Break down the walls

If there's one thing the death throes of the Republican Party is teaching me, it's that clearly there are a lot of conservatives out there that I would actually love to be friends with [emphasis added]:

"Hi gentlemen," [Poulos] began. "Um … in the interest of fun I’m going to taunt the panel first, and then try to justify running the gauntlet by phrasing it as a serious question." Poulos was wearing a charcoal suit and a brightly colored tie, which stood out in the ballroom’s sea of navy blue and khaki but was subdued by his standards, which tend to run toward things like monochromatic three-piece suits and velvet jackets. (He also has sideburns that are shaped like New Hampshire and almost as big; the combination of muttonchops and fine tailoring suggests a character in a Victorian political cartoon, or one of the white guys in Superfly.) [...]

"In the interest of being more than provocative," he said, getting to his serious question, "are we ever going to be able to address the question of cultural necessitarianism without being confident that we’re getting our cultural criticism right?"

Stripped of its woolly academese, what Poulos was asking was, can conservatism properly push back against a popular culture that it doesn’t really understand? How does a movement that yearns for the values of the past confront a culture that prizes novelty? This was a problem that had bedeviled modern American conservatism since Buckley first inveighed against the Beatles in his syndicated column. It was something that Poulos, who had dabbled in screenwriting and indie rock (his band was called the End of History) in Los Angeles before moving to Washington, had kicked around in his own writing.

This individual sounds, as Posh would say, MAJOR.

The piece, by the way, is about the demise of Culture11, one of the more interesting experiments in conservative journalism to have popped up recently. I was initially sad to see it go--well, I still am, somewhat--but Homans makes a good point about the potential value in its demise. Let's end the echo chambers and set everybody writing in the same publications together, with the standard being the quality of their journalism and their thinking rather than the purity of their beliefs.

Essential reading (no, really)

I know I've been linking and doing not much else, but these two pieces are true tours de force. (I've been swamped with work and trying to get back into the rhythm of school after ICCAs, okay, I have obligations and whatnot.)

The first is "An Oral History of the Bush White House" from Vanity Fair. I'm only on page 2 myself, but it's already been amazing hearing people from Richard Clarke to Germany's foreign minister give their uncensored, undiplomatic takes in colloquial language on various moments of the administration. The piece has also illuminated a number of moments or occurrences that I never knew had taken place.

I found the piece through Ta-Nehisi, who gave it a stirring endorsement:

...folks should read the piece just because it really is stunning to see it all laid out before you. Rarely does one see cravenness, arrogance and incompetence married in such expert fashion. I was 25 when Bush came to office, and I never thought it would get this bad. But Purdum and Murphy show how things almost necessarily--from day one--had to go this way.

I read this piece on the plane ride out West, yesterday. I got halfway through and couldn't take it, I had to take a break. Finished it just we were coming over Utah, and I was just stunned. Journalism takes a lot of heat on this blog, perhaps some of it undeserved. So it's only right that I call out something when it's well done. Read this piece. Read it. Read it. Read it.

Second, Radley Balko explains with inimitable and wide-ranging logic why the War on Drugs is both a failure and a costly, harmful, and and misguided effort to begin with in "War on Drugs: The Collateral Damage" over at Culture 11. I particularly found his points about the militarizaton of police to be fascinating, though I suppose that's not surprising given all the studying of political power and state formation/state institutions I do. The piece is a comprehensive indictment of the drug war and its attendant policies and it's very much worth reading for the higher-level perspective that is generally so lacking in discussions of drug policy.

A note on Culture 11--it's a website (webzine?) dealing with culture as well as politics, geared to the American cultural conservative. It's been cited by many conservatives who have been revolted by the contemporary Republican party. I moseyed over there once before and was unimpressed, but this article has caused me to revise my estimation--clearly the piece I read that time was not fully representative of Culture 11's offerings. I'll be interested to see what comes out of the site as part of my continuing effort to understand what the hell this "conservatism" business is actually all about.