A clarification
January 26th, 2009
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.