Last night my older son, who unlike me is a Bush-McCain Republican, called to express his alarm that the Obama administration is using, in the words of Michael Barone, “brass knuckles” and “thuggery” to intimidate FOX-news. It appears that David Axelrod and Rahm Emmanuel have badmouthed the neocon-Murdoch empire; moreover, like their boss, they are hesitating to give FOX reporters the same access in presidential interviews as they would give to friendlier news sources. Apparently this is seen as the first step in closing down the “conservative” opposition, and my Republican relatives and acquaintances are trembling in horror over the coming leftist totalitarian order.

This fear is of course greatly exaggerated. Not only is the government not closing down FOX. This channel seems to be thriving by posing as the beleaguered American Right, which is fighting for freedom against the radical Left. Never mind, that Krauthammer and other news contributors were swooning over the symbolism of Obama’s election for weeks after the event—and continuously congratulating the country for having overcome its racist heritage. Now these “conservatives” presumably know better, particularly since the GOP is not in power, and their multibillion dollar media operation claims to be fighting on our behalf for the American way of life.

I am conflicted by this situation. Emotionally I’m with anyone who wants to destroy FOX, which has diligently and steadily worked to isolate our side. My view of the present conflict is similar to that of a Russian White watching the Stalinists and Trotskyists fight it out. (Actually I did have a horse in that contest, in which the less dangerous side won.) Why should one care if one’s implacable enemies are having a street fight? As a member of the Old Right, I despise both sides about equally, but perhaps the neocons a bit more. After all, they were the ones who successfully marginalized us, with the assistance of their liberal friends.

The pity is that we can’t get rid of these successful interlopers on the American right. A loss for them against the administration would mean very little. It would mean that FOX employees would be made to go to the back of the line at Obama’s press conferences. The concern that the Fairness Doctrine would be reintroduced by Congress in order to neuter the opposition does not seem to be based on much at all, at least at the present time. All the administration has done is to demote FOX relative to other news sources. Further, I can’t see why our side should give a damn even if the Fairness Doctrine is brought back. We are the only ones whom FOX has pushed off the stage. We’d have nothing to lose and everything to gain if FOX were required to include the now excluded Right in its conversation with the Left.

What is even more upsetting is that the more the administration criticizes FOX, the greater will become its hold on right-of-center Americans. In my ideal world FOX and the rest of the neocon empire would sink into the ocean but this is not going to happen. What is happening is that our enemies are growing more influential by hallucinating about the threat that they’re facing. For this reason alone, I wish that the Democrats would leave the neocons alone. Their disparaging remarks are allowing our more immediate enemies to tighten their grip on much of the American public. This public may be lost to us forever if this phony war goes on. 

I recommend highly Grant Havers’s incisive study of Lincoln as a rhetorician. Unlike recent hagiography on Lincoln, which celebrates him as a precursor of global democratic revolution or the Obama administration, Havers examines Lincoln as a champion of a specifically nineteenth-century American Protestant worldview. He shows that Lincoln’s opposition to slavery came out of an explicitly Christian view of charity, although, as Havers insists, this view did not require Lincoln to wage a bloody civil war in order to free slaves or to inflict a vengeful and corrupt Reconstruction upon the defeated South afterwards.

The view Havers presents is essentially the one that the Southern conservative Richard Weaver expounded in his study of Lincoln’s rhetoric. Although sympathetic to the Lost Cause, Weaver was so moved by Lincoln’s arguments from principle that he favorably contrasted them to the speeches of Edmund Burke, the renowned opponent opponent of the French revolution who argued from expedience. Among the many merits of this gracefully composed and well documented monograph is that it makes clear why generations of small-town, devoutly Protestant Republicans memorized Lincoln’s speeches as models of what they were, namely, Christian charity. One can of course appreciate these speeches without hating the Southern conservative tradition or disdaining such Christian gentlemen and gallant warriors as Lee and Jackson.

Nowhere does Havers suggest that these loyalties are incompatible. Nor does he defend the carnage caused by the Late Unpleasantness. What he focuses on is Lincoln’s religious vision, as reflected in his oratory. Speaking for myself, I fully agree with Havers’s response to Lincoln as a public speaker. His speeches, with their quotations from the King James Bible used to brilliant effect, are among the most moving that have been given in the English tongue. 

