Your Conservative Movement
This is one for the books. Thomas Sowell, longtime shill for the movement, lays out some thoughts at National Review. When thoughts are presented in this fashion--a series of disconnected musings--it has the same unguarded immediacy, I feel, as the old Latin proverb, cum vin veritas: with wine, the truth. Behold, my reader:
A reader wrote: “Have you ever noticed that opinion polls ask the opinions of people who have no expertise in the subject on which they are being polled and publish these opinions as if they were gospel truth instead of group ignorance?”
This appears somewhere in the middle of the piece. But Sowell refers to the ignorance of the public several times, lamenting on the lack of reasoned discussion of political subjects. Apparently it never occured to him that using anonymous reader comments (throughout the piece) accomplishes the same thing.
Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.
I chose this one because it is emblematic of the whole thing: liberals have been fucking up this country "for generations." And on this point I have always been confused. Obviously this is some sort of cultural critique. But really, how bad is it? In what way? What is the point of reference? When was it last good? Conservatives, if they're smart, avoid these questions because the answer would have to be in the era spanning roughly from Periclean Greece to the Gilded Age, depending on who you ask. There never was and never will be a golden age where life is harmonious and perfect and in tune with God's will. Wasn't it Heraclitus who said, "you can't step in the same river twice?"
“Global warming” seems to be joining “diversity,” “gun control,” “open space,” and a growing list of other subjects where rational discussion has become impossible — and where you are considered a bad person even for wanting to discuss it rationally.
I will never understand how opposing global warming became a "conservative" issue. And I will understand even less how global warming and rational discussion became antithetical.
Is your employer poorer by the amount of money he pays you? Probably not, or you would never have been hired. Why then should we assume that a corporation or its customers are poorer by the amount paid to its chief-executive officer?
This dilapidaed piece of libertarian logic is actually a fascinating window into how the conservative mind works. Notice how two different arguments are each stripped of one of their components then welded together like some sort of libertarian monster to run amok. The effect is to render the serious issue of income inequality irrelevant.
When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.
This is, of course, the money quote, the quote that caught Think Progress' attention and then mine. And it is also the reason why this is one for the books. Here is a conservative--and an old one at that--charging politicians, the media, educators and "our intelligentsia" with degeneracy and then almost hoping a military coup comes to save the day. In case the implications of this aren't clear, this is an expression of total contempt for this nation, its traditions, its history, its values and its customs. Is Sowell so fucking dense that he has no notion of the Founders' generation fear of standing armies? That they fought a war and risked their necks to liberate themselves from the British crown, which they described as degenerate as well? Is Sowell proposing a revolution? Is is charging liberals with nothing less than altering the fundamental fabric of the American polity?
Compare what he wrote to what William F. Buckley Jr., founder of National Review, wrote the other day:
The political problem of the Bush administration is grave, possibly beyond the point of rescue. The opinion polls are savagely decisive on the Iraq question. About 60 percent of Americans wish the war ended — wish at least a timetable for orderly withdrawal. What is going on in Congress is in the nature of accompaniment. The vote in Congress is simply another salient in the war against war in Iraq. Republican forces, with a couple of exceptions, held fast against the Democrats’ attempt to force Bush out of Iraq even if it required fiddling with the Constitution. President Bush will of course veto the bill, but its impact is critically important in the consolidation of public opinion. It can now accurately be said that the legislature, which writes the people’s laws, opposes the war.
"The Waning of the GOP," the article is called. So who is the true conservative here? Buckley, who sees the situation as it is, or Sowell, who sees the situation as he wishes it was? They're both old, so we can rule out crankiness, but it is clear that the latter is suffering from the rigidity of ideological thinking. He cannot--it is physically impossible for him--to remove his thinking from the paradigm of liberals rotting the country with their degeneracy. And yes, Buckley said the same thing over 50 years ago. But back then they had a case of sorts. I don't agree with 1955 Buckley, but I do respect him as a thinker. Not a great thinker, but someone who has the capacity to interpret the contemporary landscape with reasonable accuracy. Sowell is no such figure. He is a symbol of a conservative movement that is dying. True, he will be succeeded by younger, even more ideological disciples of the movement (ahem, Jonah Goldberg), but their influence will wane in the current political climate. And unlike the older, outsider conservatives who inspired them, this new breed didn't learn the hard way, organizing a movement over many years, it was handed to them and in the face of such overwhelming opposition from the public and the majority party, they are going to find it difficult to find resonance for their messages in all places but the most close-minded, echo-chamber haunts of the conservative movement (for instance, the right-wing blogosphere). And perhaps Fox News. But if anything, the bell has tolled for the conservative movement. It has tolled for thee.