the Japery  §  Japus Gassalascus, Expectorator.

because ye were neither hot nor cold, I will spew you from my mouth

Reillyists Unite!

November 21, 2006

Austin Bramwell wants me to know that he has awakened me from a dogmatic slumber, and this only to inform me that I am advocating a distorting ideology. Readers might forgive me if I confess that foregoing the pleasures of sleep for the hackneyed jabs of Mr. Bramwell is not a fair exchange. Though the back and forth at least has the virtue of forcing Mr. Bramwell to show himself a bit more clearly. And if I am to be charged by close association with Tocqueville, Nisbet, and Ignatius Reilly, I am only too cheerful to declare my guilt. A great deal could be said, but I will restrain myself to three basic areas of comment.**

In the first place, Bramwell continues to use the term “ideology” in an overly broad manner disconnected from history and prior analysis. For Bramwell, whose heavy breathing on behalf of science and cognitive biology is telling, ideology is little more than the undeniable fact of the contingent nature of knowledge. Human beings cannot escape contingency, in thought any more than in birth. This has long been a principal conservative insight into man’s condition. Bramwell expresses the conservative notion of contingency in an appropriate, though cynical fashion: we are all “imprisoned in cages” we “cannot see.” Bramwell admits to being so imprisoned himself and reserves escape only for certain “geniuses” like Oakeshott who at least have the decency to carry the logic of contingency to its conclusion and completely shut up.

I suppose there ought to be a room or two in the conservative mansion for aesthetes who respond to this problem with Oakeshottian quietism, though it is certainly not the preferred approach. Rather, conservatives have tended to emphasize prudence, wisdom, recourse to tradition, strong pre-political ties, and separation of powers as means of checking the hopelessly colored outlook of all men and compensating for the contingency of knowledge in general. From the conservative view, to reject the contingency of knowledge is the defining feature of ideology. A point confirmed by even a brief review of thinkers from Burke to Voegelin to Orwell (whom Bramwell relies on almost exclusively in his original article).

Now, by some strange alchemy, Bramwell has managed to turn the historical definition of ideology completely on its head. So, instead of finding ideology at the point of denying man’s contingent existence in time and space (this is, in fact, how even Oakeshott defined it), Bramwell wants to make ideology omnipresent and thus defines it as suffering under the contingency of existence (whether we know it or not). Bramwell goes so far as to make the universality of ideology the central, indeed the only, conservative insight. The only truly conservative move left on Bramwell’s chess board is a retreat to various hermitages in the Oakeshottian hills of quietism. (Or perhaps a retreat to the hermitage of the lab which Bramwell places far too much faith in for its ability to unlock our cages.)

In the second place, Bramwell slings Weaver’s “ideas have consequences” as a sobriquet against what he perceives to be an under-theorized reliance on intellectual history and “typology.” Unfortunately, he uses the term in ways entirely disconnected with Weaver’s life and thought. Rather than engage in his own kind of intellectual sloganeering through typecasting and endless taxonomy, Bramwell would do well to consult just the first and last paragraphs of M.E. Bradford’s article on Weaver in American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia:

Intellectual historian, rhetorician, and political philosopher, Richard Malcolm Weaver Jr. was born in Asheville, Buncombe County, North Carolina. He was the son of Richard Malcolm Weaver Sr. and of Carolyn Embry Weaver, originally of Fayette County, Kentucky. Professor Weaver was also the great-grandson of the Reverend Jacob Weaver of Reem’s Creek, who was the patriarch of the Weaver family in western North Carolina and whose descendants continue to gather at Weaverville each summer. …


Weaver returned to North Carolina and Weaverville at every opportunity, to reassuring places, friends, and the magic circle of the blood. … His public life was the solitary life of the mind. Yet a passion for dialectics was not the source of his achievements. During a 1950 family reunion, Weaver spoke of the necessity of knowing who you are and where you are from. Concerning these home truths he was not confused. Weaver died in Chicago. He is buried at Weaverville.

