My column yesterday has generated a really interesting array of commenter, e-mail, and twitter responses. Many on the left simply think I have no standing to speak about feminism. There’s an interesting mix of identity politics and guild mentality in their arguments. Since I am a bad person who doesn’t agree with the professional feminist agenda, I can’t say anything about feminism with any credibility. Tellingly, nobody making such claims has offered anything like facts or counterarguments. They just say it is so.
Meanwhile, some readers on the right claim that little to nothing good has ever come from feminism. I am more than open to the idea that many bad things have come from feminism. I know it in my bones. I am on the same page as Kathryn, Kate O’Beirne, et al. on most of these issues. But it strikes me as lunacy to talk of feminism in the broadest sweep of things as monolithically negative if by feminism you mean the generic movement for female equality. Yes, the guild of professional feminists has done many bad things and at times have seemed at war with everything that is lovely and lovable about the fairer sex. But if we are to take the position that “feminist” is simply and in every regard an anathematizing word, then how on earth can we celebrate women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, or for that matter Margaret Thatcher?
Again, I am perfectly open to arguments and criticisms that I should have split hairs more or defined terms better or come up with some alternative term to “feminism.” And the question of when feminism hit the point of diminishing returns — post women’s suffrage? the 1960s? – is an interesting and legitimate topic for heated debate.
But take a look at this reader’s e-mail, which is an extreme, almost parodic, example of what I’m talking about:
Mr. Goldberg,
I will give you credit—you’ve got a lot of nerve praising anything at all about feminism. Feminism is, and was, a movement of the Left. Of course, you’re probably one of those newfangled right-wingers who doesn’t mind if your daughter benefits from the work of feminists. My point is that there is no principled basis for a conservative to support feminism, any more than there is such a basis for conservative support for the civil rights movement.
Feminists in the Middle East are, after all, resisting and attacking what is at bottom the conservative position of Islam on women. Once more, the ideological location for feminism is on the Left. Have you considered either switching ideological teams—or becoming a Muslim?
I think this is soup-to-nuts absurd. But it does raise a point I think many right-wingers and left-wingers alike need to acknowledge more often than they do. America is ideologically and politically syncretic. What is fundamentally American is a mix of ideas that are both on the “right” and “left” in other countries. A French conservative might hold positions shared by an American leftist, and a French liberal certainly holds positions shared by American conservatives. To say that conservatism must, of necessity, reject anything, anywhere, solely because at a specific point in time it can be dubbed “leftist” is absolutely ridiculous. So many ideas born on the left have come to be embraced on the right and for good reason. We on the right now champion governmental colorblindness, for example.
Conservatism isn’t about teams and hoarding ideological chips. It is about figuring out what is right and wrong, discriminating between the enduring and the transitory. This means, as Lincoln said, that conservatism will tend toward adhering to the old and tried over the new and untried. But eventually the new and untried become the old and tried, and there’s no reason for conservatism to reject ideas proven by time simply because of their embarrassing leftist parentage.
As I’ve been writing here for years (with all credit due to Friedrich Hayek and Sam Huntington), American conservatives are the only self-described conservatives in the world who defend a classically liberal revolution. That means something very special, indeed it is a great wellspring of American exceptionalism. A conservative in America doesn’t conserve theocracy or monarchy. He conserves the institutions of liberty. Perhaps not solely, for there are other things worth conserving as well. But a conservatism that does not conserve those institutions is not worth conserving. And in that fight, foreign and domestic, the Right should look for allies wherever it can.
My general opinion with regard to the left - and in this case, feminism - is that they are rather good at the initial act of shining the light on injustice and then they go off the rails.
They take it as a matter of faith that their virtue is tracked on a continuum of things which have become consensus, - say, the 40 hour work week, civil rights or the women's movement - and it emboldens them to press forward on all manner of idiocies in these areas in order to maintain ownership of their initial virtues. It is important to them emotionally to perceive others as ant-female, racist or rapacious (in the case of business) so expecting anything approaching rationality when confronted by them is almost too much to ask for.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"But if we are to take the position that feminist is simply and in every regard an anathematizing word, then how on earth can we celebrate women like Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann or for that matter Margaret Thatcher?"
