they didn't bargain for.
December 7, 2007 6:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yet another attempt to rehabilitate 'conservatism’ after its total failure under George Bush II..
Tanenhaus ‘ never explained what conservatives should actually affirm, professing himself a “sympathetic observer” of the movement who follows the “tonality and atmospherics” of politics, not policy.’ Redrafted he just said ‘I like how it sounds but I have no idea what it does.’ When this is applied to a political movement, this is a form of moral abdication.
Perhaps this attitude explains the failure of most conservatives to perform reality checks.
Here is Tanenhaus again: “Asked by historian Michael Kazin to explain a small-government conservatism that’s still tied to big government, including a military operation that is a virtual welfare state for its millions of participants, he responded, “I’d be interested to hear what David Frum has to say on that,” and mused a little about the Marshall Plan and a New Deal for the globe, confessing himself a “total ignoramus about globalization issues.”
Redrafted: Small government sounds good, far be it from me to understand how come conservatives aren’t doing that.
See what they say, not what they do: it might as well be poetry so vote for them?!?
See the rockets go up. Who cares where they come down. That’s not my department said Werner von Braun.
Total mush.
December 7, 2007 8:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
The central flaw -- or "original sin" -- of conservatism, I wrote in the introduction, is that it can't reconcile its yearning for ordered liberty with its obeisance to every whim of capital. Liberals aren't much better at it. You can assume, therefore, that capitalism should simply be junked and ordered liberty imposed; or you can suspend liberty except for capitalists; or you can stop being so partisan and start thinking.
There were two references to Hillary Clinton in the post, both of them protective, not because I am promoting her over Obama or Edwards but because I detest candidate-bashing of any kind, and she will come in for most of it. Only someone who is indulging a little too much partisanship to think clearly -- or who can't read well -- would assume that I am getting in a little of "the obligatory Hillary bashing." Quite the opposite. But then people who are angry often read backwards.
Running a Book Review, or running a campaign, or running anything in public that's bigger than, say, a college course, is something one should try to do oneself sometime, somewhere, at least once, before glibly tearing down those who are out there doing it. One should also have some playground experience, as in pick-up basketball games, and I don't mean that sardonically. That's why I cited sphealey, for the second time in one of my posts. He gets it.
Rdf notes, rightly, "The unasked question is why does such obviously elitist and self-serving thinking get traction? The neo-cons like to claim that it has to do with the power of their ideas, but this is part of the con job. The answer is to follow the money." My opening paragraphs follow the money.
But I think that there is more to it than that. Rebecca West observed in the late 1930s that Hitler promised Germans battle, blood, and sacrifice, and the nation threw itself at his feet. Winston Churchill, offered Britons only "blood, sweat, and tears," and got a similar response, although by then the war was already bearing down upon them, and no one questioned the justice in his remarks.
Conservatives used to love doing this, for better or worse, as the examples of Churchill and Hitler make clear. The irony about Bush, though, is that he told Americans to go shopping after 9/11 and has tried to fight an unjustified war on the cheap, as a Fox News spectacle. Conservatives such as Tanenhaus know that that's wrong, but they are themselves wrong to think the war right enough to justify what Churchill asked for, and, anyway, they copped out of facing that problem by bashing the war critics, instead.
We are in a societal crisis that won't be resolved by cheerleading or nasty old commie razzing, any more than by the Republican swift-boating I mention in this post. If you look in on TPM fairly regularly, or follow the links in this post, you'll note that last month I wrote quite a lot about Sam Tanenhaus and his book section here, in The Nation, and in the Guardian. I elucidated the pro-war, neo-conservative politics that emerges, sometimes only backhandedly, in his own writings and his book-review assignments. That Tanenhaus was giving a lecture on the future of conservatism at The American Enterprise Institute seemed to justify my reporting on and assessing what he said. If you click the first link, you can hear him say it himself.
December 7, 2007 9:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
I can read perfectly well, you insufferable scold. I've found that such insulting cheap shots are the fallback strategy of someone whose own world view is crumbling.
December 7, 2007 11:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
His first reference is how the Republicans will attempt to swiftboat her if she gets the nomination. I didn't see that as an attack on her. The second reference alludes to her book "It takes a village." That one is kind of a slam on her. I'm guessing she is too idealistic in the authors opinion? Maybe he thinks the village can help raise children and build community but the conservatives will be sure to economically destroy that village thereby negating any good that could result?
December 7, 2007 1:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
I didn't say it was an "attack". It's this constant drumbeat of negative characterization of democrats by the punditocracy that has done real damage to the democratic party, and like Bob Somerby I believe it's time to call them out on it. I was quoting Sleeper with the "such insulting cheap shots..." and reminding him that was what he said. It might have been better if Sleeper had acknowledged the part the media, of which he was a part, took in smearing democrats, especially Gore. It wasn't just the republican party that directed that election, it was the press who gleefully went along with, just as they gave every wackjob with a tale to tell on the Clintons the opportunity to go mainstream.
Why was it necessary to characterize Clinton and Jackson as "insufferable scolds"? It was not only a cheap shot, but it was a pansy way of taking it.
December 7, 2007 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
You ask, "Why was it necessary to characterize Clinton and Jackson as 'insufferable scolds'?" But I did not characterize them as insufferable scolds. What I said is that those who characterize them as insufferable scolds (perhaps BevD thinks there were no such people until I imagined them) are wrong, and that both Jackson's concept of "economic violence" and Clinton's affirmation that "it takes a village to raise a child" are right. Here is what I wrote:
"...conservatives careen incoherently between conflicting loyalties to a national-security state and a post-nationalist global capitalism that dissolves republican virtues far more than terrorism has done. Call Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton insufferable scolds, if you wish, but there is such a thing as “economic violence” that does eviscerate the villages that raise the children. Wall Street does subvert Main Street and morals."
It's really hard to continue a conversation about a post with people who are unable to read and think at the same time. That will be my one and only insult of the week.
December 7, 2007 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
I just did a Nexus search after a Google search and did not find that characterization of them anywhere. So obviously you did imagine them. It's even more difficult to continue a conversation with a pig who only lifts his head from the trough to squeal "I didn't say it, someone else said it, I just repeated it."
Now, you squeal about the moral misjudgements and antics of conservatives who supported this war and their attempts at rehabilitation when you yourself supported it - "As a supporter of the current war who is dismayed at how some others have supported it..." This is the sum total of your objection to this war - that others didn't support it in the manner you thought they should, probably the most deeply shallow, self aggrandizing, self-important, conceited commentary ever written, by anyone, ever. If only we had all supported the war Jim's way - it would all be going swimmingly now. Why we didn't listen to you in at the beginning of this war is a mystery to me. You could return to writing stinging, creepy little insults about Hillary, the scold, or Gore, the worrier of earth tones, under the pretense that you just must have heard that somewhere...you simply couldn't have pulled them from the air to swell a sentence and maintain your imagined status as the pretender to the Orwellian throne in the kingdom of "I was on your side along" in the land of "aren't those war supporters just awful the way they're carrying on now, why they're just like those crazy lefties that I used to be until I found it paid better to be on Rudy's side, although now I think Rudy's changed and become a nut."
And keep in mind that it was you that felt it necessary to first make personally insulting comments. I wouldn't think of commenting on your inability to type and think at the same time...it wouldn't be right.
December 7, 2007 5:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Time to pack it in, Bev. A Google search of "Hillary Clinton" and "a scold" brings up over 700 references. And I've never written anything that worried about Al Gore's "earth tones" or even mentioned them.
You're very, very angry about something, as your reply to this reply will undoubtedly confirm. That's no excuse to distort or, indeed, fabricate what I or anyone else has written. You misrepresented my defense of Hillary Clinton's "village to raise a child" proverb against the many people who do, in fact, contrary to your assertion, consider and call her a scold; and, ever since, you have been spiralling down, through error after error, into an uncontrollable rage that keeps you from being able to quote or accurately characterize others' writing.
For example: You say that I supported the war by quoting the opening line of a column I wrote in the Yale Daily News in April, 2003 that in fact explained -- as did another column I wrote there a week later -- why I was deciding to withdraw my support for the war as it was just getting underway. The column whose opening line you quote brought me attacks in the Weekly Standard, on the Joe Scarborough Show, and in extensive conservative hate mail that actually reads rather like yours here. Maybe you're on their side? Maybe les extremes se touchent.
