Anti-Crusaders, Really

The discussion centering around whether or not compassionate conservatives, crunchy cons, and National Greatness Republicans are all basically equal types of Crusaders, a discussion carried on for some time already by Jonah Goldberg, Ross Douthat, and Daniel Larison, needs little more from this corner, excepting comment on this point of Jonah's:

Giuliani saved my home town. But he didn't do it as part of some warmed-over social gospel, to provide "meaning" to people or as part of some vaguely utopian agenda. He did it out of good old fashioned bourgeois notions of public order, right and wrong and the belief that if government gets out of the way people can manage their own affairs. By all means, conservatives should fix the tax code, shrink the federal government, improve the health care system (hopefully with market based reforms), and help families. I'm even for censorship . But let us have no more New Politics and redeeming crusades. They always end in disappointment, at least for conservatives.

See, the trouble is that certain types of 'crunchy cons' -- and this is to the exclusion of compassionate conservatives and Nat. Great. Republicans, who by definition fit in a national membership category -- already have meaning in their lives, identities, families, and communities, no Weberian scare quotes about it. They do not need 'meaning' imparted to them by some emonationalistic scheme or by some winsome political patriot. They have typically dismissed earthy utopia in very specific terms, often on account of a recognition that utopia means nowhere for a reason. They are good, old fashioned people, and if they're anything resembling middle class, they're 'bourgeois' in social science terms but hardly 'identify' as bourgeois for reasons that should now be obvious. The certain types of crunchy cons to which I refer -- and this includes certain types of postmodern conservatives -- have no use for crusaderist projects because they don't like to endure the abstraction of virtues into vague values simply to invent things to have in common with strangers. And, no surprise, they then get attacked for not caring about others, for being isolationists if disinterested in foreign policy or jerks if interested. Damned if you do and damned if you don't for the anti-crusaders, I fear.

Comments

[chris]

interesting claims

nothing more