Inappropriate Content: Pod People

Marvel at vast, untamed swaths of the mental terrain of John Podhoretz and Jonah Goldberg:

Podhoretz:
Jonah, I've read Rod's remarkable book [Crunchy Cons by Rod Dreher. Crunchy cons are, at their best, Father Mulcahy from M*A*S*H; at their worst, Reverend Camden from Seventh Heaven.], and I have to say, like any successful polemic-manifesto, it anticipates and tries to answer many of the objections you have raised and will raise to it. Crunchiness aside, Crunchy Cons is the first popular work of our time to take up the cudgel for the Old Right and its anti-Marxist critique of capitalism -- and what's most promising and hopeful about it is that Rod does so without the repugnant anti-republican, pro-Confederate and anti-Semitic strains that properly consigned the Old Right to the ash-heap of history. That being said, Rod's great problem is that, like any effort to find a more authentic and pure way of living, Crunchy Conservatism might become a haven for purists who adopt it because they want to live a Great Experiment -- making them little different from ideological extremists of every bent. It also provides a big-tent excuse for "sanctimommy" parenting, which is not so much about raising your own kids as you see fit but more about finding other mothers and fathers wanting because they're not as austere and controlling as you are. There's a lot of sanctimommying over at the Crunchy Con blog. And don't get me started on the politician Rod praises at the end of his book and for what reason. I won't tell you who it is, Jonah. You'll have to find out on your own and get really, really annoyed. Consider it a Crunchy Con cliffhanger!

Goldberg:
JPod - Even in the early pages I get the sense that Rod was asking himself something like "What will Jonah say about this?" And I do like his effort to conjure some of the Old Right (though we can have an argument about whether Russell Kirk is really a good representative of the Old Right as Rod seems to be suggesting. I've always read Old Right to describe 1930s conservatism, not 1950s conservatism). But if you read the CCblog or Rod's introduction, you will find several examples of Crunchy Con being used synonymously with Old Right, which simply strikes me as an unsustainable position -- no matter which Old Right you have in mind. My guess is that Russell Kirk put on a tie before he brushed his teeth in the morning. From my reading, Caleb Stegall seems to understand that putting a "hippie gloss" (his words) on traditional conservatism is more of a distraction than a contribution. After all, hippieness is often just simply another form of consumerism with political pretension.

Also, just as a point of clarification, what exactly do you mean when you say the Old Right believed in "repugnant" anti-republicanism? I'm not saying I disagree but small "r" republican can mean different things to different people, including among members of the Old Right.

Podhoretz:
Jonah, by using that phrase I was actually referring to the hostility to American-style democracy -- the frank elitism that is probably more a feature of the sort of conservatism espoused by T.S. Eliot and Yeats but was certainly a feature of, say, Allen Tate's thinking. As for Russell Kirk's tie, that's purely a generational thing. My father would not go out of the house tieless even on the weekends when I was a kid, lest he run into someone on the street.

Goldberg:
JPod - Fair enough on anti-republicanism, though I'm sure someone has a problem with it (someone always does).

As for ties, I agree it's a generational thing, but it's not merely a generational thing.

I think Kirk would probably agree: this wasn't just fashionableness. People wore ties and dressed properly at public events not just in our parents' generation but for several generations. I remember when I was a kid people still got dressed-up to go on airplanes. And if you look at pictures of old baseball games, everyone was wearing a tie.

I could take almost every quote and author in the supposedly Crunchy Con oeuvre and make what I think would be a much, much stronger case that instead of putting on hippie clothing a true "crunchy con" should put on a tie and jacket. Rod talks in his opening pages about the comfort his birkenstocks provide and makes it sound like a virtue that he donned them. But Rod's whole argument is that the comfort and ease our consumer culture brings is the enemy of The Good Path.

Rod talks often and eloquently about the permanent things, of custom and tradition, but when they collide with comfortable open toed shoes and loose fitting shirts, guess which one gets defenestrated?

In other words one of the things that has contributed to a declining sense of community is precisely what Rod now celebrates. A common culture where everyone is inconvenienced equally is far more in keeping with the spirit of Russell Kirk than a culture in which everyone indulges in sartorial rebelliousness and self-satisfaction.

Schools impose uniforms, for example, not to make everybody look like a country club Republican but to make poor kids and rich kids feel just a little bit more like equals.

Man, oh man, could I go on but I really must stop myself for now.

