"Even the Conservative Conor Friedersdorf..."
On Twitter today, Glenn Greenwald generously linked my Marc Thiessen take-down. It’s gratifying to get traffic from a writer so uncompromising in his assessments, and as I’ve noted to several friends lately, I find Mr. Greenwald’s blog an indispensable read on civil liberties. Despite our many disagreements on political philosophy and domestic policy, I am certain that come what may in this country, he is a blogger who’ll offer informed, intellectually honest arguments in favor of constitutional protections and against government abuses — and agree or disagree with his War on Terrorism coverage, it is evident that if you put Mr. Greenwald in charge of World War II era California, we wouldn’t have imprisoned Japanese Americans, and had he lived during the Red Scare, he would’ve been arguing against Joseph McCarthy. In other words, Mr. Greenwald staunchly advocates for principles that are convenient to forget and important to remember in wartime, even when they are unpopular. What a valuable safeguard in a conflict as indefinite and amorphous as any we’ve ever fought.
I do wish that he wouldn’t have used this formulation in his Tweet:
Conservative Conor Friedersdorf: “Why Self-Respecting editors should be embarrassed to publish Marc Thiessen”
It is a small matter, especially as regards Mr. Greenwald, who doesn’t make a habit of this, but the practice has been on my mind lately, and has significance in general, so I am going to address it here. As I’ve noted on many occasions, the political philosophers whose views I find most persuasive and applicable to American governance are conservatives and libertarians — there are liberal philosophers whose ideas I also appreciate or even advocate, but it is my belief that the insights of the right are most often given insufficient due. In other words, it is defensible to call me an American conservative, especially if you’re coming from Glenn Greenwald’s perspective.
But there are a few things I don’t like about affixing an ideological label to my name. Foremost is the implication that my philosophical affiliation has some bearing on the issue at hand. Whether Marc Thiessen’s articles are professional efforts at opinion journalism or poorly reasoned, factually inaccurate embarrassments may be a matter that people disagree about, but it isn’t a disagreement grounded in differences of political philosophy — Mr. Greenwald and I surely agree that right-thinking conservatives, liberals and libertarians should join in putting his submissions into the discard pile, since it is the quality of argument and professionalism that is wanting, so much so that his work is deficient in a magazine geared for folks of any ideological persuasion.
Since political philosophy is irrelevant, affixing “conservative” to my name must have another purpose: it is meant not to identify the tradition of thought that I find persuasive, but rather to place me into a political coalition for rhetorical effect or as context for readers: “Why look, this guy is a member of the same political coalition as Mark Theissen, and even he, a fellow conservative, thinks that Mr. Thiessen is an embarrassment.”
I understand why this might seem like a legitimate thing to do if one didn’t think about it long enough. But I don’t share a political coalition with Mr. Thiessen or his allies — that is to say, those on the right who argue that waterboarding isn’t torture, that the Bush Administration took the appropriate approach to detainee issues, and that lawyers who represented War on Terror detainees are equivalent to mob lawyers. I’d never support a candidate who believed those things, I write against them, and insofar as I care about the Republican Party at all, I do my utmost to steer it in as far in the opposite direction as possible. When it comes to the War on Terrorism, Mr. Theissen and I share neither an ideological nor a political coalition, even those we both call ourselves conservative — as far as I can tell, that’s because he is using the word to refer to the political coalition called the conservative movement, whereas I am using the word to refer to a body of thought contained in old books. On domestic policy, I think there is still some overlap between these camps, but on foreign policy, not so much.
Perhaps I am saying all this poorly. Let’s try a couple of examples to flesh out what I mean. Were Rich Lowry and I arguing about Milton Friedman, a writer we both respect, invoke, and lay intellectual claim to, this would be a perfectly legitimate rhetorical device for someone like Mr. Greenwald to use — “look, even conservative Conor Friedersdorf, who avers that Milton Friedman is a genius and agrees with him on big picture stuff, acknowledges that this particular assertion the Nobel laureate once made was undermined by subsequent events — even someone who shares the same core premises as Mr. Lowry and most other conservatives agrees with my interpretation in this case.”
