|
Lowry joins Noonan (a year late) and VFR (three years late)
Richard Lowry of National Review is finally dissenting from President Bush’s “all humans desire freedom” mantra. As Lowry points out, people often want things other than freedom, such as to submit themselves to God or to destroy their enemies. But if Lowry has the intelligence to see what he’s seeing now, where has he been for the last three years? Why didn’t he apprehend the palpable falsity of Bush’s utopian notion the first time Bush expressed it, or any of the times since then? Why did it take the election of Hamas—a direct result of Bush’s “all people want freedom, and freedom is the cure for terrorism” policy—for Lowry to announce that he’s “getting off the bus”? The answer is that Lowry, like so many professional conservatives today, does not approach issues from the point of view of trying to understand the truth about them, but from the point of view of situating himself within the political context in which he lives and operates. So he goes along with the accepted wisdom of his milieu, until its falseness becomes so grossly apparent, and makes him so uncomfortable, that he can’t deny it any more, and at that point he starts to move sideways into a new position. Suddenly, not as a result of any rational thinking process, but as a result of his increasing discomfort, he starts to see things that were plainly to be seen all along. Lowry might have said, “For a long time I believed X about democracy and about human nature, but now, as a result of further evidence, particularly the Hamas election, I’ve rethought my position and and now I believe not-X about democracy and human nature.” If he had said that, we could conclude that he had had an honest change of view. But that is not what Lowry says. Instead he issues a proposition about human nature as though he’s always believed it, a proposition that completely contradicts the Bush policy that he’s supported for years. This shows that he has not been engaged in an honest thinking process but rather has been going along with something that happened to be false, until its falseness became so palpable that he couldn’t stand it anymore, and he “got of the bus.” Here’s another example of Lowry’s dishonesty. He quotes President Bush in the State of the Union address saying, “Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens.” Lowry comments: “True. No one should be surprised that religious parties do well in deeply religious societies.” No one should be surprised? Did the democratization supporters ever once say through all of 2002, 2003, and 2004 that the likely result of democratizing Iraq and other Muslim countries would be Islamic sharia governments? Of course they didn’t. When the Sharia constitution was adopted by the Iraqis in 2005, none of the Bush supporters had seen it coming. The same goes for the overwhelming election of Hamas in January 2006. Once again, if for several years you have been professing X and then you suddenly realize that not-X is true, and if you admit that you’ve been wrong all along, then you’re being honest. But if you say, “No one should be surprised that not-X is true,” then you’re being dishonest.
There is another way describing the phenomenon whereby different kinds of people take varying lengths of time to grasp the falsity of some progressive idea. A reactionary or traditionalist, who is grounded in principle and in an allegiance to his historic civilization, recognizes and opposes a false and destructive progressive idea the moment it appears. A conservative, who subscribes to the values that are broadly accepted in his society at this moment, even if they are liberal values, recognizes and opposes the false idea only after it has done much damage. And a liberal, who has no allegiance to his historic or even his present society but only to the ongoing advance of freedom and equality, opposes the false idea only after it has wreaked total damage—or he never opposes it at all. Email entry |