Pseudoconservative Crackup?
By Werther*
Echoing Richard Hofstadter, we observed two and a half years ago in "Pseudoconservatism Revisited," that the typical pseudoconservative suffers from a disorder in his relationship to authority. With the benefit of hindsight, we can say that that judgment is, if anything, an understatement of the problem. Given the headlong flight from rationalism of the Bush cult—creationism, apocalyptic delusions, fantasies about medieval torture, bogus environmental science, psychotically dysfunctional assessments of "progress" in Iraq that make a post-Stalingrad Goebbels look like a flinty-eyed empiricist—it is clear that pseudoconservatism is also a dissociation from physical reality.
Behold a museum-grade specimen of pseudoconservatism penned by Richard Viguerie. Even when his underlying thesis is unexceptionable (i.e., that the incumbent president is a disaster) the argument is hilariously off-register. It as if a doctor (correctly) infers that a patient is gravely ill, but diagnoses it as heart trouble when the problem is renal failure, and prescribes a treatment that is effective neither for heart failure nor renal failure.
What more can one possibly say about someone who bemoans President Bush's nation building not because it is evidence of imperial hubris per se, but because it distracts the country from the need to hysterically threat-monger about two pseudoconservative bogeymen: China, the preferred offshore platform for the business class of the Republican Party; and Venezuela, under the comic opera rule of a ham actor?
If this is the best pseudoconservatives like Viguerie can do we may venture to hope their final crack-up is not far off.
* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst.
Posted by Werther on September 24, 2006 3:54 PM 
« Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On Electronic Vote Fraud | Main | Language and Institutional Perversions in a Time of Painful Birth Pangs (Kafka Era Studies, No. 2) »
Leave a comment