The New Republic

I could tell quickly this was a Kirchick post. Not that I'm complaining.

The American Conservative is interesting -- it's got the nutty side to it, as we have displayed here. But because it's the minority in conservative opinion, it isn't afraid to attack the right-wing establishment (which never criticizes itself). For instance, there was a thoughtful review of Jonah Goldberg's monstrosity, LIberal Fascism. I think that alone barely justified its continued existence. The rest is good supermarket tabloid material.

- rozenson

May 9, 2008 at 5:15pm

I got to "wonderful" in the first line and thought "ah a pointless sarcastic adjective--must be Kirchick."  

- adamvaught

May 9, 2008 at 5:21pm

Fair enough, and I couldn't agree more with the conclusions you draw in your text. I even agree with your typos -- "aactually" is exactly how I pronounce that word. Though to be fair, I only ever say "aactually" when I have a monocle on and a wet martini in one hand.

But what of the above makes the paleocons of The American Conservative "neither American nor conservative"? First off, what is "not conservative" about referring to biblical teachings about sexual morality? What is "not conservative" about wishing to minimize state interference in private religious, family, and sexual conduct? The fact that both of the stances you describe are perfect expressions of true conservatism is exactly why conservatism is such a bad thing. As for "not American," as far as I can tell you didn't even try to back up that claim. I think someone who argues for a comprehensive "America first" ideology starts the argument with the presumption of American-ness. Sure, their kind of conservative has an enthusiasm for Russian chauvinism. But your kind of conservative has an enthusiasm for Israeli chauvinism, so it's a draw on points as far as the admiration-of-foreigners thing goes.

Fifteen points from Slytherin for failure to prove your headline.

- rhubarbs

May 9, 2008 at 5:31pm

When I saw the lede, I thought...and yes it was...

this guy trolls some murky swamps...ronpaul...gayneoconporn...this bizarre magazine, which to tell you the truth, I thought had died quietly a few years ago...

Looking at the bright side, one could say that kirchick has the tnr noir beat...that is one way to make it all smell better...

- thejauntyboulevardier

May 9, 2008 at 5:33pm

If this publication starts coming out against the enslavement of teenage girls, you're going to lose boneill's $25 a year.

- adaglas

May 9, 2008 at 5:40pm

not available online hmm...is James a writer for that magazine or just a subscriber? Inquiring minds want to know (not me though, I am a moron.)

- blackton

May 9, 2008 at 5:41pm

Rozenson: What a perfect take on Buchanan's rag. Jonah Goldberg is a fool. My local paper carried a column by him for awhile on the op - ed page on Mondays. They pulled the plug on his column a few months back, mercifully.

What is worse to paleoconservatives than sexual abuse? The state's assault on one of the few redoubts of rank patriarchy left in this country.

- liberal reformer

May 9, 2008 at 6:38pm

I stopped by Daniel Larison's blog -- the top post compares Jamie unfavorably to a wolf.  Apparently those two have the obscure, unfunny, and painfully white equivalent of a rap feud going on.

- ratnerstar

May 9, 2008 at 7:41pm

You know, Jamie, you're wonderful when you're guns are aimed at the other side.

- ackyri

May 9, 2008 at 8:11pm

"Fifteen points from Slytherin for failure to prove your headline."

Hilarious.

- adamvaught

May 9, 2008 at 8:43pm

These are the same people who condemn the Islamic world for its abuses of women and children, but of course it's OK for patriarchal dominated societies in this country to disassociate women into a completely brainwashed state to the degree that they will stand by passively and watch as their little girls are raped by old men, and then cloak their pedophilia behind the veil of pseudo Christianity.  In short they're the worst kind of hypocritical apologist vermin known to humankind.

And Pat Buchanan is a racist  Anti-Semitic Ku Klux Klan loving son of a bitch. I condemn MSNBC utterly for hiring that piece of shit.

- AaronBBrown

May 9, 2008 at 8:47pm

It's "et al.," you moron.  "Et" means "and" in Latin; it isn't an abbreviation.

I'm all for bashing AmCon, but I'd hate to have to chose between them and Kirchick ...

- Androscoggin

May 9, 2008 at 8:57pm

Hey Jamie, those fleas itch, don't they? Maybe you shouldn't oughta lay down with those folks.