My good friend Peter Kocan, who may be Australia’s greatest living novelist and a gifted poet to boot, has just informed me that he’s written a negative review of Encounters for the distinguished Australian quarterly Quadrant. It seems that Peter, who considers himself a paleo and sentimentally a Jacobite, is disturbed to learn that he and I are not on the same wave length entirely. He’s discovered that I think the paleos have spent whatever energies they could muster to fight the neoconservatives and that they have been thoroughly routed. I further suggest in Encounters and elsewhere that the discomfited paleos have turned from combating their old enemy to cuffing each other. This new blood sport involves a religious conversionary aspect, as aging paleos convert to a pre-Vatican Two-form of Catholicism and then slam each other as not being truly Catholic or (Heaven forbid!) soft on American Calvinism. Movements that engage in such activities are quickly nearing the end of their usefulness as political forces.

Peter has done me a great favor by going after my book from the right. Unlike such kind reviewers as John Derbyshire, Steve Sailer, Pat Buchanan, Jim Antle, Grant Havers and all my well-meaning bloggers on amazon.com, Peter does not praise or characterize me as a “paleoconservative.” Although I still haven’t read his review, I am hoping that somewhere in his text he identifies me as a radical leftist. That way I can hope to win attention for my work not only from the New York Times, Washington Post, and New York Review of Books. Like my leftist colleagues and acquaintances, I might also hope to bask in the attention of the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard.  Being on the unauthorized right is really the pits. It is far better to be described as a left-liberal recovering Marxist who is fixated on the Holocaust. With that label, you can pick up friends from across the respectable media spectrum.

Last week at a faculty meeting I was accused by a feminist colleague of saying that I thought she’d be doing more good for the human race by looking after her soon-to-be-born child than continuing to teach at our college. The lady who made the charge against me insisted that we should be recruiting more inner-city minority students, in order to protect her feelings against the expression of my reactionary opinions. (Perhaps the minority members would be ordered to kill me if I spoke out of turn.) Whatever the merits of the lady’s argument, I really can’t recall having uttered the offending remark. But I wish that I had. I agree with what I was alleged to have said. I can’t think of anything less productive than teaching at a PC institution of non-learning or anything more meritorious than raising a child as a dedicated parent.

I bring up this subject because last night at dinner with my wife and another couple, I backed away from defending my conviction out of excessive politeness. I equivocated when pressed on this all-important matter. Let the world take note! I fully agree with the view that I did not express. In fact I believe Western civilization is doomed unless its inhabitants can be made to look upon themselves first and foremost as the founders and perpetuators of families. Lest I gave any other impression last night, I wish to set the record straight.

I would like to thank Evan for defending my besmirched honor against Leonard Zeskin (whoever the hell he is?). It is not everyday that one is reminded of a lecture he gave several eons ago in Rockford, Illinois and about his references in that rust-belt community on the Rock River to a dead German legal theorist. Clearly for Zeskin and others of his ilk, my recommendation to study Carl Schmitt for understanding the decline of the traditional state system sent very ominous signals. It was a justification for Schmitt’s opportunistic decision to join the Nazi Party in May 1933, a decision that Schmitt made after having called repeatedly for the legal banning of Hitler’s movement.

What struck me in particular about Zeskin’s guilt-by- association brief against me is his careful attempt to distinguish yours truly from the learned and respectable conservative opposition characterized by Mark Lilla and the Frumbag. Not all people on the right are to be viewed as equally reprehensible. There are the Evil Ones like me; and then there are the nice dissenters who write for the same publications as Zeskin and who probably dine with him every now and then. These are the clubbable guys whom one can enjoy schmoozing with, unlike the reprobates who find more substance in Carl Schmitt than in Martin Luther King, David Brooks, or Bill Bennett. 

Readers of this website have been asking me since the death of Irving Kristol at the age of 89 why I’ve not addressed the meaning of his life and passing. There are three reasons that I initially decided not to weigh in. One, I believe that Grant Havers, and now Richard Spencer, have said all that needs to be said about Kristol’s legacy in their pithy commentaries. Two, I’ve already written a great deal, for example, in Conservatism in America, about the character and effects of Kristol’s beliefs. At this point there seems nothing left for me to say about him or them. No one who has read me with any regularity would mistake me for a devotee of Kristol—or of the movement he purported to found. And I suspect that most of those who wanted me to respond were waiting for a fiery outburst against someone whom they suspected I disliked.

