Obviously, I don’t buy the idea that when giants like Bill Buckley roamed the earth, conservatism was teh awesome, but Kathleen Parker digs up a quote from Russell Kirk that is very interesting in light of today’s purity tests and party purges:
In fact, the 10-point checklist proffered by Bopp and others is the antithesis of conservatism. As Kirk wrote in his own “Ten Conservative Principles,” conservatism “possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata . . . conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”
Each of Bopp’s bullets is so overly broad and general that no thoughtful person could endorse it in good conscience. Some are so simplistic as to be meaningless. As just one example: “We support victory in Iraq and Afghanistan by supporting military-recommended troop surges.” What does that mean? Do we support all troop surges no matter what other considerations might be taken into account? Do we take nothing else into account? Does disagreement mean one doesn’t support victory?
Whatever the intent of the authors, the message is clear: Thinking people need not apply.
What’s interesting to me is that today, even self-styled intellectual conservatives claim that David Hume and Edmund Burke offer specific policy proposals. I guess the truth is that anything can be dumbed down to a list of bullet points if you try hard enough.
In fairness, it’s not just Republicans hanging up a sign that says “thinking people need not apply.” When Obama is compared to Spock for insisting on the use of reason in decision-making and told to just make a fast decision, even it’s wrong, on Iraq Afghanistan, the media has that sign up too.
It’s hard not to see this as a sickness that may eventually destroy our society.
MBSS
it’s pretty telling that pubes wax nostalgic about guys like irving kristol and bill buckley. cos buckley’s racism covered with a thin veneer of high falutin’ words was soo intellectually sound…
jeffreyw
Thinking? What an odd notion! We don’t need no stinking thinkers!
FDRLincoln
It’s not between Spock/Obama and Kirk/Republicans.
The election was between Spock/Obama and Commodore Matthew Decker/McCain…half-cracked guy racked by guilt and doubt but not *completely*evil.
WIth McCain/Decker out of the way, now the contest is between Spock/Obama and Captain Ron Tracey/Republicans…
(if you understand these references, congrats on being as big a geek as me).
MBSS
@FDRLincoln:
thank god, i have no idea what you are talking about.
Heresiarch
A sickness that may eventually destroy our society?
Did you see the teabagger video that got posted earlier?
LD50
Someone hasn’t been paying attention. For 8 years, us DFH’s were told that disagreeing with that idea meant that not only did we not ‘support victory’, but also that we didn’t ‘support the troops’, ‘hated America’, and ‘wanted the terrorists to win’. Forgive me if I laugh at conservatives now acting all butthurt because they get to have this McCartyite bullshit directed at themselves for a change.
nitpicker
Also, from page 47 of my copy of Kirk’s The Conservative Mind:
Tony J
@FDRLincoln:
Okay, I think I know the first reference. Decker was the Captain of the – other – Federation ship in the Delta Quadrant, yes? The one who was violating the Prime Directive by harvesting alien energistic lifeforms for fuel because that was the only way to get his crew home quicker? And not, as Wikepedia would have you believe, the Dutch-born director of the East India Company who was created a baronet by George I in 1716?
I’m lost on the second one. There’s a Ron Tracy who has something to do with the North American Roller Hockey Championships, but I’m afraid of what I might find if I go there.
Partial geek credits?
Richard S
Too late – our society’s gone. We’re nothing more that a mass of twitching idiots waiting for the next empire – China? – to tell us what to do.
Obama as Bush light caved the minute he became emporer – it’s a drug.
FDRLincoln
Tony: Good effort Tony, but you got the wrong series…these are original series Star Trek references, not Voyager references.
Mike in NC
I really, really hope the RNC adopts the Big Bopper’s purity test. Once Palin hears about it, they won’t be able to resist.
AngusTheGodOfMeat
So far it seems to be destroying itself, and the blogs. Not the country.
Sorry, Big Scary Boogeyman image = fail.
Again.
I dunno, maybe I am just not as chickenshit as you are.
Richard S
[email protected]
Not many of us old enough to remember that who are reading progressive blogs 40 years on.
Da Nihilist
More Star Trek analogy fail from the article:
If you want to be beamed up, talk to Mr. Scott.
The Sheriff Is A Ni-
Ah yes, that good ol’ BJ optimism. Good grief, the ghosts of William Randolph Hearst and every publisher that stumbled over themselves to get the latest on Jack the Ripper, John Dillinger, and Charles Manson are going “You’ve only noticed this now!?”
Mike G
Just when a near-perfect storm of unpopular Democratic ideas — from massive health-care reform to terrorist show trials, not to mention global-warming hype — is coagulating over 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Parker can go Cheney herself.
She was all to happy to equip and goad the Repig Purity Police to beat down the DFHs because “we’re at war” (Que? We’re still at war fucktard, yet you seem to have no compunction about criticizing Obama’s tactics when doing the same with Bush made DFHs ‘terrist-lovers’). Now she’s whining that the thugs aren’t following Queensbury rules and are, well, acting like thugs and turning on her Very Special fellow villagers.
