Unpatriotic Conservatives; A war against America.

National Review Online ^ | March 19, 2003 | David Frum

[CWOJackson]

Then there was Justine Raimondo, another prominent figure in this article and close friend of buchanan's. On 9/13 he posted one of his long winded essays (all of which are printed in Pravda by the way) gleefully proclaiming that America had been driven to it's knees and that the Pentagon was paralyzed.

Now personally, I'd just as soon call him and buchanan sniveling, terrorist supporting pieces of $hit but that's a little long and not exactly the best term for public discourse. Paleocon seems to be a good replacement but I'll consider a better word.

[steve-b]

Now personally, I'd just as soon call him and buchanan sniveling, terrorist supporting pieces of $hit but that's a little long and not exactly the best term for public discourse.

Besides, pieces of $hit are actually useful if you have nutrient-deficient soil.

[mjolnir]

Defending a guy accused of being a vicious Concentration Camp guards might just be a desire to see an inncoent guy not be railroaded.

One might entertain that theory if one could find other examples of expressed concern on his part about a possibly innocent convict. However, there just aren't any.

As far as I know, you're absolutely correct. However, Jewish people like Mike Kinsley who know him well have said that Pat showed no signs of anti-Semitism in his relations with them. I like to think the best of people and try to apply this to people I disagree with--- and I usually disagree with Pat.

[em2vn]

Come on. Somebody already beat you to silly little diddy.

[Valin]

On 9/13 he posted one of his long winded essays (all of which are printed in Pravda by the way) gleefully proclaiming that America had been driven to it's knees and that the Pentagon was paralyzed.

Has anyone told George Bush about this? because I don't think he knows we been defeated.

Listening skeptically to German propaganda coming over a loudspeaker
Captain John Miller: "The Statue of Liberty is kaput" - that's disconcerting.

[x]

This article personalizes the six decade distiction very unjustly and makes the matter worse than it needs be today.

You're right. Frum is more of an attack dog than a real thinker. He's fighting for his own causes, and he's never been very fair to those he disagrees with. Much of Frum's argument amounts to guilt by association -- the policies he supports must be right because of the connections of some of those who oppose them -- but as Frum himself has apparently come to realize, such an argument doesn't prove that the policies in question are the right ones.

I'm no fan of Rockwell and his crew, and I've gotten disillusioned with Fleming, Bradford, Francis, and Gottfried over time, but what gets left out of Frum's picture is just how much of a new departure Bush's policies were. Right or wrong, they surely merited discussion on their own terms, and not such a string of ad hominem attacks.

[KC Burke]

Thanks for your insight.

As a reader who can read a bit of history and who actually enjoys books on political theory and political science, I have spent the last 15 years trying to catch up on the field I somewhat knew in the sixties in my undergrad work. Working outside those areas since that time, I have had a lot of catching up to do.

However, the general reader of this forum may read some of these articles and be totally misled if a little background isn't shared, so I try to give my two cents without just taking a side, since the author can't engage in any dialogue. I know that I rely on and appreciate the insight offered by those when other threads run into topics where there insight give the reader background to understand the importance or frame of reference that the author has when writing the article.

I am not unlike others on the thread however, in that, since 1992 we have watched Buchannan and others that we had some common ground with, marginalize themselves and get further and further afield as they carve out divisions and get narrower and narrower in their agreement with the general conservative population.

[x]

Frum's article doesn't hold up well after three years. A lot of the rhetoric of those days doesn't. You can see Frum overreaching himself in trying to pin too much significance on Tonsor's "outburst." I don't think Tonsor was proclaiming a new ideology, just trying to hold on to what had been the conservative intellectual tradition for four decades. Surely there wasn't anything wrong with established conservatives feeling a little uneasy in the 1980s about the influx of neocons who'd been Lyndon Johnson Democrats not so long ago.

But the second generation neoconservatives are quite different from the first. They're so different that maybe the same word shouldn't be used for the neocons of the Seventies and Eighties and those of today. The first generation was skeptical about what politics and government could achieve. The later generation are true believers in using American power to make changes in the world. In the younger generation there's more continuity with the hopes of the Kennedy years than with the disillusionment of the Carter era. So those earlier divisions look minor now in comparison.