Three, the main reason I abstained from commenting until now is that I don’t think Kristol was much of a presence of any kind. Aside from his accomplishments in wangling big sums for his pals from corporate executives and in helping younger neoconservatives take over philanthropic organizations, Kristol contributed nothing of substance to neoconservatism. Many of the views he expressed went counter to those of Frum, Brooks, and his son Bill, and especially on the danger of utopian thinking in foreign policy. In the 1990s Irving often sounded like his supposed adversary, Pat Buchanan, in calling for a fusion of nationalism with conservative religion.

Although Kristol continued to write for the Wall Street Journal well into his 80s, he often sounded like someone out of the past, who had become incoherent. In a section on “the mutating thought” of Kristol in Conservatism In America,  I show how nonchalantly Kristol could announce to Buchanan back in 1992 that “the cultural war is lost; the Left has won,” and then proclaim a few days later that “conservatism has won.” His inflated claims, e.g. that neoconservatism had created Republican presidencies and that no true conservatism had existed in America before the neoconservatives, often bordered on megalomania or shocking historical ignorance. And what made these claims even more questionable was that neoconservatism in practice had zilch to do with Kristol’s editorials or dabs of political theory. With some justification Russell Kirk and Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddhin, who had only limited exposure to Irving’s rhetoric, both thought to have discovered in him a true conservative sensibility. Depending on what one read of his essays and columns, this judgment could be defended. It was the rest of his work that gave him away as a sloganeer and braggart. But one should not really blame Irving for what became neoconservatism. He did not create this world historical force (or catastrophe), however much he delighted in taking credit for having launched it.

Kristol was certainly not the literary or social equivalent of another big name in American conservatism, William F. Buckley. Unlike Buckley, he was not a brilliant polemicist or charismatic personality. He looked and sounded like the displaced leader of a New York garment workers’ union, which were his real roots. His widely distributed prose rarely rose above pedestrian platitudes, often mixed with the jejune utterances of neoconservative professors in the social sciences. If his writing was meant to galvanize or sway, then I was totally immune to its effect. But Kristol, to his credit, never descended to the evil pandering that became characteristic of the later Buckley. He was fiercely loyal to his own kind, meaning New York Jews who came from the same background. This may have been the side of Kristol that was the most admirable. Although probably not a side that would endear him to many visitors to this website, it suggests to me that he was a better human being than the far more gifted social butterfly who became the father of post-World War Two conservatism.

As for the celebrations of his genius that have popped up since his death, one must attribute them to the usual sources, those whom Irving or his family sponsored and enriched and those who would be terrified of neoconservative retaliation if they failed to extol the neoconservative godfather. Since none of us falls into either category, we may speak about the real Irving Kristol, a deceased journalist and a resourceful fund-raiser.

For readers of this website who know some German, I heartily recommend the doctoral dissertation of Claus Wolfschlag, a study that was subsequently turned into a book published by Leopold Stocker Verlag, Das antifaschistische Milieu (2001). Wolfschlag, who has produced among other works an informative book, based on interviews, dealing with Hitler’s opposition on the right, and multiple movie and art reviews for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Junge Freiheit, is one of Europe’s most talented cultural historians. He is likewise a keen analyst of the antifascist and antipatriotic elites that have taken over his country, and much of my work on this subject has drawn heavily on his research and perceptions.

Wolfschlag approaches his area of investigation from a perspective that is noticeably different from mine. While my scholarship has focused on the effects of the postwar German re-education, introduced by the occupying powers, Wolfschlag stresses the irreversible shattering of the German national community. The absence of positive historical references and communal continuities has led to the often hysterical rejection of any non-incriminatory German identity among the author’s generation. He carefully distinguishes among certain German social types, those Germans who have adopted American values, especially consumerism, and who out of a fear of social and professional ostracism, go along with the state ideology; those Germans who are trying to scrape through and who therefore are for the most part politically passive; and finally, an idealistic segment that has turned its energy against all the foundational traditions of the German people.

According to Wolfschlag, this segment of idealists, who celebrate the cultural, ethnic, and political destruction of their country, may be the most uprooted of all Germans. Their only claim to community is derived from their networking with other anti-German leftists, while their demonstrations, which often turn violent, provide the frenzied participants with a sense of fellowship. According to Wolfschlag, the increasing tolerance of German authorities when faced with antifascist violence comes out of the fear of being perceived as nationalists. Such eccentric and even masochistic behavior is seen in the willingness of German police to turn a blind eye while antifascists and their Muslim allies vandalize property belonging to “fascist” innkeepers, bookstore owners, and printers. This conduct goes back to an ingrained sensitivity that started with postwar reeducation. This mind-numbing process went on during and after the occupation and was re-enforced by Germany’s foreign image, as a Nazi-prone country that had already once succumbed to rightwing totalitarianism. (Leftwing totalitarianism continues to be in favor among progressive elites both inside and outside of Germany.)

