At last! Conservatives stand up against the Muslim menace

, including Michelle Malkin and, Ive heard, various commenters at the conservative website, evidently think this T-shirt is a brave and defiant gesture against militant Muslims. Try to imagine H.G. Wellss Eloi puffing themselves up and thinking that theyre being defiant against the Morlocks, and youd have something like this T-shirt. These are the same conservatives who see Mark Steyn as a Churchillian figure.

In fact, this tactic of taking what seems like a strong conservative stand only to retract it with a wink and a smile, as this cutesy T-shirt does, has been a characteristic feature of modern conservatism. I first became aware of this when reading some of David Brookss articles in The Weekly Standard in the mid-1990s. Brooks would start out decrying some decadent aspect of the culture, and youd really get into the article, thankful that a mainstream conservative magazine was saying these things. But then, at the end of the article, Brooks would turn around and say that the very thing he had been so strongly critical of didnt matter anyway, that it was ok, that we could live with it. So he aroused all kinds of genuine conservative thoughts and feelings, only to undermine them. The impact of this technique of subversion is to silence and paralyze any actual conservative response to the ills of our time. Mark Steyn, of course, is the ultimate practitioner of this method.



Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 27, 2006 02:11 AM | Send



