The verdict is, most people thing the moral reformationists are slime too. The verdict is, most people accept the fact that Clinton's done a reasonably good job politically, and never expected him to be a moral exemplar. The verdict is, they might not like Clinton, but they like the Neocon preachers even less. Work on that log in the eye a bit, eh, Neocon?
On a more civil note, I'll repeat a question. What did you think of the Andrew Sullivan NYT magazine piece, "The Scolds", Oct. 98? Seems you should be quite familiar with the people Sullivan talks about and the peculiar righteousness they preach. Before I read that article, I thought the "Decline of the West due to Clinton" line I'd heard here was lunatic fringe, not mainstream neoconservatism. For those who haven't seen it, here's another bit.
This scolding, moralizing conservatism is one with a lineage; it is the construction of a cadre of influential intellectuals who bear as much responsibility as anybody for the constitutional and cultural damage this moment may have already wrought. And they will bear an even greater responsibility if the ultimate victim of this spectacle is the reputation and future of conservatism itself.
The Lewinsky Kulturkampf after all, did not come out of nowhere. Since the implosion of Reaganism during the Administration of George Bush, and the evaporation of anti-Communism with the collapse of the Soviet Union, American conservatism has been in a period of radical intellectual reconstruction. Much of this reconstruction has occurred in journals and magazines and seminars largely unnoticed by the general public, but quite openly and candidly discussed among the conservative intellectual elites. And the dominant ideas that have emerged in the last few years bear only the faintest resemblance to the major themes of the 1980's: economic freedom, smaller government and personal choice. Although libertarians are certainly numbered among the intellectuals of the right of the late 1990's, they are clearly on the defensive. What is galvanizing the right-wing intelligentsia at century's end is a different kind of conservatism altogether: much less liberal, far less economic and only nominaHy skeptical of government power. It is inherently pessimistic - a return to older, conservative themes of cultural decline, moralism and the need for greater social control. As much European as American in its forebears, this conservatism is not afraid of the state or its power to set a moral tone or coerce a moral order. A mix of big-government conservatism and old-fashioned puritanism, this new orthodoxy was waiting to explode on the political scene when Monica Lewinsky lighted the fuse.
You can see it in the current Congressional races. The issues that are driving the Republican base this fall have little to do with economics or politics or national security. They are issues of morals: infidelity and honesty, abortion, family cohesion and homosexual legitimacy. Much of this, as has been widely reported, is because of the evangelical Protestants who now make up the Republican activist base. Some of it is also because of Bill Clinton, who has done more to give credibility to the far right's conviction about moral collapse than anyone. But this is only half the story. If the remoralization of conservative politics has been fueled by events and by Republican activists, it has also been diligently refueled by conservative thinkers. The new moralism has been enforced with a rigidity that puts old-style leftists to shame. It is an orthodoxy, to put it bluntly, of cultural and moral revolution: a wholesale assault on the beliefs and practices of an entire post-1960's settlement. And, if recent polls hold out, it could be on the verge of coming to power in November.
The centrality of this moralism to the Lewinsky saga was perhaps best put by David Frum, one of the brightest of the young conservative thinkers now writing. "What's at stake in the Lewinsky scandal," Frum wrote candidly in the Feb.16, 1998, issue of The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, "is not the right to privacy, but the central dogma of the baby boomers: the belief that sex, so long as it is consensual, ought never to be subject to moral scrutiny at all."
It would be hard to put better what was so surprising, and so dismaying, about the Starr report and the Republican Congress's sub-sequent behavior. The report was driven, as the Republican leadership seems to be, not merely to prove perjury but to expose immorality. In this universe, privacy is immaterial, hence the gratuitous release of private telephone conversations, private correspondence and even de-tails of the most private of human feelings. For these conservatives, there is only a right, as Starr revealingly wrote, to a "private family life" (emphasis added). A private, nonfamily life is fair game for prosecution and exposure.
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 Colti Roberts," and about as close as Washington ha to a dean of intellectual conservatism. And n journal has done more to propagate, defend an 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 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 The Standard, is "a place where denatured Ne Left politics meets denatured New Age therapeutics." In February The Standard put on cover a cartoon of Clinton-as-satyr on 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 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:Revolting Generation Thirty Years On," the headline blared. The connection with Clinton was not exactly underplayed. |
