Guard Dogs of the Faith

The guys at Powerline, three lawyers, are notably low-key and gentlemanly. They rarely get personal toward political opponents (except when expressing their understandable annoyance at their local left-wing newspaper in Minneapolis), and they base their critique of leftist lies, which is their forte, on a careful accumulation of evidence. At the same time, in their world view and sentiments, they are slavish followers of the neoconservatives, a fact about which they make no bones. How devoted they are is suggested by their uncharacteristically sharp response to Robert Alter’s review of Steven Smith’s new book on Leo Strauss, the political philosopher whom many believe to be the source of the neoconservative ideology. “Alter doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Powerline conclusively declares. The only evidence Powerline offers for this claim is Alter’s comment that among the many subjects Strauss studied was the framers of the American Constitution. Powerline continues:

Alter’s familiarity with Strauss’s work appears to be faked; I believe that Strauss himself wrote virtually nothing—let alone a “study”—about the framers of the Constitution.

Well, since when is a single factual error proof that a writer’s entire knowledge of a subject is “faked,” rather than a sign that his knowledge is flawed or incomplete? This kind of bitter characterization is so unusual at Powerline that it naturally raises the question what could have set if off. Powerline itself provides the answer:

Alter crudely turns his praise of Strauss and Smith to immediate political purposes. According to Alter, Strauss “repeatedly argued against the very idea of political certitude that has been embraced by certain neoconservatives.” Alter himself sounds a little too much in love with his own certitude for a guy who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I’ve glanced through Alter’s review, and his passing comment about certain neoconservatives’ excessive certitude (and, though Alter doesn’t mention it, isn’t there much evidence for such excessive certitude, given the Iraq catastrophe?) appears to be the only critical comment it contains about the neocons. Yet that extremely mild and vague criticism was enough to set off Powerline’s amazingly nasty attack.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 24, 2006 05:22 PM | Send