I don't get the feeling that any of these columnists and publicists really speak for me, at least not 100%. There were real practical questions about Iraq that tended to get lost in the "my philosophy vs. your philosophy" battles. I'm not saying that philosophy or principle is unimportant, just that if we're discussing practical matters, practical considerations shouldn't be ignored.

BTW, if you haven't seen it yet, you might take a look at Jeffrey Hart's book on the history of National Review: The Making of the American Conservative Mind : National Review and Its Times.

[meema]

...Defending a guy accused of being a vicious Concentration Camp guards might just be a desire to see an inncoent guy not be railroaded

I believe that to be the case.

[mjolnir]

I hope you're right when you say that Pat is not an anti-semite. But in that case, he don't you think shouldn't say things like, "One nation, one man, one party, Israel, Sharon, Likud". What is the motive behind saying those kinds of things? When Pat makes Israel out to be the closest thing to Nazi Germany as Pat seems to do with that line, I wonder about him-- if not about his anti-semitism, about Pat's sense of reality.

[mjolnir]

Frum hasn't ignored practical realities-- he's actually much more in tune with them than Jeffery Hart. Look at Hart on Roe vs. Wade. He believes against all the polling that a vast majority of the American electorate is against any and all limits upon abortion and that Roe vs. Wade, despite being a technical overreaches, was a pragmatically grounded decision-- that

..Combined with Casey, however, it did address the reality of the American social process.

His analysis is utterly fact free and his conclusion demonstrably wrong, as anyone who has followed the abortion through Free Republic knows(as demonstrated by O'Sullivan's dissecting of Hart below). In fact, limitations on abortion such as waiting periods and parental notification are broadly popular and other first world Western nations, which undrwent the same women's rights revolution as the United States, are in fact far more restrictive of it than America is.

Hart is a fine literary critic and intellectual historian of the idea the created Western civilization. However, as his historical reflection comes closer to the present day, his vision blurs significantly. Therefore, his take on the modern conservative movement should be highly suspect to any conservative paleo, neo or otherwise. For example, take his notion that William James is the paradigmatic philosopher of American conservatism, as he claimed in this article in the Wall Street Journal's American Conservatism series:

For the things of this world, the philosophy of William James, so distinctively American, might be the best guide, a philosophy always open to experience and judging by experience within given conditioner's experience pleasurable or, more often, painful, but utopia always a distant and destructive mirage.

Hart's belief that William James is the paradigmatic philosopher of American conservatism is so deeply mistaken as to be absurd. Not Utopian? James thought the Olympics could serve as a replacement for war as a means of setting differences. As a cosmopolitan pluralist who upheld the idea that truth is nothing more than what works for you, James was anything but conservative--- a fact noted by those who knew, in particular his brother Henry (who was deeply conservative).http://www.opinionjournal.com/ac/

Read Frum's current criticsm of the Bush administration and even Mike Pence on immigration http://frum.nationalreview.com/post/?q=M2NmNDQ5NzVhMjUzNGU1NDllYWYxMzczM2I1N2JhNjk=
. One may take issue with aspects of the "Unpatriotic" article, but Frum is far from an ideologue who takes a position on an issue without due study on it, as Hart is I'm sure Hart's history of National Review is well done in many ways. However, at heart Hart is just what he decries and worse-- in denying the natural law at its most basic level, he has become (assuming he was ever anything else) what Russell Kirk called a "chirping sectary". He is well studied in the history of Christianity and Greek philosophy, and recognizes their current importance, but has forgotten why they remain important--- that the recognition of a right to life is not drawn from the Jacobins (as Hart claims)but from the finest, most humane traditions that followed in the footsteps of Hippocrates and Christianity. It's no wonder that another chirping sectary, Andrew Sullivan, readily finds solace in Hart as a kindred spirit http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dish_inc=archives/2005_12_25_dish_archive.html#113578707332376987

while John O'Sullivan, by virtually anyone's estimation a real conservative when compared to Andrew Sullivan, does not. O'Sullivan quickly demolishes Hart's shallow attack on the pro-life movement:

Jeff's description of the Right's attitude to Roe as "utopian" because it simply is not going to be repealed, for instance, seems to me questionable on two grounds. First, it is surely wrong to use "utopian" as a synonym for politically unrealistic or difficult. The point about utopia is that it doesn't work even when it works--utopias produce perverse results even when they are successfully imposed. Would overturning Roe produce more abortions? I don't think so. Second, opposing Roe might not succeed in the sense that it will be repealed entirely but it might well result in more restrictions being placed on the abortion right. Indeed, that seems to be happening, albeit with agonizing slowness. And if that trend continues, the actual number of abortions might not be very different than if Roe were repealed since, as others have noted, prohibiting something rarely eliminates it entirely... ...Whenever I read something along the lines of what Jeff Hart has just written about the pro-life cause, I find it helpful to recall the words of T.S. Eliot: "There is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing as a Gained Cause.