Simple. Thus far, only Margaret Thatcher in that list deserves celebration, and she simply because she was a great leader and visionary. None deserve celebration simply because of gender.
I don't celebrate women in positions of authority any more than I celebrate men or blacks in those same positions. That's nonsense.
And furthermore, just to continue this discussion of feminism and Sarah Palin, her support for title IX disappoints me and shows an ideological weakness. Her worldview isn't consistent. She played sports because of title IX, or so she claims, but on the other hand wants to allow the free market to determine outcomes.
What's good for everyone else apparently isn't good for her.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI forgot to add that when any American conservative fails to concede to the left the big picture matters where they have been correct, it makes for rather silly comments like the ones you've been subjected to.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYes. For example, slavery was not worth conserving. Hence the birth of the Republican party.
The feminist movement has left us with blessings and curses. Equal pay for equal work is a blessing; disparaging motherhood is a curse.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBravo! Spot on response, and great column too.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseBravo! Spot on response, and great column too.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf I recall correctly, according to Jon Chait, liberals are better than conservatives because conservatives are unable to incorporate good ideas from the other side, while liberals have done it once, for a while. (Welfare reform).
Therefore, Goldberg, if you claim to support giving women the vote, or independence from Britain, or any idea once opposed by conservatives, you are clearly up to something.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJonah, you take a wrong turn when you conflate "feminism" with the idea that women should participate fully in the liberty classical liberalism was designed to protect.
Feminism (like Communism and fascism) is a utopian project with its roots on the left. It has it's demons (men) and its heros (or heroines) just like every other ism of the left. It reflects Rousseau's poisonous theory that utopia will bloom if we just tear down the corrupt social structures that suppress it. The animating idea of feminism is that a feminized society will be a good society. This is strikingly similar to the Communist idea that a classless society will be a good society and the Nazi idea that an Aryan society will be a good society. There is nothing praiseworthy about feminism; it's toxic.
But the idea that women should participate in liberty just like men is altogether good and altogether conservative (in the American sense). Our concept of ordered liberty wasn't perfected in 1789. The internal logic of our system has required some social changes that would have surprised the founders, but those changes are entirely conservative. They are legitimate expressions of the classical liberalism with which we began.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAbsolutely correct,Jonah. In America, classical liberalism IS the tradition, so conservatives work to conserve classical liberal ideals.
With regard to "feminism," I think the term now means too many things to be useful. Some feminists seem to believe that men and women are exactly the same and there is nothing a man can do that a woman can't (including combat or the NFL). Others think that women are so different from men that any common understanding between the se*es is impossible and that men with always be oppressors.
Conservatives came around to support basic civil rights (such as voting and property ownership)for women because those rights are implicit in classical liberalism.
Unfortunately, classical liberalism is quite foreign to contemporary Islam.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseToo many people engage in sloppy thinking, substituting talking points for thought. I like to call it Tarzan politics - "Liberal good, conservative bad." You don't have to use your brain when you are locked into a position someone else formulated for you. It doesn't matter if a person is liberal or conservative, if they don't use their brain their thinking eventually ossifies.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMr. Goldberg, let's be perfectly honest, shall we? When the feminist movement started, it was sold to American women as a way to bring about equality; equal pay, equal opportunity to education, equal advancement in the work place. We were told we could have it all; marriage, career, children. Nothing wrong with that, right?
But it quickly morphed into a politcal cause such as free love and the right to abort an unwanted child (brought about in many cases by all that "free" love). Motherhood was quickly replaced with se*ual power. So many of us who were on the forefront of the movement, threw away our "A Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle" t-shirts understanding that our goals had been co-oped. Actions that once would have gotten us labeled "tramps" now made us "the modern woman" and those of us who chose motherhood were made to feel inferior by the very groups that recruited us.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"American conservatives are the only self-described conservatives in the world who defend a classically liberal revolution."