Ideas are not much present, though kinship, friends, place, home, and common memory are more than adequate to take up the slack in defining Weaver the man and giving an indispensable insight into his intellectual life. Does Bramwell know who he is and where he is from? I see nothing to indicate that he does, though admittedly, it may be uncharitable of me to say so. The point is that the “disgruntled-cons” Bramwell derides as suffering under an impotent and false rendering of intellectual history have always started, not with Rousseau, but with the various loves and loyalties of their own particular lives. Existential threats to those loves and loyalties most often come from the quarters of true ideologues such as Rousseau and yes, Mr. Bramwell, who would suggest that the carefully cultivated wisdom of the past is no longer necessary (and is in fact an obstacle to be torn asunder) in the face of the fully realized knowledge of the “general will” or, Jesu save us, “cognitive biology.”

In the third place, Bramwell resorts, a number of times, to flying under false colors and making standard academic namby-pamby rhetorical feints. For example, he backs significantly and disingenuously off of his earlier claims about the need to extirpate pre-political loyalties and now says he only meant the more modest claim that both political and pre-political loyalties can be either good or bad. I suppose I could have dreamed that gem up myself, even from within a dogmatic slumber. But others have already utilized a pandy-bat on this particular point to good effect, so I shall say no more about it.

But it is Bramwell’s silly references to my supposed glorification of the middle ages that is so galling. Perhaps he did not notice the art decorating this page. Bramwell’s is a typical deconstructive feint—whatever you see as a model in the past existed alongside or on top of competing, rival, and different models. It is an implied relativistic retort, or more properly, a loss of courage and nerve. Because there is no pure person or society, we can’t look to any for direction? This is not a serious argument but the diversionary tactic of a weak sister anxious to get to the red meat of a horrible big religious and paternalist bogeyman. Look at the crazy priest, he wants to take us back to the middle ages! What a nut! Needless to say, I am certain Mr. Bramwell does not wear a hair shirt under his coat of many colors.

** I will add, by way of footnote, that Mr. Bramwell’s claim that Rousseau and Burke essentially advocated the same thing is provocative. He will forgive me if I do not say it is convincing. However, I should like to know his source for such a, shall we say, unconventional view.

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Austin Bramwell Responds

Austin Bramwell has taken spirited exception to my critique of his recent essay “Good-Bye to All That” (which is now available on-line.) I shall, of course, have a few words to say in reply as weather, soul-saving duties, and the goat herd allow. +G.J.

Fr. Jape is angered by three paragraph in my essay in which I dismiss styles of “conservatism” that he, and, I daresay, The New Pantagruel, prefer. Good. I was hoping in my essay to shake certain conservatives out of their dogmatic slumbers. Perhaps, having read Fr. Jape’s elegant dissection of my essay, his readers feel that it is safe to go back to sleep. This would be a mistake. Fr. Jape’s comments typify some of the very misguided tendencies against which I was trying to warn.

Before going further, I should make an important clarification. Fr. Jape wrongly imputes to me the view that even the brightest minds of the conservative movement “are no more capable of real analysis than the dumb brutes [his words] at NR.” I said no such thing. On the contrary, the brightest conservative minds–I would name Steve Sailer and Andrew Bacevich–are more than capable of real analysis, which is why I call them bright to begin with. These writers are “ostracized” in the straightforward sense that the mainstream movement, as far as I know, will no longer publish what they have to say (no doubt because what they have to say is deeply embarrassing to the movement). Many other conservatives outside the mainstream, meanwhile, are merely “disgruntled”–that is, they dislike mainstream, but without solid grounds for their dislike. In any case, it is not true, as some have charged, that I declared a pox on all houses.

Turning to Fr. Jape’s comments, I wish to show that, contrary to protestations, what Fr. Jape advocates is a distorting ideology like any other. That ideology so far lacks a useful name (probably the best would be “socialism,” a term monopolized long ago by opponents of private property), so I will call it “Ignatiusreillyism” or “Reillyism” for short. Having met and had affection for many Reillysts in my life, I believe that I know well their habits, tropes, prejudices, and blind spots.

First, Reillyists believe, as the slogan goes, that “ideas have consequences.” That is, they view past and current events as the working out of certain (usually, in their view, pernicious) ideas. Thus, Fr. Jape, for example, his prose fairly groaning under the weight of important concepts gathered from Western intellectual history, takes it for granted that “the modern west followed the path set forth by the great Enlightenment theorists of liberalism such as Rousseau.” By what causal mechanism did Rousseau and Locke legislate the modern world into being (or did the modern world come to “follow” Rousseau and Locke)? Reillyists neither know nor (it seems) care to specify. In their minds, the big ideas brood over history like Spirit over the deep-that it is to say, mysteriously. It would be one thing if Reillyists adhered to an Hegelian metaphysic of history-as-universal-consciousness-that at least is fully developed philosophical theory–but they don’t. For Reillyists, the belief that “ideas have consequences” comes not as one hypothesis among many but as a Revelation whose authenticity must be defended at all costs.

