Hewitt and Romney

Hugh Hewitt is a big Romney supporter. Like me, he protests the strange and unseemly effort to declare Romney’s candidacy dead and push him out of the race before it’s even started. Some loud commenters at Hewitt’s site (see the comments for the page linked above), and also some name conservatives such as Michael Medved, think Hewitt has gone off the rails in his passionate championing of Romney. I don’t know enough about Hewitt’s writings on the subject to have an opinion about that. However, I have been saying for weeks that while there are reasonable grounds to oppose Romney, the inordinate and extreme animus that has been expressed against him by various parties on the left and the right shows something amiss with them, rather than with the candidate himself.

Hewitt at the top of each page of his blog features a “race at a glance” table showing the actual total votes and delegates that each candidate has won so far. Guess who’s ahead in votes and delegates? The man everyone discounts, Romney.

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Harry Horse writes:

I know Hugh Hewitt from his radio show better than his writings (mostly at TownHall.com). He competes with Mark Levin and Michael Savage for the national evening airtime. He is enthusiastic, probing, intellectually honest, very much like a junior faculty member most of us have known at some point. He is certainly worthwhile enough that honest people who consider themselves conservatives, should weigh what he has to say. His blog’s comment section is a disappointment and he shows poor judgment in letting it run wild, as it is a deterrent from viewing his site.

Alex M. writes:

I lost an immeasurable amount of respect for Michael Medved during the run up to the illegal immigration revolt, when he kept pounding anyone and everyone who wouldn’t accede to his brand of “realpolitik” which held that we couldn’t do anything about the 12 million who were here and that we should simply concentrate on coming up with the “least disruptive” way in which to grant them all citizenship. Since then I’ve stopped listening to him on the radio and don’t care a whit about anything he says on the topic of this upcoming race.

It’s too bad, because in many other ways Medved is a champion of the moral identity of Western civilization in this country. He should have stuck with being a cultural critic and left it at that.

I’ll abide by my own counsel (and that of intelligent critics like Lawrence) and continue to support Romney as the best hope that conservatism has in 2008. Not perfect by any means, but the best shot we’ve got.

LA replies:

What Alex is saying is that Medved’s championing of amnesty and his contempt for all who disagree with him undercut Medved as a champion of the moral identity of Western civilization. It’s a profound point. It means that one cannot be a genuine champion of our moral, national and civilizational identity without respect and loyalty for our actual country as distinct from other countries, a respect that includes validation of our right to exclude foreigners from our country. Without a belief in particularity, sovereignty, and the right to say “us” and “them,” any championing of Western civilization turns into neoconservatism, a view of the West as consisting of procedures and ideas, not of real concretes, a view that inevitably ends up as a betrayal of our concrete identity to other concrete identities.

Consider John McCain. According to former Sen. Santorum in his interview with Hugh Hewitt,

Well, I mean, because John McCain was the leader on the other side of the aisle. John McCain was the guy who was working with Ted Kennedy to drive it down our throats, and lectured us repeatedly about how xenophobic we were, lectured us, us being the Republican conference, about how wrong we were on this, how we were on the wrong side of history, and that you know, this is important for his … because having come from Arizona, knowing the strength of the Hispanic community, that we were going to be seen as racists, and he wasn’t going be part of that, that he was not a racist, and that if we were for tougher borders, it was a racist thing. [Italics added.]

“… knowing the strength”—i.e. the virtue, the goodness—“of the Hispanic community.” Notice that McCain never talks of the “strength” of America’s non-Hispanic white people. In fact he’s said that America has no culture, and that this is the way it ought to be. At the same time he praises the culture of the Hispanics and says we must surrender to it. They have a culture, and he promotes its spread; we have no culture, and if we try to assert one, we are xenophobes.

So, if you uphold certain traditional things about your country, which Medved does, while simultaneously despising your country’s particularity in the name of liberal universalism and nondiscrimination, which Medved also does, you inevitably open your country to other peoples who still have an intact particularity, and who will push your particularity aside. Michael Medved may sound like a champion of Western culture, and he may even believe himself to be one, but in reality he is not.

LA writes (1/13/08):

I can see why some people think Hewitt is over the top on the subject of Romney. I just found this at Stuart Rothenberg’s Political Report, in an article on Romney’s religion speech in December:

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt called the speech “simply magnificent,” but went even further, immodestly declaring, in a way not intended to encourage discussion or disagreement, that “anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst. … On every level it was a masterpiece.”

“Anyone who denies it is not to be trusted as an analyst”? Is Hewett serious? How does he expect to be trusted as an analyist, when he says something like this?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 12, 2008 12:00 PM | Send