Matthew Franck recently interviewed me about conservatism, Dobbs, Matt Continetti’s new book, and the history of National Review. A certain Florida man comes up, too. An excerpt:
Franck: So my next question is what, if anything, serves as a force for unity today? Is it simply as low and crass as the binary character of our partisanship such that conservatives tend, by nature, to vote Republican? Does that often reduce itself simply to “not the Democrats, by God!”? What is it that holds together conservatism today?
Ponnuru: I think that conservatism is often reactive. I think it was Samuel Huntington who said that it’s a strange beast that hibernates through the summer and awakes in the winter. It comes to the defense of embattled institutions and ways of life and it in a way doesn’t pick its battles, because it finds the site of conflict and then responds. We are now at a moment when American institutions are embattled. There is a lot of criticism and not constructive criticism at the margins, but really destructive, corrosive, foolish, and nihilistic criticism, mostly from the left, sometimes from the right, of our entire political order, of our Constitution and of the basic ideas and dispositions on which it rests. And I think that the bulk of conservatives instinctively respond negatively to those attacks.