At the TLS: reading Matthew Continetti through Julius Krein's 'Looking Glass'!
American Writer discovers a New American Political World, through Krein's refractions...
Headline: The poverty of theory
Sub-headline: Is there such a thing as American conservatism?
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/the-right-matthew-continetti-book-review-julius-krein/
Reading Mr. Krein’s essay is like peering into that world presented by Lewis Carroll’s classic. The Political World turned up-side down, or inside out, or to reach for the hyperbolic like reading Hegel or Heidegger without a guide? Mr. Krein even out- distances Conservatism’s maladroit re-write man David Brooks!
Some background on Mr. Krein seems in order, from the American Political Gossip Sheet, Politico, of 2017:
Headline: Meet the Harvard whiz kid who wants to explain Trumpism
A 30-year-old conservative wunderkind is out to intellectualize Trumpism, the amorphous ideology that lifted its namesake to the presidency in November.
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“We hope not only to encourage a rethinking of the theoretical foundations of ‘conservatism’ but also to promote a broader realignment of American politics,” Krein said. It will launch in both a print and digital version, and a substantial portion of the funding will come from Krein himself. He said donors to traditional conservative institutions have been “surprisingly” receptive to his pitch, though he declined to name the additional contributors.
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https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-intellectual-harvard-233150
Note that Mr. Krein declined to identify his sources of cash!
Some examples of Mr. Krein’s refractions in his ‘Looking Glass View’ where Mr. Continetti acts as a prop.
For example, Continetti points out the difference between the foreign policy realism of the first generation of neoconservatives, in the latter half of the twentieth century, and the Wilsonian moralism of the second, in the early years of the twenty-first. He notes that Irving Kristol criticized NATO (in an article for the New York Times in 1983, he advocated for US withdrawal), believed that post-communist Russia should still be treated as a great power, and was sceptical of global democracy promotion (which he dismissed as “empty of substance” and “full of presumption!”). But although Continetti venerates this neoconservative patriarch, he follows the second generation of neocons in claiming that the American public simply lacked the “patience” to see Iraq and other misadventures through to success. The failure of democracy promotion involved much more than the loss of a domestic political debate, however. US forces occupied Afghanistan for nearly twenty years, only for the Taliban to retake power almost immediately following their withdrawal. The fact is that the incompetence and corruption introduced by the American occupation bred its own resistance; “patience” was actually counterproductive. Reagan, by contrast, avoided lengthy ground wars involving US troops but invested heavily in defence technology, laying the foundation for unprecedented US military superiority. George W. Bush’s costly, failed occupations not only inflicted direct casualties and hardships on Afghanistan and Iraq as well as on US military families, mostly from working-class communities also facing economic decline, but contributed to the global loss of US prestige and squandered America’s unipolar hegemony in the space of a generation.
This reads as an integral part of the ‘Conservative Party Line’? Mr. Krien, in the final sentence attacks two icons of Conservativism.
This lack of pragmatism undermines a central conceit of The Right and a fixture of the conservative self-image. For Continetti, the principal task of conservatism is “to save liberalism from weakness, woolly-headedness, and radicalism”. But what his book actually demonstrates is that modern American conservatism is profoundly unsuited to this purpose. There are, after all, easier ways to arrive at moderate, pragmatic liberalism than through the writings of Russell Kirk or Ludwig von Mises.
American Conservatism presented under the rubric ‘an alternative form of radical liberalism’. The Reader need only look the appointments to the Supreme Court: to see that ‘Conservatism’ is about a Political Romanticism, for a past sunk in white male supremacy, now under the contemporary cover of The Federalist Society, and the hybrid of Neo-Confederate/Originalist/Textualist interpretations of the Constitution!
Instead, American conservatism is, in decisive respects, an alternative form of radical liberalism, in some ways America’s most radical variant. Its radicalism pushes in the direction of individualism and idealism rather than collectivism and materialism. But this “conservatism” is ideological, not pragmatic; it seeks revolution, not preservation. Initially including a surprising number of disaffected communists among its leadership, American conservatism eventually became a haphazard union of neoliberals and “neoconservatives” (or, less alliteratively, though more precisely, an extreme cadre of liberal interventionists). It sought to destroy the New Deal order at home and to replace political and communal relations with global market mechanisms; it promoted maximalist campaigns to defeat the Soviet Union and then to impose liberal democracy around the world. One can argue that these approaches were not always wrong, but they were never really moderate.
This paragraph demonstrates Mr. Krein’s loyalty to the current iteration of Republican Populism?
The conservative identity is based on alienation from mainstream liberalism, yet the contradictory directions and sources of that alienation cannot be explored too deeply or the whole project will collapse. Hence conservatism’s perpetually fraught relationship with populism.
Mr. Krein can’t quite bear to the use the term ‘Identity Politics’, so he resorts to a self-interested re-naming, because the very notion of a Conservatism Identity Politics might threaten his ‘Looking Glass’ evaluation of Continetti’s scattershot history of Republicanism.
Conservatives are typically harsh critics of “identity studies”. But they seem to have an endless appetite for “conservatism studies”, of which The Right is one example. Indeed, it is possible to debate whether American conservatism even exists – in the sense of forming a whole greater than the sum of its parts – outside of conservative identity studies.
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American Writer