This is an interesting op piece on how an old conservative is basically alienated from modern "conservative" politics. Don't let the first few paragraphs turn you off. It gets interesting: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=76&ItemID=7056
Very interesting article, and I agree with almost everything he says. I particularly like this: "In the ranks of the new conservatives, however, I see and experience much hate. It comes to me in violently worded, ignorant and irrational emails from self-professed conservatives who literally worship George Bush. Even Christians have fallen into idolatry. There appears to be a large number of Americans who are prepared to kill anyone for George Bush. The Iraqi War is serving as a great catharsis for multiple conservative frustrations: job loss, drugs, crime, homosexuals, pornography, female promiscuity, abortion, restrictions on prayer in public places, Darwinism and attacks on religion. Liberals are the cause. Liberals are against America. Anyone against the war is against America and is a liberal. "You are with us or against us." This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong. End of the debate." This certainly describes a lot of what I have read on the Political Discussion forum. The irony is that the frustrations that he cites above are generally frustrations that all Americans feel. The conservatives vent their frustration in war; the liberals (by and large) blame the war and a bloated, indifferent Bush administration for stealing resources that could help solve these problems within our own borders.
I can sum up how I feel about this in a single phrase: "William F. Buckley - yes, Ann Coulter/Rush Limbaugh - no"....
What ignorance? What irrationality? Which examples? BLANK OUT. On the contrary, this quotation that claims opponents are fact-free ignoramus's is itself fact free: no examples are given; to those who Believe, none are needed; those who don't, no explanation is possible. As someone steeped in the Right while living in a world dominated by the Left (locally, socially, and nationally), I don't see any veracity here. For instance, last I attented The Center For The American West's "Conversations With Secretaries of Interior" Series http://www.centerwest.org/secretaries_interior.html In November, Interior Secretary Gail Norton sat between Professors Patricia Nelson Limerick and Charles Wilkerson in front of a full house of 700 people. The only protests during the series came in the middle of this one - why? The only Bushie around to castigate over many decades long BIA problems - necessitating high security and the arrest of a dozen people. How come the Right is so irrational that it NEVER happens when Leftists show up to speak in Red States? Similarly, last October, the American Indian Movement attempted to block the free speech rights of Columbus Day marchers. Today, an AIM leader, Ward Churchill - not to mention a prof at the same university where the previous protests took place - hides behind the free speech rights he would deny others in having called the World Trade Center victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns" deserving of death the very next day! (See "Moronic Tales From Academia," Jan. 28, 2004, http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004321.html) Well, la-di-da! But since the Fall of Communism, Nation reading types (and "Z," even worse) have grown increasingly irrational, vituperative, and disconnected from reality. After all, the Left lives to rule, and has been increasingly rejected from rule in America; it's not like they don't have reasons to get hysterical and Moore-onic! Of course, the left can't abide Manicheaism when called for - they can't judge right from wrong, effective from ineffective, when reasonable circumstances (eg, life or death issues like self-defense) require it. THIS, then, becomes the jejune 'paralysis of analysis' of the Right by the Left: "This is the mindset of delusion, and delusion permits no facts or analysis. Blind emotion rules. Americans are right and everyone else is wrong." HUH? But read this - Anti-anti-neoconservatism: A review of "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order," by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke & "Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana," by Gary Dorrien http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/winter2004/alexander.html (The Claremont Review of Books, Winter 2005) - AND then tell me about "delusion," "absence of facts, or analysis!" Isn't is high time the Left got beyond the cardboard cut outs where stereotyping parades itself as "sophisticated" analysis like Michael Moore, Thomas Frank, and Khan's Zmag author? There is a world out there with real problems requiring real solutions; wishing them away won't make them so. (It's become the Kennedy-Boxer-Kerry mantra, still - even in defeat.) -Orson PS Carl: if Anne Coulter offends you, then you're simply not thinking about the treasured history of female taunting in civilization; if you can't stand Rush, then I have to wonder what other autodidacts you find beyond the pale - and why? Besides, William F. Buckley, Jr., is retired; is your knowledge ofcontemporrary conservatism this fossilized, too? YOU ought to pick up "The Right Nation" (2004) by John Micklethwait and Adian Woolridge, both writers with The Economist - sources obviously slighted at Z-magazine.
Re: What ignorance? What irrationality? Which examples? BLANK OUT. Orson, Anne Coulter doesn't offend me completely since she is a babe of the first magnitude - I would not mind becoming "fossilized" in her presence, for example....
