Crunchy-Cons
Conservative Religious Nut-Lovers. So the Crunchy-Con thing Rod Dreher started is now rolling. There is an unbelievably good blog on National Review for discussing the book. Caleb Stegall, one of my bosses at the New Pantagruel is there. Ross Douthat is there. Amy Welbourn? Well alright, then. Check it out, Caleb is saying some stuff in National Review space that hasn't really been articulated by that group since the early 60's. When Jonah Goldberg gets involved its going to be a real dust-up. His first critique of this phenomena is a pretty good one. But Jonah's writing doesn't give the sense of someone who really absorbed what we can learn from Richard Weaver. When was the last time Jonah Goldberg pointed to Occam as the point at which Western Civilization started to go off the rails? Not to say that this is a requirement - but the dissimilarity between Richard Weaver and Jonah Goldberg is easy to see.
I received my review copy of Rod's book and will review it for Brainwash sooner or later.
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Politics, Culture
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With such an alliance it is best to remember the old proverb: When supping with the devil, use a long spoon.
What is most called for in the culture war, is prudence. With prudence in mind, such alliance appears to be rather counter productive. The pro-life movement was destroyed by thinking they could outsmart the devil with their questionable alliances via compromise. And they are not the exception.
Being smart as serpents does not mean doesn’t mean inviting the Pharisees in for a cup of tea and playing footsy.
You can say that again. Leave aside for a moment the clear philosophical differences, which are so stark that they could be seen from space. Just consider the two men themselves. Richard Weaver was an accomplished professor of rhetoric, teaching for some time here at our very own U of C, and he was a first-class thinker. Jonah Goldberg is, well, neither of those. That's not necessarily so bad or surprising--I don't approach Weaver's learning and intelligence, either--but that sentence is in the running for understatement of the year.
Someone later pointed out that Weaver's "Ockham thesis" made the necessary corrective action possible--I think it was Tyrell who said this--but this was to miss everyting Weaver was saying and misunderstand historical change. If there has been a trend in thought for 500, 1,000 or 2,000 years, it does not have to continue if a better or more attractive argument can overthrow it. Ockham helped the Western intellectual tradition go off the rails, but in just the same way a repudiation of his ideas and the replacement of them with something true can begin to correct things.
I didn't intend it to be a metaphor.
Further, I understand the reason for the alliance, I also recognize National Review’s preferred method of attack via subversion at play one more time.
The most affective way to suppress and subvert a movement is to become the spokesman for that movement.
In the fall of 1991, at the age of 17, however, I exhibited an insatiable interest in politics and the great questions of political philosophy. My father, not a philosophical man, took me to a local bookstore and purchased me a copy of National Review, which turned out not to be such a bad thing, as, through it, I became acquainted with the breadth of conservative political thought. In those days, NR still published Sobran, von Leddhin (sic., I'm sure), referred at least occasionally to Kirk, Burnham, and Weaver, and still retained an awareness that conservatism was much more than a policy position on some ephemeral issue or an electoral strategy.
In 1997, I finally read Weaver, along with a few other works of political philosophy (John Gray, regrettably), and promptly forgot all about philosophy and most politics, it being, of course, 1997, and the Clinton adminstration the sort of phenomenon that inclined me to turn away so as not to see. I was, however, drifting religiously, being greatly dissatisfied with Protestantism generally and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church in particular; and, as I explored the history of Christianity, Weaver again became relevant. I had read the early volumes of Pelikan's History of the Development of Christian doctrine, and this had unsettled my Protestant certainties; but in 1999, I, idly, picked up a book I had never thought to read (this is, truly, an heroioc admission for me, as you might surmise given the author): R.J. Rushdoony's Politics of Guilt and Pity (there were Theonomists and Reconstructionists at the OP church I attended while an undergrad). I know not why I picked up this book, or what I hoped to find in it; perhaps my picking it up was providential. I read but one essay of that work, the title of which, if I recall, had something to do with the sociology of the Protestant doctrine of justification. It was, as I phrased it at the time to a friend, the worst argument in the history of theology, stripping, as it did, all realities, inclusive of the Church, of the sacramental, mediatorial significance that they possess by nature. And yet that simply is the inherent logic of Protestantism; and it is nominalistic and utterly unthinkable without Occam. So it 'clicked' for me. Bad philosophy = bad theology = civilizational decline; not a sufficient cause in itself, but assuredly a necessary one. By June of 1999, I was a catechumen.
