The Sword and the Olive Branch

Why we care what John McCain’s daughter says.

Yep.  Out of all the news stories out there, the shallow one caught my interest.  But really, the economy is going down the tubes, the world is going socialist, and America may not survive long enough to vote Barry Carter out of office in 2012.  What else is there but to quibble over the details?  What really matters is that John McCain’s daughter thinks Republicans are too right-wing.  For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, Meghan McCain wrote a column a week and a half ago which implied that Ann Coulter uses hate, negativity, and scare tactics, and said that watching her is sometimes like watching a train wreck.  Even worse, Republicans like Coulter make it difficult for the Party to reach out to young Americans.  This made McCain an instant media darling.  Laura Ingraham picked up on this and made a snide remark about McCain’s weight.  Ms. McCain retorted by telling her to “kiss my fat a**,” on The View.  She’s still a media darling.  That’s the short story. 

Before I get on with it, conservatives should stop talking about Meghan’s looks.  I’ve seen this on message boards and it’s a stupid approach.  First of all, she’s not unattractive.  Line her up against eco-feminists or the women at Code Pink and see if making fun of her appearance makes sense.  Second of all, it’s irrelevant.  You think I read Robert Bork because he’s cute? 

On the surface, what Meghan McCain says shouldn’t matter to conservatives.  She’s really no different from any 24-year old upper-middle class kid—for all the different places she’s been, she’s not apparently worldly.  She blogs about what every privileged, college-age woman is likely to write about: dating, music, and her overseas trips to places like Vietnam.  She’s solicited opinions on what tattoo she should get to commemorate her time on her father’s campaign trail.  She wearily portrays herself as a victim of “socially accepted prejudice,” because Laura Ingraham called her “plus-sized.”  It’s a sign of immaturity that her instinct isn’t to deflect Ingraham’s intemperate jab by stating it doesn’t matter what some radio host thinks of her body type, but to instead take shelter in platitudes about prejudice and inner beauty.  In short, we’re not dealing with a seasoned veteran like William Kristol here, so why does Ms. McCain get under our skin?

The reason McCain’s ideological dilettantism is troubling is that it reflects the Republican break from conservative values.  Since the conservative movement became self-conscious somewhere around the mid-20^th century, the Republican Party has been the only major party conservatives can consider a safe haven.  Even that’s been tenuous, as a good number of Republicans have been willing to walk barefoot on lava to disassociate themselves from conservatism since the days of Barry Goldwater.  A pessimist could argue that the Republican Party has never really been conservative, with the exception of Ronald Reagan’s ascendency, which began in 1976 and ended as soon as he handed the reins to George H.W. Bush in 1988.  If both the Democrats and Republicans reject conservative values, America will risk becoming Europe, a self-hating western democracy without the courage or the cultural I.Q. to sustain itself (By cultural I.Q., I don’t mean the ability to impress socialites with Seinfeld trivia.  I mean a deep familiarity with one’s cultural heritage). 

I won’t say Ms. McCain isn’t serious, but it’s fair to presume her attachment to the Republican Party is more affective than intellectual.  On one hand, she describes herself as “Republican spawn,” against everything the liberals she knows on Facebook believe in.  On the other hand, she proclaims that she’s proud of not being “conservative enough,” according to the popular myth that being against things like gay marriage is “old-school.”  In this sense, Michelle Malkin is right.  Meghan McCain seems to have no ideological principles, just a working, incomprehensible version of moral relativism, which causes her to claim that Ann Coulter’s brashness makes her bad, but the equally abrasive Russell Brand is “freaking hilarious.”  Who’s Russell Brand?  He’s the British comedian whose Schick is to mock worldliness by making fun of American conservatives.  That doesn’t narrow it down?  Hmm…I thought you had to be original to be popular with young people.   Anyway, a Republican laughing at Russell Brand is like a feminist laughing at Andrew Dice Clay as he’s going on about “broads.”  It doesn’t make sense unless the audience doesn’t sympathize with whoever’s being made fun of.  For Meghan McCain, this is a problem, because if she doesn’t relate to conservatives, she’s going to have a lot of trouble understanding what it’ll take to get them to reach out to young people. 

