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Hugh Hewitt and the Hegelian Mambo
Hugh Hewitt is a radio announcer, a contributor to The Weekly Standard, a Republican strategist, and most of all, a cheerleader in a football game that never stops, the Republicans vs. the Democrats, an all-consuming obsession in which Republican victory is the Ding an Sich, the thing in itself, true, objective being, the sole and sufficient purpose of existence. This guy is so Republican-oriented that the slogan at his website is “Potestas Democraticorum delenda est!”, which means, “The power of the Democrats must be destroyed,” or perhaps, “The Democratic Party must be destroyed.” Isn’t that taking party politics just a tad too far? Cato the Elder said that about Carthage, which in a previous generation had devastated Italy and was perhaps threatening to do so again. I’ve said it myself about the mass-murdering, suicide-bombing-cheering Palestinian Authority. In those cases the entity to be destroyed is a dangerous foreign enemy, not one of the two major American political parties. Furthermore, for all Hewitt’s fervor, what is his fervor for? Certainly not for any recognizable conservatism. Just yesterday he was cheering the supposedly inevitable GOP presidential nomination of none other than Rudolph Giuliani. About which I wrote him this e-mail:
Your article at the Weekly Standard claiming that Giuliani is the odds-on favorite for the 2008 GOP nomination is utter fantasy. The fact that the Country-Club Republican women you were addressing favored him is a reflection of their own feminism/liberalism. It just ain’t gonna happen. There is no way that the Republicans are going to nominate a man who supports abortion; who repeatedly marched along with the North American Man-Boy Love Association in New York’s annual gay pride parade; who dressed as a woman for the camera; who conducted a more or less open affair with a female subordinate while he was mayor and married to his SECOND wife; who had his attorney publicly trash his SECOND wife and mother of his children while he, Giuliani, as mayor of New York, was carrying on an open relationship with his future THIRD wife; who shared an apartment with a male homosexual couple after he had separated from his SECOND wife prior to his marrying his THIRD wife; who defends protections for illegal immigrants … and on and on and on …A couple of days after I sent this, Hewitt mentioned that he had gotten many responses, both pro and con, on this issue, including e-mails from or about self-described conservatives who declared their support for Giuliani. Here’s one of them:
Hugh: On a plane flight from Jacksonville to New York City on the Sunday before the GOP Convention, I sat next to a woman from Alabama who was a convention delegate. We spoke for most of the flight. She was pro-life, pro-second amendment, pro-school prayer—as rock-ribbed a conservative as you are likely to find. I asked her who she was supporting for President in 2008. Without a moment’s hesitation, she replied, “Rudy.” When I informed her that Rudy held views that were the opposite of the issues we had just discussed, she replied, “None of that matters if we’re dead. Rudy will keep us safe.” That’s when I knew that Rudy can be the next GOP nominee.While I still say—no matter how many e-mails Hewett receives from pro-Giuliani “conservatives”—that there’s no realistic chance of Giuliani’s being picked as the Republican presidential candidate in 2008, the bolded remark in the above e-mail complements my recent blog entry on “The reduction of American identity to the lowest (Hobbesian) common denominator.” Since the left has become so extreme that it no longer supports national self-defense against our mortal enemies, conservatism has been reduced to the support of national self-defense against our mortal enemies. That which is not actively or passively treasonous is “conservative.”
The stated willingness of “conservatives” to abandon all conservative principles except for the principle of keeping ourselves alive is perhaps the greatest example so far of the Hegelian Mambo (a coinage invented by VFR participant Matt in this discussion, as a corollary of the Unprincipled Exception). In the Hegelian Mambo, as the left become more left, the right, in defining itself in opposition to the ever-more threatening extremism of the left, and not in terms of unchanging principles of its own, abandons its prior positions and moves ever further leftward itself. Thus, for example, at the rate we’re going on the life-style front, in ten years’ time a conservative will be a person who disapproves of sexual intercourse between humans and animals, and in fifteen years’ time a conservative will be a person who disapproves of marriage between humans and animals. The moderate position will be to support civil unions. Email entry |