Mr. Salzer echos my thoughts perfectly. I know Michael and I disagree somewhat on this (we've discussed it before), but for all these people's good intentions, they are really foolhardy for associating with National Review and especially so if they actually voted for Bush/supported the Iraq war. That is not a respectable organization and its leadership is comprised of people no decent American should even consider mingling with. Moreover, the blog may be "good" but I think its ideas somewhat tired--admittedly I didn't read it thoroughly but what I saw has been said elsewhere, and more eloquently, time and again. In short, I cannot see anything coming to fruition from this new addition to the happy fraternity Nu Rho Omicron.
We disagree. That's fine.
Doesn’t it bug you just a wee bit that Mitch Muncy is a Lincoln Fellow at the Cleremont Institute?
Or Rod Dreher’s war mongering?
http://www.nationalreview.com/dreher/dreher020703.asp
They make for rather unseemly bedfellows in the culture war since they’re happy as clams snuggling up in bed with the culture of death.
http://larison.org/archives/000574.php
I'm willing to let a man come to his senses.
Perhaps it is some form of temperament but I cannot help but be happy about some of the things Messrs. Stegall and Frohenn are writing. There are sensible people who have been reading this magazine for years - who simply DO NOT know anything other than NR style conservatism. It is good to have a few traditionalists make an appearance and let everyone know that there is more to Conservatism than a "global strategy" for American power.
Allow some reality checks: Scholasticism deserved the Nominalist reaction, and Orthodox folks can take comfort in their freedom from all that because they've never been outside their own personal dark ages. There is no "alliance." Maybe Dreher is trying to start a movement, and maybe he is willing to use NRO, allowing them to potentially "subvert" him, but I really doubt NR will ever want to or be able to become a mouthpiece for "crunchies" should they miraculously emerge as a large and prosperious marketting demographic. What would NR do, fire all their writers?
This is not high politics. It is sandbox stuff. At least 3 of the commenters seem opposed to the "movement" idea, including Stegall. Yes they are saying stuff people need to hear, people who read NRO and people who don't. The NRO is a better venue to that end than posts and comments in the backwater ghettos of monarchist and caesaropapist bloggers.
“Orthodox folks can take comfort in their freedom from all that because they've never been outside their own personal dark ages.”
Straight from the New Pantagruel’s GJ
Thanks for letting me know where you’re coming from. Now I know I can write you off as an airhead. Without having to bother reading your other writing first.
Thank you for taking the hint. I suggest you go learn Byzantine Greek or medieval church Latin and never bother with English reading or wiriting again.
I'm willing to let a man come to his senses.”
When someone makes fundamental errors I am not encouraged.
Either Dreher is not capable of understanding the underlying arguments, given the cited above article by him at NRO. Or he is moved by his emotions and thus sways with any given cultural breeze. Or he is an opportunist.
Given the choices above, I would rather have opportunism since it is an error of the will which can be corrected far more easily than an incapacity to understand the underlying arguments.
And I wonder, is Dreher really any different than Alan Keyes? Either Keyes was incapable of understanding the underlying arguments concerning abortion and the proper understanding of self defense, or he had bad will refusing to see the obvious truth of the arguments. Either way is rather dubious, eh?
I am profoundly appreciative of your boundless Christian charity towards me, and towards my co-religionists. I would that I should manifest such warmth of spirit, humility, and simple human regard towards Protestants; they would be so overawed by the splendor of my sanctity that they would never again trouble me with their presence.
And to state the scholasticism deserved nominalism, well, that is just about as massive a piece of jackassery as asserting that Christianity was so dreadful at around the middle of the Sixteenth Century that Germany deserved Thomas Muntzer - and deserved that the deluded, gnostic fool should have obliterated the whole of their society with his lunacies. When a good thing goes a little awry, the thing to do is to correect its path, not blow it up, as nominalism ultimately did with the whole of what was vital in Western philosophy. Talk about affectations and the psychological tendencies of reactionaries and pseuds! You must believe in revolution, or creative destruction, or some other such overcoming-of-tradition rot. And the dark ages meme! Oh, dear! Whatever would we do without all of the wonderful enlightenment that Western society has spread around since that eponymous epoch?! We might believe that traditions are of inestimably greater value than the categorical imperative of the herd of independent minds, "Dare to Know!"
I expectorate, indeed.
Not scolding you... just saying take these guys with a grain of salt. FRSalzer is right to believe there is every chance they will become assimilated into the NRO mainstream. There is little chance of the contrary.
"What would NR do, fire all their writers?"
No, they'd subvert and destroy the crunchy-cons just like they did to John O'Sullivan.