Despite a late start brought on by a rather tumultous first month of the year (you try changing jobs and moving in the same month and see how much time it leaves you to read), I still intend to complete the 50 Book Challenge.

The Flanders Panel by Arturo Perez-Reverte is a reasonably satisfying whodunnit, but still a disappointing novel overall. Perez-Reverte specializes in the sort of clever, literary thrillers that I can never resist - the sort that make the reader feel smart for picking up on the buried literary allusions - and considering that this one revolved around chess and art restoration, it should have been highly enjoyable.

Instead, the book was marred by the presence of a number of unpleasant literary off notes. The attempts at postmodern self-referentialism, and considerations of the role of the audience in the creation of a work dressed theselves up as sophisticated discource, but came across as jarringly simplistic and out of place. Meanwhile, the extensive Freudian analysis of the game of chess rolled on interminably without a hint of irony. That the bishop's long, diagonal moves imply homosexuality would have been amusing, if the parody had not been unintentional.

Both of the above faults were exacerbated by the way in which they both appeared in attempts to beef up the intellectual credentials of the main character's love interest. Having made an unpreposessing entrance into the novel, the author spent the rest of the work attempting to demonstrate that no, really, this faded, socially inept genius chess player did constitute a worthy companion to the beautiful, worldly genius art restorer. The author would have done much better to provide information about what the art restorer did find attractive about the chess player, rather than trying to turn him into something he didn't seem to be.

Finally, the surprise denoument started off daring, but resolved itself too neatly. Instead of forcing the characters to confront a real moral dilemma, the author provided an all-to-convenient fatal disease to tie up the loose ends. Fans of the clever literary thriller are better off sticking to The Club Dumas.

With due respect to the pressing issues of the 60's TV dinner-table (this non bow-tie wearing cat loves swine), I must admit that Reihan's case regarding Gelernter's "deep-structure explication of modern conservatism" is convincing up to a point. Reihan nails that this is clearly a prescriptive intellectual history, rather than a practiced inheritance. (And how can I quibble with a man who "was a Jew, except theologically"—one might just as easily say "he was a penguin, except flightless.")

But I must admit to still not understanding what Reihan means by a modern conservative movement (whether desired or present practicing). I know he is not for rampant statism, but can he really conflate the radical policies of Bush fils with the watered-down Whiggism that better describe Bush pere (or in Gelernter's article, Nixon)? His desire to "blow-up" modern conservatism just as Disraeli popped the Tories seems to equate the two, but it strikes me that W. is a completely different animal.

Nor, to be honest, can I see what "national greatness" conservatism amounts to in terms of conservatism, or if this is really the type of conservatism Reihan wishes to usher in. This skepticism as to whether Disraeli-esque liberal nationalism is even a legitimate flavor of conservatism has been taken up before, most notably by Franklin Foer, who expressed his doubt in the august pages of TNR [article here]. Admittedly, this article's construction of conservatism (especially concerning Bush fils) is situated in the simpler world before September 11, 2001, when both the 2000 Republican primaries and reactions to the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore seemed pressing evidence of deep ideological fissures within the GOP.

But who during that ill-fated summer would have predicted a neo-conservative rise to prominence within the Bush administration's foriegn policy? With Kristol and the McCainiac wing almost exiled from the party, discussions of splitting what seemed a tenuous conservative coalition were popular Washington boilerplate (this was also the terrifying period of time that both Chafetz and I shared a bullpen at TNR, which excuses little and explains much about that summer).

But what's more ironic is that the type of conservatism (if it could be called such) which Foer identifies as "national-greatness conservatism" sounds now, in these post September 11 times, a lot like, well, the policies of George W. Bush. Foer asks:

If national-greatness conservatism scorns the Christian right, jettisons the struggle to shrink government, and champions an idealistic foreign policy more likely to be supported by The New York Times than Dick Armey, in what meaningful, contemporary sense is it conservatism at all?

