Tag: John Adams

Oh, Jonah: If only conservatives knew their own tradition, Part LXXVII

Jonah Goldberg had this little exchange on Twitter on this morning. I wonder if Jonah has ever read Section 2 of the Sedition Act. SEC. 2. And be it farther enacted, That if any person shall write, print, utter or publish, or shall cause or procure to be written, printed, uttered or published, or shall knowingly and willingly assist or aid in writing, printing, uttering or publishing any false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States, or either house of the Congress of the United States, or the President of the United States, with intent to defame the said government, or either house of the said Congress, or the said President, or to bring […]

Congratulations, John Adams: You Got CUNY’d

On Twitter tonight, The New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, whose book The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century I discussed on Memorial Day, was tweeting about the protests that greeted the Met premiere of John Adams’s opera The Death of Klinghoffer. Here are just some of Ross’ tweets.   Giuliani concedes that John Adams is “one of our great American composers” but declares that his opera “supports terrorism.” #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Ben Brafman says, “This may not be Auschwitz, it’s Lincoln Center,” but suggests that another Holocaust could happen. #Klinghoffer — Alex Ross (@alexrossmusic) October 20, 2014 Melinda Katz, Queens Borough President, says that she is “personally offended by the play.” #Klinghoffer — […]

Still Batshit Crazy After All These Years: A Reply to Ta-Nehisi Coates

Jumping off from Mark Lilla’s negative review of my book in the New York Review of Books—about which more later, though if you’re looking for a hard-hitting response, check out Alex Gourevitch’s demolition at Jacobin—Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a helpful corrective to Lilla’s claim that “political apocalypticism” is a recent development on the right. It’s interesting that Lilla raises Buckley here. People often bring him up as foil to Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, as an example of a time when conservatism was sane. But that Buckley joke has always struck me (a college dropout) as batshit crazy. I constantly hear about the sober-minded Buckley, but it’s tough for me to square that with the man who posited that the bombing […]

To Play the Part of a Lord: A Reply to Andrew Sullivan about Conservatism

Andrew Sullivan—whose views on conservatism I take very seriously (one of the main arguments of my book is inspired by and aimed at his writing)—has linked to Sheri Berman’s response to my critique and identified one paragraph in particular as the “money quote.” If these are Sullivan’s apprehensions, they merit a response. If this paragraph is the crux of concern, it can be dispatched fairly easily. The paragraph in question makes two claims; I’ve divided my response accordingly.   Claim 1: “If conservatism is always about the submission and subjugation of the lower orders, then any popular support for such movements must—by definition—be misguided, misinformed, or the result of trickery.” This claim rests upon two mistaken assumptions: The lower orders […]