What’s Wrong with the World

But the problem with what he says is that he says that he'd rather have his kids listen to NPR than to Fox, and that, because NPR has a "higher" tone. Well, that's a problem. And here's why it's a problem: Suppose we agree that NPR has a major leftist slant. Isn't it a not-good thing for people to get the idea that people with a major leftist slant are (all) the admirable, smart, reasonable people? Kids are going to get enough leftist sneering at supposedly ignorant conservatives at school, if they go to school. The last thing we should want is for ourselves, as parents, to be communicating to them, "Here, listen to the lefties. They're the intellectuals. They're the reasonable people. They're the people with a measured tone whom I want you to emulate."

If Fox is as bad as he says (and I have no TV channels, so I cannot say), then turn it off, by all means. But turn on things that are _definitely worthwhile_ instead, not lefty views on all current affairs communicated in a Saruman-like tone of sweet reason.

Well, that's the issue, isn't it: whether NPR is a bastion of cut-rate Bolshevism, conveyed in dulcet tones. I don't believe that it follows from the fact of the general liberal orientation of the network that every single production is tainted by that liberalism, any more than I believe that the general neoconservative orientation of the National Review entails that everything therein is worthless.

We don't want children to be conditioned to perceive on the left merely the presence of dispassionate reason, but surely we don't want them to be conditioned to perceive on the right naught but bitter, resentful ranters, bloviating about things entirely beyond their comprehension, like Joe the not-a-plumber droning on about taxes and political economy. For that is the dynamic that confronts the right at present.

Perhaps the problem is that politics has become a form of entertainment, or at least political debate has. Limbaugh, for instance, has to entertain in order to keep his audience, so by nature his arguments and interests are going to be relatively lowbrow. Likewise for CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, etc. Meanwhile we turn to blogs for escape, entertainment and information (I'm currently avoiding grading a bunch of papers). Plus political debate has become so debased that, just like a science fiction movie, we have to suspend our disbelief in order to function. We see the mixture of politics as entertainment in the recent blowup between Miss California and Perez Hilton and the rock star treatment of President Obama. As politics continues to become a form of entertainment we can be sure that it will continue to head down the same vulgar path as most of our entertainment -- right and left. I'm only surprised that someone hasn't turned it into a reality show yet.

Politics is a form of entertainment for the vast majority of the populace, complete with the atavistic tendency to identify with political celebrities imagined to embody all of the traits of a valorized subculture, a glorious future, etc., in inverse proportion to the significance of the opportunities for self-government afforded by the system. When the people are enfranchised merely formally, and not substantively, what is left but to make of politics a spectacle, as opposed to a public discourse upon the common good? Our politics is much like the Blues and Greens in Byzantium.

It's my opinion that blogs are a _corrective_ to what's being complained about here. Some blogs, of course. Others are part of the problem. But the sheer number of sites to choose from means that one can, as it turns out, find blogs worth reading, substantive discussion, etc. I'd rather "tune out" of mainstream media almost altogether and rely on the Internet--carefully selected--for both news and opinion. But what I won't do is just participate in the reflexive bashing of "talk radio" and join in some consensus that conservatives are mostly stupid blowhards. I won't participate in communicating that either to my children or to others, because it isn't what I believe to be true. Moreover, I think there are indeed plenty of things to be upset about and that getting upset about them is not necessarily a bad thing. A good rant can have a lot of value and can communicate important content. (Vide my post on Wright's rant against PC.) Too often the "oh, let's not be like those low-brow talk radio hosts and public figures" stuff contains an underlying theme like this: "Let's not be emphatic about our conservatism. Let's try to sound reasonable by being willing to compromise with our _brothers_ on the left." If the alternative to Limbaugh is Frum, I'm afraid I'll have to go with Limbaugh. But I'd rather go with Auster than with either, if you see what I mean.

I agree with your general assessment. Part of the problem lies in the fact that somewhere in the last few decades, the conservative guardians of culture and high society have died off, retired, or been pushed out. They have, quite as a factual matter, been replaced in these roles by subversive leftists who are not well cultured in any real sense, but are rather principally snobs (and usually nouveau-riche snobs at that), who have managed to expand the boundaries of snobbery in fantastic ways. There have always been class snobs, but the new intellectual elites are also chronological snobs ("this idea is more than 45 years old? How horrid!"), idea snobs ("this new idea is something I disagree with? How horrid!") and bad manners snobs (that is, they insist on having bad manners, which is why we constantly have to hear them and why the results are never edifying; our ancestors were at least decent enough to be snobs in favor of good manners).

