The right is intellectually dead because conservative writers behave like party apparatchiks

Clark Coleman sent this to Jim Geraghty at National Review Online:

Mr. Geraghty:

Several times in your description of the National Review cruise, you mentioned that conservatives were now liberated from defending the policies of Bush and McCain. I can understand that politicians, who must not become pariahs within their own party, feel the pressure of party loyalty. However, I have never understood why a columnist should lack the courage of his convictions and feel the need to defend policies he disagrees with. Ditto talk radio hosts.

Can you help me to understand why any of the columnists, from NR or elsewhere, feel the need to write as if they were running for office? If columnists and talk radio hosts have to defend anti-conservative policies because they happen to be GOP policies, then where in our society do we go to find conservatism advocated?

Thanks,
Clark Coleman

LA writes:

Exactly right.

I’ve made the same observation myself about conservative writers, and about one in particular, who seem to feel that instead of telling the truth as they see it, their job is to trim their ideas to what they think is accepted conservative opinion at this moment, as though they were running for office or keeping the support of a constituency. But if not only politicians must conform themselves to what they perceive to be accepted public opinion at this moment, but writers as well, then from whom will we hear ideas that are not governed by what is perceived to be accepted opinion? Remember what Ayn Rand said in The Fountainhead about “second handers”? If everyone is taking his intellectual cues from what he imagines someone else is thinking, who the hell is thinking for himself?

* * *

An example of the commentator-as-politician that we’re all familiar with is Rush Limbaugh, who grandly announced a year or so ago that he wouldn’t carry water for President Bush any longer—meaning that he had been carrying water for him during all those years of drift and folly. Then, after the McCain defeat, this same Limbaugh engaged in angry tirades about how the Republican party has lost its direction during the Bush years. But where was Limbaugh during those years? Carrying water for the Bush and the Republican party, instead of speaking the truth as he saw it, and thus providing leadership.

* * *

However, I shouldn’t complain that conservative insiders are declaring that they are liberated from defending the policies of Bush and McCain. Hasn’t such liberation of the conservative mind been my main reason all along for preferring a Hillary or Obama victory?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 18, 2008 07:47 PM | Send