Conservatives As Victims

Interesting article by Corey Robin in The Nation, and one that also stresses just how shoddy some of the work coming out of The New Republic has been of late - a theme dear to my heart:

[George] Will is not the first conservative to believe himself an exile in his own country. A sense of exclusion has haunted conservatism from the beginning, when émigrés fled the French Revolution and Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre took up their cause. Born in the shadow of loss--of property, standing, memory, inheritance, a place in the sun--conservatism remains a gathering of fugitives. From Burke's lament that "the gallery is in the place of the house" to William F. Buckley Jr.'s claim that he and his brethren were "out of place," the comfortable and connected have fashioned a philosophy of self-styled truancy. One might say this fusion of pariah and power has been the key to their success. As Buckley went on to write, the conservative's badge of exclusion has made him "just about the hottest thing in town."

While John Locke, Alexis de Tocqueville and David Hume are sometimes cited by the more genteel defenders of conservatism as the movement's leading lights, their writings cannot account for what is truly bizarre about conservatism: a ruling class resting its claim to power upon its sense of victimhood, arguably for the first time in history. Plato's guardians were wise; Aquinas's king was good; Hobbes's sovereign was, well, sovereign. But the best defense of monarchy that Maistre could muster in Considerations on France (1797) was that his aspiring king had attended the "terrible school of misfortune" and suffered in the "hard school of adversity."

Conservatives have asked us not to obey them but to feel sorry for them--or to obey them because we feel sorry for them.

...Reformers and radicals must convince the subordinated and disenfranchised that they have rights and power. Conservatives are different. They are aggrieved and entitled--aggrieved because entitled--and already convinced of the righteousness of their cause and the inevitability of its triumph. They can play victim and victor with a conviction and dexterity the subaltern can only imagine, making them formidable claimants on our allegiance and affection. Whether we are rich or poor or somewhere in between, the conservative is, as Hugo Young said of Maggie Thatcher, one of us.

But how do they convince us that we are one of them? By making privilege democratic and democracy aristocratic. Every man, John Adams claimed, longs "to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired." To be praised, one must be seen, and the best way to be seen is to elevate oneself above one's circle. Even the American democrat, Adams reasoned, would rather rule over an inferior than dispossess a superior.

...It took the American slaveholder to grasp the power of this insight. The best way to protect their class, the masters realized, was to democratize it. Make every man, or at least every white man, a master, and so invested would he be in his mastery that he'd work to keep all others in their place. The genius of the slaveholding class was that it was "not an exclusive aristocracy," wrote Daniel Hundley in Social Relations in Our Southern States (1860). "Every free white man in the whole Union has just as much right to become an Oligarch." To that end, Southern politicians attempted to pass legislation and provide tax breaks to ensure that every white man owned at least one slave.

...Making privilege palatable to the democratic masses is a permanent project for conservatives, but each generation must tailor it to the contours of its times. In 1960, Goldwater's challenge was set out in his book's title: to show that conservatives had a conscience. Not a heart--he lambasted Eisenhower and Nixon for trying to prove that they were compassionate--or a brain, which liberals from John Stuart Mill to Lionel Trilling had doubted. Political movements often have to show that they can win, that their cause is just and their leaders are savvy, but rarely must they prove that theirs is a march of inner lights. Goldwater thought otherwise: to attract new voters and rally the faithful, conservatism had to establish its idealism and integrity, its absolute independence from the beck and call of wealth, from privilege and materialism--reality itself. If they were to change reality, conservatives would have to divorce themselves, at least in their self-understanding, from reality.

...This romantic howl against the economism of the New Deal--similar to that of the New Left--was not a protest against politics or government; Goldwater was no libertarian. It was an attempt to elevate politics and government, to direct public discussion toward ends more noble and glorious than the management of creature comforts and material well-being. Unlike the New Left, however, Goldwater did not reject the affluent society. Instead, he transformed the acquisition of wealth into an act of self-definition through which the "uncommon" man--who could be anybody--distinguished himself from the "undifferentiated mass." To amass wealth was not only to exercise freedom through material means but also a way of lording oneself over others.

