Rod Dreher–a conservative who is also involved in the mainstream Dallas Morning News–has raised the ire of armchair commisar of ideological purity, Lawrence Auster. They duke it out. Auster appears, as usual, a bit unhinged with a penchant for unfair parsing of words that misses the gist of an author’s argument and explanations.
This is not new territory for Auster. He’s frequently attacking conservatives because of their deviation from his self-proclaimed perfectly synthesized conservatism. The concept of reasonable disagreement is somewhat foreign to him. He’s ripped on John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer for their admittedly unorthodox perspective. He criticizes Michelle Malkin for not criticizing legal immigration, even though she’s done a lot more than Auster ever has to bring attention to the national security aspects of our borders. Demonstrating his maturity, he says he probably won’t vote for any Republican presidential candidate. He does not talk to Jared Taylor, David Horowitz, Robert Spencer, and the folks at National Review, all of whom have “wronged” him or behaved dishonorably in his eyes. Plus, and most annoyingly, he’s always talking about how he’s been insulted and wronged, even though he mocks the clothing of Ann Coulter and, in one case, my last name, both of which lines of argument are obviously pretty friggin’ juvenile. Well, obvious to everyone but our Upper West Side Conservative Oracle.
I’m rooting for Dreher, even though I think it’s a bit much to call illegal immigrants the “Texans” of the year. They’re living in Texas, but they’re not Texans any more than Jim Bowie and Sam Houston were Mexicans back in the 1830s. But Dreher’s defense of his argument, his role in writing a newspaper editorial, and the like are eminently reasonable to any normal human being. Auster’s attack on him is unfair, extreme, and demonstrates the essential flaws in his character: mean-spiritedness, lack of judgment, and humorlessness.
2 Jan 2008 at 2:50 am
your comments were amusing. and basically true.
2 Jan 2008 at 3:14 am
Re: Lawrence Auster
“mean-spiritedness, lack of judgment, and humorlessness.”
This is not so extreme.
But all those posts on Rod’s website… to what end?
2 Jan 2008 at 7:24 am
Like Razib said, personal amusement, amusement of the audience, perhaps doing some dirty work Dreher’s not in a position to do, and they’re all basically true.
2 Jan 2008 at 8:03 pm
Lawrence Auster was a draft dodger?
2 Jan 2008 at 8:30 pm
He will neither confirm nor deny those reports, nor anything else about what he was doing before he “became” a conservative in the late 1980s. He does admit he did not fight in the Vietnam War or otherwise serve in the military, even though I believe from things he’s said he graduated HS in the early-mid Sixties and college, presumably, several years thereafter.
3 Jan 2008 at 12:09 am
looking up his age isn’t difficult. e.g., intellius.
3 Jan 2008 at 9:23 am
“Plus, and most annoyingly, he’s always talking about how he’s been insulted and wronged, even though he mocks the clothing of Ann Coulter…”
I came across your interesting blog by chance and was intrigued by the above remark. Whilst I cannot be a judge of Mr. Auster’s behaviour in general, I find mocking Ms. Coulter’s clothing rather deserving. The fact that American conservatives don’t seem to mind in the least that a vocal defender of family- and other conservative values appears publicly in a flimsy little black number will never cease to amaze me.
Of course, if you regard appearance and conduct as immaterial (and I don’t know whether you do), the point I am trying to make is irrelevant.
3 Jan 2008 at 2:33 pm
Sometimes in these matters a bit of magnanimity and restraint is called for, both characteristics Auster lacks. He basically has liberal psychic and emotional instincts with a conservative set of conclusions. It’s quite jarring.
3 Jan 2008 at 6:35 pm
“Those reports”?
3 Jan 2008 at 7:19 pm
It’s really simple: he was the right age. He went to Columbia. He was buddy-buddy with Mark Rudd and the SDS crowd. He’s an admitted ex-liberal. He dropped out of Columbia and didn’t return to college until seven years later at UC Boulder, presuambly in ‘76 or ‘77. He has said all this in his blog.
Plus he’s been very cagey and evasive about why he didn’t serve in the military. Was it medical? Was he on the run? Was he in Canada? Was he exempted for some other reason? I have no idea. I said at the time, I didn’t think it was cool to question Kerry’s courage in getting three Purple Hearts and the manner of that award, when one was nearly the same age and didn’t serve at all. He got really pissed at the time, and I basically said he had no standing to question Kerry’s courage.