A critical incentive for the expansion of this “antifascist milieu” is the willingness of the German government to lend it material and moral support. The Christian Democrats, no less than the German Socialists, Greens and Party of the Left, contribute funding and government agencies to pursue a “struggle against the Right,” the Right in this case being defined as anything that stands athwart the perpetually leftward drifting German party spectrum. Parties that are situated to the “right of center” have no chance of going anywhere in the carefully policed German political landscape. Rightwing parties are usually placed under government surveillance as threats to “the German democratic order.” People who are known to vote for them are kept out of Germany’s large public sector and often fired from their jobs. This “antifascist milieu” does as well as it does not only because younger Germans have lost any sense of community, except for a shared hatred of their national past. The antinational German milieu also thrives because those in power and those who are uprooted cause it to prosper.

The Elizabethtown College faculty has just received the following charge from the provost, who is an engaged feminist and diversitarian. Enthusiastic support from most of the faculty is expected.

TO: Faculty and Professional Staff
FROM: Susan Traverso
DATE: September 11, 2009
RE: Diversity Plan

I am happy to distribute for your review the Diversity Task Force’s plan for strengthening campus diversity.  The diversity retreat last May provided valuable recommendations and suggestions, and the members of the Diversity Task Force have worked over the summer to make revisions to the plan.  Substantial additional work done based on the comments during the retreat as well as feedback for other reviewers, including Alma Clayton-Pederson of AAC&U who facilitated the retreat, Senior Staff, and the Academic Affairs and Student Life committees of the Board of Trustees.

The Diversity Task Force has asked me to distribute the current draft plan for any final comments or suggestions.  The plan is scheduled to be included on the agenda for Faculty Assembly’s September 22nd meeting.  In order to make the deadline for that agenda, I must ask that you review the document over the next few days and send comments or suggestions by Wednesday, September 15.  You are welcome to send your comments to me directly or communicate with any of the members of the Diversity Task Force.

The Diversity Task Force is eager to present the plan to the Faculty Assembly for discussion and possible vote on September 22.  Your review and comments over the next several days will allow that process to move forward.  Pending endorsement by the Faculty Assembly, the diversity plan will be sent to the Board of Trustees in October.

I would like to thank the members of the Diversity Task Force, and particularly Diane Elliot,  who have worked diligently to engage the campus community in this process.  The goals set forth in the plan are ambitious and will require all of us to move them forward.  Inspired by the College’s strong commitment to academic excellence and core values of social justice, human dignity, and peace, the diversity plan is grounded upon the College’s mission even as it asks us to reach further to make our campus and educational programs more inclusive.

On its webpage, the Elizabethtown Office of Diversity describes its mission as “providing an environment which affirms human differences and similarities.”

Let me join Dylan Hale in congratulating Keith Preston for his perceptive comments about where the Right has gone since the 1960s. In all of the decades that I’ve written on the subject, the connection drawn by Keith never really occurred to me, that is, between the Sun Belt Republican conservatism of the 1960s and the global democratic gibberish of the present conservative movement. The connective tissue is, of course, the support for military build-up and the production of war materiel. Of purely secondary importance is the purpose for which the evolving military machine is to be used, whether to fight communism in the name of Christian civilization or to occupy Asian countries in order to provide their populations with some state-of-the-art American version of “democratic values.” John McCain perfectly embodies the type of “conservatism” to which Keith refers. He is the GOP Senator from the state that elected and reelected Goldwater to the Senate, and like Goldwater, McCain is vocally committed to military build-up and to the deployment of American military force, although, unlike Goldwater, he has generally moved to the left on social issues.

Furthermore, when Kevin Phillips published The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, he could not have foreseen the degree to which the constituent elements in his “populist conservatism” would soon be transformed. The blue-collar Catholics in Northern cities, the group to whom Phillips was ethnically related, would go the way of the dinosaur. This older generation of urban Catholic Americans would be replaced by a younger generation of yuppies, whose children I now teach. George Wallace’s populist electorate in 1968, which ran across the Northern and Midwestern rust belt, no longer exists as a significant electoral force. And the Sun Belt population has grayed without becoming more rightwing. This population depends on government programs like Medicare and, as Kevin points out, is disproportionately connected to military bases, arms production, and making the world safe for democracy. Such “conservatives” voted overwhelmingly to make Joe Lieberman’s bud, John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee last year.