Your mistake here is like your mistake with what I wrote about Hillary Clinton: You mistook, for a literal statement of opinion, an opening phrase ("Consider them insufferable scolds, if you wish...." "As a supporter of the war....") that actually set the stage for the opposite contention. But perhaps I am wrong, in which case you probably need to find targets more deserving of your attacks.
December 7, 2007 10:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
This has been an interesting & heated exchange to be sure. And I only jump in here momentarily to make a single observation that is not intended to chose a 'side'.
The observation is that it has become a rather common practice to frame an idea or belief in a manner which on it's literal surface seem to refute the position. But it's true intent is to plant the seed. And the casual matter of factness of it gives it a subtle 'beneath the surface' credibility.
Perhaps this is in part what's sparked this fire, I don't know. But it does seem a little unlikely that you would attempt something like that here given this forum & and astute people who read & post here...or maybe that's another layer of the subtle cake. ;-)
December 8, 2007 2:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
I thank mcboo for this interesting observation. I think that at some point one has to know the person who's posting (in this case, me), to understand the intent. But there are certain linguistic conventions which experienced people like TPM readers will understand. Also, elsewhere: Take a quick look at how my same post about Tanenhaus has been read and received at Daily Kos: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/7/223216/189/661/419362
December 8, 2007 7:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
You know, Mr. Sleeper, I never personally attack or criticize others for their opinions. I don't like to do that, and I apologize, neither of us should have made personal comments about the other, but what you're doing is damaging to democrats and the democratic party. It's one thing to criticize their policies or their opinions, but your literary device is not setting the stage to disprove anything. In essence you're agreeing with the persons who might say those things and pointing out that in the one instant you describe, Clinton and Jackson may be correct.
Here's an example: "People call Jim Sleeper an unsufferable scold but he's right that conservatism is a failed political philosophy." Now do you consider that helpful to the reader or do you think that the reader is left with the impression that Jim Sleeper is an insufferable scold who happens to be right about this one issue? Do you think that the reader might wonder why these people are calling you an insufferable scold? Do you think that would help sell your books or encourage the public to buy them? What if I were to comment "say then if you will, that Jim Sleeper is a pointy headed autodidact, a political stumblebum and a naif, but he's right about Al Gore." How can that possibly help to convince the reader that you're right in your assessment? You're all these terrible things, but the reader should believe that you're capable of making objective salient points about this one issue.
It isn't a linguistic convention, it's a writer's conceit and it is not only wrong but damaging to the very point you are hoping to make. Not all people who read your essay are intimates of yours and understand you style or are experienced in reading your essays. Even if all readers are familiar with your style, it isn't helpful to the reader's understanding of the issue.
December 8, 2007 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
Gee, and you promised me the last word. When I googled Hillary Clinton and insufferable scold I didn't find any references nor did Nexus provide any. Just admit you made it up.
I apologize for claiming that you made a comment about Gore and earth tones, that comment was made by Etzioni. Your comment was "say then if you will that Gore is a pointy headed autodidact, a political stumblebum, a naif" and "a republic needs a little strangeness like Kerry or Gore."
You method is claim that others say it, and you're just repeating it. Your "staging" literary device you seem to use quite regularly.
Yes, you withdrew your support in April according to you, but you supported it just as the other pundits did before it got underway which of course means you're as guilty of promoting it as any of the other pundits did. I read both letters that you wrote to the Yale Daily News, and the withdrawal of your support wasn't because the war was bad, it was because you objected to the behavior of the war supporters. Others may say then, that you're a guilt ridden, blame shifting scourge of others that held onto their support of the war longer than you did, and don't believe that the New York Times Book Review should link every book review to you. Others have said that, I haven't.
December 8, 2007 9:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bev, A direct and simple challenge to you: Google "Hillary Clinton" and "a scold," and report here what you find.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I never promoted the war. The first time any reader learned that I had "supported" it for two weeks was in the April, 2003 column where I made clear that I was abandoning my support, but which you insist on misusing as badly as you do another phrase of mine to claim that I inventd the silly notion of Hillary Clinton as a scold.
Honesty is the best policy, Bev.
December 8, 2007 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, Jim, honesty is the best policy. I googled and nexus searched the phrase "insufferable scold" with Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson and it was not found in either search.
You did support the war, you said you supported the war, and why you cannot be honest about it and say so and then explain why you changed your mind is beyond me.
December 8, 2007 11:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
OK, so apparently Sleeper is correct that some substantial number of people have found Clinton a scold, but sinned egregiously is suggesting that some of them found her scolding insufferable.
Isn't this all rather petty?
December 8, 2007 12:15 PM | Reply | Permalink
Of course it's petty. He claimed that others called her and Jackson "insufferable scolds" I found no examples of either being called "insufferable scolds" so he did invent it out of whole cloth. The fact of the matter is that he said others called them that, obviously, that's not true.
December 8, 2007 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Right, they only called her a scold.
December 8, 2007 6:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
...which would make Sleeper's quote (select one):
o Valid
o Invalid
Note to posters: Quotation marks mean something.
December 9, 2007 3:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you, yes. Why this should matter is that for too long liberals have accepted this as part and parcel of the political discourse. The reason I am adamant about this is the fact that this has an accumulative effect and is damaging to democrats and liberals.
Perhaps people did call her a "scold" of which I did find examples as well as other epithets, but nowhere did I find the phrase he used. Secondly, the question arises in the reader's mind about why and who has called her these names? Her enemies? Would they say those things to discredit liberals, liberal policies, to deride democrats?
So yes, this exhange with Sleeper is something of which I generally never engage in, is petty and I am ashamed to have taken part in it and taken umbrage at his personal insults to me, that was foolish on my part, but the objective which was lost in this was the journalistic Cider House Rules that apply to Clinton and Gore - that those who wield the pen are entitled and obligated to assign negative characteristics to them. It has become so commonplace that it now makes its appearance even at Talking Points Memo in their campaign wire as it has in all media. It is wrong and not helpful to liberal causes - I hope that all liberals will recognize this and put a stop to this.
December 9, 2007 8:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
I appreciate your comments, Dan, and I agree with you that this exchange has been petty, but that is because I responded to his insult instead of explaining my objection to his use of it. The point is that he claimed that "others" have used that phrase, and obviously others haven't used that phrase. In other words, he made it up and then claimed that "others" used it. Now he may call it and consider it a "literary convention" but I call it a writer's conceit which has no use or purpose in journalism, other than to shift responsiblity for the negative characterization on others. It is meanspirited and pervasive and it has become part and parcel of our political discourse.
December 9, 2007 9:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think you should re-read your own Yale Daily News article Jim. You certainly never announce or even tacitly imply you are abandoning your support for the war. You identify yourself in the present tense as someone who is "a supporter of the current war who is dismayed at how some others have supported it." Nothing you write in the remainder indicates you had altered that stance as of that time. It is a fine defense of the right and importance of protest, made all the more compelling by the fact that it comes from a war supporter, but it certainly doesn't make clear that you were changing your position on the war, if indeed you were.
December 8, 2007 1:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, I think you need to get a grip on yourself and ask what you're doing here, and why. I mean, have you thought about it? Or are you just doing it? What for?
Re-read that Yale Daily News column, and see if you can explain why it brought me nothing but condemnation (and two death threats) from war supporters (Hugh Hewitt in the Weekly Standard; Joe Scarborough on MSNBC; a host of nitwits on conservative websites like PowerLine), and nothing but praise from war critics. Can you explain that?
Then read the Yale Daily News column I wrote several days later, in which I likened the war's neo-conservative supporters to the old Stalinists. Then track everything I have written about the Iraq war from April, 2003 till now. And when you report on a piece, don't quote out of context; link it, so that people can see for themselves. That's one of the great gains of the internet. You'll note that in my post, I give people the video of Sam Tanenhaus' lecture and links to many of the articles I mention, not only my own.