The Tim Channel
This is what Intelligent Design leads to.
Enjoy.
jcricket
@Mike G: Thank you – was wondering how long it would take for someone to post that gem.
If this is the best the conserva-tard-elite can do then they’re really fucked. The “regular folks” are running the party into the ground through “purity tests”, teabagging and a rightward move (rhymes with Burch). The “elites” are running the party into the ground by opposing science, facts, logic and reality b/c it doesn’t fit with their agenda, which appears to be opposing whatever liberals say + tax cuts. Somewhere in their is “robbing the poor to further enrich corporations and the top 1%”.
The only problem is the American public in the “middle” appears to be too stupid to connect the dots. See California, where the voters hate Republicans a lot, but still oppose sensible tax increases, believing the magic budget cut fairy will solve everything without cutting anything they care about.
For this I mainly blame the Democrats, who seem perpetually willing to play the victim, roll over and otherwise take it up the ass with whatever meme the Republicans have concocted (like “unpopular public option”).
cleek
not if rock music, Mary Jane, short skirts and The Pill get there first!
bondwooley
The ignorance and anger spewing from the fractured right could indeed bring down our society – but luckily there’s a groundswell of legitimate rage washing up against those angry morons and their bumper sticker mentality:
American Outrage
Wile E. Quixote
@FDRLincoln
Actually I think with McCain/Decker out of the way the contest is between Spock/Obama and Garth of Izar/Republicans.
Linkage provided for you losers who don’t know Star Trek: TOS.
Woodrowfan
Decker was in the only STOS I remember watching when it first aire din the 60s, as opposed to the many reruns in the 70s. it’s still one of my favorite St’s and one of the STOS that (IMHO) aged well, “The Doomsday Machine”
Of course, I still think of Decker as James Thurber too..
Comrade Scrutinizer
@FDRLincoln: Yeah, but that whole setup on the planet with Cap’n Tracey and all was so friggin’ lame. Yangs? Kohms? Pass the Bromo-Seltzer, please.
FDRLincoln
I dunno Wile E….Garth of Izar was completely insane…Tracey was (IMO) more in control of himself and more conciously evil, which I think is more fitting for today’s GOP.
Comrade Scrutinzer: Yeah, “Omega Glory” is a lame setting…but Tracey was a great villain.
Hmm….now that I think about it, I can’t exactly say that the current GOP makes great villains. They are too cartoonish. Maybe Wile E. is right.
Deschanel
@Richard S:
Right, because the original Star Trek was absolutely impossible to see after the 1960’s. Like Woodstock, you had to be there.
matoko_chan
Well……we are very busy people.
This kinda sums it up for me at least.
The simple fact that Palin was considered an appropriate candidate for VP is simply the deathknell of WFB’s White Christian America.
Game ovah, dudes and dudettes.
I for one welcome Our New Multi-colored Overlords.
They can’t possibly do any worse.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@FDRLincoln: I always had a soft spot for Merrick/Mericus. I thought his heel turn was much more believeable than Tracey’s.
FDRLincoln
Comrade Scrutinizer: But Merrick redeems himself in the end by saving the landing party…can’t see how there is much redeemable in the current GOP.
I also have a soft spot for “Bread and Circuses”….also a ridiculous setup with the whole Roman planet thing, but there is some terrific dialog in that episode and the satire of the TV industry is great….
“You bring this network’s ratings down Flavius, and we’ll do a special on you.” lol.
arguingwithsignposts
complete, unadulterated bullshit. There is no coherent response to a party that acts like dada.
Luthe
Would anyone mind linking to the ten point GOP litmus test I keep hearing about?
licensed to kill time
@Luthe: Here’s a link from the GOS
Sly
It’s been my experience that easiest way to spot a faux-intellectual is their insistence on baptizing the dead into their own little cadre. Libertarians do this constantly with people like Adam Smith. More obvious conservative frauds do it with the entirety of the Framers, treating them as one monolithic entity that all wanted the same thing on all issues. This is in large part because these kind of people never take into account the historical context of the people their talking about. Intellectuals of yore were dealt with an entirely different set of circumstances in which they advanced their ideas, and these circumstances were often entirely different than those found today. Monarchism, mercantile empire, slavery, religious wars, etc.
I’m not sure why Brooks does this with Burke. The latter has about as much relevance to modern American conservatism as modern American liberalism. Some other conservatives, who I will concede are probably not as smart as Brooks, do this with Thomas Paine, Burke’s ideological nemesis. And, of course, they get the best of both worlds. Anything of either writer that doesn’t neatly comport with their own opinions is ignored.
Harlan Sanders
@Woodrowfan:
That show was on for, what, like three weeks? (Just checked: it was on for a whole 26-episode season. It just seemed like 3 weeks.)
