Fred Barnes conservatism

A reader writes from Tennessee:

Fred Barnes has been one of those neocons who thinks “everybody is conservative.” About nine years ago, Barnes wrote an article in The Weekly Standard on how “sports are conservative.” Barnes named pro football and pro basketball as the “most conservative sports,” and the Dallas Cowboys as the “most conservative football team.” This was when the behavior of the members of those organizations was becoming more odious than ever.

Around that time, Barnes wrote another piece in the Standard about how “California doesn’t matter anymore.” He wrote that the state had become irretrievably liberal and lost to the GOP. Barnes’s idea was that this was all right because only California was in that situation. Barnes didn’t write a word about California’s demographic change.

Barnes is a journalist, a purely conventional mind, working within and shaped by a certain conventional sphere, which in his case is the sphere of soft-neoconservatism. He has no ideas.

His comment about sports that the reader quotes is classically revealing of the neocon/Limbaugh mindset. There is nothing in these people by which they can stand back and criticize the culture of their own time. They look at our hyperliberalized, decadent society and they see “conservatism,” indeed the triumph of conservatism. The mental world they inhabit is a closed circle. This is a truly strange phenomenon.

And yet, and yet, part of the strangeness of it is that this pseudoconservatism is very conservative as compared to the left and as compared to Europe. This pseudoconservative element in America has prevented America from being much more leftist than it actually is, though, of course, the pseudoconservatism keeps becoming more and more leftist over time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 23, 2006 05:55 PM | Send