I have a personally favorite case study. Her name is Margaret Juntwait, and she has for several years now been the announcer and host for the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday matinee broadcasts. Even over the radio she reeks of the most fabulously vacuous and insipid leftist faux-intellectualism. Her predecessors, Milton Cross and Peter Allan, announced the opera with an appropriate degree of panache: the broadcasts were dignified, but without any stilted please-turn-the-dial-if-you-own-denim-clothing air. The current announcer, especially when coupled with her lisping Narcissus of an on-air commentator, gives the impression that listening to opera is something for baby boomers to do in between sacrificing oil executives to the earth goddess and yoga. Gone is all indication that the Metropolitan is a bulwark of a traditional cultural identity existing in a historical continuity and social cohesion with other such elements.

The final conclusion, really, is that these people, our new guardians, are not really up to the task. I honestly do not believe them to be as intelligent or well educated as their more conservative predecessors, and I know them to be less articulate. They cannot but be any other way---if you convince yourself that the first 25,000 years of humans were all chauvinist ignorami, you severely limit the realm of things you are willing to know and think about. So you're stuck talking about opera is if you were at best some Freudian hack, and at worst a high school drop out ("this scene is like, very powerful").

The only thing the rest of us can do is put on a well-tailored suit and do our best to teach our children by ourselves what the subjunctive is.

Among other reasons, conservatives largely abandoned education to the liberals. With education goes high culture.

I, for one, plan on taking back education. I hope this pursuit will be a defining one for the younger conservative generation.

There is also the fact that many of the most prominent contemporary conservatives in the media don't know their roots. Their collective memory goes back as far as Reagan and that's it. They wouldn't know Russell Kirk if he came walking down the street wearing a red hat.

As a matter of fact, I had one acquaintance recently ask me how Kirk could be a godfather of the American conservative movement like I claimed; after all, she said, she listens to Laura Ingraham every day and she's never once heard Laura mention him.

Ingraham, Rush, Hannity, Fox, etc., tend to espouse a type of conservatism that emphasizes economics and politics; cultural issues are discussed, but they are covered in a manner related largely to politics, and so-called "high" cultural issues (music, literature, etc.) are hardly discussed at all.

Their collective memory goes back as far as Reagan and that's it.

How is that any different from those whose collective memory purportedly goes back as far as The Great Bill Buckley?

(As if the mere mention of his seemingly ineffable name automatically wholly renders one as "conservative".)

The troubles with talk radio are multifarious, not least among them the reliance upon emotive and irrational modes of argumentation (Yesterday being Earth Day, Limbaugh unburdened himself of numerous fallacies, imagining them shatteringly profound, something I hope to post upon later); the tone, alternately hectoring and didactic, and always possessed of a supercilious certainty, as though only mental defectives could either fail or refuse to concur in whatever sentence is being passed - disagreement is a sign of moral failure; the essential anticonservatism of so much that is presented, as though Limbaugh's Emersonian dithyrambs to self-creation and limitless consumption, often expressed via the symbolism of resource-guzzling automobiles like the Hummer (which are sacraments of self-creation and freedumb) and other totems of crapulence, could be equated with the transgenerational conservation/cultivation of the permanent things; the jingoistic celebration of truculent militarism, a hubristic and bombastic chest-thumping about American military hyperpuissance coupled with a near-blasphemous faith in the impeccable righteousness of, not merely current American foreign policy, but all triumphalist American foreign policy ever undertaken; and those rote incantations of hieroglyphic anachronisms as policy prescriptions (for instance, this idiotic idea that the Laffer Curve proves that the ticket to economic recovery, and probably even the maximization of government revenues, always is to cut taxes, when, if the LC has any meaning whatsoever, it is that taxes can be either too high or too low).

In fine, neither the radio bloviators nor the Frums of the world are particularly conservative, but seek alternately, to "conserve" an earlier stage of the liberal demolition of traditional society, valorizing this as a sort of historical Pentecost of progress, or to advance, dialectically, beyond the current phase of liberal decadence, by combining certain features of an earlier liberalism with select features of the new. So, Limbaugh will celebrate the destructive creation of global capitalism, regardless of its costs for those striving to preserve some semblance of communal continuity - indeed, those having the temerity to object will be deemed whiners and losers - while Frum will attempt to preserve virtually all of the dynamism of destructive creation, while accommodating himself to liberalism's recent cultural declensions. Frum at least possesses the merit of a diaphanous veneer of intellectuality, while the radio talkers consider it sufficient that one is able to recite the talking points on cue; depth of understanding is neither requisite nor desired, and in fact is positively precluded. This is not a matter of an inner compulsion to compromise with the left, but a matter of the masquerade playing out in the name of conservatism.