Again, I ask: What are you doing in commenting like this, and to what greater end? I wrote an essay about American conservatism's original sin. It is sparking a fair amount of intelligent discussion, at sites such as Daily Kos and mediabistro and, to some extent, here. Why don't you join at that level, rather than get drawn into a mincing, pointless parsing of extraneous charges hurled by bitter trolls who spend most of their time misreading other people's essays? I've spent more than an hour now answering these pointless attacks, and the experience confirms the rule: Don't respond to trolls. The rule, for you, is: Don't become one, either. Once you get drawn in, you never get out. Just click BevD, and then "Track", and see.
December 8, 2007 8:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your essay was quite wide-ranging, Jim. It bounces off of innumerable walls. I commented on just a very few of the themes in the essay that interested me, as well as my overall perception of the general intellectual milieu of elite American political thought, and ignored most of the other topics, since they frankly did not either interest me much or concern me personally. You seem quite anxious to discipline some of us into having the discussion you would have preferred we have. Apparently you prefer the discussion over at the Daily Kos. Well fine then. Take your ball over to the Daily Kos and play there. If you aren’t interested in any of the lengthier comments I have posted in this thread, then feel free to pass them over in silence.
I’m not sure what you would like us to say about your essay. Personally, I am simply not interested in the exquisite intellectual agonies of Sam Tanenhaus, David Frum, the Kristols, the Podhoretzes, the Kagans and David Brooks. I honestly don’t care how their family squabble turns out. With their scattered movement in disarray, they evidently have some ongoing interest in assigning blame, pointing fingers, settling scores, diagnosing their strategic and tactical errors, and wrangling over the carcass of true conservatism, or some such imaginary beast. Their discussion is not my discussion. It’s inside Republican baseball, and I simply don’t care who among them are the sinners and who has been sinned against; I don’t care who are the interlopers and whose territory has been loped into. I’ve heard enough about Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss and William F. Buckley to last a lifetime. And I am not very interested in whether Dissent or Commentary is the more irrelevant periodical among the older New York guard, or in reading yet more of the tedious grinding replays of 60’s battles among New York intellectuals. Send Todd Gitlin an email if that’s where you want to go with this, and maybe he’ll stage an intervention into this thread.
The only thing I was really interested in from your essay was the closing call for a return to “civic republicanism” specifically, as well as what is to my mind is a tedious and unproductive tendency among the American chattering classes to rummage continually through the dumpsters of American history to identify the pure golden stuff and authentic traditions, and separate that stuff out from the debased corruptions and sinful innovations. As you can see, this is not my thing. My view is that contemporary American political thought from the center-left to the right is just too damn nationalistic and too damn patriotic. There are hosts of pressing global problems which need not be seen through the prism of the unending national identity crisis of Americanists of the establishment and wannabe establishment.
As far as trolling, you and Bev D have engaged in one of the most ridiculous discussions in recent memory about whether anyone out in Google-land has ever said that Hillary Clinton is an insufferable scold, or if they just said she was a scold, and you added the “insufferable” part. (For what it’s worth, in my own brief search I didn’t find any web pages in which anybody said Clinton was an insufferable scold; but I did find some where she was called and “insufferable witch” and others where she was called “insufferably arrogant”.) I made a couple of brief comments designed to bring out - with only feigned delicacy - just how ridiculous the discussion is. But given the fact that you were an equal participant in extending the inanity, I don’t think you have any basis in lecturing me on your theories about how not to feed the trolls. My impression is that you are actually a bit more of a blog greenhorn than I am.
I thought I was sufficiently obvious in my comments on your Yale Daily News piece not to have to clarify my point again. Nor do I think my motives are mysterious or ill-considered. My chief motive is to resist the common contemporary tendency among chastened former pro-war liberals to rewrite and distort the recent past. You claimed here that your April, 2003 column was one “where I made clear that I was abandoning my support” for the war. But that is simply not true. You identify yourself in the present tense in that article as someone who is "a supporter of the current war who is dismayed at how some others have supported it." You don’t say in that piece that you are "a former supporter of the current war who is dismayed at how some others have supported it,” nor do you even imply it. The evidence you adduce now against this point is entirely unpersuasive. Nothing you have written since that piece appears has any bearing on what you believed at the time of that piece. And making conservative enemies by defending the speech rights of anti-war protestors is not the same thing as agreeing with the anti-war position of those protestors; criticizing the Stalinist methods of some pro-war opponents of the antiwar protestors is not the same thing as criticizing the pro-war position itself. It was very good of you to defend the protestors’ rights while you still supported the war, but don’t turn that into a position against the war itself. No such position emerges from your April, 2003 piece.
I didn’t provide a link to the piece in question, because you had already cited it without linking it, and also because any fool can find the piece in two seconds by Googling for it. But if you insist, here">http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/7691?badlink=1”>here is the link.
I find your essays to be turgid and neurotic reflections of the hyper-reflexive mirror-world of New York political rags – a lot of words about words about words about words, egurgitated and regurgitated by the bookish New York intellectual demi-monde. If those words float the Kossack boat, congratulations. They can feel free to thrill to the battles of the pen among Dissent, TNR, Commentary and the Times Book Review.
And if you are so eager that I say something about your ruminations on Tanenhaus, then here is something: like a lot of book people, Tanenhaus appears to me to overestimate the integrity and power of ideas, and to imagine coherent ideologies where there are only convenient, temporary and ungainly associations of fellow travelers.
Broad political movements in a quasi-democracy like ours, at least those that are powerful enough to achieve power, are not ideologies. They are just coalitions. What the members of the rising counter-coalition have in common is simply a loathing toward the coalition that is in power. That’s their principle of unity – a common enemy. But the several different factions in the rising coalition loathe different things about that common enemy. Defeating the established coalition in a two-party state requires pitching a extraordinarily big tent, inviting in all sorts of contradictory tendencies, ambitions and attitudes.
Still, people seem to have a need to believe that the important groups they belong to are not mere associations of convenience, but are based on some deep and important unifying principle. So they imagine such a principle to exist, and give it a name – like “conservatism” or “liberalism,” or “progressivism”. Since there is really no single, coherent underlying ideology, however, the names don’t really refer to anything doctrinal. They are just labels for the coalition - a group of temporarily associated members. At first the members of the rising coalition don’t notice how different they all are, so fixated are they on defeating the common enemy. But the longer the coalition stays together, the more its underlying fractures begin to show. Once the common enemy is defeated, or sufficiently weakened, the shared hatred of the common enemy ceases to be the unifying force it once was. The solidarity of the victorious coalition immediately begins to disintegrate, its strength is dissipated, and they in turn become the prey for some new coalition. And so it goes.
As I see it, that’s all that is going on with the Republicans now. There is no original sin. There are no “true conservatives” as opposed to mere poseurs. “Conservative” is just an absurdly open textured word with barely any stable content. Its adherents are more attached to the word itself, and it’s efficacy as a sort of verbal flag for their own Republican regiments, than to any doctrine named thereby. And the typical Bible belt Republican has as little in common with the neoconservatives of the con-intern, as he does with Chicago School economists, Thatcherism or Disraelism. But they all hate “liberals” for some reason.
December 9, 2007 12:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
Well! As someone once said, a writer who is being criticized should respond always to lies, never to insults. BevD's comments began this part of the string with lies, bad faith, and a number or insults -- she called me a pig at the trough -- and then veered off into making charges about me that had nothing whatever to do with the post and that attributed views to me which I neither hold nor have expressed in my writing.
One of the great advantages of interactivity is that it allows anyone ask a writer to explain his post, rather than to read into his prose meanings that are far from what he thinks and from what he has written. Try dialogue over declamation, Dan. There is never any harm in asking a question that's more than rhetorical before pronouncing a judgment. Some old print people aren't used to that.
You didn't pose any questions, Dan, anywhere in this string. And in this part of the string, which I leave with this comment, anyone can scroll up right here and see you compounding the problem rather than enriching a discussion of American Conservatism's "original sin" and neo-conservatives' catalytic role in driving it against the American republic -- the subject of my post. I do think that something important is at stake in this matter. For someone who doesn't think the matter so important, you certainly had a lot to say.
A lot is at stake in it, but in the sense I emphasized by replaying sphealey's comment: It is frighteningly easy to subvert a form of self-government that depends, inevitably, on trust -- on virtues and beliefs which the system itself can't enforce, including everyday civic arts and graces like those he described in a pick-up basketball game.
