Motion to Placate

Are Republicans maturing?

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50

Congress did their job—for now. Sarah is joined by Steve and Jonah on today’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast to discuss Speaker Mike Johnson’s successful passage of Ukraine and Israel aid and explain the intellectual history of the illiberal right.

The Agenda:
—Ukraine aid passed
—Heritage Foundation vs. Erick Erickson
—What is conservatism?
—Columbia protests
—Will history prove them right?
—Genocidal language at Columbia
—Looking Jewish

Show Notes:
—Ukraine: The Latest with Jonah
—Jonah’s recap of the Mike Johnson saga
—Erick Erickson’s article on free markets
—The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
—Norman Rockwell painting
—Why are we protesting?

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Comments (50)
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  1. Clark.Monson

    "Sohrab Amari's a bit of a moving target."

    I'm with Steve: that's an extremely generous characterization of Amari. Every time I see that Amari has changed his position on something yet again, I can't help but thinking of More's line to Roper in "A Man for All Seasons": "Now look, Will, two years ago you were a passionate churchman; now you're a passionate Lutheran. We must just pray that when your head is finished turning, your face is to the front again."

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  2. Russell J

    With respect to Sarah’s question about why the fusionist type of coalition ascended I think it is fair to argue that it had a fair amount of success and that the arguments are best if they get a fair hearing. Maybe it is the dejection at discovering many were just following a tribe and getting savaged by the populist horde, but the true believers who can argue the fusionist conservative points still punch above weight so to speak and when these Heritage types are proven to be frauds, their arguments will hit like marshmallows since Sarah was remembering history already proved they will certainly fail to impress.

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  3. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    The three-legged stool of the later 20th century right is a good model (hawkish foreign policy, small government, traditional social values), but there were also three different factions in the later 20th century right that are important to understand - the libertarians, the neocons and the populists. Each of the three fractions had different feelings and emphasis on each of the legs of the policy stool. The neocons were the most hawkish, the libertarians not as much, and the populists were actually isolationists that until recently just shut up for policy unity. The libertarians were strongest on small government, which could never be too small for them. The neocons were OK with medium government. Populists didn't care much for the small government stuff and hawkish foreign policy but went along with it to get their social agenda advanced and were pissed by 2010 to find that the other two factions were just stringing them along, focused on delivering on the economic and foreign policy agendas at the expense of the social agenda. (Full disclosure - I identify with the neocon wing)

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  4. Philip.R.M.Hunt

    Restrained Jonah is the best Jonah. When making arguments to an emotional audience it pays to use inflammatory rhetoric for emphasis, but it is a turn off for audiences that are trying to be rational. The Dispatch seems to have an audience that prefers rational discourse, so restraint is more persuasive. I thought in the past Jonah's overheated rhetoric on Wilsonian progressivism hurts the points he is trying to make, but today his restraint paid off.

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    Addicus

    I attended exactly one protest in college. A dozen of us counter-protested about a dozen "No blood for oil" protesters during the run up to the Gulf War. It lasted about 10 minutes. In hindsight, the 90s were pretty chill when it came to college protests.

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  6. Michael.Mcchesney

    I grew up in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx. In the 1970s, Woodlawn was an overwhelmingly white middle-class neighborhood made up primarily of people of Irish and Italian descent. Part of the reason the neighborhood remained so white was because the three realtors in the neighborhood would not show houses to Black families. At least that's what my father told me. The neighborhood is more integrated today but is still very white. I think that has more to do with immigration from Ireland (much of it illegal) than invidious discrimination, but that is just a guess. I attended St. Barnabas Elementary, a Catholic school that didn't have a Black student until I was in the 8th grade. Unsurprisingly for a Catholic school, I didn't have any Jewish classmates or teachers. But if my early education was sheltered, attending the Bronx High School of Science was a completely different experience. Bronx Science in the 1980s had students of just about every ethnicity that could be found in NYC and (with the exception of Staten Island) from most NYC neighborhoods.

    Attending Bronx Science exposed me to many Asian people. Asians made up 40% of the students in the 80s. One ethnicity I was not exposed to until law school was an Asian person with a Southern accent. I had a Vietnamese-American classmate at Washington & Lee from West Virginia with a thick Southern accent. Bronx Science also had many Jewish students and teachers. I hadn't really thought about how few Jews there were at W&L and the surrounding community until my tax professor told us that many members of his family worried about him taking a job in South West Virginia. He told us that he never felt unsafe but that it could be difficult at times not to have more Jewish people in the W&L community.