Kevin’s comments also got me to thinking about some of the possible funding for neoconservative seminars, institutions, and speakers emphasizing “democratic leadership.” The predictable exhortations issuing from these sources in favor of international crusading are now routinely identified with Churchill, Lincoln, and Reagan. Since all such pep talks are designed to justify American intervention abroad, in order to spread a recognizably neoconservative vision of America, possibly military-related industries and lobbies are contributing some of the necessary sponsorship. Those on the right who discourage such crusading are not likely to attract funding from military-related industries. They are also kept off the gravy train of movement conservative speaking engagements and TV appearances and will often be reduced to Soviet-type non-persons. Almost every “conservative” media personality, from David Frum and Bill Kristol to Rush Limbaugh, Mike Savage, Ann Coulter, Mark Levin, Michael Reagan, and Sean Hannity, operate with the same foreign-policy template, even if members of this group are allowed to show rhetorical diversity on some domestic issues. In a word: Kevin’s focus on the continuity of a pro-military constituency on the American Right, or what passes for one, since the 1960s is extremely illuminating.   

Steve Sailer’s interpretation of Tarantino and his latest flick Inglorious Basterds coincided with that of my older son, who discussed Tarantino’s work with me last night over the phone. Like Steve, Joe viewed the subject matter of Tarantino’s latest blood-and-guts spectacle as more of the same violence and cynicism that one encounters in all of his films. The playing up of Nazi murderers and the revenge inflicted on them by Jews is supposedly the mere vehicle by which Tarantino could titillate his viewers, just as he did in Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Kill Bill, Vols. I and II.

Without necessarily denying the usual Tarantino idiosyncrasies in this movie, it seems that his subject may have been chosen, for among other reasons, because bashing Germans and showing them to be irredeemable Nazis is a popular theme with Hollywood, American liberals, Jewish organizations, and millions of self-hating Germans. Producing a counterfactual film about the Second World War, in which Jews get a chance to destroy the Nazi government while scalping Wehrmacht officers, can’t hurt box office receipts in the least. Such PC themes may not be the sole reason for Tarantino’s film success. But it is a critical factor, as I am led to believe after reading the rave reviews from Ebert, the New York Post, and several foreign newspapers.

In any case, the best review of the film I’ve run into is by my favorite German film critic, Claus-M. Wolfschlag in Junge Freiheit (August 21). Wolfschlag, who specializes in sniffing out ideological propaganda in German and American films, goes to town on Tarantino’s “overreaching.” He observes that the director pretends to be leaving “his American conceptual realm of drugs, hired killers, stuntmen, and go-go dancers” by “trying something new.” But what Tarantino produces is a mere variation on Grade-B anti-Nazi films, in which save for the quality of acting by the Austrian Christoph Waltz, everything and everyone is comfortably stereotypical.

One looks in vain for a halfway normal person of German nationality, perhaps a new father or a well-intentioned war hero like Friedrich Zoller (played by Daniel Brühl, who falls in love with a pretty Jewish girl Shoshanna. But in the end Zoller turns into a persistent stalker. The desperate Shoshanna is driven to shoot him, but then turns around, conscience-stricken, to look at the gravely wounded Zoller. This conciliatory gesture, however, turns out badly. Zoller shoots back at the young woman killing her. The moral is clear. To feel any human feeling for a German is inappropriate.

Wolfschlag also notes the final PC touch in the film. Shoshanna falls passionately in love with a very black African, whom she describes as “mon concitoyen francais.” Needless to say, the chance of any of this happening, that a French Jewish woman of this generation (played by the very Nordic looking French actress Melanie Laurent) takes up erotically with a West African black, who is helping her to run a French movie house under the German occupation, is infinitesimally small.
For want of a better characterization, I might summarize the contents of Tarantino’s movie by reproducing in English Wolfschlag’s biting resume:

Inglorious Basterds has a plain pornographic component. The actor Eli Roth called it ‘kosher porno.’ It provides a crude model for getting German haters to masturbate. Self-hating Germans were already panting with wet underpants as they waited for the film’s opening last Thursday. In a shameless society, which hypocritically elevates shame to the theme of every discussion, it behooves the Germans to feel truly ashamed for lending their support to this [odious] enterprise.