Besides blogging for the Atlanic at ideas.theatlantic.com, Conor has been in protracted debate with Dan Riehl.  Their conversation started with Conor’s criticism of Mark Levin’s bullying, but digressed from there.  The League of Ordinary Gentlemen hosted a Skype debate between the two of them earlier this week.

I was unimpressed by the debate.  The major fault line between Dan and Conor is not policy, values, or philosophy, but about the style and methods some Talk Radio Show hosts use, and whether these are beneficial to conservatism.  Unfortunately, that debate didn’t happen until over an hour into it (and even then for only a few minutes).  The two of them spent the most of their time arguing (unsuccessfully) about what conservatism means and then got into a debate about the Iraq War.

But the thing that most gets me about Dan is his constant misrepresentations of Conor and others.  Here’s a prime example from this post-debate thread:

Riehl:

On Bush’s “empire building”, I pointed out the definition of “empire,” and Conor conceded Iraq wasn’t quite that. I also pointed out that, while far from perfect, democracy in Iraq has taken root and seems to be growing, so how is it he can insist such efforts can not work. At that point he started invoking Abu Ghraib.

Freidersdorf:

As anyone can verify if they listen to the audio of our conversation, I do say that America should not become an empire — but I ALSO make it clear that I do NOT think America is an empire right now. Rather, I think it is going to be a challenge in the future for America to walk the line between defending itself abroad and becoming an empire. I actually say this very directly in our conversation.

In fact, I think that anyone who listens to our conversation will find your post to be woefully inaccurate at best.

Riehl:

Please don’t misrepresent yourself here. I just checked the audio. Go to 29:30 right after you invoked “empire.” I asked you what countries we have invaded and “taken over” in the last 40 years. You said Iraq and Afghanistan. That implies empire building.

Well, here’s a transcript I’ve made of the relevant sections.  Judge for yourselves:

UPDATE: Dan is now accusing Conor of not adequately transcribing Mark Levin’s radio show.  This is just too rich.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tom posted this at 9:43 AM EDT on Friday, June 19th, 2009 as Buffoon Watch, Conservatism

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Marty Perez on the president’s self-congratulatory, manipulative style:

[H]istory has become a competition between and among narratives, self-consciously disdainful of what we used to think of as fact. In this intellectual competition, the losers almost always win or, at least, they win the “moral argument.” Not in real history, mind you, but in many a Western professor’s classroom. And, sometimes, in an American president’s mind.

The truth is that Barack Obama has a penchant for these narratives and yet an inclination to rise above them. Two grand but antithetical stories about the same problem, awaiting him and his Olympian skill for the discovery of “common ground”: That is Obama’s favorite script. He regards himself as a kind of unprecedented referee between histories and philosophies. He likes to think that he can see what others cannot see and that, therefore, they must come to him if they wish to live in peace and with meaning. He did this with race in the Philadelphia speech, articulating what blacks see from their end of the periscope and what whites see from theirs. (Until, that is, he had to dump his minister from the campaign truck as a matter of survival. “Common ground” is sometimes not discovered so much as invented, or imposed.) A man of not especially discriminate empathy, he sees himself in the Whitmanesque sense of containing multitudes.

In addressing American intelligence and security professionals at the National Archives, the president again aimed at bridging differences by showing that apparent contradictions are not contradictions at all and that everything will go together, if only for as long as he is speaking.  National security that never compromises national values? No problem. National values that guarantee national security? Say it and it will be done. Yes, we have values that elevate and restrict us at once, the ideal of free men and women that procedurally protects also the guilty and the wicked–and never mind that, absent energetic domestic and international defenses, these principles would be outmaneuvered and outclassed on both fronts. And again at Notre Dame, the same above-it-all structure of rhetorical conciliation was applied by Obama to the subject of abortion. “Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.” Nice enough. But the debate on abortion will not be so tidily retired. All of this is rising above but not really reconciling.

One of the surest signs that someone is being intellectually dishonest is when they refuse to acknowledge flaws, contradictions, or trade-offs to their policy proposals or philosophies.  If we do things my way, everything will be self-reinforcing and beneficial.  There is no acknowledgment either that the world is messy or that people are messy, and that ideas and feelings are sometimes irreconcilable.  To paraphrase Madison, such problems may not exist among the angels, but they do among us humans.