Here, here. This lame criticism of American conservatism is myopic and ignorant of history, yet some on the Left continue to insist it is a sort of argumental trump card that, once played, immediately wins the argument.
American conservatives wish to conserve very different things than French, Chinese or Pakistani conservatives wish to conserve. Period. End of story.
Gee, how hard is that to understand?
All one has to do is look far back enough into history and *everything* about the American project is radically Left, if one defines the Left as a movement to upset the existing order of things.
One can see the legacy of this radicalism continuing today, even within American conservatism. The unending tension on the Right between the isolationst "secure freedom here at home to inspire freedom abroad" and the interventionist "expand freedom abroad to secure freedom at home" strains of conservatism is a debate that *takes place entirely on the American Right*. Alas, the modern Left routinely misses that debate-- or worse, believes that it somehow means American conservatism is incoherent or contradictory.
Of course, all of this passes over the unavoidable fact that the modern Left is, unlike American conservatism, a truly *transnational* political ideology. Meaning, American conservatives may have little to nothing in common with French conservatives, but you can dang well *guarantee* that American leftists have MUCH in common with French leftists.
Yet, it's the Left that insists that somehow all conservatives everywhere are identical, in every historical time period (the Right always wants to return to Jim Crow and barefoot & pregnant wives in the kitchen; all religious conservatives are identical regardless of which religion they seek to conserve, etc.)- and insists they are all identically *evil*.
I believe this is what we call "projection."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI think the e-mail correspondent stretches ideological purity to the breaking point with the suggestion that there is no "basis for conservative support for the civil rights movement."
As if conservatism, as an ideology, EVER mandated that society conserve laws and practices that were inimical to our nation's founding principles.
So many people get so deeply entrenched in how good and right and moral causes have been perverted by progressives to further the left's political agenda - such as the movements for parity in the eyes of the law and in opportunity for both women and ethnic minorities - that they militate in favor of conservatives disowning all that was and still is good and right in those causes.
If one views modern-day American conservatism through the lens of what it REALLY IS (before progressives effected a perversion of language by misappropriating the "liberal" label) - classical liberalism - then one automatically is faced with the practical reality that certain movements that arose on the left of our political spectrum actually embody the very essence of classical liberalism that, by and large, American conservatism endeavors to uphold.
The "Daughters of the American Revolution", the "Susan B. Anthony" Project, and many other groups, are comprised of conservative - read, classically liberal - women who are, in many respects (of which a full colloquy is a topic unto itself), actually significantly more "feminist" than their leftist counterparts. It was the more conservative major political party - the GOP - that broke the camel back of the Confederate Democrats' blood curdling efforts to preserve Jim Crow in alabaster. And it is conservatives today who champion vouchers for inner-city school children to be freed from the clutches of an adversarial monopoly that thwarts their progress.
If it bothers some that many of the causes conservatism seeks to advance today have commonality or derivation from movements that originally were advanced on the left, they may take solace in how such conservative advancement belies the very notion of left-wing "liberalism" and underscores how, in so many ways, it is today modern American conservatism that is the ideological home of equality of opportunity and blind, impartial justice.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDarn, left out a crucial sentence:
"The unending tension on the Right between the isolationst "secure freedom here at home to inspire freedom abroad" and the interventionist "expand freedom abroad to secure freedom at home" strains of conservatism is a debate that *takes place entirely on the American Right*.
