Hal G.P. Colebatch vs The American Conservative; Or, Yes, Virginia, There Are No Paleocons

Dear Paleoconservative Readers--

The Australian writer R.J. Stove, in 2006, wrote an article for the American Conservative on what he saw as the intellectual shallowness of the Australian Conservative political scene and its main magazine Quadrant.

In what may be a response to this article (and certainly a demonstration of its accuracy), the January-February 2007 edition of Quadrant, has an article by Hal G.P. Colebatch entitled "American Conservatives and the Second World War" that is basically a savage attack upon the American Conservative, with a puzzling emphasis on a book review by Bill Kauffman from 2004.

Unfortunately Mr Colebatch's article is not available online - so I will have to reproduce the relevant portion referring to the American Conservative for the edification of my occasional Paleocon readers. Let me categorically state the opinions expressed in this Quadrant article are not the opinions of The Sectarian Strand.

When I first learnt that Mr Patrick Buchanan was setting up a new magazine called the American Conservative, I was delighted. There is always room for another conservative journal of culture and ideas.

Now I have read the American Conservative. Unfortunately, rather too much of it stinks. It has its good moments, but it's also a showcase for the worst in what might be called the conservative mentality - provincial, appeasing, insular, demanding both economic and political US disengagement from the world, and well as being ... er ... how shall I put this tactfully? ... overly critical of the supposed influence of Israel. Much of the time its true archetypal hero seems to be Petain, if you can imagine Petain as a Milwaukee ward-heeler. It seems to be in some ways a Transatlantic mirror-image of that snobbish, quasi-Philbyesque British Toryism whose leitmotif is jealousy and resentment of America.

A recent effort from the American Conservative is an attack on those so-called "neo-cons" who dare to criticise that well-known pillar of George Washington's heritage and friend of freedom, Vladimir Putin, for ending the Russian people's right to elect their own provincial governors.

It's raison d'être appears increasingly to be not to uphold, expound or promulgate conservative values against the big battalions of the chattering-class intellectualoid Left and the general horrors of what Evelyn Waugh called the modern age in arms, as does William Buckley's National Review, but to attack and ridicule the "neo-cons", to divide the conservative movement, and to promote and mythologise dichotomies in it which do not exist.

The modern conservatives who look to tradition and values, who respect or love hierarchy, ritual splendour, romance and ancientry, and who look back to the likes of Edmund Burke, and the modern conservatives who look to internationalism and economic freedom and back to the likes of Adam Smith, are not natural enemies. Attempts to drive a wedge between them are destructive and mischievious.

It is a happy and symbolic fact of history that Burke and Smith were close personal friends and in agreement with each other's writings. They punished Dr Johnson's claret together, and Smith among other things nominated Burke for membership of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, which he had helped found. Both believed successful society depended on correct understanding of human nature, not on transforming human nature, and saw morality and economic rationality as going together - indeed both held them to be necessary partners for society and civilization. Their works form a luminious and coherent whole, and their respective heirs should have no quarrel.

Buchanan's writing and those of the other contributors to the American Conservative are at times sensible and worthwhile, and can be conservative in the best sense. Buchanan's book The Death of the West I think was also important, valuable and brave. As a warning of demographic suicide it should be universal reading, though I suppose only time will tell if it is justified (the future has a way of cheating the prophets). His recent deconstruction of the revolting Dan Rather and CBS is a masterpiece of cold forensic brilliance, and I dips me lid.

However, the bad of the American Conservativeis bad enough to remind one of the saying that lilies when festering smell worse than weeds. A review by Bill Kauffman of a novel by Philip Roth, The Plot against America, titled "Heil to the Chief", is a good example. It begins with the sneer:"Philip Roth's The Plot against America is the novel that a neoconservative would write, if a neoconservative could write a novel."

Roth is an American liberal with whom I would not normally feel much empathy. However, I'm with him against Kauffman. Kaufman has identified himself (in the far-left Counterpunch, edited by Alexander Cockburn) as:

of the other America ... ours is a land of volunteer fire departments, of baseball, of wizened spinsters who instead of sitting around whining about their goddamned osteoporosis write and self-publish books on the histories of their little towns, of the farmwives and grain merchants and parsons and drunkards who made their places live...

A vision (which is not necessarily the reality) of parochial, stupefied, know-nothing insularity. The sort of Weltenschaung which in selfish ignorance supported Smoot-Hawley and high protectionism, smashed world trade in the 1920s and brought on the Great Depression and, indirectly, the Second World War. (Naturally, the American Conservative is passionately protectionist.)

I won't go into jokes about lynchings and the difficulties of sleeping between between sheets where you catch your toes in dem durned ol' eye-holes, because the real rural America doesn't deserve it. I also believe that rural life has spiritual treasures and in some ways I envy those who can live it. But it is not a complete way of dealing with the world. As Kauffman says with loathing in the same article, perhaps unwittingly echoing Chamberlain at the time of Munich: "Empire focuses our attention on matters distant and remote." Tolkien made the point in The Lord of the Rings that the rustic, contented Hobbits of the Shire were on the verge of being wiped out by terrible enemies and didn't know it.

Firstly, I was disappointed that Mr Colebatch didn't use a few more foreign terms - I'm sure he could have used such bons mots as: Zeitgeist, or Götterdämmerung, or even bien pensants if he had really tried. Secondly I was impressed with his ability to seemlessly slip into the dialect of the lower orders (e.g. "and I dips me lid" and "you catch your toes in dem durned ol' eye-holes") - you wouldn't know he had a privileged upbringing as the son of a leading Western Australian politician.

Thirdly, to be serious, it takes a certain gall for an Australian to tell others what an American Conservative is and what they should believe. The mere existence of the American Conservative magazine and its authors and readers should have told Mr Colebatch that there are differences between some conservatives (the unmentionable Paleocons) and the Neocons (or so-called "neo-cons" as Mr Colebatch prefers). And these differences won't go away with incomprehensible name calling and insults. Comparing Americans who are remaining faithful to the expressed statements of many of its Founding Fathers; such as George Washington advice to avoid "foreign entanglements" or Thomas Jefferson who favoured "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none", or  John Quincy Adams who wrote that the US "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy"; to traitors and collaborators, such as Petain and  Philby, is grotesque. And I'm still trying to work out how Bill Kauffman's somewhat romantic paen to small town life exactly warrants bizarre references to the Ku Klux Klan and vituprative abuse.

I shall deal in more detail with Mr Colebatch's comments regarding Bill Kauffman in another post. Those wishing to respond to the gross caricature found in this Quadrant article can find Quadrant's contact details here or at the Feedback page.

Yours sincerely,
Mild Colonial Boy, Esq.