Though I’d argue that this kind of thinking is more pronounced on the political left, it’s hardly foreign to the political right.  Here’s David Frum on Mark Levin’s Liberty & Tyranny:

What should conservatives think or do about this [the financial] crisis? Levin offers a couple of pages of argument that the whole thing was brought about by overweening government. That’s partially true, but only partially. (Indeed among the actions for which Levin blames the government is the failure to raise interest rates in 2005 and 2006 to prick the housing bubble as it inflated. Then Fed chairman Alan Greenspan refrained from doing so because his libertarian instincts recoiled from the suggestion that he as a government official should decide that asset prices had risen “too high.”)

It’s also true however that manias and bubbles do occur in marketplaces even absent government. They occurred much more often in the less-governed 19th century than in the heavily governed mid-20th. New Deal financial reforms – disclosure requirements, margin limits, and regulation of securities exchanges – have contributed to the greater stability of modern finance, a lesson we have all painfully relearned from the disasters unleashed by the unregulated derivatives market…

None of this interests conservatives very much right now, and it interests Mark Levin not at all. Levin thinks there is nothing to learn from the present crisis, and indeed seems to regard the whole enterprise of learning as ideologically suspect. It’s very striking that nowhere in this book does he ever engage the ideas of intelligent people on the other side. He quotes stupid statements from a fringe group like Earth First! But he flinches from any encounter with any more substantial opponent. He lives in a sealed mental universe, into which nothing new or unsettling can ever penetrate.

I want to give Mark Levin some credit for Liberty and Tyranny. It is in its way an ambitious book, an attempt to offer a major political statement. Levin is not a stupid man, and Liberty and Tyranny is not a stupid book. What it is, unfortunately, is an airless and isolated book, an exercise in pure ideology radically quarantined from the life around it.

Tom posted this at 1:45 PM EDT on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 as Conservatism, Ex Pede Herculem, Philosophy

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Mark Levin is the author of the #2 book on Amazon, the host of a popular radio show, and a contributor to NRO’s the Corner.  After Rush and Dick Cheney, he’s probably the most important conservative thinker today.

He is also a human cancer:

CALLER: I just wanna say, Obama is a lot smarter than you folks give him credit for. You guys were on a roll, I have to admit, with all those tea parties. Everything was rolling along, the Republicans were gaining momentum. And he managed to change your entire conversational focus. And you let those three hundred thousand people —

LEVIN: My God. He’s so smart. His own party voted against him on Guantanamo Bay. How stupid was that, Cindy? His own party refused to fund the closing of Guantanamo Bay.

CALLER: Yeah but you know he can just move those people over here anyway. He’s already doing it with the one guy.

LEVIN: Yeah, sure, he can do whatever he wants. Let me ask you a question. Why do you hate this country?

CALLER: No, I love this country.

LEVIN: (angrily shouting) I SAID WHY DO YOU HATE MY COUNTRY! WHY DO YOU HATE MY CONSTITUTION? WHY DO YOU HATE MY DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE?

You just said it. He can blow off Congress. He can do whatever he wants, right?

CALLER: Well, he seems to, he just moved (inaudible).

LEVIN: Answer me this, are you a married woman? Yes or no?

CALLER: Yes.

LEVIN: Well I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.

We will not win so long as this kind of rhetoric is tolerated; on the off chance that I am wrong about that, will will not have deserved to win.  Levin’s bullying and tantrums — here’s another examples — toward anyone who disagrees with him are more emblematic of the Savage Nation than the conservative movement and certainly unworthy of an institution like National Review.  For God’s sake, don’t buy his books, don’t buy products from his sponsors, write National Review and ask them to stop buying his writing.  I am.

Substance matters.  So does tone.

Tom posted this at 11:55 PM EDT on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 as Conservatism, Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, I have seen the future. . .

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It’s really quite impressive how Dick Cheney is determining Obama’s agenda these days. It’s fantastic that we have a man as articulate, as intelligent, and, traveling  in the Wayback Machine to 2000, with such gravitas as Cheney engaging Obama where the public can see him. When Republican congressional leaders appear as little more than impotent whiners, Cheney really is the most valuable Republican.

Whatever negative poll numbers Cheney and Bush may have had leaving office, the American public originally liked Cheney. And seeing him out there, speaking his mind and engaging the president on substantive issues – in a way that no one else is challenging Obama on substance -  I can’t help but believe that we’re putting our best foot forward. We’re never going to beat Obama by trying to put forward someone hipper and cooler; the way we must beat Obama is by pointing out that he’s nothing more than a an attractive vessel to carry Leftist dreams. The elder statesmen of conservatism, Cheney or *cough* FRED THOMPSON *cough* are the way to point out to the American public that Leftist dreams are not their dreams.