With that Revelation comes a conventional intellectual typology into which Reillyists struggle to fit all unfamiliar utterances. To save the typology is always the goal! Thus, Fr. Jape says that I am a “Rousseauian” who champions “the general will”; therefore, I am trying, against the resistance of all “authentic” conservative thinkers, to “strip the altars in the name of pure reason.” (Fr. Jape also infers without warrant that I admire power for its own sake, and wrongly imputes to me the rather silly view that anyone who has clearly-defined political opinions must have arrived at them through rigorous analysis.) This strange interpretation of my essay is made possible only by doing violence to Rousseau’s words, my own, and those of “authentic” conservative thinkers.

Start with Rousseau. At the center of almost every Reillyist typology is some Simon Magus responsible for the all the evils modern world. Of these, Rousseau is probably the most routinely vilified. In Fr. Jape’s mind (following, I take it, Robert Nisbet), Rousseau stands for proto-totalitarian opposition to anything that comes between the individual and the state. As it happens, however, this is not the only view of Rousseau; on the contrary, many scholars see the diabolical Rousseau as in fundamental agreement with our beloved Burke. Both use the metaphor of contract to understand society, both imply that the contract cannot be broken, and both seek to prove that the chains into which we are born are legitimate. Burke saw deeply into the problem of order and freedom, but Rousseau saw even deeper. His most notorious remark, that man must “be forced to be free,” contains much of the wisdom for which Burke was himself striving.

As for my words, because I have the gall to question the value of “pre-political” loyalties, Fr. Jape calls me “bizarrely” Rousseauian. But there was nothing “Rousseauian” about my words at all, bizarrely or not. Conceding that I was being provocative, in discussing “ancestral loyalties,” I made nothing more than the self-evident-to-the-point-of-banal observation that not all “pre-political” loyalties are good things. On the contrary, just like political loyalties, they are sometimes good and sometimes bad. Would it not be sensible to favor the good ones and discourage the bad ones-just as the most admirable regimes (I pointed in particular to the United States and Britain) have always done? Reillyists just take it as self-evident that love of family, God, and community are Good Things. But they are not, at least not all the time. To make this observation is not to say that “everything is radically connected to politics” (whatever that means, anyway).

Next, as to “authentic” conservatives, I take it that Fr. Jape will agree with me that Edmund Burke would count as one. Thus, according to Fr. Jape, Burke must oppose the cutting short of “pre-political loyalties.” But it is not clear that Burke did categorically oppose the cutting short of “pre-political” loyalties. On the contrary, it strikes me as quite imprudent and un-Burkean to set “pre-political” against “political” loyalties in the first place, rather than to say, sensibly, that both, within limits, have their place. Part of Burke’s genius, after all, was to imagine a Britain that theretofore had not existed-that is, the lovely, stable and harmonious kingdom evoked by Burke’s image of the constitutional oak shading the cattle beneath. In fact, however, 18th century Britain-like Britain in every previous century–was a violent cauldron of opposing factions often threatening civil war. Burke created a national mythology (albeit a moderate and “conservative” one) under which they all could live together in peace. This national mythology necessarily required that the various groups relinquish their “pre-political” loyalties in favor of loyalty to the state. If I may say so, Reillyists often seem so enamored of “pre-political” attachments as to be almost oblivious to the problem of order. In that respect, they are the ones who stand outside the “authentic” conservative tradition.

Next, Reillyists regard the results of modern science as simply verboten subjects of discussion. Fr. Jape’s aversion to science isn’t readily apparent from his comments. How else, however, could one explain his bizarre and invidious comparison of my understanding of ideology to Erik Voegelin’s? Of course my thoughts about ideology don’t go very keep into the “psycho-spiritual” sources of ideology: that’s because, in my view, ideology has no such sources (or, at least, there’s no need to think that it has such sources). I stated that the roots of ideology lay in (i) our cognitive limitations and (ii) our coalitional psychology. In other words, I was talking Darwinian cognitive science. Fr. Jape imperiously suggests that I need to read Voegelin before I will understand anything. Well, as it happens, scientists are doing quite well these days explaining the causes of ideology and so far they haven’t needed recourse to Voegelinian notions like “Gnosticism,” “apocolypticism,” &c &c. Let’s be serious here: even scholars who have spent a lifetime studying Voegelin aren’t sure if his writings add up to anything in the end. Whatever may be said of cognitive scientists, by contrast, at least they’re actually adding something to the store of human knowledge.