If you listen to Limbaugh or Levin, who has a book out now attempting to define conservatism, conservatism originated with classical liberalism which found its highest expression in the founding of America. Thus the time of the founding is probably the furthest point to which most mainstream conservatives will look for any historical continuity. Any further back and they end up parroting the liberal nonsense about the world being entrenched in a dark age. I notice, though, that Levin is attempting to move past this at least ever so slightly, but it probably doesn't matter.

"The Morality of Everyday Life" is a great companion to understanding the shared assumptions between liberals and "conservatives." Fleming does a superb job of showing how both brands of liberalism are enemies of any real conservatism.

**Too often the "oh, let's not be like those low-brow talk radio hosts and public figures" stuff contains an underlying theme like this: "Let's not be emphatic about our conservatism. Let's try to sound reasonable by being willing to compromise with our _brothers_ on the left."**

I must confess to not seeing much of this at all among the conservatives I associate with, both locally and online and in print. The main complaint I hear about talk radio and 'mainstream conservatism' is that it's not conservative enough, or that, as Maximos states, it's just another version of liberalism with a sort of patchy conservative veneer.

"Fleming does a superb job of showing how both brands of liberalism are enemies of any real conservatism."

As does Kalb in "The Tyranny of Liberalism," albeit from a somewhat different angle.

Well, I suggest you follow Auster's coverage of Frum on Limbaugh. Like his being so proud of that magazine article cover, for example.

“… why conservatism, the New Criterion aside, has largely abdicated its natural role as the custodian of high culture, in all its expressions…”

When did conservatism ever serve as the natural custodian of high culture here in the United States?

Ideology, which modern conservatism has now become, can only corrupt, distort or suppress the true inspiration for artistic achievement. The Spirit's generative powers are thwarted in a disposable culture of consumption, and will not flourish amongst a movement devoted to preserving a life of acquisitiveness.

"“… why conservatism, the New Criterion aside, has largely abdicated its natural role as the custodian of high culture, in all its expressions…”

When did conservatism ever serve as the natural custodian of high culture here in the United States?"

The very fact that conservatism is not properly speaking an ideology provides, I think, the answer to this question---conservatism was the custodian of high culture because that culture, the idea of artistic achievement, was still viewed in a coherent manner that reflected the traditional understandings of society. People knew what "art" was, and that understanding was intrinsically conservative not because it had anything to do per se with federalism or what have you, but because it was conscious of its placement within a cultural continuity.

After the 1960s (and really somewhat before, but it goes mainstream in the 1960s) the arts become ideological---nobody wants to be Beethoven's or Van Eyke's or Michelangelo's successor; they want to show the societal oppression of the male ego on the mysteriously feminine etc. etc. etc. They are no longer interested in art. (Maybe it all would have been OK if they had been content to make beautiful things expressing their senseless ideologies. I don't really care how much Verdi longed for Italian unification---his music is still beautiful. I don't care how insightful some modern artist's thoughts are---his spray-painted urinal is still ugly.)

So conservatives were guardians of high culture not because culture and political conservatism were ideological bedfellows, per se, but rather because both sprang from common understandings about the nature of man, society, and the obligations one owes ones' ancestors and descendants alike.

Conservatives are the natural guardians of high culture because _usually_ we are not into the postmodern gibberish that has ruined so much. A conservative isn't going to make an "edgy" production of Swan Lake, for example, and isn't going to deconstruct Shakespeare. Indeed, liberalism in its academic, post-modern guise has destroyed many of the venues in which young people previously could become acculturated--the institutions of higher learning. It's the academic conservatives, some of whom are also political conservatives, who still talk about things like the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and even believe it.

It's not immediately clear to me what you're attempting to convey by referencing the Auster critique of Frum on Limbaugh, Lydia. This article on Frum's Newsweek cover essay seems to portray Frum's publication of the essay in Newsweek as a semiotic exercise, a signaling to the politically sentient that conservatism is the bigoted creed of sweaty, fulminating knuckle-draggers, and much of the subsequent commentary categorizes as an ideological cadre what is, in reality, a rather heterogeneous grouping of reformist conservatives, from the crypto-DLC member David Brooks to the genuine reformists Ramesh Ponnuru and Ross Douthat. Some of the specific, hypothetical reforms are ideas that the mainstream right has batted about since my high school days - free market health care reforms as means of expanding coverage, and approach to the environment that progresses beyond shouting that SUVs are teh awesome - and have been expressed as well by the AI software guru Jim Manzi, whom few have thought to criticize on these grounds. In fact, what Frum is attempting is really quite transparent, apart from his customary cynicism and opportunism: he is attempting to purge conservatism of the retrograde social conservatives, thereby to increase the appeal of the conservative 'brand' to the sorts of folks who live in places like the Philadelphia suburbs, people who were reliable GOP voters under Reagan and Bush the Elder, but have since recoiled from the GOP with a shudder of revulsion. He has implemented his own version of the Dougherty doctrine: conservatism would succeed if it were more like Frum; it's failing because it's too much like you social conservatives. And in this, he is diametrically opposed by Douthat, Salam, and Ponnuru, who have argued that Frum's strategy of targeting the affluent upper-middle is both electorally unsound and, at times, ethically compromised.