The details I don’t know. It would take two seconds to clear it up from Auster. He won’t, because it’s beneath him, or so he says. I hypothesize the truth is embarassing, a product of a younger him, less mature and more liberal. But, frankly, if he was in Canada or France or hiding out at some hippy commune or lying about a bum knee, I think they’re all equally lame, though forgivable. As it stands, with little information and these suspicious circumstances, I see no reason to give him the benefit of the doubt.
4 Jan 2008 at 8:49 pm
I think one can find a pattern in Auster’s writings since 911 in his approach to Neocons versus non-Neocons or Ex-Neocons. In short, Auster is much more vicious when attacking non-Neocons and Ex-Neocons then when he disagrees with Neocons. When Auster disagreed with David Frum’s dishonest portrayal of himself as having been a fighter against illegal and mass legal immigration, Auster pointed out Frum’s dishonesty but did it apologetically. You can see that he doesn’t take the same polite approach with Rod Dreher, the Ex-NR Ex-Neocon.
In some sense perhaps Auster’s attack on Dreher is due to Dreher having changed his position on the Iraq war from pro to anti. Auster was very, very pro-war in Iraq, almost hysterically so. And Auster has stated recently that he wants the USA to bomb Iran. Now that Dreher is more cozy with The American Conservative magazine than with his former employer NR, Auster attacks Dreher. Does anyone else see a pattern there? If not, just look at Auster’s nasty attacks on Derbyshire or Steve Sailer. I think there is a single reason for these nasty attacks, and I doubt it has much to do with Auster’s stated reasons.
Last year Auster attacked the movie The History Boys, a British film that made about $2 million in the US market. Auster concluded that the UK is decadent based on this film. At the same time another UK influenced film, Borat, staring the UK’s Baron Cohen, was making well over $100 million in the US. For some reason Auster didn’t mention much less denounce Borat at all, even thought Borat was about “American racism” a subject Auster is supposed to be interested in. I’m not sure if this is part of the pattern, but it just might be.
4 Jan 2008 at 9:15 pm
Do you think he hates paleocons more? Or people that won’t publish him? Or what exactly is the pattern you see?
4 Jan 2008 at 9:39 pm
I think it is clear he hates paleocons more than Neocons. In Auster’s writing, he views Neocons as mistaken or unwilling to follow through on their concern regarding Islam and Muslims. He views Paleocons as soft on Islam and Muslims. Recall that it was the response to his support of the Iraq war that caused Auster to close the comments section. Now he posts emails he gets and many of them are from others as concerned about the fate of Israel as Auster is. And Auster frequently concludes that if a person doesn’t support the war against Iraq or an attack on Iran they are doing so because of hostility (an irrational one) against Israel, rather than an objective view that such “preemptive” wars of choice are not the correct policy.
So I think Auster calibrates his nastiness based on how he views the object of his attack values Israel. I think you are correct Chris that Auster doesn’t get along with people in general, but I think there is a pattern that he is less hostile to those he considers more pro-Israel.
4 Jan 2008 at 9:50 pm
Could be one of the themes, but I think internal pyschology has much to do with it. I do think, though, his love affair with Israel seems quite out of place for any normal traditionalist conservative. I mean, we might say, “well, it’s their internal affiars, or there is something romantic about their pioneering spirit, or their enemy is at least for now our enemy, or they were stalwart allies in the Cold War etc.” But that’s different from assuming a consistent identity of interest and values. I mean, we have totally different religions, and they’re socialist. It’s not exactly George Washington stuff.
I don’t expect him to rip on his co-ethnics as a group. Such generalizations are always, of course, imperfect. But it would be nice if he showed a bit more generosity all around. He claims to be a Christian and thinks I’m nasty and rude, but he does it with everyone all the time. What kind of person so reflexively says, “You’re off base” when they characterize one of his arguments the way he doesn’t like? He sucks.