McCain’s attack on Coulter is little more than self-assuredly clever, water-cooler conservatism.  McCain claims that Coulter perpetuates negative stereotypes about Republican women, and proceeds to take the same bait liberals take by misunderstanding Coulter’s comment about perfecting Jews as anti-Semitic sensationalism.  She berates Coulter for not having the GOP’s best interests at heart, when all conservatives are generally more loyal to principles than any power-hungry political party.  This is the girl who risked embarrassing Republicans this month when she said on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show that she doesn’t know enough about economics to have a strong opinion about them, then turned around and said on Fox & Friends, “This second stimulus package that Nancy Pelosi’s talking about I think doesn’t make sense.”  Her inexperience coupled with her high profile is a red meat generator for left-wing hecklers, who seem to enjoy Republican vulnerability more than sex.  If McCain had a better grasp of her ideals, she could have at least given thoughtful reasons for feeling wary about the rumored bill. 

I’m no stranger of being critical of Ann Coulter, so I’m not angry at McCain for doing the same.  But my biggest beef with Ann is that she hit her literary peak with Treason, and hasn’t matched it since.  My critique of Coulter is substantive, but I’m also a huge fan of hers.  In many ways, I’m not much different from Metallica fans who feel disappointed that every new album James Hetfield and co. release doesn’t stand up to the classic “Master of Puppets.”   Meghan McCain’s critique of Coulter is similarly personal.  In the column that propelled her to fame, Meghan doesn’t cite anything about Coulter except her demeanor and a couple of her controversial statements.  Meghan’s post gives us no reason to believe she has read any one of Coulter’s books, or is familiar with what the polemical figurehead writes in her weekly column.  McCain only uses Coulter to illustrate what she doesn’t like about her brand new party (she registered as a Republican last father’s day).

This leads us to another problem.  Every young conservative wants to be the edgy, new-fashioned right-winger who finally gets young people to register as Republicans.  So they ignore decades of impressive conservative thought and instead attempt to redefine the entire movement along the lines of trendy, often liberal sensibilities.  Most of the time this manifests itself in libertarian types who don’t relate to the religious right.  Heck, I was guilty of the same thing once in my life.  But here’s what the neophyte crusaders for a new conservative movement always miss.  Firstly, there’s no such thing as a “progressive” conservative.  The two ideals are polar opposites; even liberalism is more compatible with conservatism than progressivism.  At best, progressives are ideologically agnostic (or nihilistic), which makes them susceptible to every bad left-wing idea they come in contact with (think FDR).  At worst, progressivism is an aggressive, statist enterprise which has little use for the United States Constitution as it limits their ability to remake America in their egalitarian image.  Woodrow Wilson is progressive, and he may have been the most anti-conservative president in American history.  The fact Meghan McCain doesn’t comprehend the incompatibility between small-government traditionalism and big-government social engineering is telling. 

Secondly, the majority of older gen-Xers, my generation, supported Ronald Reagan (60% of voters under 30 voted for Reagan in 1984).  This scared the hell out of the media, who didn’t know what to make of it.  Yet Ronald Reagan was a genial, white, old man; he was certainly not a conservative “punk,” “progressive,” “moderate,” or whatever other cloak insecure conservatives wrap themselves in order to appeal to shallow people.  That’s fine.  We don’t want the Daily Show brats on our side!  We don’t want young anti-hippies in knit caps vandalizing Priuses.  We don’t want the twenty-years old wearing Che Guevara t-shirts to start sporting Tim McVeigh’s visage.  Conservatism should rise and fall along with the character of the American people.   We don’t need to be “progressive,” we need to be smart, brave, and above all, able to defend and promote conservatism.  We need to spend more time reading Mises, and less time jeering Ann Coulter. 

Ronald Reagan took conservatism, something that’s always been unfairly derided as outdated and bigoted, and made it popular (if only for a short while) by articulately promoting it without apology.  He didn’t need to become more “moderate” in order to reach out to people.  He just needed to be himself, without rancor, and without anxious pleading.  Meghan McCain seems smart, but from what she’s written online, she’s also obviously inexperienced, and unmistakably unfamiliar with conservatism.  Meghan McCain can’t recite the underlying philosophy behind the American right any more than I can write an ad hoc historical essay about Yugoslavian chess champions.  Yet she’s been a Republican for less than a year, and she’s already convinced she knows which direction her party should go to win future elections.  She’s like a cocky rookie quarterback telling the coach, in front of his entire team, that his playbook sucks. 

