Watch the whole thing!
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 18, 2008
Pace Emmett Tyrell, now is the conservative crackup. Melissa Clouthier is right: You really have to take a few minutes to watch this, the whole thing, to get a sense of where we aren’t going, and how we aren’t getting there.
I don’t know what to make of it. First of all it’s hardly clear what the role of Brink Lindsey is here. It’s Bloggingheads.tv, but we don’t really need two blogging heads (does Brink really even blog except as an afterthought?), one — here, David Frum — to talk, and one to bounce up and down. That’s not blogging, that’s bobbing.
But this is of a piece with the wing of the GOP that believes that to be a Republican is essentially to be a libertarian with NATO, or something like that. Brink has made a career now of insisting that the Right write off right, or any concept of conservative values, to be relevant in the future. Now David Frum is at least acknowledging that he has no business at the National Review, still redolent of the incense and candles of the late William F. Buckley’s Catholic-based conservatism. If Frum is a post-neoconservative, then what kind of conservative is he, if he is so contemptuous of “heartland” conservative sensibilities? If Frum is the lone voice of a resurgent intellectualism on the Right, in theory much to be welcomed, how can he compare the inexcusable Harriet Miers nomination to the political arbitrage of the Palin candidacy?
We don’t need, and I don’t want any part of, a party of Brink Lindseys and P.J. O’Rourkes, and such a party has no future in this country as an alternative to the present regime. Frum, whose persona and ethnic / religious identity, a Google search reveals, unleashes a great deal of smoke but very little light, even confuses the Jews. As far as this Jew, so does this debate, both as exemplified in the video above and in other trenches, confound. But perhaps free of the Bush White House and out of National Review, David Frum can go somewhere coherently intellectual, yet genuinely conservative; and perhaps there will be something good there. He need not throw out the values baby with the know-nothing bathwater; if he does, what does he have?
Let’s see just how smart David Frum really is.
Likelihood of Success 
Jack said
It’s probably just me but I keep getting confused why people think “being intellectual” naturally equates with being smart, much less with being a great or visionary leader. Or confuses being intellectual with even being capable of leading, of recognizing in what direction the future is eliding, of preparing for and anticipating progress, or of being good at the necessary leadership function of actual problem solving (I’ve yet to personally meet any shade of intellectual who is nearly as good at devising solutions to a problem as he is at dissecting and deconstructing the useless minutiae of why a problem might deserve a solution, if only one could be figured out by someone less intelligent than he).
I had a very intellectual professor one time tell me that the modern intellectual is the guy who can’t repair his own plumbing but devises endless theories on water flow and ocean currents, doesn’t understand money but demands he understands and needs to control whole economies, doesn’t understand the average man and yet claims to be a genius at political necessity, and is just not that bright but speaks extremely fluidly and without pause about why the darkness is the ultimate end of all things. I suspect he may have known his own kind better than me, so I took him at his word.
The only real reason I can see to keep the vast majority of intellectuals employed at any public capacity is so that by knowing their exact location, we can better limit their potential malignant effect upon the rest of human society. That, and the fact that by reading and observing what they ceaselessly produce we are all that much more entertained, and thankful that but by the grace of God there go we.
I will say this though. If you’re unemployable for anything remotely productive, or you lack any other marketable talents, then it seems like an awfully good gig (being an intellectual that is) to me if you can fool enough other people into thinking the way you do.
Jack said
By the way, the professor buddy I had used to call modern intellectuals the “Intellectonauts.”
If you close your eyes and imagine one in your mind when you say the word out loud to yourself you’ll hear the real thrust of the joke.
Jonathan said
We could probably benefit by changing the process by which we hold presidential primaries. However, I think that the bigger issue may be today’s voters, many of whom have no memory of European communism and don’t know much history — a triumph of our leftist-dominated educational system. If this is true then the political parties are merely following public opinion, and the country is in even worse shape than infighting conservatives realize.
Jack said
“However, I think that the bigger issue may be today’s voters, many of whom have no memory of European communism and don’t know much history — a triumph of our leftist-dominated educational system. If this is true then the political parties are merely following public opinion, and the country is in even worse shape than infighting conservatives realize.”
Intellectually I suspect you’re probably very right.
Many folks nowadays don’t know enough about what they don’t know to understand why certain things aren’t really worth repeating, and many other folks know just enough about what they do know that they don’t really yet understand what everybody else doesn’t, and so why the rest of em seem so intent on doing just that.
If only we had a real intellectual or two in our ranks who could explain it all in 100,000 words or more.
Oh noet, where is thy ping?