Vox Blogoli---Insurgents in Sportcoats Round Two
Yesterday, Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic Monthly replied to the blogosphere's dissection of his statements regarding religious conservatives and allowed Hugh Hewitt to post his full article. Thanks first to Mr. Rauch for taking criticism head-on, something more MSM types ought to do.
Mr. Rauch enters the CBS Plea of Haste in his partial mea culpa for analogizing religious conservatives to abortion clinic bombers and Iraqi terrorists ("insurgents", as Reuters would have it). He further self-mitigates with a recourse to the Context Argument (we've taken him out of context, of course).
All well and good.
Here's the paragraph which preceded the snip Hugh provided:
The first and second sentences continue Rauch's pose as a moderate, looking askance at both Left and Right Wing "extremists." His last two sentences, however, oddly focus only on the Right. Let's take a closer look at them.
"Distinctively tart" is an interesting way of describing the Republican Party's alleged "right-wing flavor." Distinctive typically refers to something different, almost uniquely so. As we're comparing Republicans to Democrats in this paragraph, does Rauch mean the Republicans are "tart" to an extent the Democrats are not? He's comparing extremists to the middle elsewhere in the article. Does he mean to imply that the Republicans are further out on the tart spectrum (thus disctinctively so) than the Democrats? Tart isn't a good flavor, most of the time---the connotations of the word imply a rather shocking sourness. Given a choice of being described as sweet or tart, I suspect most readers would choose the former, even if they happened to be religious conservatives.
Either way, Rauch ascribes this GOP tartness to the religious conservatives in the party. Why, to make the entire soup "distinctively tart", one presumes these particular ingredients must be very tart indeed! The last sentence seems to buttress this interpretation, as Rauch is contending that being in the Republican soup not only makes the soup more tart, but makes the religious conservatives less so.
That's fine for sour things, as Rauch evidently finds religious conservatives, but let's trade "tart" for "toxic", shall we?
The Republican Party avoided David Duke like the plague in 1988. Would embracing him with open arms not have tarted up the GOP? Surely it would have. Would it have mainstreamed David Duke? Of course---that's what he was looking for. According to Rauch, not doing so weakened "social peace". Which is, of course, hogwash.
The two-party system works not because it embraces extremes but because it embraces the mainstream. Multiparty democracies tend to build unstable coalitions of radicals. If Mr. Rauch wants to see his model in action, he need only pop over to Italy. The U.S. is different, thanks largely to the Electoral College (which the Dems are looking to undermine). Because the President has to gain an electoral majority, he must be a mainstream figure palatable to a wide swath of the country. To do so, he's going to push his party toward mainstream policy---this is why the platform debate occurs at the presidential convention. He is also going to marginalize extremist tendencies within his party, as Bill Clinton famously died with his "Sista Souljah moment" (and failed to do with disastrous consequences when his wife decided to become the Medical Czarina).
It is no surprise that the religious conservatives have clout within the GOP. The President happens to be one. The DLC likewise had clout within the Clinton White House, since he emerged from their ranks. Where Rauch gets it wrong is the notion that religious conservatives are a radicalizing, extremist influence on the President and his party. It just isn't so. Indeed, Bush's compassionate conservatism creed stems directly from the ranks of these religious conservatives, and runs right against the grain of the entitlement-hating GOP rank-and-file. It's not the religious conservatives who are up in arms over Bush's spending at the moment.
Mr. Rauch never quite gets around to telling us what policy positions are being advanced by the religious conservatives which are so radical. Perhaps he takes exception to their opposition to gay marriage, in which case he has "radical" and "moderate" precisely backwards.
In any case, Mr. Rauch continues to misunderstand the role of religious conservatives within the GOP, continues to inflate their level of radicalism, and fails to draw the obvious parallels to the hodgepodge of disgruntled leftists which make up the Democratic Party today.
I'll make it real simple: If the Democrats are more moderate and less extreme than the "distinctively tart" Republicans, how does Mr. Rauch explain their continued and historic electoral losses at the state and national levels?
Update:
JollyBlogger doesn't much care for Rauch's notion of tamed Christians.
Skye Puppy notes Rauch's strange blind spot when it comes to leftist terrorism as well.
Update II:
Brainster nails Rauch for selective outrage.
No Left Turns marvels at Rauch's "Bipolar Disorder", and wonders if moderation isn't being defined through negation.
Mr. Rauch enters the CBS Plea of Haste in his partial mea culpa for analogizing religious conservatives to abortion clinic bombers and Iraqi terrorists ("insurgents", as Reuters would have it). He further self-mitigates with a recourse to the Context Argument (we've taken him out of context, of course).