I don't believe that Frum's publication of the essay in Newsweek represents anything more than his personal opportunism, and resulted from the fact that National Review would never have dared to publish it, as it would have outraged their subscription base, unlike Frum's last bull of excommunication. Besides, Frum left NR because - in the initial telling, at least - he couldn't reconcile the magazine's barely-critical boosterism of the economy of finance capitalism with, you know, reality. The triumverate of mainstream conservative opinion journalism, NR, AmSpec, and the Weekly Standard, would never publish such an essay, and the remaining publications would either consider the subject matter pedestrian or the author persona non grata. He placed the piece where he could, and will exercise more influence by bypassing the conservative press in any event; but the glaring flaws of the messenger cannot obviate the truth of the critique, (which is not necessarily the truth Frum imagines it to possess) which is that a particular expression of conservatism, one that traffics in the sorts of postures and tropes I've been criticizing represents only the low road to marginalization.

The only thing the rest of us can do is put on a well-tailored suit and do our best to teach our children by ourselves what the subjunctive is.

I should like to point out that Auster has said that he always blogs in coat and tie.

But, seriously, what else is there than the enculturation of the young by their parents? The common culture is an amalgam, one way or another, of family cultures. When all is said and done, righteousness is more fit than inane liberal delusions. It will be the children of men and women who dress and speak well who will preserve our culture. Was it ever any different?

Personal virtue is in the end the only thing you've got that can stand against the tide. Or wait, amend that; for it may not stand against the tide. Yet still it is the only thing you've got.

As to talk radio, well ... even a wholesome patriotic right-liberalism can seem these days an awfully fine and rare thing, a bracing and invigorating thing. Oh for the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, or LBJ! We should not expect the talk radio hosts to talk like intellectuals. Many of them really are intellectuals, I suspect. But they have a product to sell, just as Opra does. Let them sell; it's their particular duty. Someone's got to do it, right? If they do, and if they make money doing it, their corporate clients will see to it that Congress leaves them on the air unmolested. So long as they can stay on the air, they can keep interviewing intellectuals such as Feser and Beckwith.

Failing that, we'll be relying upon the monasteries again - or their modern day equivalents, the blogs. Face it, talk radio is Hadrian's Wall. Sure, the men on the ramparts are all Sassanians and Persians and Goths. But at least they are shooting at the Picts.

Kristor wrote:

"Failing that, we'll be relying upon the monasteries again—or their modern day equivalents, the blogs. Face it, talk radio is Hadrian's Wall. Sure, the men on the ramparts are all Sassanians and Persians and Goths. But at least they are shooting at the Picts."

Good!

Kristor's point underscores the egregiousness of Frum's attempt to discredit (not just criticize, but utterly discredit) Limbaugh.

(Note: Go to my site to e-mail me.)

The very fact that conservatism is not properly speaking an ideology provides,

Please, the organs of the movement march in lock-step to a series of bromides which are treated as divine Revelation by people who view Mark Levin as an intellectual giant.

I think, the answer to this question---conservatism was the custodian of high culture because that culture, the idea of artistic achievement, was still viewed in a coherent manner that reflected the traditional understandings of society.

Really? Impressionism is coherent? Frank Lloyd Wright (pre-1960's) had a vision that spoke to one's deepest aspirations? Identify this Golden Age of "conservative custodianship of high culture". When? Where?

political conservatism ... sprang from common understandings about the nature of man, society, and the obligations one owes ones' ancestors and descendants alike.

Yep, like run huge federal deficits in order to maintain a "benign" Empire abroad and a commercial state built on debt at home. Here kids, pay-off these I.O.U.'s to the Chinese for us, please.

It's the academic conservatives, some of whom are also political conservatives, who still talk about things like the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and even believe it.

Talk is all it is. The "Permanent Things" wither before the logic of the market, the onslaught of "creative destruction" and sating of the autonomous individual's material appetite. The fictional self-made man has little desire for Christ beyond the inherited custom of Sunday church attendance.

