Thunder on the Center-Right

The Weekly Standard turns 10.

W. James Antle, III from the April 2006 issue

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To some, this looked like bold strategic thinking. Skeptics thought it resembled an obsession with political gimmicks at the expense of ideas. But The Weekly Standard: A Reader mostly ignores this debate too, with Kristol referring to his presidential politicking in the foreword the way an adult would describe a photograph of his first day at kindergarten.

Although it airbrushes out much of the Standard's interesting intellectual history, the compilation does show how it became such a force on the right. Most obviously, the magazine acquired some of its generation's most talented writers, among them Brooks, Andrew Ferguson, and Christopher Caldwell. Tucker Carlson's McCain campaign journal is a first-rate piece of political reporting. Matt Labash shares Carlson's deft combination of witty prose and insightful reporting, as demonstrated in his tasteful dissection of Tammy Faye Bakker. The anthology's cultural essays are competent and wide-ranging, analyzing books, Broadway, and the nightly news. Joseph Bottum, now an editor at First Things, explores Robert Lowell's poetry, while Christopher Hitchens looks at Bob Dylan's.

There is another larger factor in The Weekly Standard's influence: 9/11. That day didn't change everything, but it did change conservatism. The national greatness obsession that seemed so out of place during the prosperous '90s suddenly became relevant. A new national struggle had been found in the War on Terror, and the "active foreign policy" the magazine craved could now be promoted on the basis of pragmatic national defense rather than abstract, high-minded principle.

Yet the war essays are among the weakest pieces in the book. Anti-war voices are repeatedly portrayed as unwilling to weigh the risks of inaction against those of action, yet no piece included in the book tackles this calculation itself. The evil of Saddam Hussein and the awfulness of terrorism are taken as self-evident justifications for the Iraq war. To the Yale computer-science professor David Gelernter, criticism of the invasion evokes "the world's indifference to Saddam" which "resembles its indifference to Hitler."

Reading this book, you get the impression that Edward Said and Noam Chomsky are the only people who opposed the war, abetted by venal Democratic politicians eager to sabotage President Bush. Brooks writes that war opponents "are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio." He laments that the "debate is dominated by people who don't know about Iraq and don't care," presumably excluding those on the pro-war side.

No one mentions what the hawks didn't know about Iraq. The selections proceed from Baghdad's fall to last January's elections without seriously confronting the violent insurgency or the failure to locate weapons of mass destruction. (Gelernter dismisses WMD criticisms as "one of the more infantile accusations in modern political history.") Pace Brooks, the articles in this book don't contain much argument or serious debate. Instead we get contributing editor Reuel Marc Gerecht proclaiming that only "the culturally deaf, dumb, and blind" deny the "democratic earthquake" Bush has created in the Middle East.

Throughout the collection, the contributors write as though there is no limit to the good in the world that can be achieved by government, especially when it's run by Republicans. There isn't a single piece advocating limited government (though Republican activist Jeffrey Bell does put in a good word for Reagan's tax cuts), and contributing editor Irwin Stelzer even shows up to defend the estate tax. Irving Kristol argues that accepting the swollen state is part of "The Neoconservative Persuasion." "People have always preferred strong government to weak government," the elder Kristol shrugs, "although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government."

Just as the war articles show little sense of the public's growing doubts, the Standard's arguments about domestic policy seem to be losing their persuasive force to those not already convinced. Its writers may be confusing a post-9/11 moment of opportunity with destiny, the inexorable march of their ideas, one democratic earthquake at a time.

If so, that kind of tone-deaf complacency could do the damage to the conservative new media that 10 years of Republican governance couldn't.