Apollo posted this at 11:37 PM EDT on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 as Conservatism

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We’ve groused before about book titles.  Ben Crair tells why the sausage is entitled thus:

Bait liberals with an insulting title and then allow their outrage to raise the book’s profile. This was the raison d’etre behind Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home, and Ramesh Ponnuru’s The Party of Death, all of which had titles that were roundly denounced in the liberal blogosphere.

Mark Levin may grate, but at least his Liberty and Tyranny has bucked the trend of inflammatory titles (though the book itself might be—[the royal] we haven’t read it yet).

Hubbard posted this at 10:49 AM EDT on Monday, May 4th, 2009 as Belles Lettres, Conservatism

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Laura Ingraham is a bitch.

Are the Republican Party and Movement Conservatives so bereft of actual ideas that they have to result to namecalling? I thought this was the exclusive domain of idiotic left wing talk-show hosts Senators like Al Franken. Perhaps I’m behing too hard on Ingraham. Maybe I misunderstood the nuances of her arguments and positions…

Nope, she’s still a bitch.

I haven’t had a very high opinion of Ingraham since the time I called into her show after she made the absurd claim that all morality stems from Judeo-Christian Philosophy. Still, I never thought she would become so moronic that her only argument against a blogger would be to call her fat.

Oh who am I kidding, given the state of talk radio and the fact that they are now the apparent arbitors of Conservatism, I expected nothing less.

All of you from the shrill Coulter’s and Ingraham’s to the pompous Hannity’s to the mean spirited, raving Levine’s can go suck a…lemon.

Jamie posted this at 3:31 PM EDT on Monday, March 16th, 2009 as Conservatism, Possession by the Coultergeist

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Mark Steyn:

Twenty-five million people listened to Rush last week. Millions of them have listened to him for 20 years. That makes them “hard-right” extremists.

Whereas being one of a few thousand who listened to Jeremiah Wright every week for 20 years makes you a mainstream moderate.

Few things were more infuriating last election than supposed moderate conservatives deluded into believing that Obama was some sort of moderate, and Sarah Palin and us knuckledraggers were far outside the political mainstream. For all the talk of the far right-wing being anti-science in terms of evolution, these supposed thoughtful moderates were presented with uncontroverted evidence that Obama was and had always been an extreme leftist, but they completely ignored it in favor of their own presumption that he was one of them. Nobody likes facts when they run counter to our hopes.

I’m glad that certain supposed moderate conservatives who supported Obama last year are now coming around to realizing what he is; I just hope they keep this lesson in mind the next time some urbane socialist comes around and us knuckledraggers warn them. I doubt it, though.

Apollo posted this at 1:22 AM EST on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 as Conservatism

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Michael Steele derides Rush as merely an “entertainer.” If that’s the case, why is it that people who aren’t entertainers keep responding to him and talking about him?

Honestly, I don’t understand this line of attack against Rush. He is indisputably presenting ideas to the world for acceptance or rejection; if he does so in an entertaining way that people actually enjoy listening to, why is that a slight on him? Are only the boring to be taken seriously? That would explain a big part of our current political class: they’re so boring that people simply presumed they’re serious.

Rush more consistently presents ideas for debate and seriously addresses the ideas of others than any politician in Washington or any “serious” journalist on TV or in newspapers. If you watch the Sunday morning talk shows, you’ll hear an awful lot of talking point drivel and name calling, and will very seldom hear any substantive matter addressed substantively. This was particularly obvious during the last election, when weeks could go by and the only discussion on the news shows would be who had momentum or who had made a mistake, rather than who had the better plans. Rush talked about the ideas and the issues every single day I listened to him.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Rush is the leading public intellectual in America. That people enjoy listening to his show and that he makes extraordinary amounts of money from it should be a point in his favor, not a cause for nitwits to look down their noses. Michael Steele has seriously disappointed me by delving into this crap.

P.S. Seriously, in an age when Al Franken (!!!!!!!!!!) got elected to the senate, why is this a line of attack? Franken was just an entertainer like Limbaugh, except he wasn’t nearly as successful. Does that somehow make him a serious person? If Rush’s ratings would collapse to the level of Franken’s old show, would he then be considered a serious ideas guy?

Apollo posted this at 2:53 PM EST on Monday, March 2nd, 2009 as Conservatism, Journalism

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David Frum here, cranky at the idolization of Barry Goldwater in conservative lore.

What happened in 1964 was an unredeemed and unmitigated catastrophe for Republicans and conservatives. The success that followed 16 years later was a matter of happenstance, not of strategy. That’s the real lesson of 1964, and it is the lesson that conservatives need most to take to heart today.

