BONUS: Pandemic as Culture War
Added 2020-05-27 22:24:10 +0000 UTCOur old friend Rusty Reno got extremely upset (while extremely online) about the cowardly, godless injunction to wear a mask in public. Then he rage quit twitter.
Thankfully, Matt, a true Reno-whisperer, is here to explain what the hell is going on. We discuss his latest article for The New Republic about the evolving right-wing response to the pandemic. How and why has the right turned a public health crisis into a culture war? We try to answer.
Plus: we divulge the results of our mini-investigation into the Mystery of the Two Frank Wilhoits.
Further Reading:
Frank Wilhoit, "Comment on 'The Travesty of Liberalism,'" Crooked Timber, March 21, 2018
Matthew Sitman, "Why the Pandemic is Driving Conservative Intellectuals Mad," The New Republic, May 21, 2020
R. R. Reno, "Coronavirus Diary: New York, May 12," First Things, May 13, 2020
Peggy Noonan, "Scenes From the Class Struggle in Lockdown," Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2020
Comments
Another post (Twitter) that parallels the Crooked Timber blog: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/13/2103841/-This-Ex-Republican-Just-Tweeted-The-Best-Thread-About-What-The-GOP-Is-About-Ever
Keith Thobe
2022-06-13 23:21:25 +0000 UTCI keep referring back to the Frank Wilhoit quote in the Crooked Timber blog post noted above. I wanted to mention here that Philip Agre wrote something similar in 2004, which is a pretty good read. https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/conservatism.html
Keith Thobe
2022-02-02 20:57:08 +0000 UTCIronic that conservatives want to preserve hierarchy but they don't want to listen to elites.
Nicholas Donofrio
2021-05-18 23:21:39 +0000 UTCReally thoughtful. Thanks Matt and Sam. Now I guess I have to go back and read Noonan (ugh) and maybe Lasch on the idea of fitness in its connection with secularism and maybe a kind of cultural liberalism. I am frankly skeptical. A few years ago I teamed up with another Left scholar who is also a champion triathlete; we thought about writing on CrossFit and the neoliberal subject,. There's also a lot of stuff about hardcore fitness (i.e. bodybuilding) and its connection to various forms of fascism (Mishima Yukio etc). Also elevating the decline of the working body and tying it to futility (as you put it) certainly seems *problematic* to say the least!
Robert Geroux
2020-09-25 01:21:05 +0000 UTCI despise Ross Douthat, he's a liar who is an apologist for creeping authoritarianism . Also he just pedals global warming denialism .
Luis Mijares
2020-06-16 19:25:30 +0000 UTCActually, I apologize for the two above rants. It's been a tough week.
pixlaw
2020-06-03 11:58:04 +0000 UTCAnd, Matt, your buddy Ross Douthat was even more disingenuous. After all, according to him, what the riots really reveal is how the liberal cities demonstrate just how broken those cities are, which is all the fault of liberal elites. "In place of any broad legitimacy, the liberal city relies for public order on wealth and entertainment, surveillance and prison sentences, pot and video games, elite guilt and lower-class forbearance." What, pray tell, does the conservative city/suburb/town rely upon? Ask your Trillbilly friends to see if there's any difference between what semi-rural Kentucky does and what the liberal city does. And then Douthat drops this bomb: "As public officials, white progressives lack both credibility with aggrieved protesters and full control over their own overzealous cops." I don't know about you, but I DON'T consider them my overzealous cops. And any claim by Douthat to the contrary just demonstrates his complete lack of honesty and/or perception. Basically, he's just David Brooks 2.0, 20 years younger and with a beard. Arggh.
pixlaw
2020-06-03 01:05:36 +0000 UTCActually, I'll second Hannah's request, except I'd like to also hear what you have to say aobut the NY Times' conservative columnists. David Brooks did a piece last week that denounced Trump, but then descended into a both-sides rant which claimed "Right now, science and the humanities should be in lock step: science producing vaccines, with the humanities stocking leaders and citizens with the capacities of resilience, care and collaboration until they come. But, instead, the humanities are in crisis at the exact moment history is revealing how vital moral formation really is." The humanities are in crisis? And that's what the problem is?
pixlaw
2020-06-03 00:50:56 +0000 UTCHi guys, I'm sure you'll be covering conservative reactions to the George Floyd protests in a future episode, but I want to make a plug for you to expand on your thoughts about how their pandemic reactions reveal the hollowness of national conservative posturing about economic populism and community togetherness. Their reactions to George Floyd of course reveal another dozen shades of hollowness - perennial favorite Rod Dreher is currently in the midst of his Nth post ruminating on how the protests are actually further confirmation that totalitarianism is coming from the left. With every crisis, national conservatism is revealed as a fraud, because every argument is premised on imagining an American public they don't fear and despise. Whenever they are confronted with the actually-existing American public and its needs, they retreat to their sad bunkers, muttering darkly about how communities must include virtue and God to be worthy of defense.
Hannah
2020-06-02 16:07:07 +0000 UTCThe relationship between Wills and William Buckley is fascinatingly weird, since Wills was, for a while, one of Buckley's favorites at the NR, until he was disgusted by the NR's views on civil rights, Nixon and the Vietnam war, and moved to the left and the NY Review of Books. Just google their two names together and some of it will surface quickly. In some ways the most revealing part of it all is (to my eyes) their argument circa 2001 about the Popes and anti-semitism. WFB wrote a typically snarky letter to the NY Times criticizing an opinion piece Wills had done on the history of papal anti-semitism. Wills' response was perfect and all of two sentences long: "William F. Buckley thinks that anti-Semitism is no bar to canonization in the Roman Catholic Church. He is right, of course -- and that was my point. "
pixlaw
2020-05-30 01:04:15 +0000 UTCOh yes, I devoured The Kennedy Imprisonment and am on to Nixon Agonistes—both reminders of what political writing can be. —MJS
Know Your Enemy
2020-05-29 20:03:15 +0000 UTCGlad to hear that you're reading Garry Wills, Matt!
pixlaw
2020-05-29 16:04:30 +0000 UTC
