"We"?
Thursday February 1, 2007
My friend and former boss Rich Lowry said the following over the weekend (video here):In recent years, we have watched a Republican Congress disgrace itself with its association with scandal, with its willful lack of fiscal discipline, and with its...
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About Crunchy Con
Rod Dreher is an editorial columnist for the Dallas Morning News, and author of "Crunchy Cons" (Crown Forum), a nonfiction book about conservatives, most of them religious, whose faith and political convictions sometimes put them at odds with mainstream conservatives. The views expressed in this blog are his own.
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Rod,
L' Affaire Miers made me suspect for the first time, "Maybe he really is stupid." The chief reason I vote republican is the issue of judges, since they exercise so much power. I was disappointed.
I think we *could* claim ignorance, for a while at least -- many of the congressional GOP could talk a good conservative game, and it takes a while to do the analysis and reflection, to get the facts and figures in order to realize that the previous congresses were running of the rails -- especially when you consider the "lesser of two evils" argument, hold your nose a little because democrats are worse, etc.
As for Bush, I somtimes remark to trusted colleagues that my problem with him is not that he is too conservative but too liberal, which makes people look at me funny.
By the way, good catch on the sic on "disinterested". I had to think for a couple minutes why you did that, and then I remembered the entry for it in Strunk and White.>
A serious suggestion: editors of the world, assign conservative journalists to cover liberals, and insist on balance; the same vice versa, with liberal journalists covering conservatives, same requirement.
Personally, I am sick to death of the bandwagon false praise coming from every side of the media. They should actually believe in the intelligence of their audience, and present the facts.>
Franklin Evans, I totally agree with your sentiments. Don't think it would sell well though, most people just want their opinions reinforced instead of the discomfort of being wrong.
Here's hoping though.>
Well, said, Rod. On another issue, I've often wondered lately if 'we' should also consider becoming more scientifically literate in 'our' conservative journals.
Just a thought.
:)>
No, George W. Bush couldn't have prevented or redirected Hurricane Katrina- but he COULD have appointed FEMA managers who knew what they were doing, who were prepared to handle evacuation and relief operations, and didn't sit around twiddling their thumbs while a once-great city collapsed.
Or, barring that, Bush COULD have recognized within hours of the levee's collapse that Mike Brown was in way over his head, that a huge crisis was under way, and something had to be done, fast. Instead, while everyone else in the country could see what was happening, the President was blithely telling use that "Brownie" was doing a heckuva job!
Look, a certain degree of cronyism is par for the course in politics. We all know that, and most of us expect it. But is it too much to ask that the cronies and pals you appoint to high office know their butts from their elbows?
I mean, sure, JFK made his brother Robert the Attorney General, but at least Bobby was an actual lawyer with some experience as a criminal investigator! What were Mike Brown's credentials, other than being a buddy of the President?>
I would ask Rod to check out National Review's cover stories for the following issues:
- Oct 24, 2005: Spendaholics:
Frum, O Sullivan, Ponnuru, and the Editors discuss a president and a party that have veered off-course.
- Feb 13, 2006: Say It Ain t So:
Who would have predicted that ten years after taking Congress and promising to clean it up, Republicans would be rocked by their own set of scandals, including the abuse of earmarks for contributors? Actually, it was predictable, given the typical course of revolutions a burst of energy, followed by a period of consolidation and the inevitable temptations of power. By Richard Lowry
- May 22, 2006: A Congress Gone to Pot:
Congressional Republican governance has gone through phases that can be roughly described as Revolution (1994 1996), Consolidation (1996 2002), and Deterioration (2002 present). The deterioration has steadily gotten worse. The Republican majority has lately been notable for its bungling, fecklessness, self-serving defensiveness, and hysteria sometimes all at once. By Kate O Beirne & Richard Lowry
It's worth noting A) that two of these articles were written or co-written by your former boss Lowry and B) that these are ONLY the relevant cover stories of the last year and change.