It’s important to remember what, precisely, Goldwater wrought:

Then came the Republican debacle of November 1964. Goldwater’s overwhelming defeat invited a tsunami of liberal activism. The 89th Congress elected in 1964 enacted both Medicaid and Medicare. It passed a new immigration law, opening the way to a surge of 40 million newcomers, the overwhelming majority of them from poor Third World countries. It dramatically expanded welfare eligibility and other anti-poverty programs that together transformed the urban poor of the 1950s into the urban underclass of the 1970s and 1980s. . . .

True, the liberal triumph of 1964 set in motion the train of disasters that laid liberalism low in the 1980s. But those disasters followed from choices and decisions that liberals made – not from some multiyear conservative grand strategy for success in 1980. . . .

And anyway, as the years pass, the consequences of Reagan’s victory look more temporary and provisional, at least in domestic policy – while the consequences of Goldwater’s defeat look more enduring and more consequential. The Reagan tax cuts are long gone. Medicare is still here.

Lots of CPAC types seem way to interested in flaming defeat. There is no substitute for victory.

However, I think Frum’s conclusion is Derbyshiran in its bleakness:

Our present strategy is one that is paving the way not merely to another defeat at the presidential level, but to a further shriveling of our congressional party –and an utterly unconstrained Obama second term that will make LBJ’s ascendancy look moderate and humble in comparison

Crikey! The dude just took office five weeks ago.  I think a sane conservatism – particularly a “conservatism that can win again” – must be able to look into the future without pooping its pants.

Apollo posted this at 9:58 PM EST on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 as Conservatism

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I believe I speak for all of my fellow small government conservatives when I say, go to hell Bill Kristol.

Jamie posted this at 5:31 PM EST on Monday, December 8th, 2008 as Conservatism

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After NPR’s appeals for donations, Mark Steyn is a breath of fresh air:

As you know, things got a little fractious here at NRO in the run-up to the election. Levin loathes Frum, and Frum loathes Ponnuru, and Ponnuru loathes Parker, and Parker loathes Goldberg, and Goldberg loathes Derb, and Derb loathes everyone. It isn’t easy keeping a pack of weasels in an online sack 24/7 without them tearing each other’s throats out. The anger-management costs alone are enormous.

So I hope you’ll consider making a donation to NRO. Every dollar helps, particularly now that the election is over and our extreme-right-wing bitterness and hatred is turned inward on ourselves. When I see Rich Lowry, I still feel like punching his lights out for falling for that bailout scam. So he could really use the beefed-up security detail at editorial meetings.

But I’d still like to see that gangwar.

Hubbard posted this at 5:20 PM EST on Saturday, December 6th, 2008 as Conservatism, Humor

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Rod Dreher on conservatism’s problems [emphasis added]:

Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have been poor stewards of our economic liberty, owing to cultural values that celebrate unfettered materialism. Our families and communities have fragmented, in part because we have embraced an ethic of extreme individualism. Climate change and a peak in oil production threaten our future because we have been irresponsible caretakers of the natural world and its resources. At best, the religious right stood ineffectively against these trends. At worst, we preached them, mistaking consumerism for conservatism.

All political problems, traditional conservatism teaches, are ultimately religious problems because they result from disordered souls. In the era now dawning, Americans will learn again to live within limits — and together. Religious conservatives are philosophically positioned to lead the way, but we can’t do it by pouring new wine into old skins.

We’re going to have to learn to think and talk in terms — and not overtly religious ones — of building up civil society and its mediating institutions.

(H/T)

Yowza.  Did Dreher just declare war on the libertarians?  P.J. O’Rourke’s response to this mindset should be recalled:

There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

The civil war on the right is going to interesting . . .

Hubbard posted this at 10:41 AM EST on Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008 as Age and Guile and P.J. O'Rourke, Conservatism

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Contra Jamie, I don’t think the conservative grassroots necessarily is revolting against elites generally. I think they’re revolting against the present cadre of elites parading under the conservative label.

Honestly, our present elites suck. They really do condescend, and their ideas are awful. Whose job should it be to persuade non-conservative intellectuals that conservative ideas are correct? That job falls to conservative elites, not the Sarah Palins and Joes the Plumber of this world. Reagan was able to do what he did because Friedman and Buckley had done what they did; politicians have a role in the system, and it ain’t as great thinkers. If educated types are trending liberal, then educated conservatives need to get on their horses and save the day, not whine that Sarah Palin can’t discuss Niebuhr.