- WoodyBombay

May 9, 2008 at 9:09pm

So the argument of the American Conservative journal is that state or federal interference in domestic sexual life and/or parenting and family arrangements is wrong, except when it's aimed against gays or hippies.  That figures.  And Kirchick's argument is . . . what, exactly?

That he's a conservative too and wants a conservatism that doesn't offend him with its homophobic anti-modernity?  Dream on.  That he prefers a progressive conservatism that's against underage sex, or possibly a conservative progressivism that doesn't believe in dusty compounds with regular mealtimes and paranoia for dessert?  Hope never dies.  But in any case he doesn't want to be bothered by weird freaky shit from the border marches of 21st century American conservative culture.  Sorry.

James, if you sit on the fence they build the wire right through you!

- ironyroad

May 10, 2008 at 2:47am

WoodyBombay: I' m confused by your post. James Kirchick is no paleo; he blogs on Contentions over at Commentary. Could you please elucidate? P.S. How goes it over at the alehouse?

Ironyroad: Moderation is an underappreciated virtue. It is because of us fence sitters that there is a modicum of peace and prosperity afoot in the land. Sure, sometimes it is a Hatfield - McCoy world and you have to choose sides to save your bacon. But I prefer posttribalism.

- liberal reformer

May 10, 2008 at 9:45am

rat,

That's an interesting point about the bleached rap feud. I have noticed that before In JK's posts, as well as in those of his mentor.

I don't really get feuds. I think if you really have it in for somebody you should just kill him. Run him over with a steamroller until you hear the satisfying crunchy sound and his brains splatter all over a passing windshield. Dismember him, slowly, then feed the dismemberments to your pet poodle, one by one. That nail gun that the guy in "No Country for Old Men" used was pretty cool, except he showed little imagination with it; I would have liked to have seen its effect on body parts other than the head.

Instead, we get feuds. Maybe folks have qualms about killing their enemies--like, it's immoral or illegal or stuff. Except when it's not, like if the enemy is somebody you never met before who had the misfortune to be born in Iraq.

So, the feud thing...like, nobody really cares except a few bored voyeurs with time on their hands. Hard-working Americans, white Americans, don't care. Neither do hard-working Americans, black Americans, for that matter.

I can't get it up for a feud, most of the time. Hell, there are guys on this board whose posts I regard as mostly insipid, but if I don't see their names for a few days I get to wondering if they're okay.

- williamyard

May 10, 2008 at 7:23pm

Marriage is legal in Texas at 16. The 16 and 17 year olds were married legally.

What this really is about is the government declaring that people of a certain faith cannot have children. That is a gross violation of the first and fourteenth amendments and must be fought at every stage.

Remember that no matter what your personal feelings on polygamy this is really really scary legal precedent on the level of eugenics cases. If it passes than your right to have kids is dependent on your religious faith opening the door for unbelievable persecution.

- cthulhu2008

May 10, 2008 at 7:24pm

Ethulhu2008: We are dealing with a cult here and cults always involve coercion to some degree. May we take your 16 year - old daughter (if you have one) from you and place her with a Warren Jeffs - like cult? No, I know we may not. Precisely.

- liberal reformer

May 10, 2008 at 8:08pm

Eugenics?  That's totally loony.  I don't think the idea is to prevent weird old men from having kids, but to stop weird old men from knocking up teenagers as the means to that end.  

As for the marriages being legal--are you sure?  Do they have licenses?  It looks like the sex with kids is illegal until you are legally married to the child, and I would expect those licenses, if they exist at all, would be void due to previous marriages.  Seems like it will be murky to say the least.

This is a testament to bizarre age of consent laws.  Other states require both parties to be under 18, which is at least somewhat more logical.  They probably won't have this problem.  

- zacwbond

May 11, 2008 at 1:15am

liberal reformer, why are you confused by WoodyBombay? Of course he -along with adamvaught, AaronBBrown and similarly bight bulbs- considers Kirchick a conservative. For these people, anyone to the right of  Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore is conservative or a right-winger.

- sleepyavl

May 11, 2008 at 4:56am

liberal reformer writes:

"We are dealing with a cult here and cults always involve coercion to some degree. May we take your 16 year - old daughter (if you have one) from you and place her with a Warren Jeffs - like cult? No, I know we may not. Precisely."