Reillyists also express contempt for styles of conservatism (indeed, all styles of thought) other than their own. (This contempt is a bit ungracious, given that Reillyists recruit from the same farm system as the rest of the conservative movement, including the much despised mainstream.) Hence, Fr. Jape’s distinction between “authentic” and (presumably) “inauthentic” conservatives. But Reillyist claims to authenticity are hard to take seriously. I take it that to plausibly claim that a given idea or set of ideas constitutes true “conservatism”, one must show either (1) that the idea or set is found or follows readily from the writings of Edmund Burke or (2) that it identifies the “core” assumptions shared, as an empirical matter, by nearly all who call themselves “conservative.” Reillyism, as discussed, does not obviously follow from the writings of Edmund Burke; on the contrary, Reillyists seem to reject much Burkean wisdom. As for capturing the hidden essence of conservatism, Reillyism never even comes close. For all their raging against the modern world, Reillyists are preoccupied by a surprisingly narrow set of concerns-largely, the Tocquevillian concerns of community and individualism. On questions of peace, prosperity and justice, however, they have almost nothing to say, and, in fact, seem determined to ignore them. In my mind, however, ideas that have nothing to say about peace, prosperity and justice are hardly even political, much less politically conservative.

Finally, even when it comes to their preoccupations, Reillyists don’t penetrate very deeply. Against the supposed alienation and individualism of modern man, for example, Reillyists pose the thick, rich bonds of family, religion and community. They allude frequently a certain vision of the Middle Ages-the same one that we get from Henry Adams-where each man knows his place in the order of things and unquestioningly does his duty. It seems to me, however, that Reillyists understand neither family, community nor the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages, first, were a revolutionary age. Nobody tried harder to “immanentize the eschaton” than Hildebrand. (In this regard, I highly recommend Harold Berman’s extraordinary work Law and Revolution.) Second, the family is not the locus of harmony from which all further social bonds may flow. Rather, as nearly all great works of literature show, it is a primary source of strife, anger, jealousy, rage, and violence. The harmonious, traditionalist society of Reillyist imagination-medieval or otherwise-never existed and never can exist, as anyone with a rudimentary understanding of modern biology could see. The best a nation can do is to contain familial and ancestral attachments; woe unto the nation that defers to them blindly.

In closing, I should state what I believe is *not* an ideology, since I must appear inordinately fond of calling everyone an ideologue. The world is generally too complex to understand without resort to simplifying assumptions; hence, for the most part, everyone who has informed political opinions is an ideologue, myself included. The only persons are who are not ideologues are, first, radical quietists like Oakeshott who hew rigorously to the belief that political wisdom can’t be expressed in propositional form. They’re probably right. Second, those geniuses are not ideologues who are capable of seeing so far that they can recognize their own assumptions as such. These are the paragons of what Weber called the “ethics of responsibility.” All others, even the Reillyists, remain imprisoned in cages that they cannot see.

- Austin Bramwell

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Another Conservative Taxonomy

November 09, 2006

The latest American Conservative will be of interest to many conservatives, especially following the woodshed experience of the GOP last Tuesday. Of particular note will be the long broadside against conservatism by former National Review trustee Austin Bramwell. Bramwell, you may recall, is the young dandy who briefly shared some real estate with The New Pantagruel over in the high-rent district of the American press.

Bramwell’s article “Good-bye to All That”—already remarked on here and there—scores a number of rhetorical hits. Unfortunately, the whole is far less than the sum of its parts. My overall impression is that Bramwell is deeply confused.

Bramwell begins his essay by picking apart several National Review editorials in support of “the war.” But,

the editors use the term “war” in a purely figurative sense. At the time of the editorial, the U.S. was not at war with Syria, Sudan, or Iran nor, realistically speaking, with any other nation on the list. No matter how vulnerable or despised, no Muslim nation can be turned into a sacrificial substitute for bin Laden. Nor, no matter how often incanted, can the phrase “at war” be made to describe an actual state of affairs. A rhetorical bludgeon designed to compel assent to certain policies, it begs the question of whether war is advisable in the first place.