You and others make declamations about the conceits of whiskered tweedies sipping sherry in common rooms and seeking a golden past in the glories of the founders while over-estimating the importance of ideas. Some conservatives deserve better than that, but many don't, and I have written some things against those who claim to be rescuing liberal education that way. (This was for Yale undergraduates, but see also The Guardian and this from the NY Times Book Review, which I also linked above. ) The "tweedie" part applies best to the conservatives in the "lavishly funded initiatives" I mentioned in this post. The part about over-estimating ideas applies especially to neo-cons like Kristols, who sold the older conservatives on it. I myself don't think that it's easy or often right to discount the importance of ideas. But I have nothing special to add to those declamations toward the bottom of the string.
Just try to keep your observations clean, Dan, and don't get side-tracked into strings like the one Bev started -- as I shouldn't have, either, even though I'm the author being attacked. If you want to trade put-downs with other people, find another site or start your own blog and take on all comers. The distinction between assailing and discussing in a manner that includes asking is akin to the distinction between a street fight and a pick-up basketball game.
I tried to give even Tanenhaus his due in the post, since I don't think him an enemy in war or a pig at some trough, even though I dislike his editing and ideas.
December 9, 2007 3:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Listen, you insufferable scold, I have been posting on this site for two and a half years, more than twice as long as you, and have participated in more conversations and exercises in extended interactivity than most would care to count. But this morning, I did count. It turns out I have posted one thousand, nine hundred and six comments at this site in my time here. I have asked numerous questions in the course of those many discussions, and also declaimed quite a bit. You have contributed a total of forty-two comments in thirteen months, all but two of which were comments connected to your own posts, of which there have been a total of sixteen.
So I don't think I need instructing on either blog etiquette or the virtues of interactivity from another vain and insulated practitioner of the art of journalistic self-admiration. Nor am I prepared to profit from your jejune theories on the differences between assailing and discussing. I was a philosophy professor for eighteen years, and have had abundant experience with both assailants and discussants at philosophy conferences filled with more perspicacious and powerful minds than yours. And addressing me with demeaning imperatives and instructions like one of your impressionable students - "try dialogue", "try to keep your declamations clean", "don't get side-tracked", "find another site", "there is never any harm in asking a question" - won't get you anywhere. Find another site yourself, poser!
I am under no obligation to ask you questions, nor do I need you to "explain your post". I read your post, painful as it was since your writing is dreadful, your style aesthetically unattractive, your rhetoric chaotic and logically undisciplined, and your thought patterns timid, neurotic and digressive. I have no questions. This is not some public lecture hall where you get to avoid unsolicited speechifying with a curt "what's your question?" You are not a visiting dignitary. We are not your audience, nor are we students. You made your speeches, I made mine. Did you ask me any questions on my long initial comments? No. So we're even.
I did address you directly and clearly in one brief comment, and rather than address the point, you chose to reply with a string of logical irrelevancies, and some petulant whinging about my need to get a grip, and my weak grasp of my own motives. But my motives are right out in the open for all to see. I have no doubt you didn't "promote" the war, since you appear to be a practitioner of the fine old lit'ry art of going on at length without saying anything definite. I imagine you were just too timid to take a stand one way or the other.
I'll leave it to others to determine for themselves whether everything I said here in this thread does more than "compound the problem." Although exactly which problem that is supposed to be, you don't identify. Believe it or not, 90% of what I have written had absolutely nothing at all to do with you or your thoughts. If you find yourself in need of continual validation, perhaps you should go find yourself another Manhattan mutual admiration society where you and your co-dependent comrades can give each other intellectual reacharounds all night.
By the way, I have also played more than my share of pickup basketball.
December 9, 2007 9:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
Righteous smackdown!
December 9, 2007 9:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
You have no idea how much I regret engaging in this silliness with you. No idea at all.
December 9, 2007 9:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you -- to Bev for taking a gracious step back, and to Dan for acknowledging that 90% of what he has written here had nothing to do with me or my post. Perhaps he should have written it somewhere else, then, than in a string like this, so let's all move on. One thing I've learned about myself over the years is that I am incapable of nursing grudges. We'll all do better next time.
December 9, 2007 9:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're impossible. You learn nothing and you forget nothing, you're the Bourbon King of the literary world. You're incapable of teaching us anything because you're incapable of learning anything.
December 9, 2007 11:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
I may just be too common and naive (and thankfully not part of any academic department anywhere), but confess I don't get where all the energy and angst is coming from some of the above. (I'm reminded of the old joke about why fights in churches and academe are so vicious-- it's because there's so little at stake.)
Personally, I thought the original essay was an interesting read and presented a point of view that I had not heard in precisely this way. I appreciate TPM Cafe because one gets a chance to read a variety of thinking, and I'm not fond of people like V. and BevD who either try to shut down a POV they find objectionable, or who try to divert us into some kind of weird personal mud-wrestling match. Take it outside, guys.
I've been repelled by the Horowitz's of the world, and the way they're trying to "take back" higher education (as though it could or should be made in a conservative, market-driven mold), and this essay and the Allan Bloom book review that Ellen linked to in the NYT in 2005 helped flesh out the bigger picture for me a little better.
Again, though, I can't quite get where the venom is coming from? Is it some kind of knee-jerk reaction to the old pheremones his words give off, or that he's somehow seeming to defend conservatism (I don't see that, myself, as much as trying to analyze it's current state), or that he's saying that absolutist extremist thinking on the Right is very similar to absolutist extremist thinking on the Left, and that we're not going to get anywhere until we start examining extremism itself?
Anyway, pound on me if you want to, but it won't do any good; I probably wouldn't understand it. Thanks to everyone who's bothered trying to engage with the ideas and move the discussion in a rational direction.
December 10, 2007 10:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Very belatedly, I want to thank PaDem for this sane intervention in what became a disappointing but revealing string. I agree that this fight was reminiscent in some ways of the fights in those churches and academic quarters where little is really at stake. As I say in my final comment, way at the bottom of the string, in this post I am trying to do something I think needed doing -- and it had nothing to do with scoring points about who called Hillary a scold and who is defending bourgeois nationalism.
December 13, 2007 8:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Okay, I've been working my way backwards up the thread, like a salmon swimming upstream, in the hope that somewhere in Jim's endless discourses we can figure out what exactly he was going on about.
From this, I'm gathering that Jims thesis can be refined to an inherent and intrinsic conflict between 'Ordered Liberty' whatever that is and 'Capitalism' as an economic system.
Jim is here painting with trowel strokes, but this is how I interpret his supplementary remarks in this passage. It seems to dovetail with his later denunciation of capitalism and his call for a new American Revolution towards the end of his original essay.
I'm still having trouble getting around the notion that that as Jim seems to articulate it, 'Capitalism' including the fundamental existence of inherent 'rights to property' was part of the woof and weft of 18th century (and therefore modern) Conservative thinking. It seems to me that in enshrining a right to property, one opens the pandoras box inevitably to the excesses he claims to decry.
So is Conservativism's original sin the very concept of a right to property? One could excavate to that point, I suppose. But my instinct suggests thats' not what he wants.
Or is it that the concept of 'right to property' has become unbalanced and is no longer part of 'ordered liberty.' In essence, that Capitalism, once a vital part of Conservative thinking, has grown or metastized.
Conservative support of this metastization is the original sin and has introduced the conflict into Conservatism, the unreliable and toxic stresses.
I could almost see this as being his point. But I have some problems. One is that if this is his thesis, he's never ever bothered to articulate it coherently.
Another is that it fails to explain his reference to William Kristol, Ex-Leftists and the rise of a pseudo-structure of quasi-intellectual think tanks and house organs. What does one have to do with the other? The 'metastization' of Capitalism certainly precedes such a movement any way you look at it. If he's assuming a relationship between the two, then he simply isn't bothering to describe or explain it.
Finally, there's a failure to explain where the 'national security state' conservative or conservatism fits into it. Is it anti-capitalist? Capitalist? Metastized? What? Who knows?
I dunno. I feel that I am quixotically hunting the ghost of an idea with a butterfly net. Perhaps no good will come of it.
December 10, 2007 12:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . conservatism . . . can't reconcile its yearning for ordered liberty with its obeisance to every whim of capital.