I have to disagree here.  Most cults, or at any rate the groups that people typically refer to as cults, do not involve coercion any more than mainstream religions do. They proselytize and members indoctrinate their children, but the same could be for many branches of Christianity.  There are, of course, several noteworthy examples of groups that were coercive (Aum Shinrikyo, the group responsible for the sarin gas attacks on the Tokyo subway, comes to mind), but these groups are the exception, not the rule.  I confess that I don't know much about the group in question here, but If you want to prove that they are coercive and therefore warrant government intervention, you need a bit more than, "well, they're a cult."

- AlanSP

May 11, 2008 at 8:52am

Incidentally, I find it bizarre that people talk about polygamist groups like this as if polygamy is somehow the relevant moral issue.  It isn't.  The relevant issues are things like rape, child abuse, and in some groups, incest.  I'm not saying that these things are or aren't going on in this case, but those are the issues we should care about.  Sexually abusing one's underage wife is no less morally reprehensible if you have only one wife.  Conversely, if you have multiple wives, but live an otherwise normal life, I don't see why the government or anybody else should care.

- AlanSP

May 11, 2008 at 9:01am

AlanSP, I tend to agree with you, but that raises the question: Do we, as a people acting through our government, have the right to recognize and reward some happy sexual partnerships and not others? Can we limit recognition to heterosexual couples, or merely to couples? Or must we also give state sanction to such happy, productive polygamous partnerships that may exist? Is "because a majority of us think it's icky" grounds enough to deny the benefits of marital recognition from happy polygamous partners?

- rhubarbs

May 11, 2008 at 3:42pm

I would say that, no, "because the majority of us think it's icky" isn't a good enough reason (this is why I support gay marriage, despite the majority opinion about its ickyness).  The one issue I can think of that might get tricky is how the benefits of marriage would apply to those with multiple partners (does your insurance cover all of your spouses? just the first one? the one whose health you care most about?).  Sort of a moot point since polygamy won't be legally recognized in the foreseeable future.

I'm not saying that we don't have a right to choose which happy partnerships to recognize so much as I'm saying that I don't believe we should exercise that right just because things make us uncomfortable.  We *should* exercise that right in cases where there is are legitimate concerns about health (e.g. incest) or the ability of one party to understand what they're doing (I don't care how happy a man's five-year-old wife is; it's still not ok).

- AlanSP

May 11, 2008 at 8:49pm

AlanSP: The word "cult" is tossed around too much (or used to be). But where it is appropriate, it precisely differentiates fringe religious groups from mainstream ones. A prime definition of a cult is that it endeavors to seperate its members from sources of information beyond itself and from contact with the outside world. The Warren Jeffs clan is an inbred group if ever I saw one. I can already hear people thinking "here he is denominating the Amish as a cult". It is true that they would fit my definition but as a consequentialist, I look at results. They are a going concern and a decent bunch. It works occasionally but more often the turn away from pluralism makes for an abuse of power.

Concerning polygamy, I think that your "liberalism", rather than a judicious and procedural one, is an uber tolerance that runs off the rails. The late William F. Buckley, Jr. used to speak of the danger of being so openminded that your brains fall out. That he had problems in the other direction does not invalidate his insight. We (in the form of the US government) settled the polygamous matter with the Mormons a century or so back. Monogamy has worked out quite well in the West. Again, as a consequentialist, I say go with it. Actually, what we have with a robust divorce rate is more like serial monagamy. But hey, what is perfect? Now, I am not a Burkean conservative who says that the present social order is the evolved wisdom of the ages and is not to be tampered with (I call myself a quasi - Burkean, though, in homage to the fact that radical social engineering doesn't work; I am anti William Godwin). But I am strongly for gay rights. I myself am straight but forever - until recently - we were operating under a heterosexist bias. Bring gays into the monagamous order.

- liberal reformer

May 12, 2008 at 10:48am

It's a really knotty question (and one that does't neatly fall into left-right schemata) to what degree the legal authority is entitled to interfere in private domestic arrangements.  Presumably most of us would reject the extreme enabling of male dominance that happens in many societies around the world, many but not all examples of which can be found in strongly Islamic societies with highly traditional cultures of obedience and theories of honor.  But you don't need to go that far afield to discover some homey versions of that model -- they are here in the U.S.