In light of all this, Meghan, I have a respectful plea.  If you have the bravery to tell conservatives they’re too extreme, then please have the character to read a few books about the movement first.  If you can discern why conservatives oppose stem-cell research, if you can recall on what grounds conservatives disagree with gay marriage, if you can understand Ann Coulter’s appeal beyond her controversial sound bites, and then turn around and tell me why you think they’re wrong, then maybe you’ll have the authority to tell me and everyone like me we’re too extremist for our own good. 

Cross-posted at

Tags: ann coulter, Meghan McCain
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Some people are famous for being associated with (or related to) already renowned individuals. Kevin Federline comes to mind; so do the modern Kennedys. Others are famous because they’ve worked much, much harder than everyone else. Oprah Winfrey is a great example of this. Then there are those who seem to approach fame like pro wrestlers, launching themselves out of anonymity by starting a feud with an established superstar. What aspiring jobber didn’t want to instantly become the greatest villain of all time by breaking Hulk Hogan in his heyday? On that note, meet Daniel Borchers.

Who the hell is Daniel Borchers? Well, he’s the editor in Chief of Brother Watch, a conservative publication which made its entire November 1997 issue a tribute to Ronald Reagan. He popped up in the left-wing blogs this weekend because Connecticut’s Elections Enforcement Commission is responding to his formal complain that Coulter committed voter fraud. Coulter has been cleared of similar charges in the past.

The story would give me pause if Mr. Borchers hadn’t done something like this before. At the 2002 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), he passed around copies of Brother Watch which bashed Coulter. He may have gotten away with it if it hadn’t read like a left-wing throwaway from a college bookstore. In it, he called the prolific author an “acid-tongued-blonde,” and accused her of being animated by an “emotional cauldron of hatred.” He printed that conservatives cannot “tolerate” her hate-mongering, abuse of power, mendacity, etc. In addition to that, he’s called Coulter’s fans “sycophants,” and accused the controversial writer of “dividing families,” as if her bombast was a threat to anyone’s household. I hear he’s currently selling paintings of Coulter with red eyes and a moustache scribbled on her visage.

Like a gambler who recklessly invests tens of thousands of dollars just trying to break even, Borchers has been pursuing a way to bring Coulter down since at least 2002. On CoulterWatch, another one of his websites, Daniel assails Ann about things she wrote in her first book, and even undermines his own overarching case that conservatives should be more civil by calling her “bin Coulter.” Take away his obsessive, extended relationship to Ms. Coulter, and Daniel Borchers is just another aspiring political commentator.

Mr. Borchers calls himself an “old-school conservative,” and much of the archives in BrotherWatch.com attest to this. But I’m an old-school conservative, and nothing in my education tells me that latching on to flimsy charges of plagiarism and defamation has anything to do with the six canons of conservative thought. Conservatives would be wrong to turn a blind eye to unethical behavior in their own ranks, such as former Republican Senator Ted Stevens’ seven felonious violations of federal ethics laws. But there’s a difference between righteous condemnation and Borcher’s self-serving persecution.

Even if he somehow gets his fifteen minutes of hate (or is it two minutes of fame? I always get those mixed up) Borchers might be disappointed to learn that critiquing Coulter from the right doesn’t make him special. If any of his overblown accusations actually stick to Coulter, it likely won’t make Mr. Borchers more important to the general public than he already isn’t. Here’s a list of right-wingers who have criticized Ann Coulter with more substance and class than the left’s favorite traditionalist of the week:

Jonah Goldberg states that Ann Coulter was disloyal and unprofessional after the National Review decided not to run her second column after 9-11.

David Horowitz criticizes Treason, my favorite Coulter book, for being over the top.

Michelle Malkin has never liked Coulter’s occasional “witless” taunts.

Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and John McCain all condemned her in one way or another for implying John Edwards was the new f-word at CPAC 2007.

Hugh Hewitt compared Coulter’s 2007 comment with Michael Richard’s intemperate bellowing of the “n-word.”

I think much of Coulter’s last effort, Guilty, is a rehash of Slander.

I’ve never met Daniel Borchers, but I get the impression he’s well-intentioned, but sheltered, and just doesn’t “get” Ann Coulter. She’s a fiery polemicist, so taking her at face value, which Borchers seems to have done, is to misunderstand her from the beginning. Appreciation for sarcasm, which Borchers has not demonstrated online, is a prerequisite for comprehending the post-modern conservative.