Post-modernism was the inevitable result of a society choking to death after relegating Him to the status of mythic symbol. And it is not just the Left who conspired to create homo economicus.

Personal virtue is in the end the only thing you've got that can stand against the tide.

The pagans had personal virtue. It is only Christ that can keep us from sinking, not any illusory strength of ours.

Oh for the liberalism of Woodrow Wilson, or LBJ!

Sure, if sending your sons to far-off abattoirs is your idea of patriotism then, yep, why settle for pale imitations like Bush and Obama.

So long as they can stay on the air, they can keep interviewing intellectuals such as Feser and Beckwith.

I suppose that this encapsulates my objection to the dominance of the talk-radio faction in contemporary conservatism: the radio personalities who interview genuine intellectuals and philosophers like Feser, Beckwith, and McGrew are not those establishing the political and cultural trajectory of either conservatism or the Republican party, any more than National Review's publication of favourable reviews of Feser's books means that NR fully apprehends and embraces the substance and implications (most critically) of his Thomism. Outliers, in other words - and therein lies the problem. Limbaugh is a right-liberal, as Kristor freely concedes, though I would hardly affirm that his schtick is in any way wholesome, which impels my question: are we traditionalists/paleos so desperate, so marginal, that we feel the necessity of latching on to an earlier iteration of liberalism in order to experience both a subjective sense of cultural significance and an opportunity at political influence? How has that worked out for us over the course of the modern conservative movement? The enemy of my enemy is usually still my enemy.

It's not immediately clear to me what you're attempting to convey by referencing the Auster critique of Frum on Limbaugh, Lydia

I was responding to Rob G, who said he didn't know what I was talking about when I referred to criticism of talk radio as code for compromise conservatism, Maximos. Probably I shd. have named him in my comment.

I think Kristor has a good point, though I have to admit that I got too busy and a bit bored with Limbaugh years ago, so now I hear what he's up to only via the Internet. (I like Kristor's reference to the Picts. Perhaps an even better reference wd. be the union of the Arian Teutons and the Romans to fight off the Huns.) Maybe he's gotten less wholesome than he was when I used to listen to him all the time. But let's be willing to lighten up a bit. I realize that his patriotism is jingoism to you, Maximos, but not all of us share your strong-paleo foreign policy views, anyway, and I, for one, often get a real sense of relief out of hearing someone of the Limbaugh ilk tweak the noses out of the pompous liberals. Let's be careful not to be pompous and long-faced ourselves.

Lydia, how can the critique of talk radio conservatism be dog-whistle for compromise conservatism, when so many conservatives who are more conservative than talk radio hosts also criticize it?

As for tweaking pompous liberals, who among us does not enjoy it? My only argument here is that there are better and worse ways to go about it, shrieking about the hypocrisy of Al Gore - to take but one example of the genre - being among the latter, not merely because it's hackneyed, but because it's ad hominem. And as regards foreign policy, one needn't subscribe to the paleo perspective in order to grasp that Limbaugh's defense of aggressive, pre-emptive war, whether in Iraq, Iran, or elsewhere, is anti-conservative, and also a patent defense of injustice. Paleoconservatism has nothing to do with the matter; Just War doctrine is what it is, and does not include pre-emptive war; nor, for that matter, does patriotism countenance the sort of "all America's foreign policy is just, and her law is truth, and, by the way, the world still owes us for (insert historical event here), so go along with us in (insert foreign policy misadventure here)" bombast.

Maximos, I'm not saying all criticisms of Limbaugh are code for compromise conservatism; I'm saying that some that I've seen are. I think too that we need to think context, here. We shd. remember the 1980's and 1990's when the blogosphere was barely (or not yet) up and running and conservative talk radio was about the only resistance out there, and we shd. remember that the Obama folks would love to silence "intellectual" conservative bloggers just as much as "bombastic, lowbrow" conservative talk radio hosts. There is a reason why Obama keeps talking about Limbaugh, and it isn't because Obama is a closet conservative! This is part of the wisdom in Kristor's comment about Hadrian's Wall. In my opinion it's not exactly the time to be jumping on the bandwagon of "Oh, what a bunch of embarrassing, knuckle-dragging idiots conservative talk radio hosts" are, when we realize that this is the very thing Obama & co want us to be doing in the service of their pretty blatant censorship goals, which will not stop at talk radio!

There are better and worse ways to disagree with what some particular talk radio host has said, and Kain's content-ignoring "I want my kids to listen to NPR because they're so classy and conservatives aren't" way is one of the worse ones.