"Liberty for wolves is death to the lambs." Isaiah Berlin
December 7, 2007 9:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Part of the problem is to make certain distinctions. There is no doubt a problem between the tradition destroying nature of capitalism and support for "traditional." It the reason for both the deification of Ronald Reagan. Reagan, or the idea of Reagan, is a safe harbor for those who favor tax cuts and those who oppose abortion and divorce. However, the social and political goals for Iraq demonstrated the fissures. George Will and Francis Fukyama's break with the neo-Cons was precisely over the ability of government to reorder society from the top down.
Another split that is growing is between the demand by the religious part of the conservatism to obesiance to a narrow reading of the Bible and an insistance of a mix of relgion and state that, for example Madison and Jefferson, opposed from the begining of the Republican.
Thoush republican civic-virtue may have had strong support in ancient Athens, and Machiavelli's Florence (see the works of J.G.A. Pocock) there is a lot of evidence that American was far more influenced by the liberalism of Locke and Smith.
The extremes of the right and the left share many of the same weaknesses including ideologies that trump facts and a belief that there are villians among the ordinary leaders of nations who prevent the people from realizing what is good for them. The contempt for the people by both the far right and far left is remarkably parallel.
Daniel A. Greenbaum
December 7, 2007 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
Are we discussing Conservatism, American Conservatism, late-stage American Capitalism, or avaricious commercial lobbying of government. They're not the same thing. Whatever one thinks of his philosophy Irving Kristol belongs in only one of the possible discussions.
The strain of American Conservatism that Sleeper and presumably, Tanenhaus begin with is based in the writings of conservative Jewish post-Holocaust Platonists of the Republic-worshiping variety (Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom, Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, etc.). These men don't trust liberal-democracy (it may be too harsh to say they despise the demos but it's certain they don't respect it), because they remember that it failed in Germany, a failure which led to the Nazi state and to the Holocaust.
Their answer: Always ensure that there's an exterior threat to inculcate fear in the people in order that the better types will be afforded a free hand in running the nation.
If this brand of Jewish-American Conservatism has an innate flaw (Sleeper's "original sin") it is that in order to convince the people that their betters (Allan Bloom's privileged minority) deserve to rule, the rulers must build up the perception of threat and must build up the means of defending against that threat -- Eisenhower's military-industrial complex.
But make the government large enough and all you've done is invited the pigs to the trough -- pigs who may call themselves conservatives but are, in the end, just greedy, opportunistic pigs.
P.S. Someone else can volunteer to do Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Bellah -- and someone else, Seth Benardete.
December 7, 2007 2:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
It’s too late for an American-centric civic republicanism fused with some kind of national greatness conservatism - or national greatness liberalism for that matter. What the world is crying out for – and what is still clearly emerging despite the temporary reflex of neo-nationalist retrenchment of Bush interregnum - is a new global internationalism that combines elements of classical liberal capitalism, socialism and contemporary green and communitarian thought, and aims at placing checks on the exercise of national power, organizing the divided energies of the globe’s have-nots and have-littles, and reviving the quest for global governance and shared, widespread prosperity. It’s something like a revival of socialist internationalism, but without the fanatical obsessions with total economic planning and organization, ideological re-education and uniformity, industrial modernism and empty materialism that characterized 20th century socialism. And the action is not here in America, or any one nation’s capital, but is distributed around the world. Americans need to get their heads out of their insular, quaintly patriotic and provincial intellectual ghettos and get with the program.
The national greatness clubbers represents a nostalgic and anxious class of progressively disinherited nobles, who can’t quite come to grips with the fact they are being gradually but inevitably displaced from what they had been lead to believe would be their positions at the pinnacle of global influence. They reek of the quaint pieties, affectations, intellectual trinkets and sentimental memories of the Federal Era, combined with the grandiose arrogance of the triumphalists of the post-war period. They are like an old and declining WWII general sitting around in a moth-eaten uniform on a dank and rotting Washington portico, rambling on pathetically and inanely about his plans for one more triumph, as he doodles an image of Washington crossing the Delaware in a D-Day landing craft.
Once upon a time, a northern Harvard or Yale man, or a southern graduate of Mistah Jeff-uh-sen’s University, could rest comfortable with the knowledge that, having been trained for and initiated into the American ruling class, while America was at the same time the chief citadel of the world, he was lined up to assume his rightful position as a master of the universe. But less and less of the world is paying attention to what these people think; their relevance shrinks daily. This is humiliating for them. So when you hear them discourse gravely and sentimentally about “national greatness”, know that what they really long for is the personal greatness that was promised them, but which the world has not delivered. While they prance around Washington like the invited grandees at a bicentennial costume party, abusing themselves to the accompaniment of Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian fantasies, the people of Europe and Asia and South America have their heads in the 21st century and are beginning to build a whole new world.
December 7, 2007 11:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Once upon a time.... and for a fairly brief period of time: a mere 50 or 60 years that America sat atop the heap, king of the global hill. And for most of that time we were challenged at least by the Soviets. Our era of unchallenged hegemony lasted a bare ten years. And dragging the Founders into this is rather unfair as the Founders were isolationists and had no dreams at all of America becoming a global hyperpower. No, the Neocons are not nostalgic; there's not much for them to look back on in fond remmeberance. Like much of the "conservative" movement the Neocons are ambitious radicals looking to remake the world, not halt its history.
December 8, 2007 5:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
I wasn't talking about the neocons as much as all the national greatness liberals, civic republican nationalists, Truman Democrats and other rightish and leftish ideologues of patriotic nationalism that Jim Sleeper invokes, and who are so common these days, especially among the younger generation of graduates of elite universities. These characters are always recycling some form or other of traditional American political philosophy, and never tire of invoking some great Founder or President, or hearkening back to some triumphant glory days recorded in the national chronicles. The attitudes are extremely provincial and sentimentally Americanist. Their thinking about other lands is either dominated by how they can carry the torch of American something-or-other to the dark-visioned heathens, or by how they can restore the virtues of the great New Republic and protect the Spirit of 1776 from unhealthy foreign influences, while stoking the lantern files of the City on the Hill. It all has the stink of an Ivy league or Little Ivy American Studies class, with tweedy English professors and whiskered Historians waxing patrician over the deeds of the noble ancestors.
I think these people need to get out more, start thinking a lot more about what they can learn from the rest of the world rather than teach it; how they can pitch in and help rather than lead; and how their country can achieve a modest state of comradeship and friendly decency in relation the world's people rather than a lofty and self-important, American-centered "greatness."
December 8, 2007 10:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Re: These characters are always recycling some form or other of traditional American political philosophy, and never tire of invoking some great Founder or President, or hearkening back to some triumphant glory days recorded in the national chronicles.
What's wrong with this? The American Founders, whatever their faults, were uncommonly wise men. And every nation (at least every nation old enough to have a sense of its nationhood) has its patriotic myths. Do you think the British, the Russians, the French (!), the Japanese and Chinese and Thais and Iranians (to name only a few) do not tell myths about their history and their national virtues? I see that as fairly normal and harmless. It's the use that the NeoCons have put these things to that I repudiate. A nation like Canada or Norway that enjoys a certain pride in its past and its ethos without seeking to rule the world or bully others is not a problem.
Moreover, telling Americans they should not take pride in their national virtues (and no, that does not entail ignoring our national sins) is not going to win you any elections or accomplish anything worth acomplishing. People need their myths, and the myths themselves are not a problem; it's what those invoking them wish to do that may be.
December 8, 2007 3:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
People need their myths . . . .
So true; so true. Else they become realists and then, nihilists -- tightrope walkers over the abyss of nothingness as our dear departed Friedrich often said. Or was it the other way around? Damn aphorisms; why couldn't he write like Plato.
In the event, I remain
Your friend,
Leo Strauss
December 8, 2007 4:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
What is going on among the national greatness libercons is just typical class retrenchment and tribalism, and is only one of the reactionary tendencies of the time, similar in character to the rise of Salafist Islam in the Middle East, Russian nationalism in Russia and fundamentalist Christianity in the American South. It's a frightened reaction to a changing world, and a sign of intellectual decadence and a loss of vitality. No doubt every society has its followers of the Ancient Law, but it's a bit disheartening that so many graduates of what purport to be our finest universities sound like provincial antiquarians straight out of a meeting of the Daughters of the American Revolution.