Podhoretz:
Jonah, it's true that people used to dress up to go on airplanes. But so what? Why on earth should people have dressed up to go on airplanes? The formality of previous generations was a social norm and therefore a convention. I suppose it had meaning in the sense that it was a way for people to look as much like adults as possible and that our casual-attired ways are an indication of the perpetual pursuit of youth. But the last thing you can say of the Crunchy Cons -- of whom I must say I am most emphatically not one -- is that they are acting like children. They're trying to live a more serious life. Rod's goal isn't to live a more sober life. It's to live a more sacramental life, to infuse the everyday with holiness.

Goldberg:
JP- Of course dressing appropriately is a social convention. But since when is it a more authentic form of conservatism to disdain social convention? You could -- and I would -- make the case that dressing appropriately is part of good manners. You wouldn't go to a funeral in shorts and a tank top, for example. Of course, it's not just clothes. My guess is Russell Kirk would be horrified by public breastfeeding.

Customs, manners, social conventions: this is the sinew and bone of civilization. Rod seems to be in the business of picking and choosing when convenient. Customs he likes: Crunchy. Customs he doesn't: "mainstream conservative" or "mainstream liberal." This will not do.

Here's something for the guys at the CCBlog to debate: birkenstocks are to culture what broken windows are to crime.

Podhoretz:
From a reader:
Oh I LOVE this discussion. I have on my wall at home a framed collection of antique mug shots taken around the turn of the century. Two pickpockets, one vagrant, one fellow arrested for "suspicious behavior," one peeping Tom, and fellow was running a numbers racket. Every one of them is wearing a suit and tie, and three are sporting hats. These fellows weren’t products of a consumer culture; they were from the street at a time when very few people in society—let alone the bottom rung—had any money. It’s only since the country has grown so supremely wealthy that the rich have taken to adorn themselves with rags purchased at Neiman Marcus for exorbitant sums.
As you know, Theodore Dalrymple writes about this all the time. What must it mean to some working in a factory in rural China who keeps what few clothes they have immaculate to go to work and shred a perfectly good pair of jeans for the racks at Bloomingdales? TD was recently interviewed by a Dutch newspaper correspondent and the subject of tattooing came up. Says Dalrymple, "it represented a mass downward cultural and social aspiration, since everyone understood that tattooing had a traditional association with low social class and, above all, with aggression and criminality. It was, in effect, a visible symbol of the greatest, though totally ersatz, virtue of our time: an inclusive unwillingness to make judgments of morality or value."

What struck Dalrymple about this well-dressed, well-spoken interviewer was how indifferent he was to the tattooing trend. The interviewer simply said that it was legal and that even Dalrymple didn’t believe it should be illegal, so why give it a second thought? "What I found so odd about the correspondent were his perfect manners and refined tastes. But so little confidence did he have in the value of the things that he valued that he seemed indifferent to the mechanism of their disappearance or destruction. This is the way civilization ends: not with a bang but a whimper."

Here’s the whole thing: http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_4_diarist.html

Podhoretz:
Okay, Jonah, look down at your neck: Is there a tie there? No fair saying there is if this is a day you're going on TV or giving a speech...

Goldberg:
John - Absolutely not. I spend most of my time in rags with Kleenex boxes on my feet like Howard Hughes. But I'm not the one extrapolating from my consumer and sartorial choices a political philosophy and movement. My definition of ideological conservatism is that it is only a partial philosophy of life, with very little to say about what to wear or what to eat. I don't believe the personal is necessarily political. In the context of this conversation, what I'm wearing is only relevant if one buys into the assumptions of Rod's paradigm which, I think it is obvious to everyone, I am not doing. Yes, I know there are objections to be raised about this point, but I'm going to keep my powder dry and leave it there.

Podhoretz:
Hey, you brought up the tie thing! And then you made it sound as though sartorial choices were an ideological matter by talking about Russell Kirk's wardrobe! And by the way, considering that Russell Kirk once said people like me think Tel Aviv is America's capital, I hope his stinking ties had ketchup stains all over them.

Goldberg:
Yes I brought up Kirk and ties, but solely to rebut Rod's insinuation that Russell Kirk of all people was the Ur-Crunchy Con and to address your praise of Rod as reviving the Old Right. Personally, I've never been an enormous fan of Kirk's, though I respect his contributions to conservatism. Kirk-o-philia is Miller's bag. I'm much more of a Hayekian.

...

My wife just yelled down the stairs (I work in the basement): "You and Pod have to stop! Nobody even knows what you're arguing about!"

So there you have it.