He was also the guy who prosecuted Tom Robinson in To Kill A Mockingbird.
Harlan Sanders
@Woodrowfan:
That show was on for, what, like three weeks? (Just checked: it was on for a whole 26-episode season. It just seemed like 3 weeks.)
He was also the guy who prosecuted Tom Robinson in To Kill A Mockingbird.
Harlan Sanders
@Comrade Scrutinizer:
The amazing thing about that episode was that its script was one of the three that Roddenberry wrote when NBC asked him to make a second pilot, having found the first “too cerebral”. One wonders if the series would ever have been made if the second pilot had been “Omega Glory”.
Could have been worse, I suppose. They could have submitted “Spock’s Brain”.
Liberty60
It’s been my experience that easiest way to spot a faux-intellectual is their insistence on baptizing the dead into their own little cadre.
Anonymous visitor from Sadly,No!
even self-styled intellectual conservatives claim that David Hume and Edmund Burke offer specific policy proposals
Excuse me, is some pissant little wanker trying to coopt Hume of all people — an anti-establishment atheist skeptical of all received wisdom — as a conservative? What a gobshite.
the farmer
except of course that Kirks “Ten Conservative Principles” are chock full of ideology and dogma themself. And are basically just a hoity toity defense of heritage and aristocracy and privlege. A defense of old unchanging privlege (wrapped up in a lot of hurrumphing on behalf of moral order). Can read the whole high and mighty holy writ here: Ten Conservative Principles
Consider the implications of this kind of conservative “way of looking at the civil social order” in the context of progressive change on behalf of labor rights or civil rights for African Americans at the time. Which no doubt would have been considered some kind of wild eyed radical Liberal experiment in social engeneering (overturning the old apple cart of moral order and entrenched tradition) by people like Kirk.
*
Uloborus
@Sly:
Thank you, Sly. I wanted to make that point myself. It’s not new, mind you. It’s based on the Philosophical system of the fundamentalist Protestants, based on the debate style of the Catholic church, based of the ramblings of the Greek philosophers, and probably so on. It may be hard-coded into the human brain, since it closely matches how ‘rationalization’ is understood.
Basically, you come to a conclusion, make up an argument that sounds good (whether or not there’s any actual logic) and reference an authority who may not even agree, because you just grab a quote you like out of context. Debate over, you’ve proven your point.
Didn’t we just go over this with Bruce Springsteen? Isn’t that how ‘literal word of god’ works? The Tea Baggers do it too, they just quote Reagan and Beck and the bible and such because they don’t want to seem snobby.
licensed to kill time
The Boss will bring back my reply arrow only if I leave a comment. Born in the WP of A, it was….
WTF! an edit button!? Shocked, I is!
grumpy realist
/begin {geekdom}
Ah yes….”Spock’s Brain.” Description I read in one of the early Star Trek books was: “a bunch of women steal Spock’s brain to run their mah-johng set.”
When you consider the rest of the plots on standard TV of that time, it’s not surprising that Star Trek had some clunkers. What is surprising is what they managed to get through and on air.
Remember, Star Trek had the first interracial kiss shown on TV. (In “Plato’s Stepchildren”, which aside from the kiss and the costumes was one of the aforesaid clunkers.)
/end (geekdom)
DBake
Excuse me, is some pissant little wanker trying to coopt Hume of all people—an anti-establishment atheist skeptical of all received wisdom—as a conservative? What a gobshite.
But Hume was a conservative. I mean, actually. He was a Tory, and his political philosophy was largely an attack on Social Contract Theorists (Social Contract Theory was the intellectual basis of liberalism at the time). Conservatives in the following decades would tend to cite Hume, liberals Locke.
Hume was an atheist (probably–though he was writing at a period when you didn’t advertise that). But I’m not sure where you’re getting the claim that he was anti-establisment.
And he was not skeptical of received wisdom. He was skeptical of the power of reason. His whole philosophy was dedicated to showing that our basic ideas about the world (cause and effect, good and bad, the idea of an object) are not the result of reason, but follow from habit. The corollary of this, however, is that we are justified in conforming to these habits of thought, because there is no independent reason which we can use to criticize them.
In the realm of politics, this means there are no principles of reason or self-evident truths with which we can criticize the political customs into which we were born. So, reformers are in bad shape. Moreoever, Hume argued that social stability was the most important benefit of government, and so reform was generally a bad idea anyway.
My understanding is that conservatives were always a bit uneasy about Hume on account of the atheism. But they needed an intellectual heavyweight (Burke was a middleweight). So there you go.
None of this, though, is to dispute your main point: Brooks is a wanker.
RememberNovember
@Da Nihilist:
Exactly, and Shatner would say, Captain Kirk, bitches.
non- execs on the ship were reffered to as “Mr.” – Mr Sulu, Mr Chekov, Mr Spock…