Linker, Tanenhaus & Liberal Fascism

[Jonah Goldberg]

Via RCP, I found this odd post by Damon Linker on Sam Tanenhaus' book, The Death of Conservatism. Among other things, he writes:

And yet Tanenhaus makes his counter-intuitive case with elegance and rigor, drawing on the ideas and policies of dozens of writers and public figures—including Edmund Burke, James Burnham, Whittaker Chamber, William F. Buckley, and Michael Oakeshott—whose conservative credentials are unimpeachable. An intellectually serious conservatism would jump at the chance to engage with an author who uses its leading lights to argue that the movement has gone seriously astray. But that’s not what contemporary conservatives are doing. When they aren’t ignoring Tanenhaus’s book, they’re doing what they do best: policing orthodoxy.

Take Peter Wehner’s representative remarks about the book, published on Contentions, Commentary’s group blog. A former assistant to Karl Rove in the Bush White House, Wehner is a master of deploying the rhetorical trick that contemporary conservatives use to convince themselves that they’re always right. At bottom, it amounts to a high-minded version of the old Pee-Wee Herman taunt, “I know you are, but what am I?” There are countless examples. A handful of liberals stupidly describe conservatives as fascists, so Jonah Goldberg responds by writing several hundred pages about the threat of liberal fascism. (Get it?) ...

And so on. Then, once Linker has cleared his throat by attacking conservatives for their rigid and ideological attacks on Tanenhaus' book he proceeds to....echo most of the conservative attacks on Tanenhaus' book, albeit with considerable boot-licking.

A few things come to mind. First, Linker gets a great deal entirely wrong. If anything, conservatives have lavished more attention on — and been more deferential to — Tanenhaus' book than they would if it were written by almost anyone else. Tananhaus was invited to make his case at the American Enterprise Institute — twice! — and each time he was given a very respectful hearing. The book's been widely discussed on the right, including in this space. The editorial note in the latest issue of Commentary is on Tanenhaus. I have a long piece in the magazine pegged to Tanenhaus. The Claremont Review of Books has a big review coming out on it. The New Criterion devoted considerable space to it. All this despite the fact that Tanenhaus' book is simply a rehash of an outdated magazine piece (also discussed too much at the time of its publication), which is usually cause for considered indifference. Moreover, the thesis of both his magazine piece and book has been completely overtaken — and swamped — by events. But instead he's received considerable engagement.

One reason for this is Tanenhaus is a nice guy who, in the past, has seemed open to conservative ideas. He's respected because of the great work he did on his Chambers biography. And he's greatly feared because he controls perhaps the single most important redoubt of the liberal establishment (he edits both the book review and the "Week in Review" sections of the Times), which still controls the commanding heights of the culture. (I don't expect any invitations to write for the Times in the foreseeable future.)

But here's the thing: The Death of Conservatism is simply, irrefutably, a wildly unpersuasive piece of work (full disclosure Tanenhaus is not a fan of mine). Here's how I put it in the latest issue of National Review (sub required):

Much has been written about Tanenhaus's book already. Indeed, it's hard to think of a book that unites more factions of conservatism than Tanenhaus's tome, about which the apparently universal consensus is that it is completely, totally, and in every way imaginable unpersuasive. Not bad or uninteresting, mind you; just unpersuasive, like a wild-eyed witch-doctor ooga-boogaing about why he should be allowed to remove your spleen. It's all heart-felt, passionate, even artistic, but you'd want a second opinion. In order to make his case, Tanenhaus offers a series of incredible (as in not credible) assertions about the political landscape that leave the reader asking, "Were we watching the same movie?" For instance, in Tanenhaus's telling, George W. Bush was a doctrinaire, dogmatic, true-blue, radical right-winger who bullheadedly refused to work with the political opposition on centrist policies. Not only that, during Bush's tenure all of the discredited ideas of the "revanchist" wing of the Republican party — those would be the ideas advanced in this magazine, in case you were unclear — were fully deployed, and failed. "During the two terms of George W. Bush, conservative ideas were not merely tested but also pursued with dogmatic fixity."

That Bush was a proud promoter of "compassionate conservatism," explicitly rejecting Buckleyite conservatism; that he massively expanded entitlements and worked with Teddy Kennedy on education; that he signed campaign-finance reform, supported amnesty for illegal immigrants, and was utterly mute about racial quotas: None of this counts in Tanenhaus's estimation. Ditto that Bush signed the first stimulus bill and backed the first bailouts of this economic crisis. That this magazine sharply disagreed with Bush on these issues and others in no way immunizes us from the charge that we spent eight years serving as a revanchist PR machine for the White House. Oh, and in case you didn't know: William F. Buckley was a Disraelian pragmatist willing to work with liberals and sagely resigned to the modern welfare state.

Don't be alarmed by that Twilight Zone vibe you're getting. It's perfectly normal. In fact, it's intended. At an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, I told Tanenhaus that his description of things had a decidedly "otherworldly" feel to it. He responded by pleading "Guilty as charged" and saying that otherworldly writing was a great tradition among intellectuals, or some such, and that he did not shirk from the accusation one bit. It almost sounds like he's saying his narrative is fake-but-accurate.

Linker's finger-wagging notwithstanding, it's clear from the second half of his post that even Linker basically agrees. Heck, even Tanenhaus understands that no one except the liberals blurbing his book (Toobin, Matthews et al) find his argument plausible. It seems to me it's a hard case to make that conservatives are simply "policing orthodoxy" when our critique is very, very close to none other than Gary Wills' critique in The New York Review of Books. Last I checked, Wills is not on the distribution list for our VRWC talking points.

One last point of personal privilege (I'll let Pete Wehner defend himself as he's fully capable of doing). Something in the water over at TNR virtually guarantees that those folks treat my book unfairly or ignorantly (or both!) and Linker's no exception. For the record, I do not object to a "handful" of liberals calling conservatives fascists as Linker crudely snorts (talk about policing orthodoxy!). What I say is that American liberalism, infected by Frankfurt School Marxism (via Adorno, Hofstadter et al) as well as Popular Front leftism generally, has convinced itself that American conservatism is a close relative of fascism and that the further right you move in the American political system, the closer you get to fascism. This idea suffuses our popular culture, academia and a great deal of the liberal journalistic establishment.

Linker is either dishonest or ignorant if he thinks just a "handful" of liberals have been infected by this article of faith of the left (though it's nice to know he thinks they're "stupid" for having been). It has been a staple of much TNR analysis for over half a century. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Lyndon Johnson, and Harry Truman all trafficked in this stuff. Truman arguably won in 1948 by accusing Dewey of being a Hitlerite stooge. Stalin stooge Henry Wallace — when he was the editor of TNR and when he ran for president — made such noises regularly. LBJ's campaign spoke in code about Goldwater being a frontman for the forces of "hate" which meant fascists. Martin Luther King Jr. deciphered the code for those who didn't understand: “We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater campaign.” Jesse Jackson a generation later: “The Christian Coalition was a strong force in Germany.” He continued: “It laid down a suitable, scientific, theological rationale for the tragedy in Germany. The Christian Coalition was very much in evidence there.”

As anyone who's actually read my book (I doubt that includes Linker) knows, I can go on for quite a while like this. Personally, I think one of the most telling critiques from the left of my book is to deny that this fundamental misunderstanding of the right is ingrained on the left.

Linker is intent on telling conservatives what we would do if we were "intellectually serious." He should try harder to lead by example.