But someone has been making arguments. Enter the neoconservatives and their flagship journal the Weekly Standard. “Whatever may be said of neoconservatives,” writes Bramwell, “at least they know what they think.” Neocons are militaristic Hamiltonians, zealous for their country’s honor and glory; despising weakness, they embrace power as the truest path to virtue. Thus, according to Bramwell, while “the movement” only knew that it wanted revenge after 9/11, the neocons were there to provide an ideological framework for revenge. “Neoconservatives just happened to provide a convenient ideological infrastructure with which to justify metonymic revenge against some Muslim Arab or other. Before 9/11, the movement was praising modesty in foreign affairs; after 9/11, it did not so much embrace neoconservatism as blunder into it by accident.” In other words, “movement conservatives” (defined as NR and its circle of influence) have no clear “idea of what they actually think. What they need is analysis: the skeptical tradition extending from Machiavelli to Hobbes, Hamilton, and Burnham.”

Where have all the movement-cons capable of gimlet-eyed analysis gone? Into exile, because analysis “requires intellect, but the movement’s mainstream, perhaps to avoid embarrassment … has increasingly ostracized its brightest minds.” Yet, according to Bramwell, these bright conservative minds toiling in the relative obscurity of the conservative wilderness are no more capable of real analysis than the dumb brutes at NR. One branch of these ostracized-cons ends up obsessing over a “Crisis-of-the-West conservatism” which results in an anti-modern chauvinism. Bramwell concedes that at one time this view was useful, but nowadays it “has become more a posture than a genuine school of thought.”

Another group of ostracized-cons “pleads for the conservative movement to return to its alleged first principles.” This is impossible because the ur-texts of conservatism were authored by “notorious eccentrics given to extravagant claims whose policy implications remain largely obscure.” In fact, men like Russell Kirk “had almost no political opinions whatsoever.” Thus, “the movement never had any first principles to begin with.”

A final group of ostracized-cons has decided to “eulogize local attachments and ancestral loyalties” by invoking institutions and social arrangements implicit in words like “family, church, kin, community, school” and Burke’s “little platoons.” This group is perhaps the most dangerous of the ostracized-cons as “ancestral attachments are dangerously subversive” and are “the curse of uncivilized peoples.” America and the West itself succeeded precisely because it “cut short the reach of the extended family or clan.”

In the end, all of the ostracized-cons suffer the same fate as the movement-cons because they have been duped into thinking that conservatism is a coherent body of thought when it isn’t—they fail to embody the “skeptical tradition” which is a prerequisite for “actual analysis” which will lead to “a genuine school of thought” which has real “policy implications” and produces “political opinions.”

The overall picture that emerges from Bramwell’s taxonomy of conservatives is so bizzarely Rousseauian as to nearly bugger description. Conservatives fall into three broad categories. There are the neocons, who know what they think and presumably have done actual analysis because they have clearly defined political opinions. The movement-cons are the thoughtless drones who provide most of the raw power driving the conservative engine. They don’t have an original thought in their head but their desire for revenge after 9/11 drove them straight into the arms of the neocons. Finally, there are the ostracized-cons who pine for something that never existed in dangerously subversive ways that result in a “mere posture” rather than the more substantial “political opinions.”

Bramwell clearly rejects the latter two groups. It is the neocons who actually come away with some approval, though Bramwell is coy enough to limit himself to praise in the form of faint damnation. What becomes apparent is that Bramwell condemns conservatism in its non-ideological forms. He can accept the neocons as at least being a legitimate political movement precisely because they are the only group of ideological conservatives. Which is to say that they “know what they think” and that what they think results in specific policy prescriptions as opposed to the mere postures of eccentric men or, even worse, the pre-political attachments of merely social relationships. In this sense, Bramwell is expressing an almost undiluted form of Rousseauian political philosophy; the very philosophy which the conservatism of Burke to Kirk has existed to stand against. Kirk famously defined conservatism as the absence of ideology. Is it any surprise that he and his intellectual heirs would exhibit their political thought principally as a “posture” rather than as a set of policy prescriptions?

