Unpatriotic Conservatives: A war against America

National Review, April 7, 2003 by David Frum

True conservatives, Tonsor said, were Roman Catholic at root, or at a minimum Anglo-Catholic. They studied literature, not the social sciences. And while he was very glad to see that some non-religious social scientists were now arriving at conservative conclusions, they should understand that their role in the conservative movement must be a subordinate one. "We are all delighted," he said (I am quoting from memory), "to see the town whore come to church -- even to sing in the choir -- but not to lead the service."

I wish I could say that Tonsor's outburst was motivated by a deep disagreement over important principles. Certainly principles had their place. But as the paleos themselves tell the story, the quarrel that erupted into view that day in 1986 began as a squabble over jobs and perks in the Reagan administration -- from the perception that, as Francis later put it, neoconservatives had arranged matters so that "their team should get the rewards of office and of patronage and that the other team of the older Right receive virtually nothing."

A quick reality check here: It is not in fact true that the ambitions of the paleos fell victim to neocon plots. Paleo Grievance Number 1 is the case of Mel Bradford, a gifted professor at the University of Dallas, now dead. Bradford had hoped to be appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1981, but lost out to William Bennett. Unfortunately for him, Bradford came to the government hiring window with certain disadvantages: He had worked on the George Wallace campaign in 1968, and he had published an essay that could plausibly be read to liken Abraham Lincoln to Hitler. In the spring of 1981, Ronald Reagan was trying to persuade a balky Congress simultaneously to enact a giant tax cut and to authorize a huge defense buildup; to slow inflation, end fuel shortages, and halt Soviet aggression, from Afghanistan to Angola. It was not, in other words, a good moment to refight the Civil War.

Bradford could never accept that it was his own writings that had doomed him. As Oscar Wilde observed, "Misfortunes one can endure: They come from outside, they are accidents. But to suffer for one's own faults -- ah! There is the sting of life." Easier and less painful to blame others and pity oneself. And so Bradford's friends and partisans did. When this one was passed over for a promotion at his newspaper or that one failed to be hired at a more prestigious university, they detected the hand of the hated neoconservatives.

Perhaps the most relentlessly solipsistic of the disgruntled paleos is Paul Gottfried, a professor at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania who has published an endless series of articles about his professional rebuffs. Gottfried teaches at Elizabethtown because, as he repeatedly complains, "in what is literally a footnote to conservative history . . . I was denied a graduate professorship at Catholic University of America by neo-conservative lobbying." Nor did the neocons stop there. When a routine outside professional evaluation of the Elizabethtown faculty reported in 2002 that Gottfried often arrived in class "unprepared or with little thought as to what he would say" and that his students found his classes "unfocused, with often rambling discussions," he responded by posting an article on the LewRockwell.com website complaining that he had been the victim of, yes, a "neocon attack."