"how can the critique of talk radio conservatism be dog-whistle for compromise conservatism, when so many conservatives who are more conservative than talk radio hosts also criticize it?"

Yes, this was exactly my point. The conservatives in my "group" (mostly ISI, Kirkean, 'Modern Age' types) criticize Fox and talk radio for being only selectively conservative, or, in other words, not conservative enough.

Although the targets are the same, Frum & Co. are attacking them for very different reasons.

Where does the line between acceptable and just not good enough lie? That would seem to be the question---do we toss out talk radio because it could be and maybe ought to be better, or do we tolerate its flaws because it not only serves a useful purpose, but actually reflects an element of truth? The Joe-Sixpack angle isn't for everyone, and it surely isn't any way to set the principles of an entire society, but clearly the acknowledgment of the worth of simpler ways of life is a valid element of conservative ideals. Look at the agrarians, or to Chesterton: the importance of the arts and intellectual endeavors doesn't mean we should disdain small farmers and shopkeepers. Rush isn't exactly Allen Tate, but insofar as he emphasizes the importance of common people and their common perspectives, he is not entirely wrong, even if he is largely obnoxious. Trying to find the proper balance of "lowbrow conservatism," then, seems to be more useful than looking for a compromise-conservative litmus test.

The Joe-Sixpack angle isn't for everyone, and it surely isn't any way to set the principles of an entire society, but clearly the acknowledgment of the worth of simpler ways of life is a valid element of conservative ideals.

If Limbaugh were merely a particularly bombastic exponent of a populist conservatism, a conservatism of the common man and his simpler ways of life, then his public persona, exaggerated though it still would be, would be worth accepting in exchange for his apologetics; but the 'conservatism' he defends is in no respect a defense of the common man and simpler, communally and culturally embedded ways of life, but a revivalist sermon for the very politico-economic forces that decimate such ways of life and deracinate their erstwhile adherents - as evidenced by his fulsome celebrations of limitless consumerist crapulence, and his supercilious manner of dismissing the occasional caller with the temerity to interrogate his advocacy of deracinated individualism, destructive creation, propositional Americanism, and overt contempt for community. Such persons are the losers and whiners of life, practicing a politics of victimization, and are counseled to grow up and jettison their childish perspectives and sentiments, and in this, it is difficult to perceive any difference between Limbaugh and progressives prattling on about the inexorable movement of history towards their own ideals. In fine, a lowbrow conservatism that actually defended the concrete, culturally and communally rooted interests of the common man would be a fine thing, in its place, in in measure, but this is not what we have.

Well said, Jeff. For evidence of this, note the well-nigh universal thrashing of Mike Huckabee's campaign among these guys. Now Huckabee may have had his problems, but their dismissal of him as "not a real conservative" and hence not worth their (or the voters') time was painfully closeminded or dishonest or both.

It is only Christ that can keep us from sinking, not any illusory strength of ours.

Oh, I'm sorry -- I thought only conservatism (or, more precisely put, today's revised version) is what can keep us from plunging even further into the abyss!

Now Huckabee may have had his problems, but their dismissal of him as "not a real conservative" and hence not worth their (or the voters') time was painfully closeminded or dishonest or both.

Yet another 'conservative' that 'conservative' viewers here can catch on the FOX network!

In fine, a lowbrow conservatism that actually defended the concrete, culturally and communally rooted interests of the common man would be a fine thing, in its place, in in measure, but this is not what we have.

With the caveat that the following is poorly, probably very poorly at that, thought out, regarding high culture, it isn't immediately apparent that political conservatism was ever its guardian, or that this is somehow one of its natural roles. Conservatism isn't innately anything other than an attitude of resistance toward what liberals and leftists are doing. It's not a philosophy, or even an ideology, but a set of personality traits and attitudes. Now, conservatives ought to be interested in the True and the Beautiful as represented by high culture and expressed in the great books of the canon, but so should everyone else. That they're not, that we're not, is just the condition of modernity.

Huckabee on Fox? That's a bit of a surprise. Maybe there's hope for them after all. Since I don't watch it I'm not sure what their take on him was during the campaign. I do know that Rush, Hannity, and Quinn wouldn't give him much time, and a lot of the neo-con types were also pretty dismissive.

Conservatism isn't innately anything other than an attitude of resistance toward what liberals and leftists are doing.

Indeed, such individuals were more again than for.

It's not a philosophy, or even an ideology, but a set of personality traits and attitudes. Now, conservatives ought to be interested in the True and the Beautiful as represented by high culture and expressed in the great books of the canon, but so should everyone else. That they're not, that we're not, is just the condition of modernity.