And presumably most of us don't want the opposite:  a kind of "lunchroom monitor" state that looks in on all arrangements to make sure that they fit abstract norms of nuclear family with well-scrubbed kids  and a sort of suburban desexualized prudery in the driver's seat.  This would be "Momism" expanded from the private to the broader public stage.

Added to that is the dimension of feminism, which offers a different and more promising frame for understanding our world of individual, ostensibly non-political, emotions and desires.  It can have a strongly libertarian bent, but it can also find itself lining up with the most conservative forces in our society (beyond the battlefields of abortion and gay/lesbian rights both sides can discover that they share a deep-seated American suspicion of pleasure).   The sight of the "liberal" women journalists and commentators leapfrogging each other to condemn Eliot Spitzer after the story broke was not particularly inspiring.  It wasn't the hypocrisy they were going after, as far as I could see, it was the libido.

In any case, beyond obvious protections for minors and those otherwise at risk, the government has no business telling us who can love us or whom we can love.  Hannah Arendt had something when she looked skeptically at the school desegregation struggles in the 1950s:  she published a dissenting view that said that legal bans on interracial marriage were much more offensive and intrusive and should be the first target for civil rights campaigners, and not school enrollments.  Needless to say she drew intense artillery fire from all sides, as it was a lot easier to carry out politics on the back of innocent schoolkids than it was to deal with the adult worlds of desire, sex, and marriage.

- ironyroad

May 12, 2008 at 11:47am

liberal reformer, we're in agreement that the word "cult" gets tossed around too much (witness, for example, the unflattering comments directed at Obama supporters).  But I would disagree with the characterization that a defining feature is that cults "endeavor to seperate its members from sources of information beyond itself and from contact with the outside world."  Not only does this include groups most people would be reluctant to call cults (e.g. your Amish example, and frankly many overprotective parents), but it excludes the numerous cults that interact with the outside world on a regular basis, whether it is through something mundane like proselytizing or something more dramatic like terrorist attacks.  I won't offer alternative criteria for defining cults because I don't think it's a term that refers to a well-defined category.  We call things cults in virtue of the fact that they share various features with other groups that we call cults.  It's a term defined by a sort of "family resemblance" (if you're familiar with Wittgenstein's example of games, that's the type of idea I'm going for here).

In any case, even if one were to accept your definition, the group's status as a cult is immaterial.  The relevant point would be that the group is coercive in a way that warrants government action.  But you would still have to show this on independent grounds, and if you take the consequentialist position that you propose, then you have to ask, "What makes these guys worse than the Amish?"  Presumably the answer would involve the actual issues that should be a societal concern (possible child abuse, etc.), which is pretty much my point.

With regard to polygamy, the relevant point would not be that monogamy works, but that polygamy doesn't work, or is morally wrong in some sense.  I have yet to see any convincing argument that this is the case.  The "monogamy works" argument is the same one used by opponents of gay marriage, with the modification that "heterosexual monagamy works."  Again, it does not follow from this that other systems don't work.  The questions, "What is wrong with polygamy?" and "What is wrong with many modern polygamist groups?" are separate questions that are too often conflated.

- AlanSP

May 12, 2008 at 1:02pm

Here's a question - why 18 (or 17, or 16)?  While we are on the subject of gay marriage, polygamy, and other "ick-factor" laws, I would like to know the reasons for the current age-of-consent limits.  Certainly, there should be some lower-limit on the marriageable age - as AlanSP said, "I don't care how happy a man's five-year-old wife is; it's still not ok" - but logically, why is that age not determined by nature (i.e., puberty, or about 13-14 y.o.)?  My own great-grandmother was married at 14 to a man seven years her senior (rural Mississippi, c.1910).  It was just what you did back then, because of the life expectancy, I think - neither she nor my great-grandfather reached 60.

I'm not pushing for a lower age limit any more than I am pushing for the old life expectancy.  I don't want my own daughter to be married before she is out of college.  Neither am I recommending leniency for those who knowingly break the law - it's perfectly acceptable to say, "I respect your traditions, but if you live in this country, you have to respect our laws."  (And, of course, a lot of what this cult is on the hook for, such as locking girls up to force them into marriage, goes well beyond the marriage laws alone.)  I'm just saying that, in the absence of even a tenuous logical basis for our selected age-of-consent, we really have no right to all the preaching about it that I've heard from Americans on both sides of the political fence.

- dhauck

May 12, 2008 at 1:07pm