In an essay published January 25 at FrumForum, John Guardiano calls me a whining, conformist young “hipster con” who misunderstands the conservative movement and lacks the courage of my convictions, linking to material that backs up none of his characterizations.
The piece stops short of insulting my mother. But it does build to the assertion that Michael Brendan Dougherty, Ross Douthat and I are fortunate to live at a time in history when the Internet gives everyone a platform, so we have “no excuses for not speaking out” and “a moral, intellectual obligation” to make our voices heard. “So stop whining and do something!” Mr. Guardiano writes, without citing any instance of me whining, or any indication that all three of us are prolific writers and bloggers. “Build a website and join the fray. Demand a seat at the political, intellectual, and policy table. Marshall your arguments and organize like-minded writers and thinkers. Pick a fight and come out swinging.”
Reader, I am human. Upon reading all that, I initially thought about a Bobby Knight quote I once heard. “When my time on earth has passed,” the great basketball coach said, “I hope they bury me upside down so that all my critics can kiss my ass.”
Can you blame me for finding his argument galling?
Here I am a full time freelance writer who made my name in political journalism as founding features editor at a start-up conservative magazine. Did I not build a Web site? Did a manifesto not precede it? I now do part of my blogging at The American Scene, another Web site filled with young right-of-center writers. Does my output there seem like it belongs to someone hesitant to join the fray? How about my Daily Beast columns? Or my second blog at True/Slant? Or the sundry other freelance pieces I write often enough to keep me housed among coastal liberals, eating arugula and making good on NPR pledges? I’ve even written at FrumForum (about my efforts to poll GOP County Chairmen all over America). Failure to “pick a fight and come out swinging” isn’t among my countless faults.
Of course, I am a relatively obscure writer, and Mr. Brendan Dougherty, a talented, outspoken writer for The American Conservative, is only somewhat better known, whereas Mr. Douthat is a devoutly Catholic, socially conservative, staunchly anti-abortion New York Times columnist. The author of an Atlantic piece arguing that pornography may be adultery, he co-founded The American Scene, literally wrote the book on the way forward for the Republican Party, and pens film columns for National Review in his spare time. So bizarre as I found Mr. Guardiano’s attacks on Mr. Dougherty and I, we weren’t even treated the least charitably! Was it the NY Times piece on overturning Roe vs. Wade or the one titled “Cheney For President” that led to the argument that Mr. Douthat is afraid of disagreeing with the liberal elite?
Defending against attacks like this is tedious and awful, especially when you’re their object. Recall what it is like to write a college essay or get asked in a job interview, “What’s your best quality?” Readers who are neither corporate lawyers nor I-bankers surely understand how uncomfortable it can be when a task demands a lengthy, favorable assessment of yourself. But I’ve grown terribly tired of attacks on so-called dissident conservatives that utterly misunderstand or misrepresent the subject at hand as much as they mislead about our output. I’m inspired by the vim and vigor of Mr. Dougherty’s excellent piece in The Awl, and my one-time professor Katie Roiphe always counseled that I shouldn’t shy away from polemical writing when the occasion demands it. So brace yourself, Mr. Guardiano, for a rebuttal that picks a fight, forgives your negligent ignorance only because it seems earnestly argued, and ruthlessly cleaves the corrupt wings of movement conservatism with the coldest, bluntest shears at hand.
Think you know what motivates “dissident conservatives?”
In an upcoming post, you’ll have the story of how one young political independent with conservative and libertarian philosophical beliefs came to Washington DC, familiarized himself with the conservative movement, and left utterly, rightly disillusioned with it. It’ll correct Mr. Guardiano’s ill-informed presumptions about what motivates people like me to write — asserted with stunning confidence given that he has never interviewed me, and attributes to me beliefs that I’ve never written and don’t hold — and more importantly, it’ll definitively set the record straight for everyone on the right who harbors mistaken assumptions about anyone who dares to criticize folks who are “on our own side,” as it is sometimes put.