No doubt many of the founders were uncommonly wise. But there are uncommonly wise men and women from every corner of the world. There is no excuse for fixating only on the small, local cult of federal era America.
Maybe the patriotism party should consider the possibility that some of the problems we face have been long-lasting and endemic to our cultural and political traditions, and that perhaps those august wise men weren't quite so entirely wise after all. Maybe the answer isn't some new Jeffersonian, Hamiltonian and Madisonian stew, cooked to a slightly different recipe, but ideas that come from beyond our shores.
Myths have their place, but clinging obsessively to overworked myths and schoolboy maxims is feeble-minded and slavish. Treating important historical figures as "fathers" and totemic ancestors is primitive idolatry. The world, I believe, is on the cusp of the next great wave of internationalism. It's not surprising to see people huddling together with their tribes and clutching the tattered ceremonial flags and robes just before the great, reorganizing shake-up occurs, but a lot of these people are going to have to get over it if they don't want to be left completely behind by history. There are times for re-acquainting oneself with the past, and it's often comforting to walk backward toward the future, gazing longingly at the setting sun of a dying era. But there are also times for sweeping great swaths of tradition away, liberating the imagination and facing the future with a fresh slate.
By the way, those wise men of 1776 and 1789 weren't slavish followers of one nation's ancestral "fathers". They were worldly cosmopolitans and indeed revolutionaries, making a radical break with their pasts. If one thinks they are so damn wise, then why not follow their example by dramatically breaking with the past, rather than treating the words of the founders as holy writ.
I can't say what is needed for the next election. Tribes do go through periods of cloying nostalgia, and maybe this one isn't done yet. But these sorts of attitudes are cyclical, and at some point people are going to grow very weary of undending Uncle Samism.
December 8, 2007 7:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
If one thinks they are so damn wise, then why not follow their example by dramatically breaking with the past, rather than treating the words of the founders as holy writ.
Dan, your posts on this subject are most excellent, however, this paragraph is the fly in the ointment, so to speak, because it could most definitely reply to the neo-Jacobin Bush regime.
I think you've got it right about the sense of grandeur, and, imo, the missing ingredient is non-partisan and non-idological--wisdom.
As the old saw goes, 'fools rush in where wise men fear to tread,' and what truly distinguishes these pretenders from our Founding Fathers is that they have abjured wisdom, reflection and prudence in favor of ideology, short-term political gain and personal reward.
December 9, 2007 11:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
You make a good point leftAhead. I am certainly not an advocate of violent revolution and wars of transformation of the of the sort practiced by Robespierre, Jefferson, Napoleon and Podhoretz. I still have faith that if we work very diligently, expend every diplomatic and organizational effort, and think very hard and imaginatively, we can navigate our way toward a new global progressive era without the violent concussions of the 20th century.
But we really need to crack the discussion wide open. Right now, for example, the United States and the Chinese are engaged in a strategic struggle over clients and influence in resource-rich Africa, with the Africans once more in the middle. Similar struggles are taking place in central Asia and the Middle East. At the same time, the world is groping with the reality of the dissipation of its most vital mineral resource, a truly global crisis in the condition of the natural environment, and weakened systems for halting the proliferation of weapons, resolving conflicts and promoting security. These are the challenges and conflict lines on which the security and well-being of our children and children's children will depend. Yet what are we doing about it - I mean right here and now, even at TPM Cafe?
The Chinese have their own intellectuals, with their own ideas about the global future and the direction of progress. The same is true of the Brazilians, and the Russians, and the Indians, and Africans, the Persians and Europeans. Where are those voices? Why is it that all we seem to get in this country from public intellectuals is Americans talking with other Americans about what America is going to "do about" China, or Africa, or Russia, or Persia. Why are Americans not debating and discussing with Chinese, African, Russian and Persian intellectuals what we can collectively do about our collective future. Why not sponsor those debates right here at TPM Cafe?
There used to be this notion that serious public intellectuals took a broad, cosmopolitan, universalist perspective, while government types confined themselves to national policy questions, and obsessing about the national mojo. Now it seems we have hardly any difference between the two.
I believe the discussions among neoconservatives, national greatness liberals and their ilk - the discussion Jim Sleeper seems so interested in - are the last wheezing gasps of of a dying intellectual tradition. the whole movement was only a temporary intellectual fad of the brief and imaginary "unipolar moment" - a tiny global hiccup between one major era ending with Second World War and the Cold War, at one end, and the next great era to come, an era which is already emerging around the world beneath the notice of the provincial American ruling class, who are obsessed with the national grandeur.
Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison are great. How much greater if we could forge a political philosophy and collective global approach that combines the best of those liberal figures with the best of Confucian, Taoist and socialist traditions from China, liberationist traditions from Latin America, and Green traditions from around the world.
The 95 corridor from New Haven to Manhattan really is not a highway through the center of the world. (It's not even a clean or attractive stretch of road.) Nor is the stretch from Boston to New Haven such a highway, or the one from Manhattan to Washington. The days when one could even imagine such a thing are gone. The era of Captain America is over.
The end of the Cold War did not magically grant William Kristol, Peter Beinart, Madeleine Albright, Will Marshall, Francis Fukuyama or John Ikenberry either the right or the power to lay out the future world's political agenda and philosophy on an Americanist plan. Isn't it evident now how laughable were those vaulting triumphalist ambitions and end of history unipolar fantasies? So we have choice: either get to work with the entire globe on forging collective solutions and plans, fusion political philosophies and instruments of global governance; or else face the consequences, which are certain to be hideous and bloody.
December 9, 2007 12:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
My opinion is that such a global conversation has become increasingly possible, which is one of the hidden reasons for the putative 'Masters of the World' to make their play for world domination 'before it's too late.'
That last bit of fear mongering, the 'end of our way of life' argument is what the global elites truly fear; a leveling of the playing field, and an end to the easy pickings of global 'low hanging fruit.'
I suspect that the common man may find out that such an end would not be such a bad thing after all.
December 9, 2007 5:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you are overstating the case by miles. The problems we have in this country are not due to anything liberals have been doing or thinking. Liberals have not been in power. Our problems come from what the so-called conservatives are doing and thinking-- and they're the ones who have indeed broken with the past and not in a good way. If our liberals have now become real conservatives by respecting past traditions too much, well, I can think of a lot worse things. Indeed, we've seeing those worse things for the last seven years. Right now the focus needs to be on getting the current SOBs out of office. Nothing else really matters. We can argue the minutiae and nuances of liberalism later.
December 10, 2007 3:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
The problems we have in this country are not due to anything liberals have been doing or thinking.
National greatness liberals were heavily involved in promoting the Iraq war. Their activities divided Democrats and prevented any possibility of effective opposition to the war in 2002, when it really mattered. Their national prominence and writing in major opinion journals helped give the war a gloss of bipartisan legitimacy. They lead a round of public recriminations following the 2004 election, and argued for purging the party of it's antiwar left wing. After the Democratic victories in 2006, they went to work on undermining the party again, blunting any effort by Congressional Democrats to fulfill their chief campaign promises related to Iraq, helping to produce all sorts of stalling tactics related to benchmarks and such, and helping to support the surge and a continuation of White House course in Iraq. Right now they are leading the calls to increase the size of the US military, and to maintain a permanent presence in Iraq. They have been absolutely no help in the Iran debate, arguing throughout for the gravity of the Iranian threat and abetting the White House's rhetorical ratcheting up of hostility toward Iran.
So they are part of the problem. Yes, they are by no means as important a problem as the Republicans, but they are part of the problem nonetheless.
December 10, 2007 5:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ah, yes. But the fortunes so gained are so vast, and the networks and alliances and interlocking directorships are so well-established that I fear these well-provisioned forces will rise again. There's no way to really get rid of them. But we do have the opportunity now to prepare to greet them when they do.
December 8, 2007 6:41 AM | Reply | Permalink
Readers of this weird but interesting and instructive string -- which sometimes imputes to me views which I don't hold and didn't express -- may also be interested to see how this post has been received at Daily Kos, among other sites.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/12/7/223216/189/661/419362
December 8, 2007 7:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
I was disappointed by this essay. I found the writing lazy and meandering, the writer frequently disguising his lack of ideas and insight by ducking into vague imponderables. The thing is full of half formed thoughts which are toyed with and then abandoned.
