P.J. O’Rourke is now officially senile. Pour a stiff glass of bourbon before wading into this farrago of parrot-sh*t. The problem with conservatism, for P.J. as for Frumbag, is conservatives. They should learn to put up with forced desegregation and worthless public schools, gay marriage, abortion, colonization by hostile, nationalistic foreigners, and the use of the U.S. military to fight other country’s wars. In return they might, just might get… drumroll please: fiscal responsibility.  Yeah, we’ve never spent a dime on all that federal equality micromanagement and foreign conquest, or all those uninsured unskilled laborers. That’s funded by pennies from heaven.

I’d like to thank the inestimable Tom Piatak for calling David Frum on his latest gesture of hauteur aimed at the lowly, God-fearing Americans who so offend his sniffy sensibilities. I’ve long wished we could deport him back to Canada, or better yet—drop him like a cluster bomb on a terrorist hideout. In case Takimag readers missed it, I’d like to beg your indulgence and re-post here what I wrote for one of my other favorite Web sites, LewRockwell.com, in response to Frum’s excommunication of the antiwar Right—back in March, 2003. Boy, have events proved him right….

National Review’s Anathema Corner

March 26, 2003

The spitball bombardiers of the imperialist "right" aren’t satisfied with imposing "democracy" abroad – they also want to stifle it here at home. The most serious attempt in recent weeks to silence discussion in American politics is David Frum’s cover story in the current National Review. If you haven’t slogged through it yet, it’s a compilation of all the most unfortunate things ever said – or almost said, or never said but possibly implied – by thinkers whom the ex-Canadian speechwriter broadly labels "paleoconservative."

Rather than refute his charges point by point – that has been done extraordinarily well elsewhere, such as here and here – I’d rather address what Frum is trying to do, and why. I’ve a certain insight into this question, since, like Frum, I was once a conservative columnist at Yale. I came in just after he graduated, and made a lot of noise in the campus papers, just as he had, so inevitable comparisons were drawn. And contrasts.

You see, Frum had made himself well-known among the amazingly intolerant leftist students of early 1980s Yale by loudly espousing Reaganite foreign and budgetary policy. He also made certain to assert over and over again that he was a fiscal conservative but a social liberal.

This was a crucial point, on a campus where liberal social attitudes were taken utterly for granted, and very few students dared to speak against them. For those who did, "social suicide" doesn’t begin to describe what they’d done to themselves. The few undergrads who advocated traditional Christian values made themselves almost radioactive. Shunned and loathed, they would eat alone, or in tiny groups of fellow thinkers, in the cavernous Gothic dining halls, as if they’d contracted some contagious, incurable skin disease. (And no, they didn’t get to date much.)

As if to publicly proclaim his distance from the misfits who were so despised, Frum led a public campaign to close down a conservative literary magazine, The Yale Lit, because – well, because "he couldn’t stand that type of conservative," as he told a friend. Enlisting student opinion, and the Yale administration’s help, Frum succeeded in quashing an exquisitely edited, beautifully produced student magazine, which was promptly replaced, under the same name, by a fourth-rate broadsheet that printed students’ trashy, confessional poems about their drug experiences and tentative erotic fumblings. Frum’s first purge of right-wing opinion was accomplished.

No ostracism for David. He went from Yale to swim among the suits at The Wall Street Journal, and write a number of mildly interesting books, en route to rising smoothly through the ranks of what was by now called "neoconservatism." He really "arrived" (or "made it" in the sense of Norman Podhoretz in his revealing, appalling autobiography) when his commentaries began to appear on that bastion of respectable opinion, National Public Radio. I listened to many of them, and found them witty. Also troubling – since their purpose was clear: To explain to America’s liberal intelligentsia why they shouldn’t be afraid of Republicans.

These urbane, chatty contributions all centered on one theme: That the social issues the Republican party had adopted were simply red meat for the rubes. They would never go anywhere, and shouldn’t stop people from voting for lower marginal tax rates and a "strong" foreign policy. Again and again Frum would patiently explain how the gestures made by the likes of Newt Gingrich, George Bush I, and Robert Dole to appease the Religious Right, the Southerners, the libertarians, and the "gun people" in their party were simply that – hollow, symbolic tips of the cowboy hat to the hapless activists whom they needed to keep in line. Cheap pizza bought for the "3:00 am" types who leave their trailer parks to volunteer at Republican phone banks. His wink was almost audible. Those people were never going to get what they wanted – any more than black voters really benefit from electing Democrats. But the rabble must be appeased. No wonder Frum got a job writing speeches for a Republican administration.

