Third-Tier Pundits, Part 2

JONAH GOLDBERG, BOTTOM FEEDER
by Justin Raimondo

Some excerpts:

The absolute evil of what passes for today's conservative movement may not shock my more liberal readers, but those of us on the Right who were brought up in a more salubrious time remember when things were quite different. Believe it or not, conservatives didn't always resort to smears instead of arguments – indeed, they were the most frequent recipients of smears (let the shade of Barry Goldwater testify on my behalf!). As a tiny minority during the 1950s and 60s, the organized right-wing in America was an ideologically diverse and intellectually exciting crowd – a far cry from the lockstep party-lining one-dimensional movement of war-bots we see today. ===== Much has been made of the lack of civility in public discourse, noted especially during the Clinton years, but no one has recently made the point that the public debates of a republican order differ qualitatively from politics in the age of Empire. In his 1992 lecture to the Heritage Foundation, Kirk cited Amaury de Riencourt, the author of a prophetic book entitled The Coming Caesars, published in 1957, widely discussed at the time and now forgotten: "Unless measures of restraint should be taken, Riencourt wrote – and taken promptly – the United States would fall under the domination of 20th century Caesars." Kirk went on to cite this passage from the text: "With Caesarism and Civilization, the great struggles between political parties are no longer concerned with principles, programs and ideologies, but with men. Marius, Sulla, Cato, Brutus still fought for principles. But now, everything became personalized. Under Augustus, parties still existed, but there were no more Optimates or Populares. No more conservatives or democrats. Men campaigned for or against Tiberius or Drusus or Caius Caesar. No one believed any more in the efficacy of ideas, political panaceas, doctrines, or systems, just as the Greeks had given up building great philosophic systems generations before. Abstractions, ideas, and philosophies were rejected to the periphery of their lives and of the empire, to the East where Jews, agnostics, Christians, and Mithraists attempted to conquer the world of souls and minds while the Caesars ruled their material existence." The money sentence: Everything becomes personalized. This is the substance and the style of the post-Clinton conservatives, whose polemics are reduced to drive-by smearing. Formerly obsessed with the sexual antics of the Arkansas Caesar, they are now employing the same tactics against their enemies on the Right – witness the really nasty and quite personal assaults launched on Taki, Buchanan, and myself. The drive-by smear technique, as perfected by Radosh, Goldberg, the National Review-Weekly Standard crowd – and their enablers in the Establishment liberal media complex, such as Howard Kurtz and Alexander Star – is their only weapon. Ideas don't matter, truth is irrelevant – if only they can have war in the Middle East, the ends will have justified the means. (read the entire article)

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