Best comment on Charles Murray’s new bestselling Social Darwinism apologia comes from Doghouse Riley:
It turns out that Charles Murray is to the “conservatives” at the Times what Halley’s Comet is to a superstitious medieval peasantry.
And yet, Murray’s call for a rekindled attention to Mad-Man– style social hypocrisy has leaked downward from the dutiful reviews by A-list NYTimes columnists and similar social parasites to the groundwaters where dwells Erick “Voice of the GOP Gated Community” Erickson, or so his CPAC coda leads me to assume:
… After RedState got started in July of 2004, blogging on the right became all the rage, though it was correlation and not causation. By 2005, CPAC had a Bloggers Row and I went for my first time… Being the good, intrepid blogger, I ran across the street to a CVS to buy a notepad, having left mine in my office back in Macon, GA. There in line were a half dozen young men, each with CPAC credentials around their necks and each buying condoms.
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That is part of life on the college circuit. Young men, regardless of political persuasion or ideology, are intent on having sex, being boys, getting drunk — doing what young men in college often do. All to often there are also a few young ladies willing to shame their parents if their parents only knew.
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But — and I wouldn’t be writing any of this had I not had a series of email exchanges on this subject in the past few days — I am more than a bit shocked by the young men at CPAC this year who just seemingly refuse to grow up or act their age. More troubling, while in 2005 it seemed to be just college kids, as the years have passed it is not just the 18 to 21 year old set, but the twenty and thirty somethings who just can’t seem to grow up. It’s like they started out at CPAC this way in college and each year at their CPAC reunion descend back to their freshman year rush week…
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I am not even sure that there is a solution to the problem. But we should not think it is anything but a problem. It is not every young man, but there are many. They risk dragging the whole affair down to some bawdy, rowdy distraction. They risk embarrassing themselves and the conservative movement. They risk the perception premised on their own actions that conservative men of a certain age think that good manners and decorum around women of the same age is unneeded or unwanted.
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This is not to say CPAC cannot and should not be fun. This is not to say that CPAC cannot and should not be a party. But it is to say that I hope the college groups bussing in students next year, the out of college set there to network, and CPAC itself encourage behavior we all too often don’t talk about anymore in our society — the behavior of gentlemen. Eat, drink, smoke, be merry, but be chivalrous too. There really is, regardless of your age, no need to play the cad at CPAC to score points with conservative ladies…
Especially with the easy availability of both Craigslist DC and Grindr! Ross “Chunky BoBo” Doubthat, be warned: Mr. Erickson is gunning for your position on the NYTimes op-ed roster…
Open Thread: Manners, People, <em>Manners!</em>Post + Comments (73)