At Last: A Conservative Magazine Worth Reading

by Franklin Harris

You may already have heard of Pat Buchanan’s latest venture, The American Conservative, a magazine set to begin biweekly publication in September.

If it were merely a Buchanan project, it would be unremarkable, a tired reiteration of Buchanan’s quirky and sometimes confused politics. It would be good on military intervention (except possibly as far as China is concerned), unspeakably bad on trade, and so-so on immigration. And you would never know when Pat might spring something weird on you, like when he decided Ezola Foster would make a good candidate for vice president.

I’ll leave aside Pat’s social-policy views. No doubt most LewRockwell.com readers are more in agreement with Pat on such matters than I am.

Fortunately, Buchanan is only one-third of The American Conservative. The other two-thirds are Scott McConnell, late of The New York Post, The New York Press, and Antiwar.com, and Taki Theodoracopulos, better known, thankfully, as just Taki.

Given its backers, it is clear The American Conservative plans to focus on the one area where Buchanan is strongest: military intervention.

Taki is a long-time critic of the US government’s unquestioning support for Israel. And McConnell has distinguished himself post-Sept. 11 as seemingly the only New York-based writer who doesn’t want to turn the Arab world into a parking lot for M1 tanks.

On the The American Conservative’s fledgling Web site, McConnell lays out the magazine’s mission:

"It is written especially for those who have begun to question whether ‘conservatism’ means – as many Beltway conservatives now would have it – that the United States should have bombed Serbia and should now embark on countless other wars that have little to do with America’s own vital interests. It is written for those who question whether we ought to completely remake our wonderful country through continued mass immigration from all corners of the globe. It is written for those who understand what George Washington meant when he warned Americans of the dangers of passionate attachment to foreign nations."

This is the side of conservatism largely is absent from the post-Sept. 11 debate.

But is there a market for it?

Over at The New Republic, Franklin Foer is already predicting "Buchanan’s surefire flop."

This isn’t surprising. The New Republic, with its annoying brand of center-left, pro-war, pro-welfare politics, is as close to the anti-American Conservative as you can get. It is impossible to tell if Foer’s column is dispassionate analysis or wishful thinking. (But then the same could probably be said of mine.)

Foer cites polls indicating that most American conservatives support massive military intervention abroad in general and the war on terror, as President Bush defines it, in particular. So, he concludes that no one, apart from the left, is interested in Buchanan-Taki-McConnell conservatism.

Well, so what?

If Buchanan, Taki, and McConnell didn’t think the American conservative movement needs a drastic change from the pro-war rantings of Fox News and The Weekly Standard, they wouldn’t bother starting the magazine in the first place, would they? The purpose of The American Conservative is to change minds, not follow polls.

For that matter, what has all of its warmongering got The Weekly Standard? It is supposedly the leading "conservative" publication, yet it couldn’t survive a day without its sugar daddy, Rupert Murdoch.

(Would it be impolite to mention that Marty Peretz provides the same service for Foer’s employer?)

Nobody gets rich from punditry alone.

For what it’s worth, I wish Buchanan and company well in their new endeavor, although I’m sure I’ll have my disagreements with them. I’m tired of Chronicles being the only magazine of the anti-empire right.

The biggest problem with Chronicles is its dubious anti-capitalism. Whatever its other virtues, it is hard to take a publication seriously that claims to represent Middle America while railing against the "evils" of Wal-Mart.

Buchanan shares the Chronicles crowd’s antipathy toward the market, but Taki and McConnell do not. If nothing else, given their decidedly cosmopolitan outlooks, we won’t endure the spectacle of Taki and McConnell trying to pass themselves off as pitchfork populists.

July 13, 2002

Franklin Harris [send him e-mail] is a columnist and online editor for The Decatur (Ala.) Daily. His Web site is www.pulpculture.net.

Copyright © 2002 LewRockwell.com

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