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Who’s cracking up?
(Note: this entry has been substantially revised since its initial posting.) Do those social conservatives and regular conservatives (for example, many of the NRO crew) who are leaning toward or actively backing Giuliani imagine that, after he becomes president with their support, they will ever again be able to stand for the importance of marriage and family, for the importance of parents putting their children’s needs above their own, for opposition to abortion, and for the rest of the moral values they’ve supposedly stood for all these years, including even simple decency? What do they think will be left of themselves, after they’ve sold themselves out to elect Giuliani? The conservative move toward Giuliani is, of course, seen by liberals as a great victory for liberalism. Frank Rich recently wrote a piece in the New York Times called “Rudy, the Values Slayer,” in which he celebrated the surprising level of evangelical support for Giuliani, as detailed in an earlier New York Times Magazine article by David Kirkpatrick, “The Evangelical Crackup.” Rich says the shift is due to a general loss of concern about the moral issues that once motivated the evangelicals compared with issues such as the “war,” and also to the hypocrisy of the evangelical leaders whom he characterizes as a bunch of Elmer Gantries in it for self, money, and power (a conclusion that would be hard to resist in the case of Pat Robertson’s appalling endorsement of Giuliani). As Rich sees it, Hillary Clinton and Giuliani are identical on moral issues, and he ecstatically looks forward to the outcome of the presidential race: “Whichever candidate or party lands in the White House, this much is certain: Inauguration Day 2009 is at the very least Armageddon for the reigning ayatollahs of the American right.” Richard John Neuhaus at First Things amiably mocks Kirkpatrick’s and Rich’s liberal triumphalism:
In the division of labor at the Times, David Kirkpatrick has the job of reporting and Frank Rich the job of gloating. In the same day’s paper, he gleefully rubs his hands over the evangelical crackup. His column is titled “Rudy, the Values Slayer,” and his point is that Rudy Giuliani’s standing in the polls shows that Karl Rove’s theocrats are a paper tiger. They don’t really care that much about abortion, same-sex marriage, and those bothersome “values” issues after all….Neuhaus points to evangelical leaders such as James Dobson who are four-square opposed to Giuliani, then adds:
The reality is that, for millions of voters—evangelical, Catholic, and other—the number-one moral and political issue is the defense of the unborn. Join that to the defense of marriage and family and it seems certain that we are talking about no less than twenty million people. That is more than enough votes, or decisions not to vote, to decide a presidential election. It seems probable edging up to certainty that, if the choice is between a pro-abortion Republican, such as Giuliani, and a pro-abortion Democrat, such as any of the Democratic candidates, those millions will take it as an invitation not to be bothered with election day.If Neuhaus is correct, then what we are looking at is not the evangelical crack-up, but the Republican crackup.
Meanwhile, Patrick Buchanan writes at Vdare:
A Giuliani presidency would represent the return and final triumph of the Republicanism that conservatives went into politics to purge from power. A Giuliani presidency would represent repudiation by the party of the moral, social and cultural content that, with anti-communism, once separated it from liberal Democrats and defined it as an institution. Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 08, 2007 03:46 PM | Send Email entry |