The Weekly Standard: "Hey, we're having fun over here on the Right!" The Left is so dull and puritanical...
Another amusing bit of irony there. Here's a contrary take on which side of the political spectrum and which publication, exactly, might properly be considered puritanical, in the conventional sense of the world. In a further bit of irony, this analysis comes from a well known warblogger and Nadine's favorite NYT critic, back before testosterone poisoning set in.
No conservative thinker has done more to advance this new moralism than William Kristol, best known for his urbane appearances on ''This Week With Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts,'' and about as close as Washington has to a dean of intellectual conservatism. And no journal has done more to propagate, defend and advance this version of conservatism than the magazine Kristol edits, The Weekly Standard, founded in 1995 by Rupert Murdoch. Most of this year, Kristol and The Standard have gleefully egged on Republicans in their moral crusade. As early as May -- at a time when it seemed the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal might dissipate -- Kristol urged Republican Congressional candidates to forget other issues in the fall and campaign solely on the issue of the President's morals. ''If [Republicans] do that,'' he argued, ''they will win big in November. And their victory will be more than a rejection of Clinton. It will be a rejection of Clintonism -- a rejection of defining the presidency, and our public morality, down.''
His magazine has been relentless in presenting the scandal as a moral crisis for the nation. Thanks to the President's affair with Lewinsky, The Standard's writers were finally able to see unreservedly in Clinton what they had desperately tried to see in him from the start, but which Clinton's own conservatism had blurred: the apotheosis of the 1960's. The Clinton White House, in the liberated words of Peter Collier in The Standard, is ''a place where denatured New Left politics meets denatured New Age therapeutics.'' In February, The Standard put on its cover a cartoon of Clinton-as-satyr on the White House lawn grappling with a nude Paula Jones and a nude Monica Lewinsky, surrounded by other naked women in bushes and on a swing, with the one-word headline, ''Yow!'' Almost 1 out of 2 subsequent covers in 1998 have focused on the Lewinsky affair. One of the few breaks from Lewinsky coverage was a September cover article on Clinton's alleged genesis. ''1968: A Revolting Generation Thirty Years On,'' the headline blared. The connection with Clinton was not exactly underplayed.
But perhaps no edition of The Standard captured the current state of American conservatism better than the one that came out immediately after the Starr report was made public. Its cover portrayed Starr as Mark McGwire, with the headline: ''Starr's Home Run.'' Inside, page after page of anti-Clinton coverage, anchored by an essay by Kristol advocating a full House vote for impeachment of the President within a month, was followed by a long, surreal article by a reporter attending a four-day World Pornography Conference. Six pages of explicit sex, interspersed with coy condescension, followed. (The cover teased with the headline: ''Among the Pornographers.'') One of many graphic scenes in the article occurs in a ladies restroom: ''Unprompted, [Dr. Susan Block] removes a rubber phallus from her purse and hikes up [her assistant] LaVonne's dress, baring her derriere. Block paddles it and kisses it while LaVonne coos.'' The article was so lurid that The Standard's editors prefaced it with a note: ''Because of the subject matter, some material in this article is sexually explicit and may offend some readers.'' The weird porno-puritanism of the Starr report does not exist, it seems, in a vacuum. It comes out of a degenerated conservative political and literary culture.
The only issue to rival Lewinsky for prominence among conservative intellectuals in 1998 was homosexuality. But in some ways, this was only apposite. For the new conservatives, the counterattack on homosexual legitimacy is of a piece with the battle against Presidential adultery. They see no distinction between an argument for same-sex marriage, for example, and a Presidential defense of adultery, because in their eyes, there is no context in which a homosexual relationship can be moral. Homosexuality, for the puritanical conservatives, is not a condition or even a way of life; it is a disease. And again, the intellegentsia led the way -- with Kristol at the heart of it. . . .
In the broad advertising campaign last summer, sponsored by groups allied with those who organized the D.C. conference, homosexuals were portrayed as sick and in need of therapy. The notion that homosexuality was involuntary was dismissed, with Starr-like certainty, as a violation of ''the truth.'' The Senate majority leader, Trent Lott, said that homosexuals were guilty not of a public crime, but of a private ''sin.'' Again, The Standard had pioneered this politics, routinely decrying any public destigmatization of homosexuals, and calling, in one article in late 1996, for the ''reaffirmation by states of a sodomy law'' that would imprison gay men for private sex as a counterstrike against the threat of same-sex marriage.