Demonstrating the left’s eager accolading of all things anti-conservative, Mother Jones Magazine has called the founder of CoulterWatch subversive. For what? Daring to say bad things about Ms. Coulter from a conservative standpoint? It’s been done (see above). Let’s face it, when a middle-aged man defends himself by noting that the FBI has determined he’s not a threat to a particular woman, desperate, not subversive, is the first word that comes to mind.

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: ann coulter, Coulter Watch, Daniel Borchers
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GUILTY

Liberal “Victims” and their assault on America

By Ann Coulter

311 pages.  Crown Publishing.  2009.

Slander II

So I just finished Ann Coulter’s latest book, Guilty.  Like a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it starts with a lot of promise, but gets sidetracked just as the plot starts to develop.

It begins by describing how people go out of their way to portray themselves as victims in America.  Some make up hate crimes against themselves; others make up stories about growing up impoverished.  Particularly interesting is how celebrities such as Halle Berry, Alicia Keys, and Barack Obama embrace their African-American heritage while downplaying their white heritage in order to acquire what Coulter calls “Victim Chic.”  Then there’s Asians who complain about being stereotyped as “model minorities,” which is only harmful in the sense that it inhibits upper-middle class San Franciscans from playing the race card.  This is only a fraction of the evidence Coulter cites to demonstrate that victimhood is a status symbol. 

This is followed by the controversial chapter on single mothers.  Here, Coulter makes a compelling case that single motherhood is deified (as if to prove Coulter right, the New York Times recently printed a squeezably soft puff piece on single mothers).  The glorification of single motherhood causes Americans to overlook its negative consequences, including the fact that children from single-parent homes are more likely to end up in prison, drop out of school, kill themselves, and even become rapists.  As Coulter’s latest interviews show, not everyone is prepared to consider these harsh truths.  This is Coulter at her best, taking an entrenched liberal narrative and turning it on its head.  The most any polemicist can do with a sacred cow; break the ice around the taboo subject, hopefully making it more acceptable to debate in polite circles. 

Here’s where the conductor forgot to hit the right switch.   Soon after the chapter on the complicated realities of single motherhood, Coulter turns her attention away from what I thought would be the driving theme of Guilty, the left’s idealization of victimhood, and instead focuses on her arch-nemesis, the arrogant, left-wing media.  As a result, most of Guilty reads like a sequel to Slander, including b-sides from the original involving Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.  It’s full of great information (I like her breakdown of books written by George W. Bush “insiders,”) but liberal media bias doesn’t need to be discussed again, especially to her readers.   

In Slander, Coulter’s point is that the media is overwhelmingly liberal.  Her focus in most of Slander II is that the media is still that way, which allows leftists to behave aggressively while maintaining their front as victims.  Even left-wing journalists act as if they’re part of an oppressed minority in their field.  She could have done this in a brisk chapter.  Instead she spends more than a hundred and fifty pages discussing how the media perpetuates the myth of liberal victimhood in one form or another.  Sentient Americans know the media slants left.  The science is pretty much settled on that. 

Fortunately, in the last chapter of Guilty, Coulter picks up the pace again.  In it, she indirectly cites an interesting Rothman and Lichter study that liberals are twice as likely to value being popular as conservatives.  This may explain why artists are so liberal.  Popular culture is driven by image, not substance; thus the most successful artists are usually going to be the ones preoccupied with shallow things such as popularity.  It also explains why liberals are so uptight about America’s standing in the world.  It’s as if they need their country to be liked in order to feel validated. 

Like all of her actual books (as opposed to assorted collections of her work) Guilty finishes strongly.  Towards her stirring denouement, Coulter lists a long line of political violence committed by left-wingers.  The intimidating compilation starts with the violent pacifist John Wilkes Booth, and ends with a 2008 story involving two young liberals who walk into a Republican campaign headquarters, accuse old people of stealing Obama campaign signs, and are then escorted out of their opponent’s office, only to spray five McCain staffers with mace. 

Behavior like this doesn’t happen on accident.  All the liberal radicals Coulter describes view themselves as downtrodden, or at the very least, spokespeople for the downtrodden.  The children of single parents also tend to view themselves as powerless.  So do violent felons.  Even if it isn’t rooted in reality, feeling powerless excuses violence, and shows how a preoccupation with victimhood leads to not just bad behavior, but often self-satisfied cruelty. 

Ann Coulter could have written her entire book on these losers, creating a media firestorm and bursting the argument about the roots of political extremism wide open, starting with the contentious premise that it’s rooted in victim ideology.  But she only spent a handful of pages on that, and instead we’re left with a good point about the deification of single motherhood that America doesn’t seem to be getting. 