But the American Right begins from the radical starting point that American freedom is what must be conserved-- we've already established what we are arguing for, now we're only negotiating *how* to WIN that argument."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHere's an interesting thought experiment: re-read Dave's 10:26 post, and then reflect on Teddy Kennedy's ruminations on "Robert Bork's America."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseJonah - that last paragraph was a brilliant observation. I've never heard anyone make that point before.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"American conservatives are the only self-described conservatives in the world who defend a classically liberal revolution. That means something very special, indeed it is a great wellspring of American exceptionalism. A conservative in America doesn’t conserve theocracy or monarchy. He conserves the institutions of liberty. "
This can't be repeated enough.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm not always happy with what's argued here, even by the editors, but it's conversations like this one -- beginning with Jonah's blog post, and continuing with excellent points from AbeFroman, JPMulhern, Dave, and madisonian -- that makes me glad for NRO and its new comments functionality.
I agree with madisonian that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bathwater simply because the Left has coopted the baby for its causes. THEY'RE SUBVERSIVE STEALTH RADICALS, THAT'S WHAT THEY DO.
Conservation, personal health, aid to the less fortunate: all of these things are good, all have been coopted, and we shouldn't cede that ground. We should challenge the Left's pretense of a moral monopoly.
--
As a digression related to American conservatism, awkwardly named because what we conserve is classically liberal, I note that Christianity is in that same boat.
That's not to suggest that Christianity mandates classical liberalism, though I note that the two are largely compatible.
(There are serious exceptions: on the issue of the right to revolt, I don't see how one can reconcile the Declaration of Independence with Romans 13.)
But Christianity is radical to a literally infinite degree, in that the problems it claims to solve -- including the sin and alienation that Marxism pretends to address -- aren't solved by human plans or efforts. They're solved by literally divine intervention, by the actions of God Himself: His Incarnation, His sacrificial and atoning death on the cross, His Ressurection, His sending of His sanctifying Holy Spirit, and His promised return.
Nothing's more radical than that.
And yet, at the same time, Christ showed Himself to be extremely conservative in terms of authority, appealing to God's written revelation over and against even merely human tradition (Mark 7:9). Christ's common refrain was that "It is written," which might be better understood as "It stands written."
Nothing could be more conservative than that.
Christ and His Apostles were staunchly conservative in defending the authority of a written revelation, the content of which is extraordinarily radical.
We seek to conserve institutions that are liberalizing in their effects.
It's an interesting parallel.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"But if we are to take the position that 'feminist' is simply and in every regard an anathematizing word,..."
It *is*, Jonah. It's a ridiculous concept -- in fact it's *not* a concept. (You can understand this if you understand, with technical epistemic precision, what a concept is.)
"...then how on earth can we celebrate women like Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, or for that matter Margaret Thatcher?"
We *don't*. Get this through your head and stop stipulating to a nonsense premise.
We admire them as *people*. Do you understand?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseNothing good has ever come from feminism.
Those of us who believe that feminism is 100% pernicious can also believe in syncretism.
Those of us who believe in syncretism can also believe the balance is so skewed toward one side that a massive correction must be effected, and therefore compromising with the opposition amounts to the institutionalizing of a permanent imbalance.
Crying "syncretism" confirms the underlying feminist assumptions that we desire to be extirpated root and branch. Squishy mediocrity, or splitting the baby in half, is no substitute for finding the golden mean. Fellow-feeling with one's opposition is a rhetorical strategy ("Of course we believe some good has come from feminism, but...."). This preemptive capitulation to their foundational assumptions is not just timid, it also sends us astray from our search for the truth. Virtue is not found in the compromise between a truth and a lie, but rather in discovering the straight and narrow way between exaggerations of truth.
Goldberg's critics are not arguing about how much of the loaf they deserve. We don't dispute that three slices are better than two. We are saying that the entire loaf is moldy. This is not an illegitimate position to advocate.
Terms like "absurd" and "absolutely ridiculous" are flailing internet hyperbole that have nothing to do with the principled criticism leveled at Goldberg.
Nothing good has come from feminism, yes. But before we can defend this truth, Goldberg has to be aware of the legitimacy of those who speak it, rather than dismissing us out of hand. He doesn't allow us to make our case, convinced as he is that the truth necessarily must appear pleasantly syncretic so as to be digestible to his delicate stomach.
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