As a member of the Conservative Book Club I enjoy reading Jeffrey Rubin’s “And Rightly So” column that is printed on the back page of the flier that is sent out each month to introduce new books. The CBC is forty years old and I have seen it advertised in copies of National Review from the ’60s—they have a pedigree of sorts, you could say. I thought this month’s entry from Mr. Rubin might interest you. Rubin’s rejection of Fred Barnes’s book may be a small gesture but I found it to be refreshing.
One “conservative” book you DON’T want to read
January 3, 2006
If the most important part of my job is choosing the “right” books for the Conservative Book Club, almost as important is rejecting the wrong ones. That latter task has taken on increasing importance in recent years as more and more publishers have entered the conservative marketplace, hoping to catch the wave of conservative bestsellers. After all, not every “conservative” book coming out of some giant New York publishing house staffed largely by liberals is likely to be the real McCoy. Nor, for that matter, is every book written or published by sincere conservatives necessarily worth your time.
Usually, our decisions about which books to reject attract little comment from members, partly (I hope) because you trust us, but doubtless also because, in the vast majority of cases, if you don’t hear about a conservative book from the Club, you don’t hear about it at all. Occasionally, though, our decisions do draw comment—especially when we reject a “big” book (i.e., one from a major publisher, with a lot of marketing muscle behind it) by a high-profile author. That’s when I end up having to explain myself.
Well, allow me to strike pre-emptively at any forthcoming complaints about our decision not to carry Fred Barnes’s Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush. Barnes, as you may know, is Executive Editor of The Weekly Standard and a commentator for FOX News, both part of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. As such he is able to garner an enormous amount of publicity for his book, which, as I write—a month before it is officially published—has already begun, in the form of full-page ads in the Standard. Hence, my expectation that some of you will want to buy it. Let me assure you: we did you a favor by rejecting it for the Club.
Space doesn’t permit an in-depth critique of Rebel-in-Chief, but one isn’t necessary. Most of what Barnes delivers is the usual “inside knowledge” and empty puffery that comes with being granted “extraordinary access” to the President and his advisers; Joe Sobran once called this sort of thing “courtier journalism.” Still, dull though it is, I didn’t reject the book for that reason alone. Mainly, I rejected it for its argument.
That argument was well encapsulated in the original subtitle of the book, How George W. Bush is Redefining the Conservative Movement and Transforming America (which was later changed to the current subtitle). To Barnes, what Bush is “rebelling” against, in large part, is conservatism. All those things that Bush does to drive traditional conservatives to despair—federalizing education, massively expanding Medicare, committing America to a global crusade for “democracy,” and so on—are part of a grand strategy to “redefine” conservatism for the 21st century and create a “new Republican majority”; old-style conservatives will have to get with the program or get left behind. This new conservatism, it should be apparent, bears more than a passing resemblance to the old liberalism. In any case, the fact that Barnes sees nothing self-contradictory in the attempt to “redefine the conservative movement” is enough to call into question his own understanding of conservatism, if not the President’s.
Please don’t misunderstand me: I’m not rejecting Rebel-in-Chief because it defends the President—we’ve offered many pro-Bush books in the past, and I have no doubt we’ll offer more in the future. But Fred Barnes isn’t doing the President—or the country—any favors by celebrating his worst political tendencies. And we would be doing you—and the conservative movement—a disservice by offering Barnes’s book.
— Jeffrey Rubin andrightlyso@ConservativeBookClub