Like the rest of us, conservatives feel the need to respond to the provocations of pop culture. Sometimes they are driven to respond to lush, prestige dystopias. Sometimes they come to praise anthropomorphic cartoon ponies.
Meanwhile, like liberals, some are seeing parallels between events in America and France. Others are bewildered by America’s wasteful Middle East adventures. Yet more will not give up on trying to convince the readers of the New York Times that Donald Trump is normal.
No, The Handmaid’s Tale is not ‘unexpectedly timely’
Publication Bloomberg View
Author Megan McArdle was described by Mark Ames’s and Yasha Levine’s Shame Project as “a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit”. She is an alumna of the Economist, the Atlantic, and the Daily Beast, and has emerged over the last decade and a half as America’s leading purveyor of spicy-hot contrarian-liberatarian takes.
Why read it Libertarians have a reputation for being somewhat … concrete. McArdle wants you to know that Trump’s America is nothing like Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale, which she re-read for the purposes of this sniffy article.
Her main objection to the claims that the series is “timely” seems to be that America is not a literal misogynist theocracy. The prospect of Trump appointments rolling back reproductive rights, and his political debt to the Christian right, are no excuse, she thinks, to draw parallels with a patriarchal dystopia. Sadly, in her zeal, she is driven to insist that “a decade after the Reichstag fire, most of German society still looked pretty much like it had in 1925.” Germany in 1943 is not what most writers would reach for as an image of normalcy and calm. But no one ever accused libertarians of having a deep sense of history.
Extract “Meanwhile, the culture is moving the other way. Women are gaining more economic power relative to men; the nation is becoming less religious. The Handmaid’s Tale is becoming less plausible a future with each passing year, no matter how hard feminists insist that there is only a brief and slippery slope between overturning Roe v Wade and forcing women into state-sanctioned breeding programs.”
French election: American conservatives should support Macron
Publication National Review
Author Tom Rogan was born and educated in Britain, but he now inhabits the world of thinky US conservatism, and is a National Review columnist. His long list of bylines has a pronounced rightward tilt, but he has published more than once at the Guardian.
Why read it Once #nevertrump, National Review is now developing a #neverLePen line in relation to Front National’s rightwing populist leader. It’s not so much her racism that is the problem as her economics, which fly in the face of the free trade mania of movement conservatism. All we can hope is that their endorsement of Macron is not the kiss of death that it was for the string of Republican contenders that Trump tore apart, one after another.
Extract “[Le Pen’s economic plan] is socialism. It would mean higher living costs for families, ballooning deficit spending, and more barriers to first-time employment for younger workers. Conversely, Macron has promised reforms to encourage entrepreneurial risk taking and to unshackle private-sector businesses from France’s constricting labor laws. Put simply, Macron is the candidate of economic opportunity; Le Pen is the candidate of special interests. Millennial conservatives have particular reason to support the former, in the sense that their futures depend on creative destruction born of fields such as those in the sharing industry.”
America’s misadventures in the Middle East
Publication The American Conservative
Author Chas Freeman was the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf war, and later served as an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration. He’s written five books, two of which are extended meditations on the theme of this essay – that America’s Middle Eastern wars are failing and misdirected.
Why read it Freeman thinks that the jig is up. The US has not won any of its wars of choice in the greater Middle East, and it has no plan to turn this around. America’s presence has not only affected the countries ruined in these wars, but has come home, where they have “proven ruinously expensive and injurious to the civil liberties of Americans. They have poisoned American political culture with various manifestations of xenophobia. Islamophobia has transitioned naturally to anti-Semitism and other forms of racism and bigotry.”
It’s rare to read the case put with such clarity by a former professional, let alone on a conservative site.
Extract “If the Congress can muster the will to re-examine the wars it has negligently tolerated, it should begin by belatedly asking how and on what terms they will conclude. What are America’s objectives? Are these objectives feasible? What would constitute success? When might it come? How much would it cost to achieve and consolidate it? Where the US objective has basically come down to avoiding obvious defeat, what must be done to minimize the consequences of failure? And how are Americans to pay for the debt their ever-widening wars are running up?”
Donald Trump is a real Republican, and that’s a good thing
Publication The New York Times
Author Charles Kesler edits the Claremont Review of Books, and is a senior fellow of the conservative Claremon Institute and Claremont College in California, where he also teaches political science. The journal has flirted with the “intellectual Trumpism” proposed by writers like Michael Anton and the now-defunct Journal of American Greatness. Kesler, and his journal generally maintain a dissident, aristocratic toryism that doesn’t quite line up with Movement Conservative organs like National Review.
Why read it Kesler tries out a novel method of “normalising” Trump. Postwar “movement conservatism” is the aberration; Trump is a perfectly standard representative of the pro-business, patriotic conservatism that animated the GOP from its inception to mid-century. Kesler’s effort to turn the tables on the #nevertrump crowd leaves many questions hanging – Trump’s foreign policy is shaping up as anything but “restrained”, and Trump has not yet renounced plans for deportations and other policies which would involve a degree of federal government intervention which older conservatives would not have been willing, or able to carry out.
Extract “In those days the party stood for protective tariffs, immigration tied to assimilation (or what Theodore Roosevelt called Americanization), judges prepared to strike down state and sometimes federal laws encroaching on constitutional limitations, tax cuts, internal improvements (infrastructure spending, in today’s parlance) and a firm but restrained foreign policy tailored to the defense of the national interest. Are these not the main elements of Trump administration policies?”
Four positive countercultural messages in My Little Pony
Publication The Federalist
Author David Breitenbeck is a freelance conservative writer who has previously treated readers of The Federalist to an explication of the conservative messaging of Godzilla movies.
Why read it Poe’s Law points to the difficulty of distinguishing satire from odd but sincerely held views. But given the existence of Bronies, far-right Bronies, and Nazi furries, it’s reasonable to assume that this effort to evangelize Friendship is Magic to a less extremist conservative audience is the real deal. David Breitenbeck wants you to come for the cartoon horses, and stay for the conservative moral sensibility. If it isn’t parody, it’s beyond it.
Extract “Not only is FiM smartly written and hilarious, and features excellent characterization, but it sometimes even dares to offer up actual moral wisdom in place of tired Marxist shibboleths. The show mostly is about how people with starkly different personalities get along: a message it often presents with more maturity than many a more ‘adult’ show.”