It is this kind of abhorrent conflation that folks herein have been notoriously complicit in by entries as these that only serve to engender even greater animosity towards traditional ideals and high culture.

It's no wonder that subsequent generations tend to treat the latter with such disgust & utter resentment. In actuality, what they actually do resent and dispise are not these but rather supposed conservatives whose incredible elitism and intellectual snobbery only tends to inspire such flagrant hatred for such things!

Rob G.

Huckabee on Fox?

Yes - Huckabee does have a show on the FOX network:

http://www.foxnews.com/huckabee/index.html

Well, blow me down flat. I am just...shaking with something akin to outrage. You see, I didn't know anything about Erik Kain before this post. Maybe you, Maximos, and all these other commentators did, but I didn't. If I had, I would have been a heck of a lot less gentlemanly in my comments above where my fellow conservatives said, "I just don't know why in the world you consider all this anti-talk-radio stuff to be code for compromise conservatism. That's not what my crowd uses it for."

Well. Then. I guess Erik Kain isn't part of you guys' crowd either, is he? Except that this very post is predicated upon hearty agreement with Erik Kain. And this is Erik Kain:

There are a number of fires burning in the ongoing culture wars - from immigration to censorship to gay rights and of course, abortion. Some of these are more controversial than others. Some are a whole lot less morally clear than others. And almost universally, the way the culture warriors fight their battles - on the left and the right - is by waging divisive wars, demonizing the other side, and through the incessant politicization of our culture.

Look, to me, the gay marriage debate is not really a controversial item anymore. I think it’s unequivocally right that gays to be allowed to marry, and for Churches to choose who they do and do not marry. I believe both the religious and the homosexual population will be protected this way, though I think there’s another trial in store for religious homosexuals, but that’s another story. In this sense, why Rod Dreher, for instance, is making this about religion is beyond me. That struggle will be made within the Churches and the individuals who attend them.

However, the issue of abortion is much more difficult. No matter how hard I try to see it from a pro-choice perspective - and I do try - I cannot think of a fetus as merely that, as merely an extension of the mother. I think of a fetus as a baby, and I think of babies as people with basic human rights. As such, I think of abortion as a violation of that baby’s right to life. I don’t consider girls who receive abortions or their doctors as murderers, though. I don’t think of pro-choicers as “evil” and in fact, I have a lot of sympathy for the moderates in that camp, because I think more people than not - pro-life and pro-choice - would like to see the end of abortion, they just often disagree about the means by which to achieve that end. There are deep cultural beliefs at play here, and it’s wrong to think of the other side as “the enemy” or as bad, immoral people - it misses the larger point, and denies them the compassion and respect they deserve.

http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/04/pacifism/

Gay marriage? He's on board with the left. Abortion? Well, that's _difficult_, but God forbid we should be _polarizing_ about it or fight a _culture war_ about it or think of the other side as _evil_ or anything. (How about the doctors who actually tear the babies limb from limb, Mr. Kain? Are we allowed to think of them as evil? Or not?)

And on and on and on. The guy is calling us all to throw in the towel on the culture wars. And _this_ is the person whose views on NPR I'm supposed to care tuppence about and whose animadversions on talk radio and the Right I am not to take as code for compromise conservatism?

I'm in something akin to shock. Next time, I'll click on all the links before commenting on a post. And maybe do more research on the person being approved of.

I'm fully cognizant of the commitment of Erik Kain, and several of his co-contributors over at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, to homosexual "marriage", and in point of fact, I even emailed Paul Cella a link to one such article this very week, the comment appended to the link referring to the repulsive condescension of it, or something to that effect. But Kain's personal employment of the critique of talk radio, a critique shared by conservatives whose commitments to traditional morality cannot be impeached, does not determine the objective significance of the critique; one man's use doth not the meaning establish. While I do, myself, find the "just get over it" meme re: marriage and the religiously committed to be offensive, as I've repeatedly demonstrated on this site, it's a but mysterious to me how my rejection of Kain's position on a social issue is supposed to translate into an acceptance or tolerance, if not endorsement, of, say, Limbaugh's jingoism or hymns to self-indulgence. If anything, all I'm asserting is an intellectual rejection of a more general anthropology that both hold in common, beneath their apparent political and circumstantial disagreements.