On the other hand, say I am arguing with the editor of World Net Daily about whether or not President Obama is eligible to be President of the United States. In that case, I don’t think it would be legitimate to say, “look, even conservative Conor Friedersdorf says he is a natural born citizen…” — the fuller, more honest statement would read, “even conservative Conor Friedersdorf, who has almost nothing in common with World Net Daily’s agenda, and thinks questions of presidential eligibility are utterly unconnected to ideology, political philosophy, or political coalitions, thinks that he’s a citizen — even someone who rejects all the core premises of World Net Daily disagrees with them.”
As you can see, this kind of invocation makes no sense when you think about it. In fact, the illegitimate kind of invocation is made so frequently, and the legitimate kind so infrequently and even then with so little value added, that I wish people would just quit labeling people by affiliation entirely. I am loath to abandon labels that I regard as accurate descriptors of my beliefs — doing so seems inaccurate and disingenuous for the sake of convenience — but it would sure be convenient! Finally, if anyone can say all this more succinctly, I hope you’ll do so in comments, as I found my thoughts on this matter quite difficult to articulate. It seems like the kind of dynamic Julian Sanchez would explain better than I.
I’d rather put it: Even the unhinged lefty Glenn Greenwald agrees with Conor.
— Derek Smithee · Mar 10, 02:25 PM · #
The answer, of course is, as a writer, to not be lazy and to write as concisely as possible, using labels sparingly, only when they add value to the point being made, and then applying labels which are individually accurate. My prolem is that the labels “conservative” and “liberal” are misleading in most cases without serious qualifications.
— mike farmer · Mar 10, 02:35 PM · #
In our public political discourse — if you can even call it `discourse’ rather than, say, `kindergarten sand-flinging’ — it’s all too common to dismiss criticisms of one’s views simply on the basis of the political affiliation of the critic: conservative ideologue, Obama apparatchik, `socialist’, and so on. Call it the Culture War Block, and note that it often is as crude as in those examples. The Culture War Block is, I think, closely tied to a loss of distinctions between views. After all, our public political discourse is dominated by a man who thinks `progressive’, `socialist’, `communist’, and `Nazi’ are all synonymous. Similarly, and most relevantly, we’ve generally lost the distinctions between libertarian conservatives, communitarian conservatives, religious fundamentalists, and Nietzschean nationalists who seem to believe waterboarding is an expression of America’s will to power.
Pointing out that critics of some person or idea come from across the political spectrum disables this block. You’re completely right when you call it rhetorical, but it’s a piece of rhetoric that’s used to counter or pre-empts the rhetorical effects of the Culture War Block. It thereby enables, not disables, a thoughtful exchange of views. When used well, it encourages the interlocutors to look deeper, to try to recover some of those lost distinctions, and to learn how to apply labels like `conservative’ and `liberal’ with more subtlety, care, and sophistication.
Of course, it can also just be another rhetorical club with which to beat one’s ideological foes. And, not being familiar with Greenwald, I’m simply not in a position to comment on whether or not he tends to use this labeling strategy in that way.
— Noumena · Mar 10, 02:44 PM · #
Calling Conor a conservative is not that far off from the people who still refer to Andrew Sullivan as conservative.
— Phil · Mar 10, 02:48 PM · #
Phil, Andrew Sullivan IS a conservative.
Anyhoo. The real story of course is the utter lack of editing when it comes to Marc Thiessen. Why INDEED do they publish him? For that matter, why does Bill Kristol appear on TV several times a week? Why does Juan Williams pretend to be liberal? Why does Diane Sawyer pose as a journalist? Why was the Lindsay Lohan lawsuit the top story on Corporate TV News this morning while we’re fighting two wars and dealing with a fiscal crisis? Chomsky has the answer. And you know he does.
— Ray Butlers · Mar 10, 04:08 PM · #
Here’s a suggestion: when you find your thoughts hard to articulate, keep them to yourself.
— tom · Mar 10, 04:15 PM · #
Conor Friedersdorf agrees with Glenn Greenwald. I’m shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
— Eric · Mar 10, 08:23 PM · #
Sock puppeteering frauds should be shunned by polite society.
— BrianF · Mar 10, 08:26 PM · #
Awww, CF hearts GG. And Greenwald is so dreamy, he could have saved us all in the 40s and 50s. It must be very painful for Conor to have been called a conservative by Greenwald.
— JC38 · Mar 10, 11:01 PM · #
The problem is that “conservative” has been hijacked as a term by the anything-but-conservative Republican Party, which is actually a radical religious revanchist coalition with the time horizon of one news cycle and the philosophical depth of coat of morning dew.