Stay tuned.
WillyP // Jan 26, 2010 at 4:26 pm
I think people what people find risible is your willy-nilly abuse of history.
Aquinas referenced the pagan Aristotle approvingly.
Hitler banned the Church all but in name, subsuming it into the Nazi machinery.
Jesus, being the Prince of Peace, and an observant Jew, would generally be against tyranny, and likewise the things you apparently like:
1) Gun control 2) High taxes 3) Compulsory health insurance
It is a bit disingenuous to start slurring earlier Christians, when in fact, politically speaking, they existed in the same world as the rest of humanity. Every creed has had periods of tyranny; that Christians were far and away the largest religious group in Europe lends it to more criticism by virtue of the fact that it had more followers – i.e., people identifiable as “Christians.”
I told you – you like to discuss religion. I am not a comparative religious scholar, and do not spend very much time investigating the religious roots of political movements (though I can tell you in no uncertain terms that Hitler was not some sort of modernist Catholic dictator… modernism, born out of Germany, was actually a target of the Church, if I’m not mistaken).
I suggest you occupy your time on a forum where you’ll have all sorts of nuts eager to engage you in inflammatory religious dialogue. That seems to be what you’re looking for.
WillyP // Jan 26, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Err, let me clarify:
Modernism, as a movement, was quite German.
Hitler was not a modern (in the vulgar sense) Catholic dictator. He was a Nazi dictator, which was an entirely different ethos, and mainly pagan.
kevin47 // Jan 26, 2010 at 11:50 pm
Fair enough on the cease-fire for dissident cons. In Conor’s defense, he wrote conservative articles for our college newspaper, which certainly was not the hip thing, and more than I and the few conservatives on campus were willing to do.
I would still call the centrist wing of the party to move beyond drafting manifestos, and begin to take stances going forward. Given the implosion of the Democratic party, there is a wide swath of ideological terrain to cover.
Part of building a consensus means staking a claim on that territory, and defending it. If the “new majority” movement has a lingering fault, it is that it has skipped the claiming part, and moved right to the defense. The result is rather, erm, defensive.
So let’s call a truce. I’ll quit calling the Conor Friedersdorfs of the world RINOs, hipsters, and dummy farts, and they can quit evoking Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin at every turn. Sound fair?
jakester // Jan 27, 2010 at 12:56 am
Of course Hitler was not a practicing Catholic and he and the Nazis certainly did not like the Church. But he and the Church were willing to deal with each other. After all, the Nazis occupied Rome for nine months: if Hitler hated Catholics and the Church so much, who was stopping him from annihilating the Vatican, the Pope’s Swiss Guard? It’s not like Hitler was coy and concerned about world opinion at this time. The only Nazis who set foot in the Vatican in that time were the accredited ambassadors to the Vatican and other envoys.
Nor am I laying the blame for the Holocaust at anyone’s feet but the Nazis and the bulk of the German people who went along with them and followed all their orders willingly. But don’t tell a millenia of anti-Semitism, most of it theologically inspired, didn’t provide fertile soil for this horror to happen.
WillyP // Jan 27, 2010 at 1:09 pm
I’d say, much more than the ancient prejudice, the fertile soil was provided by militarism, German nationalism, the myth of the Aryan uberrace, and a desperate population that had just suffered a currency collapse on the heels of losing a major armed conflict. For the sake of brevity, one could say WWI led to WWII, and they’d generally be considered correct.
The Holocaust is, of course, not exactly WWII. Addressing specifically that atrocity, we should remember that dictators regularly make use of old hatreds. We can see that right now in our own country, as the president regularly attacks the successful with Marxist rhetoric. Sure, Antisemitism is largely a European brainchild. In the 13th century, it was Aquinas who espoused tolerance of different creeds, but death to the heretics [i.e., Christians who were not in line with official Dogma]. I don’t think the casuistry of Antisemitism of the Christian ages leads, necessarily, to the Holocaust. You should also remember that it was not only Jews who were targeted, but the Roma, the infirm, and anyone else who fell outside the Nazi eugenic ideal.
