Polishing Jonah

“American Greatness,” as all things Trump in general, has gotten under his skin.

American Spectator: Jonah Goldberg wrote a column for National Review before departing for his Christmas holiday in Hawaii. Was it a retelling of a long ago night before Christmas, when a tiny Jonah in footy PJs couldn’t sleep for hope of a pony under the tree? No. It was a screed titled “Conservative Facts.” What set off Goldberg was a column in American Greatness by Chris Buskirk titled “Death of The Weekly Standard Signals Rebirth of the Right.”

Goldberg speckles his efforts with pop culture references to things like Star Trek. Example: in this column, he says Washington “picked a wrong week to stop sniffing glue.” I like a good Airplane! reference as much as the next fellow, for life is hard and humor, however looted from better humorists and however clumsily employed, softens that hardness. But Goldberg doesn’t stick to joking. He bitches.

Buskirk’s column applauded the failure of the Weekly Standard and the dwindling influence of neoconservatism, which was featured in that publication. He, like many conservatives, sees neoconservatism as an ism that through “titanic hubris and priggish moralism” failed conservatism. They think it led America into unnecessary wars while failing to contain the growth of government, defend our borders, or promote traditional American beliefs and institutions. They believe that while America was trying to build democracy in foreign lands with our blood and treasure, America, at home, was being transformed into something unrecognizable.

In his column, Goldberg attacks Buskirk by parading and applauding the intellectuals who created neoconservatism. Buskirk is “dumb” because he doesn’t address the works of each of these luminaries when criticizing neoconservatism. It’s a bit like the Antifa loon who says you can’t knock the “Resistance” till you read his latest manifesto, then after you do and say you still don’t like them, he insists you must also read his book I’m OK, You’re a Nazi, then watch a dozen YouTube videos of him lecturing his cats. Well, unlike the Antifa idiot, we can learn important things from the writings of the neocons. They were clever and patriotic, but that doesn’t mean they were always right or Right. Good motives don’t guarantee good results. Smart people can underestimate the difficulties to be overcome to achieve a righteous goal and can ignore other, more worthy, goals. To the point here, criticizing them doesn’t mean you must contend with every word they ever wrote or every honorable deed to which they are connected. A practical way to evaluate political ideas, and a way empiricist neocons should applaud, is to look at the results the ideas produce. Neocon-endorsed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan got rid of some people well worth being rid of, but there appears to be no end to the bloodshed. Neocons also failed to reduce Big Government, the target they explicitly reviled in their foundling days. Buskirk aptly observes that conservatism during the heyday of neocons became “a shadow of the progressive Left — following always just a few paces behind wherever it led.”

Buskirk’s sharpest criticism is directed at neoconservatism’s camp followers who cashed in on the philosophy. He writes that during the heyday of neoconservatism “a new generation of careerists, sycophants, and know-nothings flooded Washington eager to find a Beltway sinecure. The legacy conservative media began to change. Step by step it abandoned historic American principles and ultimately came to despise the American people. Their motto seems to come from Horace, the Roman poet, who wrote, Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (‘I hate the common people and avoid them’).” Goldberg doesn’t address this point. Instead, he proves it true.  more

h/t Forcibly Deranged.