...Goldwater lost big in the 1964 presidential election. His children and grandchildren have won big--by broadening the circle of discontent in the realm of domestic politics to include husbands and wives, evangelicals and white ethnics, and by continuing to absorb and transmute the idioms of the left.

...In an interview with the Washington Star, just one of the many absorbing documents gathered by Story and Laurie in The Rise of Conservatism in America, [Phyllis] Schlafly described herself as a defender, not an opponent, of women's rights. The ERA was "a takeaway of women's rights," she insisted, the "right of the wife to be supported and to have her minor children supported" by her husband. By focusing her argument on "the right of the wife in an ongoing marriage, the wife in the home," Schlafly reinforced the notion that women were wives and mothers first; their only need was protection from their husbands. At the same time, she described that relationship in the liberal language of entitlement rights. "The wife has the right to support" from her spouse, she claimed, treating the woman as a feminist claimant and her husband as the welfare state.

Like their Catholic predecessors in eighteenth-century France, the Christian right appropriated not just the ideas but the manners and mores of its opponents. Billy Graham issued an album called Rap Session: Billy Graham and Students Rap on Questions of Today's Youth. Evangelicals criticized the culture of narcissism--then colonized it. In his article in Rightward Bound, Matthew Lassiter reminds us that James Dobson got his start as a child psychologist at the University of Southern California, competing with Dr. Spock as the author of a bestselling child-rearing text. Paul Boyer points out in his contribution to the volume that evangelical bookstores "promoted therapeutic and self-help books offering advice on finances, dating, marriage, depression, and addiction from an evangelical perspective." Most audacious was the film version of Hal Lindsey's book The Late Great Planet Earth. While the book popularized Christian prophecies of the End of Days, the film was narrated by Orson Welles, bad boy of the Popular Front.

...The rise of the neocons is a puzzle. How did a group of bookish, mostly Jewish, ex-leftists from New York City come to help govern a nation that is Christian, anti-intellectual and hates New York City? [Jacob] Heilbrunn (a former neocon) doesn't solve the puzzle, but he brings a welcome scrutiny to one piece of it. "Neoconservatism isn't about ideology," he writes. "It isn't about the left. It is about a mindset, one that has been decisively shaped by the Jewish immigrant experience, by the Holocaust, and by the twentieth-century struggle against totalitarianism."

...This combination of resentment, zeal and intransigence has been a source of intellectual fertility--and political anxiety. Whenever neocons get too close to the Promised Land, they fret over losing their status as outsiders. Being comfortable makes them uncomfortable. Thanks to the failure of the war in Iraq, however, "they are back in exile, where they belong--and where they are, in some respects, most content," Heilbrunn explains.

...Here's Heilbrunn discussing how supporters of the war in Iraq began to criticize the Iraqis once the war effort faltered ... The identical order and nearly identical setup of the same quotes, with the same ellipses, caught my attention, especially since Heilbrunn cites only Wieseltier in his footnote. But I dismissed it as a single instance of carelessness. Then I found another. ... Heilbrunn, it turns out, borrows more than the syntax, setup and sources of other people's writings. Sometimes he reproduces, sentence by sentence, the arc and logic of their prose. ... Heilbrunn is a journalist, not a scholar; he is a former senior editor at The New Republic and a former member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board.

...And, in the end, his argument about the neocons is incoherent. One of the reasons the neocons succeed, Heilbrunn claims, is that they don't compromise their principles. Consequently, "the political class in each party regards them with a mixture of appreciation and apprehension, even loathing." Yet Heilbrunn also claims that neoconservatism has "become a partisan cause dedicated to advancing the Republican Party's electoral fortunes rather than an independent collection of thinkers." The neocons "started out as intellectuals who were attracted to power. Soon enough, however, the prospect of access to the high and mighty became an end in itself." So, are the neocons sticklers or hacks, purists or politicos?