And to the extent that some “intellectuals” voted for Obama because of their dislike of Sarah Palin, if these elites are so offended by the style of one side that they’ll vote for a substance with which they disagree, I question their intellectual bona fides. Who’s being an over-emotional identity voter at that point?

Who are the genuine intellectuals expounding genuinely conservative ideas? Newt. Sowell. That’s about all I can think of. Our newspaper columnists are either too low brow to have a conversation with David Brooks, or too heterodox to be real leaders for conservatism. I love Krauthammer, but outside of foreign affairs he’s a quirky sort of conservative, at best. George Will has been overtaken with bizarre notions of the Constitution lately and is one of the people driven so batty by Sarah Palin that he’s not making much sense.

Brooks, Kristol, and a whole swath of others are enamored with big government. If you had to pin down one thing that has broken the conservative coalition, it’s not the embrace of the religious right, it’s the abandoment of small government principles. The libertoids could put up with the fundies so long as both were voting for smaller government.

There’s no party out there preaching Reaganite freedom, which is how conservatism needs to be explained. Why shouldn’t we bail out Detroit? Because I should have the freedom not to have my money taken away and used to prop up failures. Because entrepreneurs should have the freedom to enter the market and crush crappy old companies. The free market is freedom, the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail, without which the freedom to succeed is meaningless. Where are our “elites” here? Who’s making the heady case for freedom? No one I can think of.

For all the talk of the “youth vote” this year, no one’s catering to it. We Millennials are fundamentally a libertarian generation, and to the extent Democrats are winning the Millenial vote, it’s because Republicans have been impressively lax in letting the Democrats somehow portray their big-government never-saw-a-problem-that-didn’t-need-more-regulation “solutions” as somehow not offensive to liberty. A big part of this, of course, is that our nominee, selected by non-Republicans, was himself offensive to liberty. This year Republicans were an echo of big government nannyism, not a voice for freedom.

And the part of this campaign that our “elites” felt compelled to gripe about was Sarah Palin? The Republican nominee supported a no strings attached $700 billion bailout to companies that desperately needed to fail, and Sarah Palin was the problem? The Republican nominee said that “greed” was the source of our economic problems, and Sarah Palin was the one whose intelligence needed to be questioned? The Republican nominee tried to pass himself off as a stronger regulator than the Democrat, and the only thing that could stir our “elites” to put pen to paper in complaint was Sarah Palin? The Republican nominee had absolutely no intellectual coherence to his positions, but it’s Sarah Palin who’s the thoughtless anti-intellectual?

Sarah Palin moved most of the Republican electorate to the poll. McCain failed to pull through those independents and Democrats he was supposed to get, and moved a portion of the Republican electorate to stay home.

And the elites? If they’re so damned smart, why couldn’t they get their Niebuhr-reading pals to vote Republican this year? Who among them made a strong case for conservatism this year? And who among them made a strong case against Sarah Palin? Why is the latter list longer than the former?

Sure, we need elites. But we need better elites, who will defend freedom in a way that will win over the American public. We don’t have that right now. And if the only options are bad elites or no elites, then I say it’s time to start up the guillotine.

Apollo posted this at 4:26 PM EST on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 as Conservatism

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From The Master.

(Post title is one of the more choice lines from the piece.)

Jamie posted this at 6:36 PM EST on Monday, November 10th, 2008 as Age and Guile and P.J. O'Rourke, Conservatism

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This piece puts into words what I have been struggling to articulate since last Tuesday:

Back in the ’70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about “radical chic,” the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their “struggles.” But “populist chic” is just the inversion of “radical chic,” and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.
Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives’ ”disdain for liberal intellectuals” had slipped into “disdain for the educated class as a whole,” and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn’t care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.

I have seen the rise of populism on the right in recent years as a deeply troubling mixed blessing. It has helped the right win elections, but at the cost of our soul. It has encourage the basest and most crass kind of conservatism, an intollerant Us vs. Them dynamic that in the end will doom a movement that is based so heavily in logical reasoning.

A friend of mine (a liberal one mind you) likes to say “Conservatives vote with their head, Liberals with their heart” – by encouraging this new wave of populism the GOP is alienating all of us who believe that conservatism is the logical path. Replacing it with a new kind of intellectual class warfare based solely in peoples desires not to feel inferior to elites – many of whom are elite by virtue of natural talent and hard work.

This is a strain of conservatism we would do well to stamp out.

(H/T: Conor)

Jamie posted this at 12:52 PM EST on Monday, November 10th, 2008 as Conservatism

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