Aside from scorning the Christian right (something Kristol now only does in private), doesn't Bush represent, in a meaningful way, what Kristol (and by extension Gelernter's citation of Disraeli) advocated as "national greatness conservatism?" The Foer article should be read in full, but the way in which its potential revolution parallels Gelernter's analysis of Disraeli, and by extension Reihan's prescription for the Republican party, is striking:

In Brooks's view, the national-greatness conservatives should become a Republican version of the New Democrats--a movement to reform the party from within. But New Democrats took over the party in the early '90s, after it had lost dismally for more than a decade. The GOP, by contrast, controls the presidency, both houses of Congress, and most of the nation's governors' mansions; most Republicans don't see the need to blow it up and start again. That's why Wittmann is considering a more radical route: the creation of an entirely new political party. "The Bull Moose Party and the 1912 election are the only models I have to work with," he says. McCain, of course, would be the latter-day Teddy Roosevelt. And although the Arizona senator has publicly said he won't challenge Bush, his aides insist he has left himself some wiggle room. ("If Bush vetoes campaign finance reform, all bets are off," says one loyal McCainiac.)

But if Wittmann and Co. hope to create a new Bull Moose Party, they might take a look at what the first one produced: a two-term Democratic president. Instead of forcing the Republicans in a progressive direction, the conflict turned reform-minded voters (the precursors to the independents who backed McCain last spring) into Democrats and drove the Republican faithful into the arms of reactionaries like Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. The national-greatness conservatives understand that risk, which may be why they call their strategy "creative destruction." But today, at least, the second half of that slogan seems more likely than the first.

Gelernter wants to position Disraeli as the natural antecedent to modern conservatism. This seems incorrect. But clearly the fractures in conservatism were not as wide as Kristol et al. believed, or Foer reported. In many ways, much of the revolutionary radicalism which threatened to tear the party apart during the 2000 primaries has been adopted by the former target of its greatest fervor. Has Bush become McCain? Certainly not. But how does Reihan see his inheritors of the prescriptivist intellectual history of conservatism performing a more radical shift than that of the second Bush administration and still remaining conservatism?

That is, given a party torn between Christian libertarianism and liberal nationalism, how does Reihan's revolution (metaphors and all, Kristol's revolution tout court) forge a third way? What is being advocated, what being torn down? Both Andrew Sullivan and David Adesnik have been very sharp on the remarkable transformations that President Bush has made in terms of our notion of the conservative (a freedom that his resolute anti-ideological anti-intellectualism allows him), but both have also noted, repeatedly, how Bush has done so at the expense of conservative principles. (Admittedly, Adesnik calls this the transformation of neo-conservatism after the Cold-War into assertive nationalism, but for this to be at the forefront of Republican policy is a remarkable sea change.)

I don't mean to bash Reihan. I just feel that his revolution happened and didn't produce the type of conservatism he anticipated, which as this guy pretty well knew, often happens in revolutions.

But the real deal: competing visions of what conservatism should look like. This is a call for serious papers from serious thinkers, both liberal and conservative. Whence do we draw a prescriptive intellectual history for conservatism? What are the practical implications of that ideology in terms of modern American politics? Does Bush represent a real transformation in conservative thought, or can his mixed bag of policies and beliefs be thought of as stemming out of the conservative tradition? Email me and if there are enough responses, maybe we'll have a colloquium of sorts in New York (at least there will be one on the web). Submission deadline: March 3, 2004. Happy hunting.

Yale Law Professor Ian Ayres is happy that YLS has won its First Amendment case in district court, so YLS now has a constitutional right not to have certain government funding conditioned on the presence of military recruiters on campus. Ayres and many faculty are happy about this; I am more skeptical.

The military's discrimination against homosexuals is bigoted and wrong, and people like the faculty members at Yale should (and do) speak out against it. But I am increasingly beginning to believe that collective institutional action in support of this position (which is what the faculty went to court to protect), rather than individual action, is somewhat incompatible with the principles of academic freedom, as Harry Kalven once warned.

Ordinarily I wouldn't beat this drum again right now, since the district court will probably not be the last to speak on this matter, but the second part of Professor Ayres's post chilled me:

1) YLS might want to consider applying the non-discrimination policy to judges. The opinion got me thinking about this when it said in a footnote “approximately 50% of Yale law school students obtain employment as judicial law clerks, a recruiting process that does not use the CDO program or any form of on-campus recruiting.” So it turns out that a much more important government employer of YLS graduates (i.e. judges) are never asked to sign the non-discrimination pledge. Should the law school faculty refuse to help the faculty send recommendations to employers who refuse to take the pledge? [This is not just a matter of symbolism. I sadly remember receiving a call from a judge who was concerned that a male clerkship applicant was wearing an ear-ring. I’m almost certain that the concern was that the man might be gay.]