Month: December 2011

Fight Club, or That’s the Year That Was

I only began blogging in June. But because so many of my readers are new to the blog and we’re approaching the end of the year, I thought it might be fun to review some of the blog’s greatest hits. Traffic to the blog has been growing steadily every month, with the blog on some days getting nearly 6,000 hits. My two most popular posts, by far, were this roundtable on the Obama presidency from August and my recent take on Christopher Hitchens.  My personal favorite, which hasn’t generated nearly as much traffic, was this discussion of Ross Douthat’s views on sex. In general, though, what seems to generate the most traffic are the periodic arguments I get into with […]

Reactionary Minds

The Masters of the Universe don’t take kindly to the accusations of Occupy Wall Street, and they’re fighting back. Here are some verbatim quotes from the transcripts of their own defense, which toggles between a haughty contempt for the lower orders and a genuine, self-pitying sense of persecution.  Gee, if only someone would write a book explaining this… “Who gives a crap about some imbecile? Are you kidding me?” Bernard Marcus, co-founder, Home Depot “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it.” Jamie Dimon, CEO, JP Morgan Chase “Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.” John A. Allison IV, BB&T […]

My Blog Wins 3rd Prize

3 Quarks Daily, one of the classiest outfits on the internet, has awarded me 3rd Prize  in its annual competition for “the best blog writing in politics & social science.” Harvard professor Stephen Walt, a formidable blogger in his own right and a model to younger academics like myself, was the judge. This is the post that won me 3rd Prize, which is officially called “Charm Quark.”  And this is what Walt had to say about it: Why are today’s so-called “conservatives” so enamored of far-reaching social and political transformations, not to mention costly and ill-fated efforts to export “liberty” at the barrel of a gun?  Far from being traitors to true conservatism, Robin argues that today’s conservative radicals are […]

“Yes, but”: More on Hitchens and Hagiography

Reading more of the commentary on Christopher Hitchens’s death—and the reaction to those of us disinclined to join the hagiography—I’m struck by a consistent line I hear from some of his admirers and followers: “Yes, he was wrong on Iraq, but…”  And then any one of a number of claims follow: he was a brilliant raconteur, a steadfast opponent of authoritarianism, a lovely stylist, a sensitive critic, a hilarious polemicist, a bon vivant, a loving and lovable mentor to younger journalists, a loving and lovable friend, and so on. I want to focus on that “Yes, he was wrong on Iraq, but.” First, Hitchens wasn’t just wrong on Iraq; he was wrong on the war on terror. As soon as […]

Christopher Hitchens: The Most Provincial Spirit of All

On the announcement of his death, I think it’s fair to allow Christopher Hitchens to do the things he loved to do most. Speak for himself: [On the use of cluster bombs by the US in Afghanistan] If you’re actually certain that you’re hitting only a concentration of enemy troops…then it’s pretty good because those steel pellets will go straight through somebody and out the other side and through somebody else. And if they’re bearing a Koran over their heart, it’ll go straight through that, too. So they won’t be able to say, “Ah, I was bearing a Koran over my heart and guess what, the missile stopped halfway through.” No way, ’cause it’ll go straight through that as well. […]

It Was 20 Years Ago Today

Twenty years ago, to the day, I participated in a strike.  My very first one. I suspect that as human beings, we have the capacity for one, maybe two, genuinely radicalizing experiences in our lives.  This was mine.  As I wrote in a New York Times op-ed years later (read first page here, second page here): How did a university founded in revolt against old Boston come to practice such lordly rule? Because it can. Unlike Harvard, which must compete with large private employers, other major universities and cultural institutions, Yale is by far the largest employer in New Haven. In 1965, Yale accounted for one out of every 20 jobs in New Haven. Today, because of a combination of […]

Ross Douthat Channels Georges Sorel

Ross Douthat, writing in today’s New York Times (“The Decadent Left“): Yes, Occupy Wall Street was dreamed up in part by flakes and populated in part by fantasists. But to the extent that the movement briefly captured the public’s imagination, it was because it seemed to be doing what a decent left would exist to do: criticizing entrenched power, championing the common good and speaking for the many rather than the few. The union rallies and the Keystone demonstrations, by contrast, represented what you might call the decadent left, which fights for narrow interest groups rather than for the public as a whole. … Whatever your politics, there’s arguably more to admire in the ragtag theatricality of Occupy Wall Street […]

My Response to Bruce Bartlett

Bruce Bartlett was a senior policy adviser in the Reagan White House and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under George H.W. Bush. He’s worked with and around conservatives—from Jack Kemp and Gary Bauer to Ron Paul and the Cato Institute—for decades. In recent years, he’s become a major critic of the Republican Party and the right, joining the ranks of Andrew Sullivan, David Frum, and other conservative apostates. He is, to cite a t-shirt my three-year-old daughter likes to wear, “kind of a big deal.” So I was more than pleased when he decided to respond, in the comments section, to my most recent post on the utopianism of Sullivan’s brand of conservatism. Given Bartlett’s stature, and my hope […]

Reality Bites: Andrew Sullivan’s Utopian Conservatism

In a nice post about Peter Viereck, a mid-century American conservative who the New Yorker rightly rescued from obscurity a few years back, Andrew Sullivan makes the following observation: …there is a distinctive conservative strain of non-violence, pragmatism, restraint and limited government that is at peace with the New Deal. How else to expain Eisenhower or the first Bush or Reagan in some moods? Equally, there has been a long tradition of the kind of conservatism that is ascendant today: relishing violence and war, ideological, revanchist and in favor of limiting government but not of limiting other forces inimical to liberty, like rentier classes, or a fusion of corporate interests and legislation. As some of you know, I’ve been poking […]