Look- the intellectual wing of the Republican party is dead. What is left are brain-dead acolytes spreading meaningless and simplistic anecdotes, trite stories, and distilled nonsense passed on that has a more fitting home in AM radio. The McCain campaign, once again, is just a symptom of the real problem- an intellectually incurious and lazy movement in the final ugly spasms of death. The McCain campaign is now, in their interviews with the press, spreading what we can all recognize as wingnut email chains. John Cole
I've been reading Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, and it's been very helpful for me in filling in some gaps and in stimulating me to think why I lean left rather than right or why people like Douthat, Larison and some of the others at Culture 11 lean right instead of left. When I read these people I find that I have more common ground with them than I have with a lot of people who self-identify as Democrats, but I guess I still can't get past the idea that some of these--Douthat in particular--can self-identify as Republicans.
I'm not going to make the argument here, but I think the argument could be made that the policy prescriptions in his and Salaam's book have a better chance of being adopted by moderate Democrats than by the people who are running the GOP. (And this defense of McCain by Salaamis a perfect example of how very smart people can indulge in ridiculously delusional thinking. Or is his motive just to be a smart-ass contrarian? Can he possibly believe what he's writing? Does he have no grasp what the Republican Party has become? Does he believe that even if the "real McCain", as opposed to the "bad McCain" we've been exposed to in the last year, were to reemerge that he would control his party rather than the party controlling him just as his campaign controls him now?)
Maybe the issue is generational. I grew up Catholic in a Republican dominated suburb on Long Island graduating from a Catholic High School in 1968 and from Boston College, a Jesuit university with a conservative reputation in 1972. Just about everybody I knew was unconsciously conservative, and I think I associated being conscious with being liberal--at least until I began understanding unconscious liberalism.
The faith was important to me, and understanding the tradition was too. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate later theology as a graduate student with some very capable teachers, and everybody I met who was thoughtful and well informed, including priests and other believers, leaned left. I was then and am still liturgically conservative and was generally appalled at the vulgarization of the liturgies in the post-Vatican enthusiasm to make them more relevant and engaging, but it never occurred to me then or now that the Vatican Council's aggiornamento program was a mistake. So for me being a Catholic has always meant living in the tension between revealed truth and the secular world in which it makes no sense. The fundamental mistake is to be seduced into a one-sidedness in either direction. For me being a politically left-leaning orthodox Catholic has been my path to avoid one-sidedness, and if anything I say here has any value it is valuable it comes from my aspiration to live in that tension honestly.
So anybody I met who was conservative in the sixties and seventies struck me as dishonest or unconscious. Even when intinctively I wanted to agree with them--as for instance on abortion--I rarely heard good arguments from them. At best I heard unconscious prejudices cleverly defended, the way ante-bellum southerners defended slavery. I'm not saying that there were no honest non-self-deluding conservatives, but that I just never came across them in the flesh in an environment that was dominated by them. I only learned to respect the conservative critique of modernity from reading in my twenties.
I grew up in a family that loved Bill Buckley, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan--the first two fixtures of my youth, the last coming onto the scene when I was in college. I listened to them, and while I found Buckley clever and charming, I also thought his project fatuous. I still do. Nixon was Nixon, and Reagan, I don't know. I still find it difficult to take seriously anybody who takes him seriously. I credit him with one thing and one thing only, following Gorbachev's lead rather than the coterie of advisors who didn't want him to. He otherwise represents just about everything I can't stand about the GOP. What Cole says in the quote excerpted above is pretty much what I have always thought about the GOP--a thin veneer of sensible moderation covering a throbbing mass of resentment, belligerence, jingoism, and wingnuttery. It astonishes me that any sensible person could associate himself with that.
So I always been curious some sensible people, who are clearly intelligent, well-informed, and sensible can do it. And my only explanation is that their antipathy toward Liberalism is greater than their antipathy toward wingnuttery, or that they see the dangers posed by Liberalism as greater than those posed by what I call zombie traditionalism. I get that, I think. But that's here where the differences between me and someone like Douthat lie. I am very sympathetic to the de Toqueville-T.S. Eliot-Belloc-Chesterton-Agrarian-Viereck conservative critique of secular/mass society, but I believe that rather than resisting it, it has to be embraced, assimilated, and moved through. Or perhaps another way to say it is that rather than condemning secular society it has to be redeemed.
As I've written here many times before, I have enormous respect for principled conservatism, and I have big, big problems with secular liberalism, and I don't have any illusions about Democrats. But given the choice between Republicans and Democrats, the Democrats are more in the posture of embracing rather than resisting, and for all their limitations, they represent a mentality that is more amenable to be converted to something better.
The Dems, the way I think of them, are like the younger brother in the Prodigal Son story; the GOP like the priggish older brother. The older brother might be technically correct and even smarter with better arguments than his younger brother about virtue and restraint, but he's still missing the whole point. He's stagnating, suffering from whited-sepulcher syndrome. They are both one sided, but his brother is there for him to embrace not to condemn. His own spiritual development requires it. To be a Christian is not about being technically correct tight-ass; it's about embracing the mess and loving it and in doing so to raise it up. Socially conservative Republicans, even the intellectuals among them, seem to have trouble grasping that idea.
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