For Bramwell, the symbol of “analysis” functions as a form of Rousseau’s “general will” which was the aggregate of rational individual wills cut off from (or set free from) any pre-political attachment. Ancestral loyalties undermine the general will and therefore must be “cut short.” To a large degree, Bramwell is correct that the success of the modern west is attributable to cutting short these pre-political loyalties by following the path set forth by the great Enlightenment theorists of liberalism such as Rousseau and his chief English bedfellow, John Locke. It is thus surprising that he apparently shows absolutely no recognition of the fact that conservative thinkers since the Enlightenment have stood precisely against this sort of stripping the alters in the name of pure reason. Rousseau maintained that “everything is radically connected to politics.” If there is one idea that Bramwell advocates in his essay, this is it. And if there is one idea most purely antithetical to authentic conservatism, this is it.

Finally, the train wreck that this article has become jerks so wildly as to give any desk-bound policy wonk permanent spinal damage. For Bramwell’s final act is to turn around and accuse movement conservatives of “ideology.” By ideology Bramwell means a kind of closed minded adherence to party over all else as described especially by George Orwell in 1984, complete with memory holes and two-minute hates. This take-down of “ideological conservatism” is fine as far as it goes. Voegelin and Kirk (two of Bramwell’s useless obscurantists) did it all before and, dare I say it, with a deeper level of both psycho-spiritual and political “analysis.” Voegelin in particular isolated the “closed” nature of these systems which denies the ability of anyone to question it. I guess those eccentric theorists with no practical ideas might have come in useful after all if Bramwell had bothered to read them.

On the other hand, it should come as no surprise that movement-cons engage in Orwellian power politics. This is basic party-ism. It is necessary, though reprehensible in certain respects and always dangerous to real thought. This is one reason conservative luminaries have always stood outside mere politics. However, Bramwell strangely resists the very Machiavellianism of power politics which results from his vaunted devotion to political analysis and shrewd skepticism about the way the world really is.

In the end, what Bramwell despises is any pre-political loyalty of any kind. Even party loyalty, which is only barely pre-political, must be dispensed with in favor of purely individual political calculus. How, I wonder, is this anything but a rather smart version of Andrew Sullivan’s prescription for conservatives? That it should appear in the pages of The American Conservative is perhaps the most remarkable thing about it.

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A Jape In Wolfe’s Clothing?

October 27, 2006

If theocracy is not a looming danger to our democracy, bathos might be. For every evangelical leader spewing hate, there are ten evangelical followers who believe that all you need is love. David Kuo is one of them. He brought to the White House neither money nor mission, but only mush. No matter how much he came to disagree with the ruthless operatives with whom he was working, he writes, “I couldn’t dislike them.” After all, Harriet Miers, then White House counsel, had responded to his hospitalization by writing him a note offering love and prayers; and this, for him, counted far more than her–or anyone else’s–position on anything involving actual policy. “From the moment I found Jesus–or Jesus found me–in high school, it was his peace I longed for. I didn’t know what it meant or what it felt like. But wanting Jesus’ peace made me ache.” Most people seeking peace would not march willingly into the middle of a culture war. But Kuo, the kind of person who could actually be moved by one of Harriet Miers’s treacly notes, did. His intentions were not malevolent. They were oblivious, which may be worse.

The last thing America needs now is more innocence. Most Americans have wildly unrealistic expectations of what politics can do, and, expecting too much, they settle for too little. We need leaders who can level with voters, offering good news when there is good news, but not afraid to share bad news when necessary. Religion may or may not help in cultivating such leaders, but evangelical religion offers precisely the wrong ingredients to make such leadership possible. Testimonialism simply does not make for serious politics (or serious religion). It is not enough for us to absolve presidents for today’s mistakes because they have confessed to yesterday’s sins. The one skill that policy-makers ought to possess is the willingness to look beyond personal feelings in order to enact sensible programs. David Kuo’s religious sensibility never allowed him to do that. His book offers an acute warning of the dangers that evangelicals pose to democracy, not because they are too Machiavellian, but because they are not Machiavellian enough.