Food for thought indeed. The temptation is to grab some of these half baked notions and to try to develop them in some concrete way. But I decline to do the writers work for him.
December 9, 2007 7:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
I thank the gentleman for this sample of his own thinking and writing, which sets a clear standard against which to assess our uses of the wonderful opportunities for thoughtful commentary and dialogue which TPM provides.
December 9, 2007 9:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Something about kitchens and personal comfort comes to mind.
Expect no quarter from our point-of-the-spear, the big V. But don't take it personally. We just like to see a good fight. (We don't hold grudges for long, either.)
If our internecine squabbles are part of our strength, or at least part of our (hoped-for) better understanding of reality. maybe there is hope for conservatives if they set up their own circular firing squads.
December 9, 2007 10:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm not sure that the internecine squabbles of circular firing squads are part of any group's strength; I'm not even sure I'd want to see conservatives doing more of that, since that's never the end of the matter, and what comes of such things isn't entertainment but real destruction. If there isn't more at stake in these dialogues than the satisfactions of administering "righteous smackdowns" based on insults and lies, let's all stop posting and go out on the street and do the dozens. A website like TPM isn't a symphony orchestra, but it isn't a street fight, either. Even if they're writing from at home in their pajamas -- and, for all I know, from the kitchen table -- people should take some care to recognize that posting a comment isn't like razzing a family member, and it isn't like picking a fight at a bar. It may take time for better standards to evolve, and I'm sure that my post, "American Conservatism's Original Sin," wasn't a Periclean model of public discourse; but the responses we're talking about here really don't belong in a kitchen or in a public square. Let's see if we can do better next time.
December 10, 2007 12:12 AM | Reply | Permalink
All I want from you Jim, is that you should take some responsibility for what you write, and that you should write better.
I don't think that's unreasonable.
December 10, 2007 11:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
Frankly Jim, I was hoping for an apology. Your essay amounted to a very long walk across marshy ground to very little result. It's all well and good to write this stuff, but then you offer up the risk that someone might read it.
December 9, 2007 6:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is troll talk -- the kind that is posted by someone who wanders into a discussion; gives it a quick read; says something that is snarky, light as air, with no constructive content or contribution whatever; and moves on. In your first message, Valdron, you wrote, "I decline to do the writers [sic] work for him." Therefore what you are doing here is your own work, a sample of your thinking and writing; otherwise, you wouldn't post at all. So one reads what you have written here and assumes that you are doing the best you can with what you've got. It's not good for you to do this. Move up or move on.
December 10, 2007 12:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, I think I have enough history on this board of reasoned and insightful commentary, often at length, to establish my bona fides.
That said, occasionally a piece of work simply does not merit more than a casual dismissal. If you insist upon deconstruction, I'll see if I can find the time. But I would regard it more as a courtesy than any worthwhile endeavour.
December 10, 2007 5:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
With all due respect, Jim, Valdron does have a lengthy history of solid posting here, and perhaps you are not used to such pithy replies to your august pearls.
December 10, 2007 9:27 AM | Reply | Permalink
Frankly Mr. Sleeper, if I am required to read something "light as air, with no constructive content or contribution," I might prefer it in doses of 100 words or so than in an unswallowable glob 100 times that.
As as for the accusation that Valdron is behaving like troll, wouldn't you agree that such a statement is a bit trollish itself?
I do commend you for having the courtesy of answering our comments though. Many posts with more virtue go undefended by their authors.
December 10, 2007 10:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oops-- keyboard error: See comment below.
December 9, 2007 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
We are in the kitchen, every American with any sense is. It all shakes out right here, between the newspaper and the toaster. That means you have to get whatever you are selling past me.
Speaking of papers, according to mine, we will have suffered eight years of trashing the U.S. Constitution and you are now asking me to give up my blender?
I prepare affordable meals of protein powder, liquid vitamins and occasional shots of vodka to steel my sensitive soul against Cheney pain. Thankfully, there is still community around my kitchen --specifically around my blender, where I dance and blend and push the buttons to different beats.
Besides, as any bartender with an IQ above room temperature knows, if you blend it, they will come. ;D
December 9, 2007 11:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
Allow me to state a few points for the record:
I had an exchange with JPF311 in this thread that was prompted by Jim Sleeper's explicit call for more civic republicanism, and by his passing references to the movements of national greatness conservatism and national greatness liberalism. I made it clear what I think about these nationalist movements, their elitist provenance and the selfish class interests which these movements serve. And I included my own - no doubt by now tiresome - pitch for American political intellectuals to embrace global internationalism, and escape from what I personally view as a provincial intellectual ghetto obsessed with reworking tired themes from American political thought. There were no personal smackdowns directed at any individuals participating in this thread in these comments, to which I devoted a fair amount of time and thought - at least such thought as I am capable of conjuring up.
I then defended Jim against some of Bev's comments by suggesting that Bev's point was extremely pedantic.
I later criticized Jim's representation of the content of his Yale Daily News article. My criticism was direct and unambiguous, but civil, and even included a compliment along with the criticism. It concluded with the claim that the article "is a fine defense of the right and importance of protest, made all the more compelling by the fact that it comes from a war supporter, but it certainly doesn't make clear that you were changing your position on the war, if indeed you were."
I didn't go into "smackdown" mode until Jim responded to my criticism with personal comments about my own motives and my need to get a grip on myself, and expressed the view that I was posting thoughtlessly and randomly, without any end in view. He then proceeded with some condescending instructions on the way I out to comport myself in the construction of blog comments, a minor and forgettable genre to which I would suggest I have made significantly more substantial contributions than Jim Sleeper. He included a statement of "the rule for me". By what authority he claims the right to establish rules for me, he did not say. But his subsequent comments were laced with a number of other statements of the rules.
December 9, 2007 11:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
Stings, doesn't it?
December 9, 2007 11:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
I see your point.
December 9, 2007 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem I have with these treatises, as to what has gone wrong with "conservatism" or "liberalism" is that rarely is a definition provided as to of which conservatives or liberals, as the case may be, the author is writing.
There are many brands of conservatism and "neo-conservative" is not one of them. Just because some wily, amoral scam artist declares himself and his acolytes as Neo-conservative does not make them conservative.
However, if one seeks opportunity in an era when "conservatism" is chic, then to gain power, influence, and/or cash it would probably be best to present oneself as a conservative.
The whole discussion, it seems to me, is pointless.
The comments brought to mind the report I recently read of someone predicting the internet will be full in two year. Just in case it's true, it seems to me that we should all do out part to conserve the bandwidth.
Strive for the ideal, but deal with what's real.
December 9, 2007 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Conservatives are people who voted for Bush/Cheney in 2004.
sPh
December 9, 2007 5:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
There are many brands of conservatism and "neo-conservative" is not one of them.
I see. It must have been the liberals who voted the neocons into power, sort of, twice. It must have been a liberal Congress that rubber-stamped every atrocity Bush committed on the country, the MidEast, and the planet for the past seven years. And those judges he has perpetrated on our Supreme Court -- lefties, every one. It must have been that pinko Giuliani who intoned on 11-Sep-2001, "Thank god George Bush is president."
The paleocons and the neocons are all cons in all senses of the word. None of 'em are conservative, but most all of 'em are Conservatives. Toss 'em all in a sack, shake 'em up, pull one out, ask him what time it is. Neo or Paleo, he'll say 1250 A.D.
December 9, 2007 5:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, this crowd reminds me more of the robber barrons of the 19th century, the Fricks and Vanderbuilts and Rockefellers, who themselves were just the philosophical descendants of Rollo the Red or Forkbeard. They, like their great-grandchildren of our time, believed that there should be no restriction on anything they wanted to do to grab as much as possible, for as long as possible. Their tools were no longer swords, but pens and contracts.
Maybe our grandchildren will be able to pay to tour some hedge fund manager's mansion someday, too, and marvel at the incredible hubris and excess of that fallen class.
December 10, 2007 11:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . it seems to me that we should all do out part to conserve the bandwidth. Turnow
Q.E.D.
