But For One Misplaced Decade

Andrew Sullivan's radically expurgated Alternate History of Modern Conservatism might not sound so fucking idiotic.

See if you can spot which decade the World's Greatest Blogger has carelessly mislaid...

Fighting Al Qaeda To Fight Liberalism

In 1993, Irving Kristol wrote "My Cold War":

There is no "after the Cold War" for me. So far from having ended, my cold war has increased in intensity, as sector after sector of American life has been ruthlessly corrupted by the liberal ethos. It is an ethos that aims simultaneously at political and social collectivism on the one hand, and moral anarchy on the other. It cannot win, but it can make us all losers. We have, I do believe, reached a critical turning point in the history of the American democracy. Now that the other "Cold War" is over, the real cold war has begun.

Michael Lind extends the metaphor:

9/11 fortuitously provided the American right with the external enemy that allowed it to go back into business demonizing the internal enemy, liberalism. And the idea of World War IV enabled the right once again to smear American liberals as defeatists or appeasers, if not traitors, in a struggle on the scale of the world wars and the Cold War. ... World War IV was never really about bin Laden or al-Qaida. It was always about American domestic politics.

I think it's fairer to say it was about both. I do believe that the reaction to the end of the cold war was a classic moment in conservatism's divide. I was relieved we no longer had to fight a global war, with all the draining of resources and fraught spasms of McCarthyism and far leftism it created. Others - mainly neocons - were desperate to fight another war. They picked China first, but then Jihadism took its place. There is a conservatism of nonviolence and a conservatism of violence.
...

And then it ends with yadda-yadda-yadda Strauss, yadda-yadda-yadda Oakeshott.

The reason I bothered with this particular post was that -- like an ant-farm -- in it you can actually see the specific sub-genre of mental illness that is Expatriate Conservatism in situ.

So anxious is Mr. Sullivan to sprint the Hell away from his former fellow travelers -- to cook up some bullshit distinction that allows him to continue to pretend that the Movement to which he has given his life (and which, in exchange, gave him a career) was not born in corruption, failure and sin -- that he has managed to elide over the entire Clinton Administration.

Andrew, I know none of your buddies will tell you this, but forgetting the Clinton years is not an insubstantial omission.

I know that whole True Conservatism Kabuki you and engaged in depends 100% on the Big, Self-Absolving Lie that Good, Reagan-y Conservatism was somehow undone by naughty external forces and evil political body humors, but that Real True Sullivan Conservative Snake Oil was once our national salvific, and could be again if purchased from a reputable dealer and used according to the instructions printed in very, very tiny white font on the bottom border of the white label.

This is, of course, a great, big, whopping lie.

Like racism, anti-intellectualism, xenophobia, homophobia and Dominionism, Conservative "Team B"-ism has been a vital organ of the Right since before Mr. Sullivan was in long pants: just one more ally in the vast, ignorant yahoo army which the Right deliberately invited into the Big Tent and carefully flattered and cultivated year after year in order to win elections and enact their horrible, horrible ideology into law.

However hard Mr. Sullivan claps his hands and pretends otherwise, there is no good "conservatism of nonviolence" and bad "conservatism of violence" that stand apart from and opposed to one another: there is only one Modern Conservatism -- one that has shown that it will, without hesitation, lie, cheat, slander and destroy opponents, play on the darkest fantasies and fears of the public, and recruit the scum of the Earth in order to win at any cost.

For decades, decadent Liberal fifth columnists have warned clowns like Mr. Sullivan that as they sow, also shall they reap, and that one day the mindless, hateful, fact-resistant Devil to whom the Right long ago sold its soul would one day come for His due. That day has finally arrived, postage due, wrapped in a flag, carrying a Bible and shrieking like a banshee, but Mr. Sullivan is neither emotionally nor intellectually strong enough to look this reality square in the eye and face all of its implications.

And so if people like Mr. Sullivan decide to barber a decade here or there right out of history to smooth over all the inconvenient loose ends caused by their ideological perfidy, who remains who can say otherwise?

For those of you who have forgotten the 1990s and the Conservative Movement's contribution to it, this extended clip from "The Power of Nightmares" is well worth your time.


Also, it is slightly delicious that the Michael Lind whose quote got Mr. Sullivan all stirred up is actually the same Michael Lind who is interviewed in this documentary.