But there is one issue above all others at the center of this new conservatism. That issue is not adultery or even homosexuality, although both have come to play a significant part in it. It is abortion. Its importance to the new generation of conservative intellectuals is easily underestimated, and far too easily ascribed simply to the influence of religious activists. In fact, abortion is at the center of current Republican orthodoxy as much because of conservative intellectuals as evangelical activists. Since this may not be self-evident, I'll let one of those intellectuals stress it himself. Here is a writer in The Standard, taking a rare break earlier this year from the Lewinsky obsession:
Republicans talk a lot about being a majority party, about becoming a governing party, about shaping a conservative future. Roe and abortion are the test. For if Republicans are incapable of grappling with this moral and political challenge; if they cannot earn a mandate to overturn Roe and move toward a post-abortion America, then in truth, there will be no conservative future. Other issues are important, to be sure, and a governing party will have to show leadership on those issues as well. But Roe is central.. . .
Who wrote this paragraph? Pat Robertson? Patrick Buchanan? Randy Tate? The answer, again, is William Kristol. His seamless merging of the Lewinsky scandal with the right's other social concerns is perhaps what makes him so integral to the new conservatism. Always, however, the key social issue is abortion. He put the argument most revealingly in the February 1997 issue of the neoconservative political monthly Commentary. ''The truth is,'' Kristol wrote, ''that abortion is today the bloody crossroads of American politics. It is where judicial liberation (from the Constitution), sexual liberation (from traditional mores) and women's liberation (from natural distinctions) come together. It is the focal point for liberalism's simultaneous assault on self-government, morals and nature. So, challenging the judicially imposed regime of abortion-on-demand is key to a conservative reformation in politics, in morals, and in beliefs.''
The choice of words is revealing here. Not just politics, a realm conservatives were once comfortable restricting themselves to, but ''morals'' and ''beliefs.'' And not revolution or reform but ''reformation.'' Kristol's conservatism is happy with the vocabulary of religious war. Earlier this year, Kristol argued that ''abortion is likely to emerge as the central issue in the Presidential campaign of 2000.'' . . .
In the 1980's, the outlawing of abortion was framed in the somewhat liberal terms of saving human life, and protecting human rights. And that is why a smattering of left-leaning intellectuals also signed on as anti-abortion advocates. But in the 1990's, the conservative emphasis has changed. Now the banning of abortion is linked primarily to an attack on the Supreme Court's judicial activism in other areas as well (prayer in schools, women's equality and gay rights foremost among them) and to the more general sexual liberty of the society as a whole. Abortion is central to a reassertion of what Kristol called ''traditional mores'' and of ''natural distinctions'' between the sexes. It is not unrelated to the Lewinsky obsession and the anti-gay crusade. In fact, it is the anchor of both.
Bizarrely enough, abortion has even come to play a role in the reformulation of Republican foreign policy. After all, the main obstacle to Republican financing of the United Nations has not been that body's wasteful bureaucracy, or even the U.N.'s infringement of American sovereignty, but rather its support of birth-control initiatives in the developing world. And the critical issue that seems to have tilted the right toward rampant hostility to China has not so much been Beijing's Communist regime or its militarism but Beijing's specifically anti-Christian bent.
In a long article two years ago in Foreign Affairs that Kristol co-wrote with another Standard regular, Robert Kagan, the connection between domestic puritanism and foreign-policy interventionism was made explicit: ''The remoralization of America at home,'' Kristol and Kagan wrote, ''ultimately requires the remoralization of American foreign policy.''
China has been the case study, becoming the overwhelming foreign-policy obsession of the fin-de-siecle right. Kristol and The Standard have long advocated a policy of containment and economic sanctions against China almost identical to the one fashioned for the Soviet Union for several decades. Kristol has also argued for a large increase in defense spending and a policy of international isolation of the Chinese. The posture against China is not related to Beijing's puny military power as such, but to its moral indecency. Gone is the realism that was once the hallmark of conservative foreign policy. andrewsullivan.com |
