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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
America's highest-powered conservatives invited me to their posh weekend retreat, expecting me to bash the left. I'm afraid I wasn't a very good guest.
Nov 18, 2003 | The roomful of Republican activists booed when I said that George Bush was the most dishonest president in living memory, but otherwise my conservative hosts at Restoration Weekend were quite cordial. David Horowitz, the radical leftist turned radical rightist, invited me to his ritzy confab, held at Palm Beach's posh Breakers resort, to speak on a Sunday morning panel about the antiwar movement. I agreed to go in order to eavesdrop on the conservative elite and see what they were thinking as their dream of a new Middle East withers in Iraq's growing violence. For two days, I skulked around a crowd that included House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, ultra-right strategist Grover Norquist, U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris of Florida, and neocon ideologue Daniel Pipes.
Here is what I learned: The self-regarding humanitarianism that the right wrapped itself in before the war with Iraq is beginning to fray and chafe. At Restoration Weekend there was anxiety about the postwar situation, and anger. Senators and congressional representatives avowed their faith that Bush's fabled steadfastness made victory assured in Iraq, a stance they struggled to reconcile with the White House's recently announced decision to expedite the transfer of power to Iraqis and scale back the occupation by election season. Meanwhile, the right's intellectuals and activists had largely scrapped talk of democracy. Some suggested that the Iraqis themselves are our enemy, that we owe them nothing. Pipes referenced "The Mouse That Roared," the 1959 film in which a poor country declares war on America, hoping to lose and be rebuilt like Germany and Japan. The implication seemed to be that Iraq is both lucky and greedy.
Meanwhile, those troubled by Bush's decision to cut and run blamed it on Democrats and the liberal media, who through their unfair scrutiny of irrelevancies like Bush's uranium claim and the Valerie Plame affair were sapping the national will. Horowitz accused Salon itself of compromising the country's security by sniping at the commander in chief, repeating the phrase "ideas have consequences," over and over. It wasn't quite clear which ideas he was talking about -- that Bush's case for war was mendacious? That it would be preferable to have a different president? Yet the consequences, he was clear, would be catastrophic.
So why had Horowitz invited someone from such a traitorous publication to his festivities?
The answer likely lies in the right's love of native informants. Horowitz has made a career denouncing his old comrades to his new ones in books including "The Politics of Bad Faith: The Radical Assault on America's Future" and "Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes." His new book, "Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey," is an obsessive catalog of the political sins of liberals including John Judis, Todd Gitlin and Hendrik Hertzberg, but it turns admiring whenever one of his subjects turns on his own side. He devotes an entire essay to a piece democratic socialist Michael Walzer published in Dissent called, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" Walzer's piece bemoaned the left's alienation from the rest of America. Horowitz's piece lauds Walzer's alienation from the left, seeing it as emblematic of Walzer's own essential decency.
Restoration Weekend swarms with influential Republicans, but the star this year was a Democrat, U.S. Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia. The reason was clear -- Sen. Miller has, much to the right's delight, decided that the gravest issue facing the country is the perfidy of his own party.
Miller just published a book, "A National Party No More: The Conscience of a Conservative Democrat," in which he excoriates fellow Democrats for being out of touch with "America," the right's synonym for "the deep South." He spoke Friday evening, at a black-tie dinner of crab cakes and filet mignon topped with foie gras, after a pianist played a surprisingly lovely composition said to be inspired by a column Peggy Noonan wrote about 9/11. To cheers from an audience including DeLay, former Attorney General Edwin Meese and former CIA chief James Woolsey, Miller praised President Bush and slammed "soft-bellied peaceniks who believe war is pointless and that foreign policy is just some kind of fuzzy social work." Coming from a Democrat, such comments have a special savor, confirming conservative suspicions about their opponents' degeneracy.
So it may have been Horowitz's obsession with Democratic defectors and self-critical leftists that led him to invite me to this year's Restoration Weekend, all expenses paid. After all, I've been consistently critical of the politics and rhetoric of some of the major antiwar groups, especially ANSWER, a Stalinist cult no more concerned with human rights than Dick Cheney is.
I've also disagreed with the call issued by some corners of the left to end the occupation. Reporting on the situation in Iraq, both from here and from Baghdad, has convinced me that if America suddenly pulls out of the country, the Iraqi people are liable to suffer even more than they already have. Thus I've been frustrated to hear the left demand that Bush bring the troops home. It's a demand that, ironically, the administration is about to meet, having just announced a plan to end the official occupation in June and reduce troop strength by about 25,000.
Yet if my reporting has been critical of the hard left, it wasn't meant as fodder for the right, which is why Horowitz's invitation made me uneasy. One reason I've focused on ANSWER is that I believe they help the right discredit the millions of citizens who oppose Bush because they hate what he's doing to America, not because they hate America itself. I had little desire, then, to stand before a roomful of powerful conservatives and offer them tales of leftist degeneracy.
Yet I went anyway, because I hate to miss a chance to see what the right is up to.
