Posted under Conservatism & NeoCons & Political Correctness & Political Philosophy
Larison is critical of Frum here.
Frum responds here. He calls paleos crybabies.
Of all the many things I dislike about the paleo-libertarian faction championed by Larison, high on the list is this: they are howling Georgie-Porgy crybabies.
Frum actually misses Daniel’s point as Daniel points out in an update to his post. I agree with Daniel and Frum that paleo and libertarian rhetoric has sometimes been so overheated as to be counterproductive. But I hardily encourage a good intellectual tussle.
But the problem with Frum, and he is typical of neocons and mainstream movement cons, is that he doesn’t really seriously engage an argument on an intellectual level. He trots out conventional wisdom and calls names and questions motives and mounts his PC high horse.
The Rand Paul Civil Rights Act controversy is an excellent example. Paleos and libertarians have questioned the constitutionality of the Civil Rights Act. Frum addresses the argument here. However, he doesn’t mount a spirited defense of the constitutionality of the CRA. He basically just asserts it, and then mounts his PC high horse about injustice towards blacks. But the question of the constitutionality of the CRA is left basically unaddressed. Does Frum support original intent? Why or why not? Does Frum support the enumerated powers doctrine? Why or why not? Does he believe in an expansive reading of the Interstate Commerce Clause? What evidence does he marshall for this reading?
Again, I am all for a gentlemanly intellectual debate where everyone takes their licks and when it is over no one leaves whining. But debates have to go two ways. Calling people unpatriotic or dismissing their arguments without actually addressing them does not a debate make.
Sean Scallon on 23 May 2010 at 5:55 am #
Awww, we hurt Frummer’s feelings.
Captainchaos on 24 May 2010 at 4:18 am #
You know what Frum’s game is, and if you didn’t before, now you do, as I have told you. You know per your reading of the Old Testament that you are COMMANDED by God to be loyal to your own blood lest you spit in the face of God. You know per your reading of the New Testament that what God commands in the Old is not obviated as Christ came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it. In short: One must be loyal to one’s race or forsake God, yet one is not absolved of the responsibility of being a good man – a White man.
If you understand and will live by the preceding you need nothing else as far as I am concerned. With the sole of exception of the duty to imbue other men’s minds with your understanding.
Upshot on 28 May 2010 at 1:10 am #
Aside from being loathsome in manner and appearance, Frum is irrelevant. Engaging him only fouls the interlocutor and ascribes Frum a spurious importance. Generally speaking I’d advise paleos to ignore the neocon / AIPAC people for the time being. They were culpably wrong about practically everything, this has been exhaustively documented, and only the inertia of a fin-de-siecle political establishment keeps them bobbing about in our national consciousness.
We can bide our time until Federal prosecutors are permitted to start prosecuting some of the dozens (at least) of mind-boggling cases investigators and intelligence agencies have been bringing them for the past 10 years or so.
Paul on 31 May 2010 at 8:10 pm #
Frum’s defense of the Civil Rights Act is a very conservative (small “c”!) and Burke-like argument: over the course of several decades, the Civil Rights Act has become a universally accepted and widely celebrated part of American history, law (as Frum points out) and political culture. As of 2010, to entertain thoughts of repealing it or combating it is not conservative at all, but radical and disruptive to our national equilibrium.
Engaging in an intellectual debate about the Civil Rights Act is indeed interesting, but completely unrelated to modern American politics and political challenges.
Moreover, Frum is practical: he wants the Republican Party, as a national brand, to be electable and popular. How does the open questioning the Civil Rights Act (among the most admired pieces of legislation of the past 50 years!) by a major GOP nominee make the party look? Certainly not like a modern party (a party that has accepted some of the changes of the past 50 years) concerned with modern problems (i.e. NOT the Civil Rights Act.)
R. Salyer on 16 Jun 2010 at 3:10 pm #
Paul
The Civil Rights Act is not part of a conservative tradition to which I will conform. True, conservatism, in its most basic understanding, involves resistance to change, particularly rapid, utopian-minded change. The conservative desire is to conserve something that is of value. And any status quo has some value inasmuch as things can always change for the worse. As such, a Russian conservative in 1990 might choose to protect Communism, just as an American conservative might choose to protect the fruits of the Civil Rights revolution today.
Nonetheless, despite the method aspect that is at the root of Conservatism of any stripe, there is also some substance, some vision of a proper ordering, also inherent at the root of any Conservatism worthy of the name. One fights in order to defend some-thing. And nothing from Johnson or Burke, to use two examples, suggests that the Anglo Conservative intellectual tradition approves of just any situation or status quo under the sun as legitimate, so long as it is arrived at by legitimate means.
I must part company with Mr. Paul, to the extent that he limits the evil of the Civil Rights Act to an extra-Constitutional imposition on property rights. The Civil Rights Act is not merely an illegitimate means to me, as much as it undermines the very political object that I wish to serve. My political loyalty is to a white Anglo-Southern community, and its supremacy within its own land. The Civil Rights Act exists to sever the governing infrastructure of the South from this community, and, more seriously, it exists for the purpose of deconstructing that community. Thus, it is per se an evil for me, and for all those who value as I do. It is simply NOT “admirable.” The problem is “modern American politics” and what it considers to be “political challenges.”
Moreover, the Civil Rights Act is not only un-Constitutional; it is unconstitutional as well. It not only legally changed this country from one of European civilisation, to a multicultural universal “nation.” It also makes it impossible for citizens to establish any organised identity other than simply “American” defined multiculturally. Effectively it makes illegal the citizen’s own desire to define himself as he sees fit. Via his ethnicity, for instance. How can it be possible in a country that boasts of freedom for the government to mandate who the person may be, with whom he must associate? There is simply no freedom without the freedom to exclude.
I also question whether opposition to Civil Rights does not have a potential for political traction. Millions voted for Strom Thurmond in 1948 and George Wallace in 1968 and 1972. While those may be elections decades old, I have to believe that some of the same spirit still resides within those voters’ descendents. As such, I feel that opposition to Civil Rights today has political potential at the local and State level, and this is what is important to me. As a Conservative, I feel that it is indeed time for change and welcome the national disruption.