A column by
Jonah Goldberg published in the dead-tree National Review (August
30) “A Muslim Gay Bar by the Mosque?” typifies the utterly infantile quality of
our current movement conservative discourse. Goldberg writes in glowing defense
of Fox News celebrity Greg Gutfeld, who had just advocated (presumably in a
serious way) the creation of a Muslim gay bar in the vicinity of Ground Zero.
Goldberg happily embraces this idea as a “tough-minded libertarian.” After all,
freedom, he insists, “is a cultural institution that needs to be defended, even
if that means offending people.” Moreover, “whatever you may think of gay bars,
they’re not going away in the freedom-loving West. Pretty much everybody else
in American life has learned how to live-and-let-live with such places to one
extent or another.”
One might ask Goldberg, the
“tough-minded libertarian,” why just one month earlier he had denounced Rand
Paul in a column for raising hesitant objections to Provision Two of the Civil
Rights Act, a provision that restricts an employer’s right to hire whom he
wants for a job. According to Goldberg in one of the most ferocious tirades
I’ve seen coming from his pen, unless the subject is the critics of Israel or
“Obama fascism,” he let loose against the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate
from Kentucky for “lamenting the lost right of bigots.”
Apparently the anti-discrimination
mechanism created by Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave this country “economic
freedom” for the first time, although it is not at all clear how it did so. But
in any case why is my historic right to hire or accommodate whom I want in my
business establishment less of a right than the right to run a gay bar, to the
consternation of religious and moral traditionalists? Why should I have less of
a right not to confer a job on a prospective employee than to scandalize devout
Christians by establishing a sodomy recruiting agency in their neighborhood?
We all know the answer. Like his
pals on FOX News and NR, Goldberg occasionally mimics a politically
correct leftist even while working for GOP electoral victories. There is
nothing noticeably rightwing about him or his chums, Rich Lowry, Glenn Beck, or
the other movement conservatives who are working overtime trying to demonstrate
their sensitivity to minorities and cultural liberals. Whether it is Glenn Beck quoting Martin Luther King and deploring the mildness
of Reconstruction, Rich Lowry congratulating Abe Foxman and the ADL for taking
a “courageous” position against building a mosque near Ground Zero or Laura Schlesinger ranting against the N-word, all of these personalities
are as nauseatingly obsequious as they’re predictable. I’ve no idea why the
only people who seem to notice this obvious fact are contributors to and
readers of this website. Whenever I mention the same tics to white-bread
Republicans or NR-subscribers, their response is to tell me they
didn’t notice the offending behavior.
Are movement conservatives who
denounced Obama for bowing to the Emperor of Japan blind to the infinitely
greater indignity committed by W, who apologized for slavery in West Africa in
2003? Why was there no “conservative” outcry similar to the one against Obama
when a Republican insulted White Americans? Further: was Steve Sailer the
only writer who noticed when FOX “conservative” Karl Rove pushed sub-prime rate
loans for Hispanics before the financial crash at the end of Bush’s reign? One
might think that conservatives would be up in arms over such an outrage.
Somehow such facts never register
when I bring them up to movement conservatives. My interlocutors prefer to go
into a song and dance about Obama’s being bad news. They also insist that the
people I complain about must be rightwing because the Left says so. And,
equally important, FOX News describes them as “conservatives.” Moreover,
these good folks have no choice but to butter up minorities and gays. Otherwise
the Left would attack them even more vigorously than it does as racists, sexists,
and homophobes. The question left begging is this: If the Left rushes to attack
their mild opposition as politically incorrect, no matter how furiously
Goldberg, Lowry, and Schlesinger suck up to PC victims, why do movement
conservatives bother to grovel -- to no avail? They might as well move to the
right openly -- or at least stop groveling. The reason they don’t is they
themselves are captive to the Left psychologically and socially. These
authorized opponents of the Left reflect what they intermittently claim to be
against. In the media industry, cultural-social differences are far less
significant than elsewhere in the country.
As a scholar it behooves me to
mention some possible objection to my assertions. There are movement
conservative critics, it might be argued, who, contrary to what I seem to be
suggesting, have moved away from Goldberg, Ross Douthat, and David Frum by
going after the gay lobby. Just about any issue of First Things would
show the persistence of this other view. Also (and this too I may be missing)
articles in mainstream movement conservative publications take critical stands
against illegal immigration, more gay rights, and other recent demands of the
social Left. Certainly the conservative movement does not uniformly resemble
the establishment Left on every question relating to race, gender, lifestyle,
and the war against discrimination.
But counter-objections could be
raised to these arguments. One, most prominent movement conservative
journalists and TV personalities associated with the Right behave very much
like Lowry, Goldberg, etc. Beside feeling obliged to express joy over the civil
rights revolutions for black, women and other minorities, these prominent
conservatives are slavishly tied to the GOP. Fox News and NR stars
have become tiresome adjuncts of that party. And movement conservative
celebrities seem to be following the Bush-Rove strategy of throwing under the
bus traditional conservative groups like Southern Whites in order to appeal to
the civil rights lobby, AIPAC, and “moderate” minorities. Why bother worrying
about insulting crackers, which Lowry did in a glaring manner when he described the alleged racist murder of Shirley Sherrod’s father
as “demographically representative” of the South before the feds got into
enforcing the civil rights revolution? The Southern whites will vote for the
GOP no matter what.
Two, the morally traditionalist,
predominantly Catholic wing of the conservative movement will be allowed to
spin its wheels, as long as it doesn’t show too much independence. About twelve
years ago, R.J. Neuhaus and others associated with First Things began
talking about the moral decadence of the “American regime.” But the grousers
were promptly disciplined by Decter, Himmelfarb, and other female custodians of
the neocon hegemony. These ladies explained to the obstinate priest and his
friends who it was who controlled their finances and access to the media.
Almost immediately the complaints against the “regime” stopped.
Moreover, it is permissible for
conservative movement-affiliated traditionalists to go their own way on
abortion, gay marriage, and a few other family issues, providing they swear
fealty to their masters in other matters. To the latter belong such weighty things
as backing neocon-promoted wars to spread liberal democracy and end
“Islamofascism,” celebrating the triumphs of the civil rights movement and the
canonization of Martin Luther King, and praising the American example of
global, propositional democracy. Opponents of abortion treat their pro-life
stand as an extension of the civil rights movement, and they counterfactually
identify the pro-choice lobby as “anti-black.” (Of course blacks take the
diametrically opposite position, as one learns from their predictable political
choices.) The same traditionalists, typified by Michael Novak and Cal Thomas,
enjoy attacking the Left as “anti-Semitic,” although this warning has certainly
not affected Jews’ voting patterns. The traditionalist wing of the conservative
movement pays a heavy price indeed for its limited right to expression under
neocon surveillance. Catholic and other traditionalists are clearly not in the
driver’s seat, and they can be effortlessly pushed off the bus or demeaned, the
way NR treats unreconstructed Southerners.
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Friday, 20 August 2010
GOLDBERG VARIATIONS
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