December 9, 2007 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Responding to Wright's message, just above Valdron's: I'm not sure that the internecine squabbles of circular firing squads are part of any group's strength; I'm not even sure I'd want to see conservatives doing more of that, since that's never the end of the matter, and what comes of such things isn't entertainment but real destruction. If there isn't more at stake in these dialogues than the satisfactions of administering "righteous smackdowns" based on insults and lies, let's all stop posting and go out on the street and do the dozens.
A website like TPM isn't a symphony orchestra, but it isn't a street fight, either. Even if they're writing from at home in their pajamas -- and, for all I know, from the kitchen table -- people should take some care to recognize that posting a comment isn't like razzing a family member, and it isn't like picking a fight at a bar. It may take time for better standards to evolve, and I'm sure that my post, "American Conservatism's Original Sin," wasn't a Periclean model of public discourse; but the responses we're talking about here really don't belong in a kitchen or in a public square. Let's see if we can do better next time.
December 10, 2007 12:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
At times, one must pick up the gauntlet and wallow through various unpleasantries. So it is here. Let me first say that I do not know Jim Sleeper. I have no idea who he is, what his background is, and whether he has ever produced anything of note. I have no particular antagonism towards the man, and for the most part wish him well.
Sadly, I can't really say the same for his rather sloppy and empty headed essay "American Conservatism's Original Sin."
Despite the fact that I found nothing to recommend it, obviously others did since there are over a hundred posts to the thread. Good for them, and good for Jim. I read through it, I found it wanting, I said so and would have been content to leave it at that.
Unfortunately, Jim seems to be a bit thin skinned at points, and is annoyed by my dismissal. So be it. I am put to justifying my position.
To begin with, let's ask ourselves what Jim is actually up to. ‘Conservatism's Original Sin' might persuade us that he has drawn a bead on some inherent ideological flaw in American Conservatism, or perhaps some early strategic or critical mistake. That's a promising enough notion. There's certainly no shortage of ‘sins' to pick and choose from, be it Hoover's negligent approach to the depression, Nixon's southern strategy, Goldwater's barking nuttiness, the lust for authoritarianism, deregulation at all costs, or any number of things. I can imagine any number of interesting discussions arising from such a title.
Unfortunately, Jim's is not any of them. Rather, let's look and see where he went with it:
December 10, 2007 12:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
Trying to boil this down to English, Jim seems to be saying that Conservatism is expressing a conflict between libertarian idealism on the one hand (but apparently an orderly libertarian idealism, freedom, but perhaps not too much of it), and financial pragmatism (looking out for the money, or possibly representing the needs and wishes of monied interests). There's a conflict between cowboys and businessmen, or perhaps between Texans and New Englanders.
I understood Jim Sleeper's point this way: The term "ordered liberty" is not supposed to be a synonym for some form of libertarianism, but a synonym for what is variously called "civic republicanism", "civic humanism" or "classical republicanism". The contrast between this outlook and the Republican approaches of today is that civic republicanism envisions an actual republic with an actual functioning government and an actual rule of law, placing some reasonable restraints on both individual and corporate behavior, but allowing a fairly high degree of liberty within that framework, and capable of organizing human energies in constructive ways to advance the public good. It also emphasizes the importance of an enlightened humanistic education and the cultivation of the intellectual and moral virtues necessary to turn the slavish and dependent human beasts fit only for life under despotic governments into self-governing and self-directed citizens. Something like this ideal is supposed by some to be the founding constitutional ideology of the American republic, while others put more weight on a fairly similar England-derived classical liberalism. Civic republicanism is supposed to derive from various forms of Roman, and then Italian thinking about government.
"Obeisance to the whims of capital" is supposed to refer to the later capital-R Republican Party infatuation with laissez fair economics - an economically extreme manifestation of classical liberalism, and something much closer to what we now think of as "libertarianism". The liberty here is seen by its critics as anarchic, disordered and fundamentally destructive of sustaining traditions and both public and private virtue. It elevates some men to positions of extreme power and unaccountability, and reduces others to servitude. It destroys the personal virtues of republican citizens, by tempting and corrupting them with the satisfaction of every base desire that unrestrained commerce can supply, and by reducing many citizens to the status of mere "workers". It promotes debt and dependency over frugality and self-reliance. And by fostering tremendous inequalities in wealth, and the inequalities of power those bring, it makes it virtually impossible to sustain a society of self-governing, equal citizens.
Many neoconservative figures have purported to be defenders of civic republicanism, and indeed that is born out by some of their more philosophical writings which are very historically-oriented, and look back for political and moral models to the classical epoch and the ancient virtues. But neoconservatism as a movement and ideology is really quite different in character, and the civic republican rhetoric is a bit of a crock, dressing up plutocratic domination and civic irresponsibility in some film company classical costumes. Domestically, neoconservative rhetoric amounted to little more than an excuse for cutting back social programs - supposedly seen as atithetical to the cultivation of republican virtues of self-reliance, industry and temperance - but without a program for building republican institutions, promoting citizenship, lifting people out of an impoverished and subordinated condition, extending competent self-government, devoting resources to the public good or reigning in the abuses of wealth.
And the whole domestic "republic" of neoconservative fantasy is yoked to a modern industrial state engine driven by the lust for power, aggrandizement and domination, and the satisfactions of the ego that go with them. It trumpets a quite different set of classical virtues - an arrogant Nietzschean dynamism, of the kind promoted by Robert Kaplan, that is quite alien to the modesty and conservatism of republican thought. The gulf between neoconservatism and civic republicanism is as vast as the gulf between the arrogant character Callicles in Plato's Gorgias and the modest Roman farmer, or the stoic Marcus Aurelius.
December 10, 2007 1:51 PM | Reply | Permalink
As I read your rendering of 'ordered liberty' as 'civic republicanism' it strikes me as fairly close to my lighthearted 'liberty, but not too much of it.'
Essentially, as I read your interpretation, you're saying that Jim's ideal of 'ordered liberty' is a framework of state controls and state and social obligations in the context of which some degree of personal autonomy is granted. 'Liberty' exists largely in the context of state and social control, and as a degree of license within that control?
I'm not entirely sure that's what the founding Father's may have had in mind, enlightenment notions seemed more expansive, although it may well have had origins in Greek or Roman writing.
In Jim's harkening back to the ideals of the 18th century and his muddy effort to reconcile the interventionist or controlling state with his Conservatism of 'the rights to life, liberty and [b]property[/b]' I think that there are enough echos of your concept to persuade me that we're both in roughly the same ballpark in terms of dissecting what passes for Jim's thinking.
That said, his emphasis on education and super-moral behaviour, his expectation that people can, shall, will and would behave as enlightened paragons seems reminiscent of both your discussion of the ideal of 'Civic Republicanism' and the fairly wooly notions of 'Civic virtue' in ancient Greece.
Sadly, I just don't think that these elevated 'civic virtue' ideals, are terribly practical or realistic. Human nature is what it is, is what it is. 'Civic Republicanism' calls on people to behave in ways that seem contrary to the trends of human nature. Instead of a nation of philosopher/warriors or bold yeomen/farmers, history invariably reveals petty gossipers conspiring against Socrates or obstinate Roman soldiers working out national grudges.
I've always seen Conservatism as having a fairly jaundiced view of human nature. But this whole notion of 'ordered liberty' or 'civic republicanism' strikes me as rooted in an idealized and unrealistic view of humans.
I also don't think that Jim is on any kind of solid ground with his 'whims of capital' bushwa. As I've noted, capital or capitalism derives pretty much inevitably from the conceptualization of rights in property as part of the package of fundamental liberties. His pining away for an inherently moral capitalism as articulated by Locke or Smith in the 1700's strikes me as fatally misreading both these gentlemen and history.
I would have to argue that Jim is fatally misreading his characterization of Conservatism's virtue and original sin, they may well be one and the same. Alternately, he may be seeing 'original sin' in the disharmony of property rights transcending some sort of idea of social balance - 'capitalism in context.'
Of course, his occasional references to the National Security State, which itself seems to undermine his rather gold tinted view of Civic Republicanism or Ordered Liberty. So perhaps his original sin is 'lack of balance.'
In the end, I am reminded of that famous passage from MacBeth...
December 10, 2007 2:31 PM | Reply | Permalink