Daniel McCarthy

Nicholas Wade on the Trade-Offs of Editing

The New York Times‘s superb veteran science journalist Nicholas Wade has accepted a buyout. Reflecting on his many roles at the paper, he records one of downsides to being an editor:

An editor’s life is interesting, because you get to see what goes on in the rest of the paper, but it is also tiring. For lack of reporting and engagement with life outside the paper, one’s intellectual capital is not replenished and rapidly trends toward zero. After the ritual seven years I returned to writing.

Of course, there are editors and then there are editors, and luckily for me the magazine world is quite different from that of a newspaper, let alone the NYT. But I know the feeling Wade describes. It takes effort to buy back intellectual capital after a week of putting ideas in other writers’ hands (and heads) and rewriting other people’s prose. By the end of a day, the last thing one wants to do is read any more nonfiction. Instead I’ve lately turned to Gore Vidal’s Julian and Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies and Sword of Honor trilogy. My trip to the bookstore last night netted two volumes of Wodehouse and a recent novel by Ian McEwen — though it also took in books by James Kilpatrick, William Safire, and Tony Judt, so I’m not altogether getting away from the realm of fact.

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Balls of the Moth

Ye olde Tory Anarchist began as a non-TAC project — an online scrapbook for ideas not quite worth developing into essays and a butterfly collection of links and quotes that I wanted to keep in memory. I brought it over to TAC two or three years ago primarily to keep our other blogs company, something that’s less important now that Dreher and Larison are our anchors. (In an earlier era, as readers may recall, we tried out in season several different personalities and styles of blog.) So for the time being Tory Anarchist is going into mothballs: archives will remain up, but my occasional blogging will appear on @TAC rather than here.

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Getting Society’s Drift

[A]ll the enduring institutions which human societies have attained have been reached, not of a set design and forethought of some group of statesmen, but of that unbidden and uncoerced consequence of many thoughts and wills in succeeding generations, to which, as it obeys no single guiding hand, one may give the name of ‘drifting.’

The sentiments could be those of an Old Whig such as Burke. In fact, the words belong to the quintessential 19th-century Tory, Lord Salisbury, as quoted in David Steele’s biography.

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Become The American Conservative’s Web Editor

TAC is hiring, and while we already have an impressive constellation of candidates, from highly skilled young graduates to several big names within the world of traditional conservatism, we’re eager to give as wide an array of contenders as possible a chance to join us. This is a pivotal time for conservatives: as the painful lessons of the Bush years go unlearnt, there’s a burning need for a voice of principle and realism — both together, not one or the other. If that sounds like you, and you have the skills enumerated below, get in touch.

Do you want to join a Washington journalism team that’s advancing a smart, independent voice on the Right?

The American Conservative is looking for an online editor. The magazine is already expanding its website, which will re-launch this winter as the nation’s premier online hub of traditional conservatism. If you are the right editor for this job, here’s what you’ll be doing: Managing and growing The American Conservative’s web presence, overseeing online content (assigning, editing, and writing articles and blog posts), planning/producing the homepage on a daily basis (aggregation, multimedia creation, comments curation, and overseeing staff bloggers), developing and executing the web strategy (including social media, search, referral traffic, and e-newsletters), and monitoring analytics.

The ideal candidate will have some experience in online journalism and a passion for engaging with a dynamic community of serious readers, plus:

* Eagerness to work tirelessly in a small but ambitious team (the position will report to magazine’s editor)
* Superb writing and editing ability
* Strong communication and organizational skills
* Love of considered, lengthy journalism as well as an appreciation of horse-race politics
* Excellent news/opinion judgment
* A background in intellectual conservatism and keen understanding of The American Conservative’s unique sensibility.

This position is based in our Arlington, Virginia office. To apply, please email your resume, cover letter, and writing sample to: apply@amconmag.com.

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Publishing Without Borders

Here’s a riveting interview with Richard Nash, formerly of Soft Skull Press, by Matt Runkle in the Boston Review. While I don’t sign off on everything Nash says about the future of publishing, he’s clearly onto something in the remarks below. I believe there’s some tradeoff between physical sales and giving material away on the ‘net, but the relationship between the two is more complicated than one merely cannibalizing the other, and it’s quite apparent that for certain kinds of writing — especially longer kinds of writing — the demand is not just for the text itself but for a comfortable way to read it.

MR: Will the failure of Borders change the way the book business thinks of books?

RN: What does a person do when they want something to read? One of the big mistakes that often gets made in publishing is we focus a lot on price. We focus on how much a book costs and we decide whether it’s worth it or not. Now we’ve got a lot more books that are absolutely impoverished. The reality is that people’s decision-making process has a lot more to do with time than with money. It’s 15 hours in the inside of your head. Books are so cheap compared to the hours of entertainment they provide. The problem is, do they provide entertainment? Is it in fact a book you want to read? If after four hours you hate it, what most people say is “I can’t believe I spent fifteen dollars on this.” But what they really mean is “I can’t believe I just wasted four hours of my life on this.”

MR: Red Lemonade allows people to view free of charge complete manuscripts of books you have for sale. You’ve mentioned that having access to the full text online will help readers make up their minds and commit to buying a hard copy. This view differs from a general reluctance of publishers to post complete works online.