All well and good.
Here's the paragraph which preceded the snip Hugh provided:
Moreover, although party polarization may disgruntle the center (can't we be for stem-cell research and school vouchers?), it helps domesticate fanatics on the left and the right. Though you would be partly correct to say that the mainstream parties have been taken over by polarized activists, you could also say, just as accurately and a good deal more cheerfully, that polarized activists have been taken over by the mainstream parties. The Republican Party has acquired its distinctively tart right-wing flavor largely because it has absorbed---in fact, to a significant extent has organizationally merged with---the religious right. As Hanna Rosin reports elsewhere in this package, religious conservatives are becoming more uniformly Republican even as their faiths and backgrounds grow more diverse.
The first and second sentences continue Rauch's pose as a moderate, looking askance at both Left and Right Wing "extremists." His last two sentences, however, oddly focus only on the Right. Let's take a closer look at them.
"Distinctively tart" is an interesting way of describing the Republican Party's alleged "right-wing flavor." Distinctive typically refers to something different, almost uniquely so. As we're comparing Republicans to Democrats in this paragraph, does Rauch mean the Republicans are "tart" to an extent the Democrats are not? He's comparing extremists to the middle elsewhere in the article. Does he mean to imply that the Republicans are further out on the tart spectrum (thus disctinctively so) than the Democrats? Tart isn't a good flavor, most of the time---the connotations of the word imply a rather shocking sourness. Given a choice of being described as sweet or tart, I suspect most readers would choose the former, even if they happened to be religious conservatives.
Either way, Rauch ascribes this GOP tartness to the religious conservatives in the party. Why, to make the entire soup "distinctively tart", one presumes these particular ingredients must be very tart indeed! The last sentence seems to buttress this interpretation, as Rauch is contending that being in the Republican soup not only makes the soup more tart, but makes the religious conservatives less so.
That's fine for sour things, as Rauch evidently finds religious conservatives, but let's trade "tart" for "toxic", shall we?
The Republican Party avoided David Duke like the plague in 1988. Would embracing him with open arms not have tarted up the GOP? Surely it would have. Would it have mainstreamed David Duke? Of course---that's what he was looking for. According to Rauch, not doing so weakened "social peace". Which is, of course, hogwash.
The two-party system works not because it embraces extremes but because it embraces the mainstream. Multiparty democracies tend to build unstable coalitions of radicals. If Mr. Rauch wants to see his model in action, he need only pop over to Italy. The U.S. is different, thanks largely to the Electoral College (which the Dems are looking to undermine). Because the President has to gain an electoral majority, he must be a mainstream figure palatable to a wide swath of the country. To do so, he's going to push his party toward mainstream policy---this is why the platform debate occurs at the presidential convention. He is also going to marginalize extremist tendencies within his party, as Bill Clinton famously died with his "Sista Souljah moment" (and failed to do with disastrous consequences when his wife decided to become the Medical Czarina).
It is no surprise that the religious conservatives have clout within the GOP. The President happens to be one. The DLC likewise had clout within the Clinton White House, since he emerged from their ranks. Where Rauch gets it wrong is the notion that religious conservatives are a radicalizing, extremist influence on the President and his party. It just isn't so. Indeed, Bush's compassionate conservatism creed stems directly from the ranks of these religious conservatives, and runs right against the grain of the entitlement-hating GOP rank-and-file. It's not the religious conservatives who are up in arms over Bush's spending at the moment.
Mr. Rauch never quite gets around to telling us what policy positions are being advanced by the religious conservatives which are so radical. Perhaps he takes exception to their opposition to gay marriage, in which case he has "radical" and "moderate" precisely backwards.
In any case, Mr. Rauch continues to misunderstand the role of religious conservatives within the GOP, continues to inflate their level of radicalism, and fails to draw the obvious parallels to the hodgepodge of disgruntled leftists which make up the Democratic Party today.
I'll make it real simple: If the Democrats are more moderate and less extreme than the "distinctively tart" Republicans, how does Mr. Rauch explain their continued and historic electoral losses at the state and national levels?
Update:
JollyBlogger doesn't much care for Rauch's notion of tamed Christians.
Skye Puppy notes Rauch's strange blind spot when it comes to leftist terrorism as well.
Update II:
Brainster nails Rauch for selective outrage.
No Left Turns marvels at Rauch's "Bipolar Disorder", and wonders if moderation isn't being defined through negation.
1 Comments:
Great analysis, Teflon. You've shot holes all through Rauch's soup, so to speak. David Duke is the perfect example of why the bring-the-extremists-into-the-pot theory doesn't hold up.
I've linked to your post.
Post a Comment
<< Home