4 Jan 2008 at 11:17 pm
Questions of psychology aside, Auster has created a trail of questionable comments and double standards on issues that in my view create a pattern. That pattern is one of making attacks on those to his right that are at best beyond nasty and indicate an irrational bias on Auster’s part. Even when Auster attacks the Neocons he usually does so with some degree of regret and even sometimes some respect. Auster appears willing to tolerate the fear that some Neocons may have about taking a non-liberal position with regard to Muslim immigration into Europe and the USA even as he is frustrated by it. Auster has rightly taken issue with the attack by Little Green Footballs attack on those in Europe opposed to the Muslim immigration invasion. But Auster never seems to understand or admit that many of those at LGF are hysterical Zionists who at the same time are virulently opposed to any corporate protection of European culture and ethnic identity.
Below are comments Auster made last summer at Randall Parker’s website. Note Auster’s irrational attack on the paleo magazine Chronicles, in which Auster claims Chronicles’ paleos never made any rational arguments against the Iraq war. This is consistent with Auster’s comments at other times suggesting it was the fault of Paleocons in refusing to make good arguments that got the USA into the mess in Iraq. So, to Auster it wasn’t the Neocons who are at fault over Iraq, it was Paleocons!
BTW, the comments Auster made below were in regard to the Scooter Libby case. Auster of course was in Scooter Libby’s corner.
THE FOLLOWING ARE COMMENTS BY LARRY AUSTER:
Posted by Lawrence Auster on July 5, 2007 07:23 AM:
Oh my, now my character is being attacked because of the opinion I have expressed. So Matt is doing what Randall has been doing: making the focus of the issue people’s putatively bad character, instead of the facts and the right and wrong of the case.
And this, as I have been arguing for years, is part of the decline of our culture which is reflected in particular in the paleocon right. For example, in the run-up to the Iraq war, at Chronicles and elsewhere, there would be articles that argued against the invasion of Iraq, not because it was a bad idea or because the cons of it outweighed the pros, but because the neoconservatives are BAD PEOPLE. This way of thinking has so infused the paleo right that paleocons have lost the ability to argue objectively about issues. And Matt’s despicable statement is part and parcel of that.
I stand by what I said. The whole investigation was an outrage from the start, and should not have taken place. Unless Matt wants to live in a society where special prosecutors with unlimited budgets are free to spend years questioning people under oath about non-existent crimes in order to catch them in a false statement that can send them to jail, he ought to wonder about this himself.
Also, I notice that paleocons, who are supposedly very suspicious of the power of the central state, have no problem with an unaccountable federal special prosecutor being able to spend years and many millions of dollars pursuing a non-existent crime. They have no problem with it, so long as the target of it is someone identifiable as a neocon.
First “Alon” made an anti-Semitic statement about me, and Randall Parker’s response was politely and respectfully to disagree with him, not to tell him that his anti-Semitism was unacceptable at this website. And now I’m told I have a bad character because of my opinions. If this is the level of discussion to be expected at this site, it ceases to be worthwhile for me to post here.
END OF Comments By LARRY AUSTER RE: Bush Lets Libby Escape Jail Time
5 Jan 2008 at 8:22 pm
I like the way in Auster’s worldview his character gets attacked often, sometimes for having vile opinions, and he always assumes it has nothing to do with his character even though it comes from every quarter.
5 Jan 2008 at 10:28 pm
I think what I’ve been trying to express is that Auster often (although not always) attempts to fit an idea or his analysis of someone or something not only into a preconceived conception or ideology but into an agenda that is informed by a bias that is irrelevant to the issue at hand. For example, when the Civil War movie Gods and Generals came out, Auster attacked it because it was a favorite of some paleocons and Auster was upset with those palecons because they were opposed to the Neocon agenda in the middle east. While the merits of the movie had nothing to do with Auster’s then support for the pending war in Iraq, I think Auster’s response to the movie was based on his underlying agenda. The same could be said for Auster’s often very emotional disapproval of the Gibson movie the Passion. It was certainly strange for a person who became a Christian to have nothing to say in response to the Neocon attacks not only on the movie the Passion, but also on the basic source material for that movie, which was the New Testament. But Auster was silent about the attacks by high profile Neocons not only on the Passion itself (which they typically hadn’t even seen), but also on the New Testament. Both Mrs. Irving Kristol and Charles Krauthammer attacked the New Testament as the basis of the “anti-Semitism” they imagined was contained in Gibson’s movie. But Auster didn’t have anything to say about the Neocon reaction to that film, not even to distinguish his own disapproval of it from the broader Neocon disapproval of Christianity itself.