I love Ann Coulter.  She’s one of my three biggest influences.  Slander is the book that turned me towards conservatism.  Perhaps because of that, I expected a lot more from Guilty.  It’s worth reading at least once, if only for chapters one, two, and seven.  Yet for all its high points, Guilty is still not nearly as good as Treason, her most focused (and entertaining) effort.  In 2007, Camille Paglia wrote that Coulter seems to be regressing rather than growing intellectually.  I won’t say that, partly because I don’t think I can hold a candle to Coulter’s breadth of knowledge.  But I will say she’s mining in a familiar cave, when she could be finding much more gold someplace else. 

Cross-posted at Modern Conservative

Tags: ann coulter, Guilty, Slander II
Posted in Belated book reviews | No Comments »

Of course conservatives should be able to criticize one another. 

I got my first two complaints the other day.  Surprisingly they were both written by self-identified conservatives (I need to start leaving my URL on progressive blogs).  It turns out they were rubbed the wrong way by my list of annoying conservative subgroups, specifically the part about “intellectual elitists.”  Apparently not everyone sees the humor in lines such as: “It’s nice to see that Ann Coulter is getting airtime LISP! but better specimens SLURP! of conservative thought LISP! could be chosen.”  Politely but tersely, I was accused of arguing that any conservative who criticizes another right-winger is being disloyal.  I was also chided for ignoring the value of education.  I think it’s clear that I wasn’t doing either of those things, but since I was contacted in good faith, I should handle these comments in good faith.   

Getting right to the point, my entire post was a critique of a broad array of conservatives, so it wouldn’t make sense for me to lambaste right-wingers for being critical of their own.  I don’t mind that some conservatives share legitimate concerns about Ann Coulter.   I myself am no fan of her tendency to be glib rather than forthcoming in her interviews, and her occasional schoolyard taunts, such as “raghead” and “faggot,” are irritating.   But I don’t criticize her the way conservative elitists do, by (1) assuming intellectual superiority, and (2) using language crafted to appeal to Coulter’s liberal opponents (EX: calling her “hateful” when she’s merely being crude).  These two tendencies are what I have in mind when I mock intellectual elitists, not mere criticism.

While I don’t doubt the value of higher education (I try to bury my nose in a book every day) I strongly disapprove of conservatism’s elitist strain, which seems to be related to the status education bestows a person.  I’ve actually read a line much like the “better specimens of conservative thought” comment I typed above.  There was an air of condescending self-promotion to it that stuck with me.  Why did the writer need to qualify his statement by taking a cheap shot at his subject?  Telling a conservative they can be a better thinker is something a mentor should do in a classroom or in private, not something an arrogant peer should do in a public forum.  Treating your conservative peers as if they were younger siblings betrays a lack of respect and dignity which deserves to be lampooned at the very least. 

A recent example of this is an opinion piece by Mickey Edwards, a former Republican congressman.  Here he criticizes the Republican Party’s conflation of small government with limited government, all the while making the case the Ronald Reagan wouldn’t belong in today’s GOP.  So far, so good.  But then he calls today’s Republicans “Anti-intellectual,” and cites Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, George W. Bush, and Karl Rove of not representing a conservative party, but rather one bent on the “narrow pursuit of power.”  While a good argument can be made that Bush isn’t all that conservative and Rove may be more conniving than normal, Newt-Gingrich is a right-wing egghead.  He’s neither anti-intellectual nor disloyal to conservative principles.  Mr. Edwards has tips his hand with Gingrich’s inclusion; it shows that he’s not taking aim at anti-intellectualism, but unpopular conservatives.  This is what I mean by intellectual elitism.  His article is conservative, smart, but fundamentally disloyal.  He could have easily made his point without tossing these five figures under the bus, but he didn’t.  In fact, he followed that by parroting the jejune cliché that today’s conservatives have turned to the politics of exclusion and division.  I wonder if he was paying attention when Reagan joked about bombing the Soviet Union.   

I wholly embrace the idea that conservatives should criticize each other.  Without internal criticism, we’d be vulnerable to groupthink.  Even worse, if we don’t evaluate our own arguments, liberals will do it for us, and they’re far less likely to treat them fairly.  But we can do this without looking down on our peers or borrowing the left’s cheap rhetoric.  The fact this isn’t self-evident is troubling. 

Tags: ann coulter, loyalty, mickey edwards
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