It does, however, strike me as strange that such a chameleon feels entitled to dictate the legitimate boundaries of conservative debate. I feel it’s fair to ask Frum now: Where does he stand on the social issues which matter so much to many fervent conservative voters? Is he still pulling the wool over their eyes, wrapping tax cuts for Enron in pages torn from the New Testament?

Frum’s ascendancy doesn’t surprise me. You see, one of the most dominant motives in any socially stigmatized group – such as conservatives were at Yale and still are in the opinion-making circles Frum now inhabits – is self-purification. One tries to wash away the taint that your opponents have attached to you by finding someone within your own movement who is more distasteful, more extreme, more socially maladroit, then denouncing him. Best of all if you can lead the chorus of ostracism. That renders you yourself ritually pure, at least for a while – and joins you securely to the community that has now been purged. Anthropologist Rene Girard analyzes this social phenomenon brilliantly, tracing its operation from the ancient world, through the death of Christ, up to the present. It was frequently the motivating force in anti-Semitic uprisings, as social misfits whipped up the crowd to persecute the "evil," loathsome Other. As Justin Raimondo points out in Reclaiming the American Right, this liturgy of anathema has been the rite of choice for decades in "movement conservatism." Self-hating conservatives conduct such a ritual every few years – are duly applauded for it.

How easy to relieve one’s own anxieties, demonstrate one’s own "good will," and win general approval by finding an alternate focus for opprobrium, then leading the mob that drives out the evildoer! Bill Clinton (remember him?) was engaging in this tactic when he denounced Sistah Souljah. Moderate black leaders do the same when they dutifully denounce Louis Farrakhan – a point made brilliantly in Warren Beatty’s worthy film "Bulworth." Countless conservatives joined in such fun when Trent Lott shot off his mouth. I must confess that I’ve done it myself. There’s a certain glee, a sense of cleanliness and virtue that arises when you discover that there is someone – anyone – in the world who’s further out on a limb, then you righteously saw it off. "I may be conservative (or liberal, or antiwar), but I’m not like…" Fill in the blank with your favorite extremist, the person with whom you’d least like to be associated. The gay writer David Sedaris described the phenomenon brilliantly in a radio essay, explaining how in high school he’d find someone more effeminate than he, and lead the chorus of taunts, to help redirect the social abuse from himself, and affirm his place in the mainstream.

Of course, there are ideas that must be refuted. But the unseemly eagerness with which today’s political police latch onto and denounce perceived dissidents betrays something dark at work. When you realize that someone in your own political camp has taken your own principles and perverted them beyond recognition, the appropriate emotional response is sadness, a grim sense of necessity, and a determination to be fair. That’s also the spirit in which sane men approach the prospect of starting a war.

Instead, too often, the self-anointed members of a given "mainstream" movement (whatever it is) respond with an ugly glee. John Podhoretz boasted on NPR of the role warbloggers had played in bringing down Trent Lott. Podhoretz spoke with as much bravura as if he’d personally captured Osama bin Laden, and dragged the murderer to prison by his beard. It’s the very same spirit that Frum displays in his preening piece in National Review. With an almost papal solemnity, he declares opponents of the current war virtual traitors, and employing the papal "We" he pronounces anathema: "We turn our backs on them." My first reaction to this was simply to laugh, and mutter, "Be glad there’s an American soldier watching your back, chicken-hawk."

But upon reflection, I think I was being a little too harsh, expecting too much of a political ghostwriter. Man is a social animal, and it’s only natural for men to wish to move amongst the principalities and powers, to ascend socially, to consume rubber-squab at election parties with Republicans, then kick back and drink Barolo with the Democrats. It’s only human. But it’s not particularly admirable. It doesn’t take courage – just the instinct of a dog to stick with its pack. The lone wolves Frum presumes to exile – serious, flinty, sometimes wrongheaded and mostly crotchety, unclubbable thinkers such as Peter Brimelow, Lew Rockwell, Paul Gottfried, Sam Francis, Pat Buchanan, and Justin Raimondo – have each added far more to the stock of interesting arguments on the Right than Frum ever will. They have each, in different ways, helped blow away the cloud of rhetoric, demagoguery, and lies that passes for political debate in this country. They each write with careful reference to history, reverence for the Western tradition, and an understanding of our country and its Constitution – instead of spewing mindless, provocative slogans such "Axis of Evil," or "Nuke Mecca." They each provoke serious thought among their readers. But then, that isn’t what Frum cares about. As far as I can tell, it never was.

