I really do have a soft spot for intramural spitting contests among Republican intellectuals. It reminds me a lot of the stuffy air in Nassau Inn’s Yankee Doodle Tap Room, with its black and white photos of alumni like George Schultz and Donald Rumsfeld.
What, after all, are we to make of the following defense of snobbery from the retired Dartmouth English professor and National Review Senior Editor, Jeffrey Hart?
“Like the Whig gentry who were the Founders, I loathe populism,” Hart explains. “Most especially in the form of populist religion, i.e., the current pestiferous bible-banging evangelicals, whom I regard as organized ignorance, a menace to public health, to science, to medicine, to serious Western religion, to intellect and indeed to sanity. Evangelicalism, driven by emotion, and not creedal, is thoroughly erratic and by its nature cannot be conservative. My conservatism is aristocratic in spirit, anti-populist and rooted in the Northeast. It is Burke brought up to date. A ‘social conservative’ in my view is not a moral authoritarian Evangelical who wants to push people around, but an American gentleman, conservative in a social sense. He has gone to a good school, maybe shops at J. Press, maybe plays tennis or golf, and drinks either Bombay or Beefeater martinis, or maybe Dewar’s on the rocks, or both.”
Holy smokes!! Most conservative professors I’ve known have had better sense than to praise their own privileged lifestyles. Usually, they complain about how poorly they are compensated. Hart has all conservatives’ knickers in a twist. That’s what happens when one of their most revered elders leaves the reservation and starts saying stuff like this:
[William] Buckley did object to my conclusion that Bush had been the worst American president in that earlier draft. He thought it too categorical, and, at the time I was writing, he was right. That was soon after the 2004 election. But much of the evidence now is in. And I’m sure that somewhere James Buchanan is throwing a champagne party. He’s no longer the worst.
The earlier draft was more explicit:
“Bush will be judged the worst President in American history, from both a conservative and a liberal point of view, finding a consensus on the bottom, at last, and so achieving a landslide victory that evaded him in 2004.”
All this Bush bashing has created a bit of a backlash. For example:
Alston Ramsay ’04, a former editor of both The Dartmouth Review and National Review who now works for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, disagrees: “There is no doubt that Hart’s encyclopedic knowledge of literature could make even the lousiest argument take on the sheen of verisimilitude. But in his recent writings the willingness to ignore contradictory evidence, the monopolistic way he defines his terms, the baffling dislike of Evangelicals—it all adds up, and even his legitimate points become hard to discern through the haze of his own internal contradictions. About the only thing Jeff Hart has convinced me of recently is that ‘conservatism’ is what Jeff Hart says it is. No more, no less.”
Hart’s young colleagues at National Review have been equally unsympathetic: “In every generation,” wrote Jonah Goldberg and Ramesh Ponnuru in the magazine, “some conservatives will lose the intramural debates, and it will be only natural for them to feel that they have lost them unfairly. They will maintain that they alone have stayed true to the faith. Liberals will, in turn, be delighted to tout these scolds as exemplars of a good conservatism.”
But Hart isn’t taking that crap from a couple of paste-eating wannabes.
Goldberg and Punnuru are certainly correct in saying that I have lost the “intramural debate” among the ignorami who agree that Bush is conservative.
I certainly was not aboard that Ship of Fools, so-called “conservatives” as well as “neo-conservatives” – more correctly neo-trotskyites – who sailed with Bush right over Niagra Falls and smashed to pieces on the rocks of reality below.
In a just world, the whole lot of them would be caught up by a hungry mob and given over to Robespierre’s favorite instrument of death. And then we would break into their homes and drink all their Beefeaters.