What conclusions are we supposed to draw, Rod, about your flagrant disregard for what NR's actually written? What possible conclusion would not be considered a personal attack?>
Settle down, Bubba. The reason I ignore you, even when you make good points, is because you have the hardest time making them without personally insulting me. It's not that hard to say, "Rod, you're wrong about this, here's why."
Anyway, you give me the opportunity to clarify my point: I said "serious and sustained." I applaud the stories you bring up, but I note that the ones you pick out only started appearing in late 2005, only a year before the GOP got walloped. Maybe there were others, I don't know. I hope to find out. I don't mean to trash NR either; I am as guilty of anybody of the same thing, because I didn't start to criticize the president until around the time the first story you cite came out. What I'm trying to say is that the tendencies of Bush and the GOP Congress that many of us on the Right woke up to and started writing critically about didn't suddenly appear in 2005. What I'm interested in is why we only started noticing it then, and speaking out.>
Rod, we have such a hard time not insulting you because you have been so insulting to us. If you're gonna dish it out, then you'd better be able to take it.
"Personally, I fell off the Bush wagon with Harriet Miers and Katrina, but until then, I wrote and thought as if the president could do no wrong."
You often still do, Rod. But it doesn't speak well to your thought process that it took you that long. The man is dumber than a post and got selected then re-"elected". Used to be Americans wanted the smartest man in the world to be the President.
"And I think you'd have to look pretty hard to find much criticism in my written work of the Republican Congress."
I agree. So why slough off Bubba's (or anyone else's remakrs) with insults? WE didn't write that 'supportive' material - YOU did.
"I might be mistaken, but I'd guess that's the record of most, though not all, journalists and commentators who identify themselves as conservatives."
You would not be mistaken. What we can't understand is why it took the "conservatives" six years to figure it out.
Impeach the bastard, I say. (That would be W, not you, Rod.)>
"I applaud the stories you bring up, but I note that the ones you pick out only started appearing in late 2005, only a year before the GOP got walloped. Maybe there were others, I don't know. I hope to find out. I don't mean to trash NR either; I am as guilty of anybody of the same thing, because I didn't start to criticize the president until around the time the first story you cite came out. What I'm trying to say is that the tendencies of Bush and the GOP Congress that many of us on the Right woke up to and started writing critically about didn't suddenly appear in 2005. What I'm interested in is why we only started noticing it then, and speaking out."
Allow me to venture a guess:
BECAUSE YOU WERE/ARE IN A STATE OF DENIAL. Literally anything that came out of the mouths of a "liberal" (spit!) was God-hatin', un-American treason. You were aided and abetted by White House TV (aka Faux "News"), by Anne Coulter, by Jerry Falwell (heck, Mr. Foulwell is STILL considered a valid commentator on most American news sources!!!), by James (beat the kids) Dobson. etc.
It is a radical, rightwing, 'religious' (not!) agenda that has driven social discourse for the last 6 years ->
and still you would not listen.
"It's amazing I won. I was running against peace and prosperity" - George W. Bush, June 14, 2001
Don't you folk on the 'right' even miss those things?>
You'll notice I didn't insult you, Rod; I simply asked what conclusion could be drawn that wasn't insulting.
You "hope to find out" if NR was critical of Bush prior to late 2005? YOU DON'T KNOW? I would suggest that, since you are a journalist, you should establish whether a thing is true before pontificating about the reasons why it is true.
"What I'm trying to say is that the tendencies of Bush and the GOP Congress that many of us on the Right woke up to and started writing critically about didn't suddenly appear in 2005. What I'm interested in is why we only started noticing it then, and speaking out."
We didn't start noticing then, as yet another NR cover story proves:
Sept 29, 2003: Swallowed by Leviathan:
Government spending has been growing faster under Bush than it did under Clinton, renewing the debate about how conservative Bush is. A minority of Bush s supporters have celebrated the president s alleged embrace of "big-government conservatism." By Ramesh Ponnuru
That's two years prior to the magical milestone of late 2003; how much farther back do you insist that we go? I believe Goldberg was skeptical of the big-government tendencies of "compassionate conservatism" way back in 1998.