Well, now we’ve got one. The Republican ideologues who twisted the Constitution into pretzels to grant Dubya almost unrestricted presidential powers—including that to detain and hold an American citizen indefinitely, without legal counsel or formal charges—now have the chance to savor the fruits of their labors. Some of us, six long years ago, warned of the dangers, said things like, “Don’t give George Bush powers you wouldn’t want to see Hillary Clinton wield.”  We were duly laughed at, by people who drank the Tom DeLay Kool-Aid about a “permanent majority.” Any prospect of a Republican re-alignment was squandered by our “cakewalk” into the Mesopotamian quagmire, and the influx of 2 million more future Democratic voters every year across the borders. We cranks, we unclubbable denizens of the fever swamps, we residents of the reality-based community, might justly take a bitter glee in the outcome. Except of course that we are more likely than anyone to feel the brunt of Obama abuse. The “conservatives” who’ve spent the past few weeks preparing the narrative that blames Sarah Palin for McCain’s defeat are quite adept at holding onto their seats at the table—even if they’re only begging for scraps. As someone who loves this country, and is grateful for all it has given my family in the past few generations, I cannot even muster a snicker of “I told you so.”

My final pre-election reflections, aimed at my fellow Catholic voters, over at InsideCatholic.com.

My series on the Seven Deadly Sins continues at InsideCatholic.com. This week it’s time for Gluttony!

My series on the Seven Deadlies continues over at InsideCatholic. This week, a sin that’s to most of our tastes: Good, old-fashioned Wrath.

The dust-up between Christopher Buckley and the management of National Review reminds me of the vicious infighting that prevailed in the Party of the Right, and other conservative groups, at Yale in the 80s. Bereft of influence, socially radioactive, completely marginal to campus life, we did what came naturally: turned on each other, convinced that if only we could purge “the freaks” in our midst whom we blamed for our situation, we would rise to prominence and make a difference. Of course, nobody agreed over who were the “freaks” who were giving us a bad name. So the infighting never ended. Soon the group was so small that there weren’t even enough constituents to form proper factions; we were just a group of “friends” and “colleagues” who pretty much hated each other, but had to stick together because everybody else seemed to hate us even more (if that were possible). Things got better after I left; I like to think it wasn’t just BECAUSE I left….

Here’s the key difference: We didn’t deserve our disgrace. While the profs and the institution were fairly tolerant (they could afford to be), students in those days were lockstep intolerant, sniffy and self-righteous twerps when faced with dissent. (I give a more detailed picture of the campus situation, and David Frum’s toxic legacy, here.)

The contemporary Right, having been neoconfiscated, has earned the contempt it’s getting. National Review is headed for a crack-up similar to The American Spectator‘s. Richly deserved. And very, very sad. The next four years of radicalism, expanding government confiscation, and abysmal Court appointments can be laid at the feet of the men in conservative institutions who feathered their nests, confident that they could go right on fooling 51% of the people 25% of the time (every election).  As they say down at the Kappa house: “Whoopsies!”

My latest reflections on the Seven Deadly Sins—this time I look at Lust.

The first in my series celebrating, one at a time, each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Click over, unless you’d rather just curl up in a fetal ball and take a nap. Which sounds really good, come to think of it….

Courtesy of LRC, a painfully funny Web cartoon on the $700 billion heist perpetrated last week—which apparently had no effect whatsoever on the global crisis. Does that mean we can ask for the money back? Count on this collapse of credit—caused by a combination of mindless populism (‘Every American deserves a McMansion…”) and affirmative action (”...even unemployed illegal aliens!”) to be used as an excuse for making our economy more corporatist than ever. This is what happens when inconsistent/dishonest people claim the free market mantle, and shed regulation while trying to hold onto government guarantees. Privatize benefits and socialize costs for long enough, and soon the people will insist on socializing the benefits too. Which will then mysteriously trickle down Uncle Sam’s leg.