The intellectual bad faith of the Buckley mourners

What depths of denial and doublethink must the neocons, minicons, and teeny-cons inhabit, that they laud as their god and founder the man who wrote in 1955 that the mission of conservatism was to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop,” given that the revered godfather of their own questionable branch of conservatism wrote in 2003 that “the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy”?

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In the first article linked above, which was posted last June, I explain that the term teeny-cons is not a criticism of actual teenagers, but of

chronologically adult “conservatives” who bring an unregenerately adolescent—or, given Jonah Goldberg’s fixation on bathroom humor and excretory functions, pre-adolesecent—perspective into their “conservative” writings.

I also wrote:

I am repelled, though not surprised, when teeny-cons (or should we call them puer eterni-cons?) like John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg, whose entire cultural and artistic horizon has been formed by television, talk at length at a supposed conservative website about whether the last episode of a trashy, deeply nihilistic tv program “worked” or not. But then I saw that William Buckley has posted an article today expounding on the same subject. So it’s not just a teeny-con problem, is it? Goldberg is now the trailblazer, and Buckley the deferential follower.

So much for Buckley steadfastly resisting, to the very end, the controlling political and cultural forces of our time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 29, 2008 12:12 AM | Send