Right and Left: Gloom Enough to Go Around

One might expect to find conservative magazines on a high this month. After all, patriotism is back--and how. The Taliban is on the run, thanks to a U.S. military campaign constructed largely on a blueprint drawn by the right. Bin Laden’s smoking gun has been unveiled. President Bush is still making reassuring, if vague, noises about taking the war to the next level: Saddam? Iran? To infinity and beyond? And Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft is not only sticking it to the blame-America-first, civil-libertarian crowd; he’s even reining in the Darwinists. So what’s to complain?

But, alas, some conservative commentators see nothing ahead but darkness and retrenchment.

“Despite signs of a fleeting and shallow cultural regeneration in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, savvy observers understand that the foundations of our country continue to be undermined by a steady rot,” warns Eric Heubeck in right-wing activist Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation house organ, Notable News Now. Heubeck goes on to call for formation of a “New Traditionalists” counterculture in the home, on college campuses and in home-schooling groups.

Weekly Standard senior editor David Brooks looked back at the press following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, contrasting that era’s mood of sunny resolve with the “self-doubting gloominess” that has enveloped the country since Sept. 11. “We have become a country disproportionately familiar with our own failures,” Brooks writes. “It’s a weakness unbecoming to a great democratic power as it embarks on a long campaign against an indisputably evil set of foes.”

National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg frets about a New York Times piece by former conservative Michael Lind suggesting that the religious right has shanghaied the Republican Party. “The fact that all of this was either a deliberate lie on Lind’s part--or, more likely, a phantasmagoric concoction of imagined slights, personal agendas, and rank careerism--didn’t matter. Adding a neo-leftist’s hissy fit to the shrieking chorus coming from the op-ed page of the New York Times made for pitch-perfect harmony.”

In the Atlantic Monthly, Byron York delivers a fascinating if funereally paced elegy to the fallen Clinton-bashing journal American Spectator. Soaring in circulation, name recognition and respect after its Troopergate scoop, the Spectator got sidetracked onto an anti-Clinton wild-goose chase, financed by right financier Richard Mellon Scaife, that ultimately led to the magazine’s demise, York finds. The hubris at the heart of the whole mess can be summed up by the message on the answering machine of Troopergate author David Brock, York reports: “I can’t come to the phone right now. I’m either on another call, writing or out taking down a president.”

Of course, Spectator founder R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. (why do so many conservatives have three names, one an initial?) remains a member in good standing of the punditocracy, available both in syndication and through the newly reconstituted American Spectator, which has been folded into millionaire George Gilder’s Gilder.com. But even Tyrrell thinks America is on a bummer. The country is grieving, he says, but it is also ennobled by its grieving. “The mystery for me is that [Bush] has almost totally ceased to mangle the English language,” Tyrrell writes. “How do we explain such a transformation? The poet goldsmith in The Deserted Village speaks of “The silent manliness of grief...” In other words, real men don’t butcher words.

Over at FrontPageMagazine.com, Deroy Murdock is worked up over “wrist-slapping” for “baby-killers” and the feminists who support them, particularly the National Organization for Women, which he says championed Andrea Yates, the Houston housewife accused of drowning her five children in the family bathtub. “Feminists could have mourned five innocent kids between ages 6 months and 7 years (two of whom police believe Yates chased around their home before overpowering them last June),” Murdock says. “Instead, they turned her into a poster girl for post-partum depression.... America’s newborn babies are citizens, not mere pieces of Kleenex that cry throughout the night.”

Both in newspaper opinion columns and its own house organs, the right is engaged in a fascinating debate on the cultural significance of John Walker, the American Taliban. Most see in Walker, the son of “hippy-dippy divorced parents from Marin County,” as National Review Online’s Goldberg puts it, an indictment of a liberal, whatever-rocks-your-boat permissive upbringing. But Andrew Sullivan, of andrewsullivan.com, cautions an equally persuasive argument could be made that Walker is a right-wing religious nut. “Let’s at least be honest that Walker represents some of the worst of American permissiveness and multiculturalism, while being the embodiment of right wing religious fanaticism,” Sullivan writes. “I think we all get caught on this one.

If the right is gloomy despite its president’s triumphs, imagine the left. Not only are newspapers running headlines like “War Works,” liberal New York City has embraced capitalist Michael Bloomberg. Can a Republican mayor in Berkeley be far behind?

Katha Pollitt in The Nation sees an ironic justice in the defeat: “Since politics seems to be the only line of work for which lack of experience is a qualification, it’s not so surprising--in retrospect!--that in the end New Yorkers chose to write a comic-opera ending to the autumn’s tragedies and put into Gracie Mansion a bon vivant too rich to want to live there,” she writes.

In American Prospect, Harold Meyerson draws an analogy between Green’s shellacking and Antonio Villaraigosa’s loss to Los Angeles Mayor James Hahn, which he blames on racial identity politics. “In New York...a future looms in which racial resentments are both the means and ends of political life,” Meyerson writes. “Add a decent political culture to the list of things New Yorkers need to rebuild.”

And then there’s the war to dither about. Doug Ireland for In These Times warns that despite Taliban retreat, the war is far from over--both the one in Afghanistan and the one here at home against liberals. “With Democrats having failed so far to develop a coherent set of popular issues to take to the country, and with nearly nine of 10 Americans approving Bush’s performance, it is hard to find any reason for optimism,” he writes.

Under the heading “the new McCarthyism,” Progressive editor Matthew Rothschild composes a dirge-like litany of post-9/11 civil-liberty intrusions, including a visit by two burly Secret Service agents demanding to see the “anti-American” poster on a Raleigh, N.C. student’s wall. (For the record, it was a poster protesting Bush’s death-penalty record in Texas.)

“A chill is descending across the country, and it’s frostbiting immigrants, students, journalists, academics, and booksellers,” Rothschild writes.

A subject that pulled both the right and left commentators out of their torpor was Advance Cell Technology’s human cloning announcement. J. Bottum, for the Weekly Standard, editorialized against “manufacturing human beings in order to destroy them.” Ralph Brave in The Nation saw the cloning advances as a new argument for universal health insurance. “With so much of insurance responsibility placed on employers, we now guarantee that insurers and business management will engage in genetic discrimination as a matter of fiduciary responsibility.”

At least one conservative faces the holidays in good cheer. Ann Coulter, that irrepressible right-wing gal who earlier called for bombing Afghanis and converting survivors to Christianity, writes with gleeful satisfaction for townhall.com about the post-9/11 decline of feminism. Under the headline “Women we’d like to see...in burkas,” Coulter sniffs: “When America is threatened from the outside, men are ascendant and Republicans have a lock on the White House. Naturally, feminists are petulant about this disturbing turn of events.” Coulter, you can correctly infer, is not.