Well, from now on I trust my antennae more than ever before. I mean, look, Maximos: You evidently knew well, before I knew it, that this whole preference of Kain's for NPR over Limbaugh is part and parcel of his general opposition to "polarization"--all that leftish, Frumish, junk--which is the _very thing_ that I pointed out we need to distance ourselves from and be careful of associating ourselves with by jumping on the "bash Rush" bandwagon. And yet I got a "nobody here but us chickens," "I scarcely know what you're talking about," "why are you bringing up Frum?" response. *At least* you could have said, "Your point is well-taken, and I'm sorry to say that Kain is very much of that ilk. And I do very much wish to distance myself from all this nonsense about ending the culture wars, finding common ground, and getting rid of the social conservatives, being a rampaging soc-con myself. I would merely agree with Kain on such-and-such a limited point." You're saying the latter part of that now, though not the former part. But instead of which, I stumbled upon Kain's agenda and larger political outlook entirely accidentally on my own. Wouldn't it have been better to volunteer the information that my worries about this sort of agenda to the Kain-talk are, in fact, well-placed in more cases than one?

*At least* you could have said...

Why, exactly, unless it is the case that the critique of talk radio is of its nature always a dog-whistle for abandonment of the culture wars? The merit of the critique, and the meretriciousness of talk radio, are independent of any one commentator's intentions in articulating that critique; I'm no more affirming or minimizing Kain's positions on marriage in approving his critique of talk radio than I am approving every detail of Zizek's leftism by observing that, for example, his discussion of perversion and the obscene secret supplements to public legality is insightful, particularly in this age of torture-as-conservative-litmus-test.

Kain's politics, incidentally, are decidedly un-Frumian, as Frum is a neoconservative defender of managerial democracy and Kain is an exponent of a sort of left-decentralism.

Well, partly because it ain't just some one position of Kain's. Note what he says about abortion, about being a "pacifist in the culture wars," etc., in the long quote above. It's *absolutely obvious* that all this stuff about how wonderful NPR is and how icky conservative media is springs from the "left" part of that "left-decentralism." Which leads to the question of why a conservative should care tuppence about the fact that Kain would rather his children listen to NPR than to Limbaugh. From what I'm seeing, it's a case of "Well, no kidding, the guy's a liberal and doesn't like 'polarization' or the culture wars. We already _know_ what those people think of talk radio, and they can go pound sand." The comment in Kain about NPR was pretty strange to begin with, especially given the complete absence of any concern about the _content_ or _slant_ of NPR, but when it turns out he's *not a conservative*, it all falls into place.

We're talking past one another at this stage, to wit: there is no reason to interpret Kain's critique of Fox News and talk radio as principally concerning the culture wars, inasmuch as a) the culture wars do not feature significantly in either medium, both of them tending to focus on hymning war, torture, tax cuts, and the worst expressions of capitalism to the heavens, and b) the occasion of Kain's little critique was a Fox News segment on.... torture. This critique is quite valid independently of any unimplied subjective inclusion of the culture-war angle on Kain's part.

For my part, I would never have my children listen to talk radio, because there is literally nothing conservative about the personalities that have become household names, either in the substance of their politics or their manner of presentation. They are connoisseurs of emotive and fallacious argumentation, and theirs is increasingly a politics of irritable mental gestures. I quite honestly cannot fathom the obsession with NPR as a bastion of Bolshevism, when there is much in the programming that is simply apolitical. Certainly, I've no interest in listening to an interview with a female professional of some sort who, at the age of 40, meets the love of her life, the first woman she has ever dated, and I would never permit my children to listen to it, either. But am I to believe that an interview with Simon Johnson of MIT on banking and the power of financial oligarchies is either inherently leftist, or leftist by virtue of the fact that it airs on NPR? An interview with some film producer? All conducted in polite, measured tones?

We already _know_ what those people think of talk radio, and they can go pound sand.

If talk radio is even in the general vicinity of where Kain claims it to be, it seems to me that that is the pertinent issue in the critique of talk radio, and not the unenumerated motivations the critic may have for voicing the critique. If the criticism is that radio talkers are un-self-reflective blowhards who have torture fetishes, the question is, "Is that true?", not, "Is Erik Kain only complaining about blowhards who love torture because he really supports gay marriage?" Please, let's not be inverted Andrew Sullivans, for whom all issues reduce to detecting the support for gay liberation behind every argument we dislike.

We don't want children to be conditioned to perceive on the left merely the presence of dispassionate reason, but surely we don't want them to be conditioned to perceive on the right naught but bitter, resentful ranters, bloviating about things entirely beyond their comprehension, like Joe the not-a-plumber droning on about taxes and political economy.

Jeff, that is a head-long assault on the basic assumptions underlying our system of government, and a complete capitulation to leftist thought. The notion that only a special intellectual elite can possibly comprehend "taxes and political economy" is pure Saint-Simonism.