NR probably hasn't been as critical of Bush as Buchanan's magazine, but to suggest that you'd "have to look pretty hard" to find criticism of Bush and the GOP Congress before late 2005 is utterly absurd.>
Correction: I meant to write that Ponnuru's article was written two years before the milestone of 2005.>
There was also a big front page article on why Iraq was going badly the week before the elections in 2004.
And, the Weekly Standard was calling for the firing of Rumsfeld, Condi, etc., since 2004 (at least).
The National Review endorsement of George W. Bush in 2000 was extremely qualified.
So, no, I don't think you're making a fair point. I think that the conservative press in general has done a good job.>
And is it possible for Bush to be wrong, to not have acted in a way you think is Conservative without being a 'Liberal'?
If he had been Liberal, don't you think that Liberals would've.. you know, voted for him?
Unless you think the entire depth and breadth of Liberalism is 'Spend money and use the Government to do things', even if they spend money on, and use the Government to do things that are entirely against the other elements of Liberal philosophy.
How about this. Bush is simply a bad Conservative.>
Bubba asked, "What possible conclusion would not be considered a personal attack?"
Is this going to be answered? If someone says -- and demonstrates -- that you are wrong, Rod, that equals a personal insult to which you refuse to respond?]]> 2007-05-08T19:28:32-05:00 Derek Copold polichinello@hotmail.com 163.188.53.170
Truth is, I was quite sincere about the question: I think it's obvious that the leadership of conservative thought has long been irritated at Bush and the Republicans in Congress. I believe this is an easily proven assertion, and it's stunning that a so-called conservative who used to work for National Review would miss this.
But miss it he did, and I cannot conceive of an explanation that's not damning to his credibility.
And, though I understand that Rod has other responsibilities, I would love to see a response to the subsequent proof I offered that mainstream conservative thinkers were not blind Bush partisans before late 2005.
While we wait, perhaps I should offer further evidence to support my claim: Rod hopes to find out if there's earlier criticism, right?
- "Blowing It" by Ted DeHaven, National Review, April 5, 2004. "The administration's spending is inexcusable, no matter what the White House spin."
- "The Tempting of Conservatism," by Ramesh Ponnuru, December 22, 2003. Ramesh concludes that if conservatives decided to act primarily as "cheerleaders for the Republican party" or even act that way, "they will have negated the reasons for their own existence." He begins his article with the litany of criticisms leveled at Bush during his first three years of office:
"Conservatives have had no trouble denouncing President Bush's steel tarriffs, his Medicare bill, his profligate spending, and so on. Libertarian-minded conservatives have roundly criticized the Patriot Act. Social conservatives have complained that the administration has not done more to resist gay rights."
He says that he thinks that, if anything, conservatives have been "too unreflective in their criticism" rather than too willing to nod their heads at whatever Bush says, though the sub-head of the article is this: "In supporting Bush and the GOP, don't lose yourself."
- And then there's the cover story to the August, 2003 issue of the Limbaugh Letter. Two years before Meirs and Hurricane Katrina, during which time Rod was apparently still nodding at George Bush's every word, Rush Limbaugh himself asked quite plainly:
Whatever Happened To Limited Government?
"Now that the president and the GOP in Congress are on the losing side, we can't credibly claim that they betrayed conservatism and us -- as if we had nothing to do with it."
Horse manure, Rod. Utterly putrid, easily refuted horse manure.>
Exactly what I was thinking. If there is one thing that I believe stood out in Crunchy Cons, it is about making touh decisions and enduring the sacrifices that come with them.
I drive an hour each way, for example, to keep my family where they are. In NYC that's just a step across the street. Good luck.>
Sorry, folks, that's "tough decisions".>
Well, which is it?
If you guys are devoted to the idea of small communities, family farms, rural settings, you have to become aware of the fact that we cannot support the current population of the globe in that fashion, let alone the future population.
