McCain as Burkean

Jonathan Rauch, writing in The Atlantic, makes the case that John McCain should be understood not as a conservative heretic but as an old-school Burkean conservative at a time when much of the GOP may have come unmoored from those traditional roots.

I think there's a lot of truth to this analysis (though I don't really think it can account for everything McCain did early in the Bush administration -- a lot of the positions he staked out for a couple of years there seem explicable primarily as driven by anti-Bush pique that he eventually got over) but it neglects the whole topic of foreign policy. Which is fine -- the other issues are important, too. But foreign policy questions are McCain's passion, he's chosen to put them at the center of his campaign, and there's really nothing at all Burkean about McCain's take on them. The "our country is democratic, democracy is awesome, therefore we should try to conquer the entire world in the name of spreading democracy" syllogism at the core of McCain "Enduring Peace Built on Freedom" is straight out of the French Revolution.

Comments

Would you say that in foreign policy terms, McCain is a Napoleanic Conservative?

Posted by blah | April 11, 2008 2:36 PM

The article does what the press always does with McCain, to simply ignore logic in their adherence to their saintly narrative.

He's not a "newfangled" supply-sider, even though he supports the supply-sider inspired Bush tax cuts and all other supply-side doctrine. He's an honorable man who thinks torture should be illegal even though he voted against banning the CIA's use of it.

His immigration flipflop isn't even mentioned, but I'm sure like every other utter reversal of McCain's, it can only prove how straight and honest he is. Ugh.

Posted by skylerjeff | April 11, 2008 2:38 PM

He looks a little devilish to me.

Posted by Linus | April 11, 2008 2:52 PM

A Robespierre for the rich.

Posted by Tom from the Bx | April 11, 2008 3:17 PM

OMG, here it comes. McCain is the true heir to Conservatism, and Bush is a failed messenger who claimed he was a Conservative, but was Not. And communism still works, we just never tried it.

The author's piece is full of ridiculously cherry-picked data to back his thesis, and when he's not cherry-picking, he's just wrong.

[Burke] would caution against forcibly uprooting the authority structures of a long-tyrannized society like Iraq and expecting a mini-America to spring forth.

Whereas McCain predicted that's exactly what would happen. And his main complaint now is we haven't gone nearly far enough nearly fast enough. Not very Burkean.

[McCain] has been an old-fashioned budget balancer, not a newfangled supply-sider.

He certainly isn't one now, and just because he supported the Balanced Budget Amendment (uh, a not very Burkean vote) doesn't mean he's a budget-balancer. Right now, he's got grandiose spending plans (mostly on war), but he's said he is not going to cut any programs significantly, increase taxes or the deficit. And as far as I can tell, these have always been his positions, regardless of whether he opposed tax cuts he now embraces. The salient difference now is that before he got the nomination, no one (including him) did the math and realized it was impossible to do all the things he wanted to do simultaneously! So yeah, he's for balanced budgets and endless war spending and low taxes, the same way I'm for eating nothing but twinkies and bacon and being a size two.

McCain opposes gay marriage but also voted against a federal constitutional amendment to ban it. Inconsistent? Not if you think that marriage is best handled by the states, which have handled it since Colonial times, or that there is nothing conservative about preemptively amending the Constitution to end-run the Supreme Court,

But no mention of the fact that he'd support a constitutional amendment to ban abortion? He said that on Russert in 2000 & again on Stephanopolous in 2006. I'd say that's an end run. And it's radical. Every fertile woman in America today grew up with 100% certainty that if she got pregnant, it was her judgment whether or not she wanted to continue the pregnancy. It's radical to go from that to a constitutional ban. This doesn't even mention his stance on birth control, which is ludicrous.

Not to mention the fact that he voted to support a constitutional ban on flag-burning? Because I think these little positions rather undermine the whole "he's a principled Burkean, not a flip-flopper" BS we're hearing.

McCain, in short, is an anti-revolutionary, not a counterrevolutionary.

McCain, in short, is a lightweight who doesn't care if the numbers add up. He doesn't get called on his pandering, flip-flops, and general policy incoherency because he's got a spectacular relationship with the media. They love having a beer with him, so they give him a pass.

He gives a crap about very few issues--and his signature one is an expansionistic foreign policy that is light years away from anything resembling Burkean philosophy.

Posted by anonymous | April 11, 2008 3:18 PM

Pat Buchanan said that the Republican Neocons are "Jacobites". Which, from his tone, I thought had sometime to do with sodomy (I'm not equal to parsing Catholic erudition).

Someone finally took pity on me and explained that it means they operate on orders from God and don't need to consider lesser beings like Parliaments or US Congresses. "Divine Right of Kings -- and of Kings' Chief Buttkissers"

I could definitely see 72 years old John McCain getting behind that philosophy. After all, he's only one heartbeat away from God as it is. Or maybe the other guy.

Posted by Don Williams | April 11, 2008 3:18 PM

Would you say that in foreign policy terms, McCain is a Napoleanic Conservative?

Indeed, I wrote a soon-to-be-released magazine story about McCain's foreign policy in which he's depicted on the cover as Napoleon.

