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Jim Kalb was interviewed by the bloggers 2BlowHards on January 2004. It is a three-part interview dealing mostly with conservatism.
I remembered reading this part of the interview a while ago. In view of my last post, How Not to Fight the War against Islam, I thought it appropriate to present it here.
Here is the pertinent part:
2B: I find many media conservatives (Bill O'Reilly, etc) unappealing -- gloating bullies who like to use ridicule and tell people, "Tough, kid, suck it up." To what extent to such people represent the kind of conservatism you discuss?This has been my problem with conservative writers (pundits, bloggers) for a while. This is why I don't follow the vituperative writings of Main Stream Conservatives (a new term here?) such as Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham (notice how these are all women - is there a connection?). Talk show hosts and Fox News presenters are perhaps the more volatile of the male version of these female bloggers. In fact I no longer read them, or listen to them, unless there is a link to them from other blogs or sites.
Kalb: They are indeed conservative, since what makes their views what they are is that they choose some things that are inherited or natural at the expense of liberalism -- that is, at the expense of a direct attempt to maximize the equal satisfaction of individual preferences. They're not thoughtful, though, so they can't explain why they reject the liberal program in favor of something else. The result is that their conservatism takes on an aggressive and arbitrary quality, at least in style.
In Canada, we have bloggers Kathy Shaidle, Wendy Sullivan (and the more obscure Kate McMillan), TV host Michael Coren and magazine publisher Ezra Levant, who are part of this vocal conservative group.
In my own humble way, I think I recognized the trend that Jim Kalb discussed in his interview in 2004 (which I only recently found, and was not influential in my decision) after a year or two of reading their sites.
I think that there are various levels to the thoughtlessness that Jim Kalb is describing. I think Coulter is actually quite sharp and witty, and comes up with sophisticated arguments. But, it gets tiring to just get a string of complaints (amounting to rants, at times) on her weekly articles, all aimed at "liberals". No solutions, no new ideas, just the kind of arbitrariness that I discussed here about Shaidle's recent post, which was thoughtlessly acquiescent to the leftist run-of-the-mill idea of "diversity".
I feel that we have been led (or led ourselves) on a wild goose chase, without realizing what we are chasing, why we are chasing it, and what to do about it if we ever caught it (not that we'd even want to catch it.)
In truth, what we should have done is to define our own principles better, and forget about "catching up" or acting in defense. It not necessarily an offensive mode that I am suggestion, but a tactic that includes better articulation of our ideas, better understanding of the consequences of liberal/leftist ones, and strategies and principles to advance those, and protect what we already have. This of course takes time and study, and is not privy to the sound-bite type reactions which we have borrowed from the left.
Besides the knee-jerk reactions, which Kalb mentions in his interview with 2blowhards, here are two articles which explain this phenomenon more clearly.
For the sake of brevity, I will just posts some relevant quotes from both, and leave you to read the articles for yourselves, since the authors discuss their ideas in depth, and convincingly.
From Jim Kalb's Reason and the Future of Conservatism:
[M]odern tendencies of thought have deficiencies that make them destructive if left to their own devices. What do we do about it?From Lawrence Auster's How to Oppose Liberal Intolerance:
There is an inarticulate "I just don’t like the way things are going" response. That takes two forms: first, things were better the way they used to be, and second, "thus far and no further." Neither of these options is going to stand up. Something more principled is needed.
Many conservatives therefore adopt what might be called the neoconservative or moderate modernist response...But that doesn’t work either.
[...]
What conservatism needs, then, is a non-modern understanding of reason—of what makes sense. Otherwise conservatives will always be playing defense, with no clear idea what the game is about.
How do we articulate a different understanding of reason?...We can start, though, by noticing some things lacking in modern reason with regard to the good, the true, and the beautiful.
As to the good,...rational action is not a simple matter of means and ends...Loyalty, for example, is rational because it’s a matter of acting in accordance with what I am. I’m loyal to my country and my family not simply because I happen to feel like it or to achieve some other goal but because I’m part of them and they are part of me.
As to the true, we need the transcendent. The modern outlook lacks a way of dealing with realities that we cannot fully grasp
[...]
Religion is the obvious source. You can pretty much define religion as a scheme of orientation toward goods and truths we can neither do without nor understand completely.
One final point [on beauty]: a great point in favor of conservatism should be a superior understanding of beauty. Beauty is one thing that modernity can’t give us at all. The point of beauty, after all, is to be exactly what it is. It’s irreducibly non-technological. For these reasons, a conservatism that does not take beauty seriously is rejecting something essential to its own life. Burke said that a social order has to have something in it that inspires love. He was right.
While conservatives complain endlessly (one might even say boringly) about the double standard, however, they have signally failed to understand it. One explanation may be that today's leftists deceptively describe their politics as "liberal," a fiction to which conservatives have all too willingly subscribed.
Conservatives have done this partly out of naïveté and partly out of a desire not to be polarizing, since their most basic need as conservatives is to affirm the harmony and cohesion of the existing order. Treating leftists as "liberals," they are constantly surprised and scandalized at the "liberals'" illiberal intolerance.
Let us therefore go beyond these futile complaints about the double standard and instead ask why the double standard is so characteristic of today's "liberalism." Once we answer that question, we may be in a position to combat the double standard effectively, instead of spending the rest of our lives complaining impotently about it.
[...]
The basic reason for the "liberal" double standard...is that today's "liberals" are really leftists who have rejected the older liberal belief in a shared equality of citizens before the law and have embraced the socialist vision of "equality as a fact and equality as a result," as Lyndon Johnson famously put it.
Moreover, since socialism has been discredited following the fall of Soviet Communism, the left has for tactical reasons largely shifted its demand for equality of results away from the economic sphere to the cultural/moral sphere and the advancement of "oppressed" cultural and ethnic groups. The result is cultural socialism...In order for the desired state of equality to be attained, we, the unfairly dominant group, must be condemned, excluded, and dragged down, while the Other must be celebrated, included, and raised up.
[...]
The key point is that the double standard results automatically from the demand for equality between inherently unequal things. The double standard is not a mere excess or defect of leftism, but its essence.
[...]
Therefore the real debate that we conservatives must seek to join with our "liberal" adversaries is not between their alleged support for equality and tolerance and our alleged bigotry and hatred. The real debate is between their desire to dismantle our traditional morality, institutions, and culture, and our desire to preserve our traditional morality, institutions, and culture—indeed our very freedom and existence as a people.
Modern liberalism is a leftist and nihilistic rebellion against the inherently unequal nature of the human condition. If we conservatives named this ideology for what it is, we would have a fair chance to defeat it or at least stem its advance. If we are effectively to oppose modern liberalism with its destructive double standards, we must oppose it on principle.