If unlimited reproduction is the goal, then even viewing the thing optimistically, we have to realize that factory farming (eg, something I have seen myself, a roof, covering dairy cows wading in excrement, which stretches as far as the eye can see) and global commerce is our only hope to produce enough food cheaply enough to feed everybody.>
Do some want their cake and eat it, too?>
Yeh, these people do, tovart. So do I, for that matter, but it usually doesn't work out that way. :)>
Trying to figure out how best to live when the choices before one are limited and difficult for reasons one has only limited control over is not a matter of hypocrisy.>
No one is talking about hypocrisy, Rod, don't be sensitive. You just want contradictory things, as don't we all.>
Who cares if it isn't sustainable for the population of the globe? We're talking about Crunchy Cons, some tiny fraction of such.>
We are not there yet in terms of ideas. Cities are here to stay. Daydreams about small town life are not fruitful. Cities will continue to grow and dominate, so let's figure out new ways to relate and organize our lives in cities. I think that is where real visionary leadership needs to show up. I don't mean government planning, but a social movement that changes the city in profound ways on the level of the industrial revolution that drove people off the farms. What would that look like?>
There's nothing necessarily permanent about cities, either. A lot of movement has been away from urban centers to suburban locations. Given a shift in the economy or the social makeup of the country, the movement might reverse further.>
Christianity thrived in the cities of the Roman empire in part because it offered community and support to people who had moved to distant cities and were without their support networks. I've lived in Chicago and suburban DC, and the Catholic churches to which I've belonged seemed to reflect the same situation - they were the support for people who moved to the metropolis from the surrounding provinces. Of course, urbanization isn't exactly thriving in the US now either. The growing place to live is the exurb, where you combine the problems of urban and rural life, or the amenities, depending on one's perspective and what one does with one's situation.
As for the "Benedictine option," everytime I hear it, it grates on me a little, because it seems so ahistorical. In general, the Benedictine order thrived because it could draw upon the protection of Christendom - the Franks and later the Ottonians, the Anglo-saxon aristocracy, etc. Remember the early medieval worldview - monks pray, peasants work, nobles fight. In other words, there was a surrounding culture amenable to the work of the Benedictines, as much as there were significant imperfections in that world. Withdrawing from the surrounding culture is less like being Benedictines in 9th century France (or even Saxony). It's more like being Christians in 9th century Egypt or Syria - you've ceded the culture to forces hostile towards you, and you may endure, but you won't flourish, and eventually you'll begin to fade.>
Michael Barone has an interesting article out now about migration patterns between cities. He points out that as housing prices, etc. go up in certain large cities (NY, LA, etc.) people are moving inland (Dallas, Atlanta) and being replaced by immigrants. He looks at its political implications, but I think it is also instructive in that some redistribution to "flyover country" is already occurring.>
How does the issue of size of city play into this? How large does a municipality have to be to qualify as a city? It seems to me that there are big difference among the ways of life possible in communities of 1,000,000 people, 500,000 people, 250,000 people, 100,000 people and on down in population from there. The choices before us are much more numerous that New York City on the one hand and Walnut Grove on the other. Most people opt for something along the broad range of possibilities between the two.>
but it's also true that there is no longer an enforceable (by custom and consensus) and clear set of moral standards governing behavior, sexual and otherwise,
Now there's something *else* to think about - something that I find myself musing about on a daily basis.
If "it's all good" (i.e., if that is a more or less accurate approximation of our newly-libertarian foundation for society), how can "society" be at all?
Cf. Obama's observation above that if everyone is family, no one is.>
but it's also true that there is no longer an enforceable (by custom and consensus) and clear set of moral standards governing behavior, sexual and otherwise,
I doubt that's true. At least it's not true where I live (San Francisco Bay area). It may be true in other places I guess. I've lived my whole life in California, and though I know a lot about Europe - my daughter lives there - I'm pretty out of tune with the rest of the US.
First, non-sex. Robbery, assault, burglary, homicide, all that stuff, is just as it has always been, so far as I can tell, except that we're much better policed than, say, the Middle Ages. People got away with a lot of behavior then which would be criminally punishable now, only because the society wasn't rich enough to afford intensive policing, to say nothing of jails. Even fairly recently wife-beating, for example, was winked at. Now domestic assault is widely seen as criminal.
