Conservatism

We have Occupy Wall Street to thank for the already grating tendency among pundits to sort the American people by percentages. The possibilities for such categorization are endless. There are, of course, the 1 percent of Americans who make more than $516,000 a year and the 99 percent who do not. But there are also the 21 percent of Americans who identify as liberal and the

The first master’s thesis defense committee on which I served, more years ago than I care to count, evaluated an effort titled “Liberal Deviations of Robert A. Taft, 1945-1953.” As a young assistant professor still intoxicated by a heady academic liberal consensus, I was prone to dismiss the author’s assertion that Senator Taft was something more than an iron-hearted reactionary.

Frank Cannon, in the Los Angeles Times, on conservatism:

Of all the mischaracterizations of social conservatives, none is more stubborn and pernicious than the notion (promulgated by liberals and eagerly snatched up by credulous media voices) that groups and politicians that espouse a "values" philosophy seek to impose a draconian moral code on a dissenting populace. This notion not only demonstrates a lack of understanding of conservatism and its self-imposed limits, but it also betrays a refusal to face the fact that nanny-state preoccupations are the province of the American left.

Must viewing this weekend: On C-Span's "After Words" series, Bill Kristol, who wrote the foreword to The Neoconservative Persuasion, the new collection of his late father's essays, discusses those essays and Irving Kristol's thought in general with David Brooks.

If Americans know anything about the presidential election of 1924, they know that it was won by the incumbent Calvin Coolidge in a landslide over the Democratic nominee, John W. Davis of West Virginia, a prominent lawyer and diplomat who was a compromise candidate after 103 ballots at a convention where support from the Ku Klux Klan was an issue. (Davis was an anti-Klan Southerner.)

In a response to my article, “The Two Faces of the Tea Party,” Jonah Goldberg writes that “at times [Continetti] seems to be trying — and trying very hard — to use [Glenn] Beck to discredit the entire conservative argument against the progressive revolution in politics.”

Via Matthew Milliner's terrific post yesterday, I came across a seven-part series about the relationship between beauty and conservatism, Art and Beauty Against the Politicized Aesthetic, by the young scholar and poet James Matthew Wilson. He studied under the late Thomist scholar Ralph McInerny, whom Jody Bottum kindly remembered in our pages, and is largely inspired by the thought of Jacques Maritain, who, as Milliner points out, is becoming a bit more in vogue these days. Katie Kresser, for instance, has argued for a Maritainian approach to making art in IMAGE. (A good place to start in reading Maritain is Art and Scholasticism, a book Flannery O'Connor read and reread and had several copies of to give to those who visited her for tea and discussion at Andalusia.)

WHAT DO CONSERVATIVES think today about History? As President Bush readies the nation for war, an abstract question like this one seems out of place. And yet, having raised this theme himself in recent speeches, President Bush has been faced both at home and abroad with widespread criticism for his use and abuse of History.

WE ARE NOW just weeks away from going to war to disarm and depose Saddam Hussein's regime, and beginning the difficult but necessary task of bringing the fresh breezes of self-government into the authoritarian hothouses of the Arab world. The arguments of the antiwar protestors--to the extent they even bother making arguments more sophisticated than placards reading "Bush = Hitler"--are refuted easily enough, and fortunately they've only strengthened the resolve of George W.

THE URGE TO EMBRACE "Gods and Generals" is so strong as to be almost overwhelming. It is a beautiful, serious movie about the Civil War that holds tight to the trail of truth. It is well acted and scrupulously made. Anyone who has recently suffered through Hollywoodized history--Pearl Harbor, "The Messenger," "Thirteen Days"--will surely run to "Gods and Generals" if for no other reason than director Ronald Maxwell gets things right.

No small achievement, that.

WE LIVE IN A FREE COUNTRY, thank God, so we are each of us entitled to celebrate Richard Nixon's birthday in our own way. Out in Yorba Linda, California, at the Nixon Library & Birthplace, the hardiest of the nation's merry-makers assembled on January 9 to toast the former president's 90th birthday with their annual "Victory of Freedom Gala." Other Americans celebrated quietly, surrounded by family and friends, while some preferred to be left alone, to gather their thoughts and memories. Still others chose not to mark the occasion at all, which is their right.