The Nazi religious ceremonies and holidays, like I said before, were primarily pagan. And to the extent that the National Socialists were Marxists, they detested religion in general.
PCR // Jan 27, 2010 at 3:59 pm
WillyP, your history is spot-on until the bit about the Nazis being, in any sense, shape, or meaning of the word, Marxists. This is just factually untrue. Yes, there were, in the early days of the movement, genuine socialists in the Nazi movement (like the Strasser brothers), but these were removed from positions of power by the late 1920s, and the leaders of the left wing of the Nazi Party were, almost to a man, dead or imprisoned after the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The “Socialism” in National Socialism was a complete fiction by the time Hitler had consolidated his power.
Hitler, for his part, was class-conscious only to the extent that he hated intellectuals and people more sophisticated or educated than himself. He actively courted both large corporations such as Krupp and Bayer and preserved the estates of the landed Junkers when they came under the threat of land reform.
Orthodox Marxism is decidedly international, the Nazi movement by its very nomenclature was xenophobic and nationalistic.
Orthodox Marxism ascribes to a class-based, non-ethnic, teleological view of history, Nazi ideology was explicitly racial and emphasized the work of “great men” as the shapers of events.
Regarding religion, Hitler was inconsistent. When he needed the support of the Church and the Catholic Center party, he actively courted them, portraying himself as a bulwark for Christian Europe against the godless Soviet hordes. When they had outlived their political convenience, he disposed of them alongside the countless other betrayed allies who facilitated his rise to power. If he was antagonistic to religion, it was in the same way that he set himself as an enemy of any interest group that detracted from the all-encompassing service and worship of the totalitarian State. While you are totally correct in asserting the pagan origins of Nazi ceremonies and holidays, I think it’s erroneous in the extreme to somehow conflate Nazi paganism and anticlericalism with the rabid, unyielding hatred that Marx and his ideological heirs have of religion in any form. The ends may be similar, but they arrive there on two totally different ideological roads.
Words like “Marxist”, “socialist”, “fascist”, etc., are so overly and poorly used that they have lost practically all of their meaning, and now signify little more than “someone we don’t like”. I hate to call you out on that when your history is, as I said, otherwise flawless, but words do HAVE meanings, and it’s important to understand what those are before we throw them around carelessly.
WillyP // Jan 27, 2010 at 5:56 pm
PCR,
Thanks for the praise. On the Marxism of Nazi Germany: this is not my original idea. It was generally considered true at the time of Nazism.
You can read the first few pages of this book (see below), written by a Communist economist, stating his the belief that there were (at the time) no more pure examples of the Marxist ideal of the State than Russia and Germany.
http://blog.mises.org/archives/006248.asp
W.E.B. Debois, H.G. Wells, and many other intellectuals of the Progressive era (whose names escape me at the moment) visited both Italy and Germany, and regarded them as Marxist states. The intellectual history goes back to Hegel and Nietzsche, Saint-Simone, Comte, and the earlier socialists. It was the ideal of the State before the people, which goes back to, oh, say Hobbes.
I will defend the use of my words fascist and socialist, because I have studied their intellectual origins and theories of economy. And in practice, although the technic may have been marginally different, both system end with bureaucratic planning of the economy. From the perspective of a citizen, it matters very little how my rulers justify their totalitarian tyranny; be it the omnipotence of the State over the individual, or the Marxist dialectic.
When I said the Nazi ethos was a fusion of paganism and Marxism, it was meant, primarily, to show that Nazism was anything but Christian – as both those belief systems are explicitly anti-Christian. I did not mean to imply that the two (paganism, Marxism) were otherwise interconnected.
Way Out of Left Field « noot // Feb 1, 2010 at 3:40 am
[...] but one wonders. To paraphrase Friedersdorf’s response, what the hell is he talking about? Here I am a full time freelance writer who made my name in [...]