Joe Klein reads Whiskey Fire! Klein:
Emery's attempt to smear me falls quite neatly into the wingnut canon: neoconservatives style themselves as intellectuals, but they shy away from proper conversations about facts and ideas. Though some are erudite, and some even polite, their public face in magazines like the Standard and Commentary--with a few notable exceptions--is quite different: they are, at base, ideologues not intellectuals, propagandists not journalists, thugs not thinkers.
I am, of course, pithier:
If "movement conservatism" has failed, as I sincerely hope it has, I'd argue that this is because too many of its proponents believed their own press and became persuaded that "movement conservatism" was ever an intellectual movement at all, as opposed to an essentially nihilist politics of vicious opportunism, where the entire goal is power for its own sake.
But it's the same idea. Klein has shifted to the Left because we have persuaded him through Reasoned Debate (as when I called him a "sorry-assed shallow little shit" for his Jim Webb & John McCain manly-man-crushing a few years ago). Also, "conservatives" called him an "anti-Semite," which probably also has something to do with it.
It would be nice if Klein would push past his insight that there is nothing "intellectual" about movement conservatism and recognize that one of the main reasons wingnuts have been so successfully able to game elections is by pushing ridiculous -- but effective -- notions of masculinity, grafting them onto class, and thereby suckering even clever fellows like Klein into sneering at, say, John Kerry for being "effete" even if he was "right."
Klein has pretty clearly turned on McCain, but I haven't really seen him admit yet that the primary reason he used to be so in love with McCain is his fetish for associating "manliness" with "authenticity" and "honesty." For instance, Klein a while ago:
Kerry, whom I've known for many years, was always a different, more awkward guy in public than he was with his Vietnam pals--and, according to one of his closest Vietnam pals, he'd even stopped being loose with them in private in recent years: "We lost him when he married Teresa." It showed. It showed when he got pissed off at the secret service guy for getting in his way when he was snow-boarding in Sun Valley. It showed when his consultants ran focus groups to figure out how to respond to Abu Ghraib--something Jim Webb (or John McCain) would never do.
The GOP manufactures masculinity: it's what they do. "Have a beer with our candidate! The Democrat candidate likes Chablis! Ha ha!" It's not-so-subtle code for "fag." And it works -- in no small part because the punditry seems to buy into that crap in a major way. Whether Klein is going to progress further than he has, I don't know, but the answer to that will depend in no small part if he can get past the silly "Real Man Drink Beer Vote Him!" fetish he's indulged in the past.
MORE. This isn't Klein, but the pathology I'm discussing is on lurid display right here.
