Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Today's "Lighten Up, Francis" Award Goes To...   [Jonah Goldberg]

Thomas Frank.

Update: Sorry, I hit "publish" when I meant to save to finish later.

Anyway, I think the Journal was smart to hire Thomas Frank. He's not boring and he makes liberal arguments from outside the beltway perspectives. But I think sometimes he let's his passion get the better of him. His column today is splenetic. He goes beyond the now somewhat clichéd (but not entirely invalid) liberal complaint  that we conservatives are never willing to accept that conservatism is to blame for Republican troubles or mistakes, to arguing that  conservatives are in fact never really principled and are always  the real evil-doers. He writes:

Again and again, it is the most zealous and high-minded conservative soldiers who lurk behind the movement's foulest deeds. Richard Nixon, for example, always turned to what he called "right-wing exuberants" when he needed something really dirty done. Among the most exuberant was Tom Charles Huston, a famously idealistic leader of the Young Americans for Freedom, who drew up the administration's notorious plan for domestic spying. "What does it mean," asks historian Rick Perlstein, "that the member of Nixon's staff who was closest to the conservative movement, who was best-versed in its literature and its habits, was not merely the most ruthless malefactor on Richard Nixon's staff but the one most convinced he was acting on principle?"

This reminds me of all the people who blamed "neocons" for all that went wrong in the Bush years, but not the neocons' bosses — Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Gonzales none of whom were famously neoconservative. Nixon himself wasn't particularly conservative (in fact he was decidedly liberal on domestic policy) and he disliked the "Buckleyites" but proof of Frank's indictment is found in the fact/allegation that Nixon's best henchmen were devoted and principled conservatives. 

Frank's manicheanism is getting the better of him. I don't know much about Tom Charles Huston, but I have heard of Nixon aide Chuck Colson. Is he a "corruptionist"?

The game Frank is playing is very, very easy to play. Does anyone doubt that one could count up liberal and leftwing pols and activists who've been seduced or corrupted to one extent or another and make a similar charge? Jesse Jackson, Jim Johnson, Al Sharpton, Bill Clinton come immediately to mind. Why don't they prove that the most zealous and high-minded liberal soldiers lurk behind its foulest deeds?

It's also worth pointing out that the tendency to blame poor  implementation rather than principle is a bipartisan disease, one I would argue afflicts the left far more than the right. Conservatives can at least admit conservatism has been wrong in the past. The Michael Tomaskys, George Clooneys and, one gets the impression, Thomas Franks of the world hold that liberalism has never been wrong, indeed, that liberal and wrong are a contradiction in terms.

06/18 11:16 AMShare