For Auster to bizarrely claim that paleocons are “tribal” is beyond a pot calling the kettle black moment. Auster is often willing to claim that a person not supportive of some Neocon policy is biased, but of course will never admit that the reverse could be true. Adopting a policy of invading and occupying Iraq or bombing Iran seems to Auster to be the default position, and any opposition must be based on some irrational bias against Israel. For Auster not to admit that such has been and remains his position is a much greater “intellectual” fault than any he may have identified in Dreher or any other paleocon for that matter.
8 Jan 2008 at 5:34 pm
The Auster comedy continues. Just this past week, Auster claimed to have an insight that Barak Obama is the new Sidney Poitier. The problem with that insight is that it was made nearly one year ago by Steve Sailer, in an infamous essay that ran in The American Conservative, one of Auster’s least favorite magazines (at least before Ron Unz took it over). And Auster himself read Sailer’s essay at the time and attacked both that essay and Sailer and defended Obama. Now, I don’t really think Auster analyzed Sailer’s essay on its merits (or demerits). Auster just took that opportunity to attack Sailer for “other reasons.”
THIS IS AUSTER’S POST THIS MONTH
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009615.html
THE RETURN OF SIDNEY POITIER
A not insignificant reason why white Americans in the early 1960s supported racial equality was that they inchoately believed that blacks were like Sidney Poitier. Over on the main page of Rasmussen Reports today there is a photo of a handsome, smiling Barack Obama talking to voters, and it struck me: Obama is Sidney Poitier, a nice-looking, friendly, intelligent, nonthreatening, civilized black man with great personal appeal. That is what the white American imagination found to its delight in the early Sixties, then lost, and now has found again–and this time whites don’t just get to see him in a movie, they get to vote for him to be the Democratic presidential nominee.
–end of initial entry–
THIS IS AUSTER THIS WEEK RECOUNTING HIS COMMENTS ON OBAMA AND SAILER LAST YEAR
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/009625.html
THOUGHTS ON OBAMA LAST YEAR AND NOW
VFR’s previous biggest discussion on Obama, which took place last March, began with my comment on a long Steve Sailer article on Obama where I said:
In his diffuse and disorganized 4,000 word article about Barack Obama in The American Conservative Steve Sailer signally fails to make the case about Obama’s supposed racial hangups that he claims to make. For example, Sailer writes: “And yet, at least through age 33 when he wrote Dreams from My Father, he found solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against his mother’s race.” But Sailer doesn’t demonstrate this. Yes, as Sailer points out, Obama has written frankly about his ambivalent racial feelings and his search for identity that you would expect the son of an African man and a white American woman to have undergone, but nothing that adds up to what Sailer is saying.
I carry no brief for Obama. I’m completely open to the idea that he is an anti-white “race man,” as many right-wingers keep telling me he is. I just haven’t seen the evidence for it.
THE LINK TO AUSTER’S COMMENTS LAST YEAR
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/007485.html
AND HERE IS AUSTER’S COMMENT FROM LAST YEAR REJECTING CONSERVATIVE CRITICISM OF OBAMA
http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/007484.html
WHY ARE CONSERVATIVES ATTACKING OBAMA, WHILE GIVING HILLARY A PASS?
(See further comments from readers below who are very displeased with me on this issue, and my replies.)
The blogger Vanishing American writes:
[Lawrence] Auster has been devoting considerable attention to Obama and his qualities as a candidate. I am nonplussed by Auster’s seemingly somewhat favorable opinion of Obama; he certainly seems to be “praising him with faint damns,” willing to give him much more credit than I would expect to be given a liberal candidate who seems to be a proponent of multiculturalism and the proposition nation.
I like that phrase “praising with faint damns,” which I had never heard before. I admit I’ve been piqued by Obama’s good qualities, not only because he is a fresh and intriguing figure in himself, but, more importantly—and this is the point that Vanishing American and other conservative critics seem to have missed entirely—because he offers an alternative to what had seemed like the Hillary Inevitability. Would the conservatives who are dumping on Obama, would the conservatives who want nothing said about Obama that is not negative, actually prefer that the Dragon Lady be the Democratic nominee and possibly the president, with the Clintons and all the horror that they represent returning to the White House?
- end of initial entry -