Now, no one has ever succeeded in exterminating criminal behavior from any society, and I wouldn't hold my breath, but we're not doing badly overall, especially if you compare us to Europe in the 1500's, the Empire in the 200's, or even this country in the 1800's.
Now then, sexual behavior. There are indeed clear standards, it's just that you don't like them. Having sex in public, for example, is still frowned on (to say the least) and pedophiles are hunted down without mercy. What adults choose to do in private is indeed deemed outside the purview of law or social sanction, but I would argue that that is as it should be.>
Are we defining "city" too narrowly? When I lived in Bangor, ME, it was considered a city by its residents, and it certainly had an old industrial core. I would say it felt like Worcester, MA, where my husband was born. And Bangor had 30,000 residents. Now, Bangor is not exactly a growing community, but Portland, ME, at 60,000, is going strong. So I think there are places where people can find affordable community AND "city" employment. If you are willing to give up whatever keeps you where you are.>
Zak -- Great post, and spot on.
.>
Rod,
I am in the predicament you mention, with a highly specialized skill in high technology. My children are just about grown and I've been coming to the realizations you are coming to over time, but I'm where I am. I have had deliberative conversations with my almost adult children about my desire to see their generation change for the better. We've even talked about potential places we'd like to set down multi-generational roots. Metro Phoenix definitely isn't it.>
Isn't the idea of living in these Utopian communities that having high tech/intellectual trades isn't really helpful to the community? Who do you think is going to grow the food, make the food, build the homes, watch the children while you are busy on the computer? The reality is these kinds of communities also require people to abandon their privilieged lives and occupations and instead focus their efforts on the common good, not the personal ego.>
Rod: but it's also true that there is no longer an enforceable (by custom and consensus) and clear set of moral standards governing behavior, sexual and otherwise,
Enforceable by whom? People all over the US evacuated small towns for the cities all the time. They didn't want to live there, subject to gossip and ostracism. (I'm not talking about criminals, but rather people who simply didn't "fit in.")
There's an old WW I song, "How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm / After they've seen Paree?" The soldiers in WWI were overwhelmingly from rural backgrounds; some had never left their remote holler or village until they left to go to war.
In Europe they encountered French post cards, lingerie, cafes (which managed to stay open even during the war), brothels, cabarets, and all the other seductions of big city life. General Pershing tried to keep his men from it, but to no avail.
The point is, hiding out in a rural enclave means nothing today - not because people have TV, but because universally, many people want to move from country to city. By the end of WW I, the country had lost the vast majority of its rural population, and the Great Depression just about finished off the rest.
As Susan said, what remains now is not "farming" as we think of it in the quaint early 19th c. sense, but simply industrialization writ large across the face of the countryside. It's not bucolic, it's not community-building; in many cases it can ravage and destroy communities.
But as Susan said, how else are we going to provide 49 cents a pound chicken to people, as opposed to $4.99 a pound free-range organic chicken? It doesn't seem like much when children are small and don't eat much, but try feeding 3-4 teenagers and young adults (especially young men who are physically active) on organic-food-mart food. You'll go broke.
So US "customs and traditions" have never been that enforceable - there's always been the option to move. But then again, there's always been the option for the children to move as well, when they decide they don't want to live like *their* parents.>
If you try to enforce customs and traditions those who object will crush you in court.
If you try to create a closed community where customs and traditions are enforced, you will probably end up in prison or worse, like Waco.>
What CC is describing is a "ghetto", and I use that term in a positive sense: a community that self-isolates for purposes of identity. Jews and Catholics come to mind. Their lives form fences around themselves to maintain identity and religious continuety.>
Zak, fabulous post.
For reasons stafanie elaborated, bucolic village life doesn't exist in the US. Spiritually, it doesn't exist in the West.
I travel back and forth to East Africa 2-3x per year doing mission work and experience village life of old first hand. The community expectation that all live up to a highly defined set of standards may grate on "freedom" loving Westerners and feel terribly stifling, but most of the inhabitants are mystified by our do-what-you-like disconnected way of life. Having experienced both, I wonder at what cost our 'personal freedom' has come. I'm sorely tempted to pack up and move to a Maasai village in Tanzania...>
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