— paul o · Mar 10, 11:24 PM · #
Connor—again, thanks for fighting the good fight on this issue. It’s good to be reminded there are conservatives who strongly oppose torture, and you’re a credit to conservatives.
— Greg · Mar 10, 11:33 PM · #
This was a tweet, so Greenwald was limited to 140 characters. Hard to get too much nuance in there.
He had to identify you in some fashion – or do you think his twitter followers know you that well? If it was a liberal writer would the article and link have as much impact or interest for Greenwald’s audience? Would it have warranted a link otherwise?
— Tiparillo · Mar 11, 12:36 AM · #
I think saying this sort of thing either, at best, tends to add nothing really significant – although it is intended to sound as if it does – or it adds something downright hallucinatory and distorting to the calculations. (I still cringe at a memory of my least favorite conservative columnist, now mercifully out of the business, writing a sentence that began, “Even liberal Cass Sunstein…” … in an attempt to get an armlock on liberal-identifying people who would generally much rather have eaten library paste than agree with Sunstein on what was at issue.)
The “liberal”, “conservative”, etc. identifications aren’t meaningful enough for this stuff. When they’re treated just as being passively, vaguely adjectival in a way that might roughly fit a person’s individual constellation of views, assumptions and reactions, they can make little trouble. But when they become memberships, or species descriptions, and seem to assume lockstep creeds, they become hard to use in ways that aren’t slightly loony, even when they are used in reference to people who do consciously class themselves as exactly this sort of a Member of a Gear.
— Alex Russell · Mar 11, 12:59 AM · #
But I guess I might agree with Noumena about its possible usefulness in one respect, or under one kind of circumstance: it’s useful when it has the effect of saying that the assumptions of absolute diametrical opposition between the “sides”, and of the world of ideas being naturally divided among these well-defined tribes, are actually a bunch of hooey – that the actual ideas and their reasons, and the pattern of people who react to those reasons, don’t follow such a pattern at all. “Look, this is not a Left Wing Idea,” or etc. … I see why Conor had trouble; I’m having the same. Maybe it’s a difference in intent and occasion, between someone being (at that moment) a manipulative partisan-thinking winner using a trick and someone who is (at that moment) trying to get the ideas looked at outside the frame of the fixed-sides contest. (Given that few would abandon the strict-ideological-designation weirdnesses in the absence of doing this either.)
— Alex Russell · Mar 11, 01:15 AM · #
I can think of at least one reasons Mr. Greenwald might have used the wording he did in the context of the (short) tweet format: he may have wanted to recognise the efforts made by thoughtful conservatives such as Connor, David Frum, et. al. to find a conservative, thoughtful and effective response to the issues facing the United States, as opposed to the Bush rump that wants to double down and admit no mistakes, no failures, and no wrongdoing.
— John Spragge · Mar 11, 02:08 AM · #
Good grief. It’s Twitter. It’s 140 characters. I get you, I really do, but, um, perspective? You’re going to be used like this as long as you’re a public blogger and as long as most people only have attention spans that last no longer than a tweet or a facebook share.
That might not be a bad thing. Folks who called themselves “liberal” but nonetheless cringe at some of Greenwald’s absolutist statements, and nevertheless think waterboarding is torture, might take an extra 10 minutes to read you.
That’s a good thing, right?
— Rick Powell · Mar 11, 04:35 AM · #
After Patterico’s been revealed as a stupid, petty, partisan joker so many times, do you really think his so-called “expose” holds up? Get real.
— Chet · Mar 11, 04:40 AM · #
If Mr. F doesn’t like the Conservative label of Greenwald’s tweet, then he needs to use his powers bestowed upon him by the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy and start labeling the Thiessen Coalition something more akin to what they are, for example : Torturists; neo-Fascists; anti-Constitutionalists, Dirty Stinky Creeps. Whatever! Take back the label you like and put your balls on the line by correctly labeling those you want to be disassociated from. It won’t make you friends and get you any work from those Conservative ThinkTanks, however. (And I bet you didn’t mind the Conservative label until about 2004.)
— theod · Mar 11, 07:25 AM · #
Well said. I never thought I would agree with this opinion, but I’m starting to view things from a different view. I have to research more on this as it seems very interesting. One thing I don’t understand though is how everything is related together.
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