Posted by Matthew Yglesias | April 11, 2008 3:25 PM

I doubt Buchanan accused the neocons of supporting a Stuart restoration to the British throne. As bad as the neocons are, I think they support the Glorious Revolution. What I bet Buchanan was referring to are the Jacobins, who the neocons in their zeal for worldwide "democratic" revolution do resemble, rather than Jacobites.

Posted by Chuck | April 11, 2008 3:32 PM

nonsense. This is just more McCain fluffing. The guy is an incoherent mess. He takes both sides on pretty much everything, depending on the short term political fallout, and his mood at the time. He's pissed at Bush, he checks out the Democrats. He wants to president in 08, big Bush hugs. Falwell is divisive and evil in 2000, a great guy in 07. There's nothing, except abortion, that he's not been on both sides of.

And he's wrong about that.

Posted by jayackroyd | April 11, 2008 3:43 PM

It's not at all "Burkean" to support giving the war powers of Congress away, as McCain and Clinton did when the AUMF was passed in 2002.

Burke would have been no doubt disgusted by a body that passed such a buck, so it wouldn't have to take responsibility for starting a war.

Posted by anon | April 11, 2008 3:49 PM

I await McCain on the sublime and the beautiful. At least Teddy Roosevelt would have known what the words meant.

Can you imagine Dr. Johnson sitting down to talk with McCain????

Posted by Gene O'Grady | April 11, 2008 3:57 PM

Can you imagine Dr. Johnson sitting down to talk with McCain????

Johnson siting down with Obama would be a real hoot.

"You have the appearance of a savage Hottentot, sir. I expect you to spear me and cook me over a fire at any moment."

Hold on, that's Harold Bloom. I get them mixed up all the time.

Posted by goethean | April 11, 2008 4:09 PM

The argument that McCain is an "Old school Burkian" is a little bit of a reach since I'm pretty sure McCain spoke at Burke's graduation.

Posted by crack | April 11, 2008 4:19 PM

In point of fact Dr. Johnson, as an old style conservative, was as unracist as they came in the 18th century (add the 19th, I would suspect) and left his estate to a black man.

Posted by Gene O'Grady | April 11, 2008 4:24 PM

Yglesias: "Indeed, I wrote a soon-to-be-released magazine story about McCain's foreign policy in which he's depicted on the cover as Napoleon."

Yea, a cover story! I was wondering when you would actually start publishing stuff in the print magazine.

Posted by Korha | April 11, 2008 4:27 PM

Although Dr. Johnson might compare Hillary's campaign to a dog walking on its hind legs.

Posted by blah | April 11, 2008 4:29 PM

And to what great intellect can we compare George Bush?

Absurd.

Posted by kristi | April 11, 2008 4:33 PM

He's not a Napoleon, but a Murat or a Ney. Bravest of the brave from the Vietnam stuff, but with no strategic sense whatsoever, and utterly representative of the Peter Principle at its worst.

Posted by Greg | April 11, 2008 4:42 PM

"Johnson siting down with Obama would be a real hoot.

"You have the appearance of a savage Hottentot, sir. I expect you to spear me and cook me over a fire at any moment."

Hold on, that's Harold Bloom. I get them mixed up all the time."

Johnson's valet, whom Johnson paid to educate to become Johnson's longtime research assistant, was a black man and a former slave. Johnson opposed slavery in the American colonies, and left his estate to his black valet (whose descedants still live around Johnson's native town of Lichfield). There were a few hundred black people living in London at the time. While not perhaps a very common sight (outside of the dock areas), people of African descent were hardly unknown at the time. It's quite possible that Johnson knew, and he almost certainly knew of, such black London-resident writers of his time as Equiano or Ignatius Sancho.

Posted by burritoboy | April 11, 2008 5:20 PM

Spot on matt; spot on. As you said, he is a neo-con. Are you familiar with John Gray's writing by any chance?

Posted by Chris Dornan | April 11, 2008 10:19 PM

McCain is a Burkean only in the sense that he likes things like tradition and hierarchy, loosely defined to suit his needs. He probably doesn't buy into the whole intellectual framework of neoconservatism (including Trotsky and Strauss) because he's not much of an intellectual (graduating almost last in his class at West Point). He just seems to latch onto vague ideas like "honor" and "glory" and runs with them. Comparing him to Napoleon, who told his tired and confused troops in Egypt that they were fighting for "glory," is spot-on. Burke's thought as a whole hasn't had much influence on conservative thought in this country (outside the likes of Dartmouth's English department, which has almost no influence on the GOP as a whole) since Eisenhower left office.

The neocons, meanwhile, are pretty anti-Burkean. Burke looked on the French Revolution with horror. The neocons and, to an even greater extent, their Trotskyite intellectual forefathers, probably think Robespierre was a pussy.

Posted by Reality Man | April 12, 2008 3:20 AM

Actually, the Burke/McCain parallel holds in one (and only one) respect : Burke in his last years took a strong regime-change approach to revolutionary France, demanding that Britain back to the hilt whatever royalist Chalabi clones wanted to land in/take over Brittany or the
Vendee, consequences be damned (Letters on a Regicide Peace makes the Weekly Standard look pretty tame). Larger point : you can follow any course of action whatsoever and find a quote from the Collected Works of Edmund Burke/Thomas Jefferson/Winston Churchill/Lindsay Lohan to justify it.

Posted by David Drewer | April 12, 2008 4:49 PM