    Obviously, I met quite a few Jewish people while working as an attorney in NYC. I worked at a firm called Brody, Fabiani, and Cohen, where the partners would jokingly ask us to "find the Jew" (i.e., identify the Jewish partner). It was a trick question as it turned out that the only partner that wasn't Jewish was Steve Cohen (not the one that owns the NY Mets). Steve's grandfather had converted, and Steve was Catholic. John Fabiani was not only Jewish; he was the then president of The Jewish Lawyers Guild.

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  7. Pohl

    Interesting pod. I’m no post-liberal, but, pace Jonah, I would not simply glorify individualism as opposed to the “high abstraction of the family,” whatever that means. It’s arguably better to say classic conservatism is jealous of a measured individualism, whereas post-liberals are concerned that individualism has already run amok. That being said, it’s too early to pitch in the towel on our individual freedoms and American way of life.

    Post-liberals may, however, be a canary in the coal mine. Trump’s rise is surely another. If politics is all about timing, some post-liberal ideas are hopelessly ahead of their time, some are incurably behind the times, and some are right on time but too countercultural. Will we recognize in time when our lofty experiment has begun an inevitable descent into moral turpitude and total political dysfunction? Let’s hope so.

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  8. Kalo

    Did I hear Sarah make reference to an ISSUE POLL with regard to the public's desires towards deportation of illegal immigrants?

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    Coolidge’s Burner

    Per usual, Jonah makes me feel seen: "A lot of the 'Common-Good Constitutionalists' on college campuses [Ed.—Not just college ones.] . . . would rather be the president of their own group than be a peon/cog/pay their dues in The Federalist Society."

    But also (IMO) an incomplete argument. Forget about slope-foreheaded political climbers like Charlie Kirk for a second—at least at the thinktank/policy-paper-level, a lot of these "New Right" figureheads (e.g., Josh Hammer, Michael Anton) actually do speak to a genuinely intelligent and ambitious segment of Very-Online goo(oooooo)bers long since corrupted by circle-jerks to NatCon webinars and Curlius Pubio Moldork blog posts about how monarchy is actually super terrific awesome.

    They may be truly malicious political forces, but they're not "bad-faith." They actually believe this postliberal stuff because—much like their progessive cousins currently gathering BO in the Columbia Yard—they think they just untapped this hidden source of Gnostic wisdom that us* old has-beens never knew about.

    *I'm actually, like, very early 30s; I was just born at the tempermental age of ~67.

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    1. Bobby D

      I agree that it may not be in bad faith. It’s more a form of LARPing, where the participants have conflated the manufactured drama for real life.

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        Coolidge’s Burner

        I largely agree with your point with a small exception for the LARPing analogy.

        It's less incorrect than it is imprecise. Those people know that they aren't actually in Middle Earth when they assemble to role-play. These (exclusively) guys genuinely believe they've stumbled onto true, not manufactured, drama when they just-ask-questions about whether medieval peasantry actually did provide a coherent sense of meaning in life. IMO, viewing those eggheads (of which I am a spiritual sibling!) through the prism of asking how they came to believe such nonsense is much more useful than actually grappling with their arguments at face value.

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        1. Bobby D

          That makes sense. Grappling with the arguments probably makes little sense. I listened to a few podcasts in which Yoram Hazony was interviewed. It seemed like he started with the conclusion and then cherry-picked the evidence for it. It was apparent that his intent was not to persuade skeptics, but to create apparent plausibility—however thin—for those already inclined to embrace the conclusion. It’s also curious that those who embrace this view are almost all men.

          This suggests that it’s more of a psychological phenomenon than an intellectual one. I’d be interested in what your thoughts are on this, as someone who seems to know a few such guys. I suspect that they’re mostly the bored sons of privilege who are taken by a kind of romantic idealism. They are attracted to this view because it seems more heroic, edgy, and transgressive than the drudgery of perfecting a craft and molding oneself into a decent person.

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  10. Austin from Atlanta

    Sarah, your comments section is replete with progressives who fight tooth and nail against conceding progressives hold outsized sway in crucial cultural points of influence (a morally neutral proposition) and saying third-party votes are actively bad-faith. How could you possibly expect any sort of genuine admission of guilt at scale without it being accompanied by bountiful reminders of rightwing sins?

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