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You say Liturgy, I say Lechery

October 11, 2006

Here is some noteworthy flotsam. Maggie Gallagher rebukes Rod Dreher and his crunchy legions for being big fakers:

We have lots of choices in our society but we don’t have the choice to be genuinely traditional, as far as I can see, and nothing in your book suggests otherwise. Yes, the absence of traditional bases for identity creates a genuine hunger. If you want to try to satisfy that hunger by “attaching” to a tradition, I have no objections. I really don’t. I just can’t look at that process and see that its will achieve what you claim for it. Its not being traditional, its choosing tradition as the best of all available consumer goods. You make that choice, other people make other choices. God bless, I hope it works for you. … I personally think the benefits of the modern condition seriously outweigh its liabilities (and so there we may differ). But don’t imagine you are recreating a traditional world. It’s not true. You are creating a personal world.

Is my opposition to theoconservative ideology not better understood as opposition to orthodox Catholicism? Can you and Neuhaus, as Catholics, be good citizens of a liberal polity like the United States? My answer is simple: Of course you can–on one condition. Like every other citizen, you must be willing to accept what I call “the liberal bargain.” In my book, I describe this bargain as the act of believers giving up their “ambition to political rule in the name of their faith” in exchange for the freedom to worship God however they wish, without state interference. What does this mean, in practical terms? It means that your belief in what the Roman Catholic Church believes and teaches is irrelevant, politically speaking. It simply shouldn’t matter whether or not you think that justice has a divine underpinning, anymore than it should matter whether you prefer Jane Austen to Dostoevsky. In a word, liberal politics presumes that it’s possible and desirable for political life to be decoupled from theological questions and disputes.

In this sense, Gallagher is the perfect pin-up girl for Linker’s vision of America, even though he would likely describe her as one of the theocon boogeymen. What a fraud this entire discussion is!

The bottom line is this: both Linker and Gallagher are utter ninnies. They would be completely worthless in any real political fight. Well, that is not entirely true. They are effective enough noisemakers to provide distracting cover for the real political actors. Which is to say that both, in their way, are dupes and stooges for the prevailing political consensus of middling liberalism.

If there is any valid critique of Dreher’s “crunchy cons,” surely it is their predilection to easy distraction. They, by and large, still want to be nice. Where are the crunchy bare knucklers, or better yet, brass knucklers? Where are the stem-winders and latter-day Elijahs set to call down fire upon the prophets of the liberal order? Where are the anarchists and wild-eyed populists infused with righteous rage who will say not just “no” but “Hell No!” to the Linker/Gallagher bargain?

I see the sage of New Mexico is making a good start. He says again what I have been saying for some time now:

As Ross knows, American Christians are perfectly content with the liberal order (though they will object to a thousand and one policies or legal rulings within that order), because it is the only kind they have ever known and indeed the more intensely Christian Americans are the more they (typically) invest the American system of government and political culture with quasi-religious significance. Actual anti-liberal Christians are as rare as gold in this country, not least because so many Christians have persuaded themselves that America is a “Christian country,” and not just in a historical-cultural sense, which causes them to intellectually bend themselves into pretzels to demonstrate the religious origins of the Union. The “Christian country” spiel is just the “proposition nation” claim for people who go to church, and is just about as substantial, but it is very effective in keeping people on board with the project. American Christians have seen Christianity excluded from the public square more and more each decade, and have mustered by and large limited resistance to this trend. Who now fights for prayer in school–not a minute of silence, not “one nation under God” hokum, but actual prayer? To ask the question is to acknowledge the extent of the defeat. In fact, you would be fairly hard-pressed to find a religious conservative today who would lament this development in print. Unlike Christians in fights with liberalism in Europe–which the liberals tended to lose in the early decades when they provoked the Christians about vital issues pertaining to education or social policy–American Christians are locked into some form of liberalism and, through the work of theocons, have developed an entire argument for why they are basically not only in harmony with this liberalism but are the essential protectors of it. They cannot mount an effective counterattack on the ravages of secularism, because they are so committed to the procedural rules of the game to which they constantly appeal in arguments with secularists, while the secularists have no scruples about altering the political and legal landscape through ever-more outrageous and preposterous readings of the law. Each time they change the rules, religious conservatives cry foul but then set about convincing themselves that they must abide by the new rules. If this is the backlash against secularism and liberalism, I would hate to see what accommodation looks like. More to the point, if this is what has resulted from half a century of galloping secularism, the secularists have nothing to fear from any more serious backlash in the future. Seen this way, the theocons are certainly not laying siege to secular America, which appears here as an entirely ludicrous claim, but might as well be opening the gates to the secularists with their half-hearted, “We’re Christians, but we love liberalism!” defense.

This is You say Liturgy, I say Lechery in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. |

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