I agree with you that there are different sorts of "neo-conservatives". There are also different sorts of "paleo-conservatives". I would suggest that Hart is neither; removed from his academic specialty, in which he still does good work, he is not a conservative at all.

[x]

I recommended Hart's book to KC Burke, because he was interested in the history of the conservative movement, not because I agreed with Hart on abortion or William James or anything else. I don't agree with him about such things, but he was around in the 1950s and 1960s when the conservative movement was coming together, so his views on the history of conservatism may be of interest.

It was not my desire to present a "Hart Good, Frum Bad" contrast, and that should have been clear from a reading of my post. But I'm not so sure that Frum looks that good in comparison to Hart. Hart's tried to bridge conflicts on the right, at least until recently perhaps. Frum's made a career out of pouring gasoline on brush fires and making conflicts worse.

As a pundit Frum's had a lousy record. He's pretty much admitted that he was wrong immigration, wrong about compassionate conservatism, and wrong about some other important things. Apparently, he's also changed his mind on abortion. Of course, there's always a self-serving element to Frum's criticisms of bad policies that he once supported.

Whatever Jeffrey Hart was right or wrong about, he's at least had the courtesy to keep a relatively low profile. One moderately controversial WSJ article in forty years isn't much. "Chirping sectary" Frum just can't help making a spectacle of himself. Anybody can be wrong sometimes, but those who crave the limelight as much as Frum does inevitably get things wrong more than other people.

[mjolnir]

Thanks for the links! Frum's position on abortion (referenced by your link) has pretty much always been his position, although it has probably inched rightward-- nothing wrong with that kind of movement from where I stand. As for small government conservatism, Frum has always supported that, and as far immigration, I applaud him for thinking the issue through and being honest about his progression on it, even if I think Pence's plan is much better than he says.

As far as Hart keeping a low profile or being a model of consideration among conservatives, well, I didn't notice much of that in the early National Review, but it's true that Hart has been able to treat seriously and with respect conservative sub-groups such as Straussians and paleos who don't always shopw the same consideration to one another. However, I think you're correct to make a distinction between how he treated such differencesthemn and how he does now. I'm aware that fans of Chronicles probably agree with his description of Richard John Neuhaus as a “Jacobinical priest” and “easy chair revolutionary” and describing the former's symposium on the Constitution as reflecting “the spirit of Che Guevara”. Still, it's clear that such name calling is quite simply not what what the sort of person tries to bridge conflicts does.

Hart's "gasoline" went well beyond his single piece for the Wall Street Journal--- he kept writing--- and writing-- and writing on his odd mixture of "realism" with William James style pragmatism. The WSJ article itself was notable because it was not simply a leftish, or as you say, "moderately" conservative article on international relations or literature or bass fishing-- it was on conservatism itself, i.e. it was a characterization of what conservatism in its deepest soul is. For Hart, that deepest foundation is... the philosophy of William James. Speaking for myself (who else?) I'm going to take anyone who writes that at his word and thereafter with a grain of salt--- such a writer is not what Kirk called a chirping sectary for holding any particular policy position, but because a conservatism that has Jamesian pragmatism rather than some form of moral realism as its foundation, is not a true conservatism. I don't know that I would go as far as Kirk, but the thing about Hart is that, as I said, he presents himself as being emblematic of conservatism and his conservatism as emblematic of conservatism, and so I take Kirk's criticism as more applicable than to someone such as, say, George Santayana or Milton Friedman, who readily admit(ted) the areas in which they (were) are less conservative.

I'm sure Hart's book is both well written and interesting, since Hart is a talented and interesting writer, and as you say, he was present at the creation of National Review. However, Hart wrote the book recently, and that's why I thought my comments about his recent explication of his philosophy and criticisms of the present state of conservatism were relevant-- notwithstanding my tendency to blather!:)