Man, Noah put me to shame just now.
I haven’t written anything about Ross’s new gig because the enormity of the news defies comment. Ross is one of my best friends. We used to live in a house together with our friend Bridge and later our friend Graeme, and we also wrote a book together. We’ve spent more hours than I care to recall watching old episodes of Lost and the 1989 film Deep Blue Sea, eating Popeye’s, and plotting my career as an avant-garde monologist. It is absolutely impossible for me to be anything approaching remotely objective on the subject of Ross. I met Ross fairly late in life — we didn’t really know each other in college — and yet I feel a very strong kinship with him, despite the fact that we are deeply different people. When Ross is criticized, fairly or unfairly, I feel a sharper sting than I feel when I’m criticized, which is something that extends to a lot of my friends. The truth is that I’m not at my best when responding to the criticism of a friend. I have a tribal instinct, I guess.
So with that, I will try to make a substantive comment about Ross’s debut column: it is crisply written, carefully argued, persuasive, and a pleasure to read.
I think Noah makes a reasonable point, but, in truth, I don’t think it detracts from Ross’s central point — that the Cheney worldview should have been tested during the campaign.
I’ll add only that Ross’s argument has, I’m sorry to say, been lost on many readers of the Times, many of whom stopped reading the column after the headline or the headline and the first few paragraphs.
Ross is offering a fairly subtle critique of the Cheney worldview, namely that its continued popularity among rank-and-file movement conservatives represents their alienation from the electoral mainstream. Granted, Ross didn’t offer a frontal critique of the Cheney worldview. He acknowledges its intellectual seriousness as a prelude to bringing to light what you might call the dream palace of the Cheney-ites — the refusal to acknowledge that their view is rejected by most Americans.
So why not offer the frontal critique, i.e., why not explain why Cheney worldview is wrongheaded? Well, that doesn’t strike me as a smart way to introduce yourself to readers of the Times, who overwhelmingly reject the Cheney worldview. That would be preaching to the choir, and it’s my hope and expectation that Ross won’t be doing much of that. My guess is that the Times hired him precisely because he can craft his arguments in such a way as to engage but also to constructively provoke its readers, particularly on questions surrounding the state of the culture and our sexual mores and what an ethic of political compassion ought to look like.
I think….you need someone that can reach the base more than you need someone to tactfully explain conservative ethos to the left. The base pretty much threw all you Palin-rejectors out of their party.
“By “shredding her and mocking her,” they put themselves in opposition to the base, and intensified the identification of the base with her. Anyone with some minimal experience of life, without an ego or professional aspirations obscuring his or her vision, should have understood what would happen when, with the election under way, you called the base’s new darling, under heavy attack from all the usual suspects, a “cancer” (Brooks) or offered childishly ludicrous political advice (Parker) or made blanket judgments about Palin’s real understanding of her people – from 30,000 feet (Noonan) – or simply accepted without question the distortions of her beliefs and her record (all of them), then seized upon them as an excuse to re-double attacks not just on her but on her entire constituency.
It’s as though they wanted to split the party/movement – and right in the middle of a presidential election – all the while speaking as though convinced that they unquestionably possessed some higher insight into our best interests. It was a confoundingly, pathetically fatuous display.
- Ross calls the Cheney worldview a “diamond-hard distillation” of a strand of conservatism opposed to what it sees as excessive idealism and sentimentalism. This might be something like what Thomas Sowell called the tragic vision of human nature, a belief (basically) that constraints are more central than desires. Yet since Hamilton this view has coexisted in America with a belief in the possibility of republican government, which opponents of Cheney say he essentially rejected. And opposition to activist social policy need not be based on cold-heartedness. Distilling to the “Cheney worldview” is too reductionist a way to look at conservative politics, and too easily puts an unattractive face on ideas Ross wants defeated.
- Further, as a Douthat fan I was alarmed by the “supply-side economics and stress positions” line, which has a NYT op-edish, even Dowdian, ring to it. When in Rome, I guess.
- Critiques of limited government conservatism are, I submit, a response to the conditions of the year 2000 rather than today. The growing consciousness of the cost of government, the possibility of a double-dip recession if we destimulate the economy and fiscal catastrophe if we don’t, and the possibility that Obama supporters will discover that limits on the capabilities of government result from factors other than malice, incompetence and cynicism should lead us to expect another swing in the pendulum.
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