Conservative who calls illegal aliens Americans accuses other conservatives of living in a bubble

Rod Dreher appeals to the deep wisdom of David Brooks and to the latest New York Times life-in-America-is-a-bottomless-pit-of-misery story to show how wrong-headed are those conservatives who oppose McCain and Huckabee. McCain and Huckabee, say Brooks and Dreher (echoing every me-too Republican of the last 50 years), are the “modernizers” who are trying to lead conservatism into the real world of today. The conservative opponents of McCain and Huckabee, Dreher continues, are the “Bubble Republicans,” who, he predicts (and it’s the sort of “prediction” that is plainly the expression of a wish), “are going to go down this November, and they’re going to go down very, very hard.”

Take that in, folks. Rod Dreher, the “Crunchy Con,” doesn’t just side with Huckabee and McCain. Dreher wishes political destruction on the conservatives who oppose them, as well as on whichever candidate those conservatives nominate, presumably Mitt Romney. How quickly crunchiness turns to vengeance when its warm and fuzzy sentiments run into an external check. (And Dreher’s sentiments were checked as never before when I and others criticized him recently for his corporate authorship and personal approval of the “The Illegal Alien as Texan of the Year” essay.)

Also take in the fact that David Brooks, whose entire career since the mid 1990s has been devoted to subverting conservatism and changing it into liberalism, is now Rod Dreher’s authority on where conservatism ought to head.

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Stewart W. writes:

So, instead of presenting a conservative, traditionalist alternative to liberalism and then providing the leadership to help achieve that goal, or at a minimum “standing athwart history yelling stop,” the goal of these “modernizing” conservatives is to drag conservatives into a world we didn’t create, and which we all despise, for the good of us all. Very inspiring, but no thanks.

LA replies:

Very well put. What you’re showing is that they are not just betraying one side and going to the other side, they are literally abandoning and reversing the very essence of conservatism in order to become liberals.

It’s like what Irving Kristol in 2003 said was the purpose of neoconservatism, to create a new conservatism, suited for the modern world.

Also, what you said triggered something in my head. In my 1991 review in NR of Richard Brookhiser’s The Way of the WASP, I summarized his account of America’s loss of its former WASP ethos:

… the objective test of use (which implies a moral standard derived from nature) has given way to diffidence: “[Things] are, therefore we defer to them”—a neat characterization of America’s timorous response to every minority demand …

Then there was Progressivism (exemplified by Woodrow Wilson), which changed men’s notions of the good. “Progress was not progress toward anything definite…. It was going with the flow, waiting in the baggage-claim area of history to see what rumbled up the belt next.”

So:

Things are, therefore we defer to them …
Going with the flow …
Waiting in the baggage-claim area of history to see what rumbles up the belt next …

Sure sounds to me like the current editors of NR, as well as Rod Dreher and a lot of other “conservatives” who have been telling us we have to abandon our principles and adapt ourselves to what liberals believe, instead of standing for conservative principle and trying to lead others in our direction. The very notion of having principles, the very notion of leadership, is alien to the chestless “conservatives” of today. What they call leadership (as in leading conservatism into the modern world), is simply a cowardly surrender to current apparent trends.

A reader writes:

I don’t think Lowry and Ponnuru ever were conservatives except in the most shallow way. They are products of their time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 16, 2008 10:24 PM | Send