RN: Exactly. With the vast majority of books, the problem that most people have is they don’t know whether it’s going to be worth their time to read it. There are a tiny handful of books, in the case of each person, where they can be sure they want to read them. The reality is that I don’t think, in fact, there are a huge number of people reading our books for free online that have made a decision about whether to buy it. I mean there is probably a small number that are doing it for that reason and that number may increase, but I believe the number is smaller than has occurred to people because publishers refuse to do it. But what we’ve very clearly demonstrated by putting it for free online is that reading the book online has absolutely no negative impact on sales. Why in fact would it?

In many respects we’ve got a real Stockholm Syndrome around the model of publishing as it’s existed up until now. We just take for granted that it is the way it is because that’s a good way for things to be. And when something diverges from it we look for proof as to why it should diverge. But I’m interested in trying to reframe questions. Why do we think that a person won’t buy a print book because in theory they could read it for free online? What is it that people are buying? What is it that people want? In many respects what people want is to read it on their own terms, so in many cases, people don’t want to have to read it on a screen. Then the other thing is that people want to feel like they are spending money. It is their way of feeling good about themselves. It is their way of voting for something with their dollars.

The full interview is well worth your time.

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9/11: Goading Us Into War

Ten years ago I was a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and had only begun to write semi-professionally. On the Tuesday of the 9/11 attacks, I had woken up early to study for a quiz that morning and saw on the Drudge Report that some nitwit had flown his light plane into the World Trade Center. Of course, it wasn’t a light plane. And soon there was another, and two more in Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

The piece below was jotted down two days after the atrocity in response to the war fever that broke out at once. My suspicions of Saudi connivance were mistaken, as was my doubt that the Taliban’s involvement was as simple as it seemed. But for the most part, my warnings about bin Laden’s purpose hold up. Bush did exactly what the mastermind wanted him to do, not only by invading Afghanistan but by globalizing the conflict with the invasion of Iraq, an act that for a time gave al-Qaeda the international theater it desired.

Al-Qaeda then overreached as badly as the Bush administration had, however, and as the organization’s violence against other Muslims escalated — something for which the leader of the affiliate in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was upbraided by Ayman al-Zawahiri — the prospect of setting off an anti-Western chain reaction across the Islamic world vanished. As a brilliant new book by Jason Burke,The 9/11 Wars, shows, local factors in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere trumped the region-remaking agendas of the neoconservatives and al-Qaeda alike. The Arab Spring, triggered by neither bin Laden nor Washington, is an ironic bookend to the wars of 9/11.

Goading Us Into War

The terrorist’s most effective weapons are not bombs and guns or even the knives and airplanes that were used in Tuesday’s attack. The terrorist’s real arsenal is fear, confusion, anger, and paranoia. Effective terrorists know psychology and sociology — human nature — even better than they know ordnance. Tuesday’s atrocities have been called an act of war and compared to Pearl Harbor. It is a comparison which the perpetrators of the attack must have anticipated.

Anyone tactically brilliant enough to hijack four planes simultaneously and turn them into living bombs is going to be equally brilliant strategically and will understand what the reaction to his actions will be. The strikes against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not intended to get America out of the Middle East, they were intended to get America into war.

Whenever Americans have been attacked abroad a familiar pattern has emerged. The American people will not accept casualties. Vietnam demonstrated this, as did Somalia, as did NATO’s operations in Serbia which were designed to avoid American casualties at all costs. When Americans are killed abroad, Americans at home respond by demanding to “bring our boys back home” and by questioning the propriety of our activities abroad.

The American character has always been deeply skeptical of foreign entanglements. Just consider George Washington’s famous farewell address. So great is this popular “isolationism” that there’s only one reliable way to defeat it — attack America at home. Pearl Harbor is the proof. America would not have entered World War II without being attacked first. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelet, who greatly wanted to enter the war, had had to promise during his 1940 campaign that America would not get in, unless attacked at home.

Is it reasonable to think that Osama bin Laden or anyone else would kill thousands of Americans on American soil without considering the consequences? Terrorists look at a big picture. They have to understand how their actions, which serve no immediate military purpose, can affect their enemy. The terrorists behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Tuesday knew what the reaction would be. They were too smart not to.

The Islamic world is sharply divided along several lines, between “moderates” and “extremists” as well as Sunnis and Shi’ites. On top of that the usual internal power plays go on behind the scenes of Islamic countries as much as anywhere else. There’s good reason to think that lust for power is at work here at least as much as ideology. There is, for example, a faction of the Saudi royal family which is more hard-line than King Fahd and would like to replace him. Whether this faction is really ideologically anti-American or simply sees anti-Americanism as a tool to use against Fahd is irrelevant. It’s worth remembering that Osama bin Laden, for all the talk about his ties to the Taliban, has ties to his native Saudi Arabia too.

The Taliban have good reason not to provoke the U.S. They are still fighting a civil war for control of Afghanistan. They stand to lose everything if the U.S. and our “friends” the Russians get involved. But it’s easier to shoot a more cruise missiles at Kabul than to risk antagonizing “friends” like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

If Osama bin Laden is behind this — and really it must go far beyond one man, however wealthy he may be — then what he expects to accomplish is clear. He wants to polarize the Islamic world, and indeed the whole world. Whoever is behind this wants America to react by going to war, which will put pressure on hard-line factions throughout the Middle East and Central Asia to side with the anti-Americans, even if they would prefer to remain neutral.

War will exert pressure on regimes like Kin[g] Fahd’s to distance themselves from America, in trade as much as militarily, and to become more amenable to hard-line factions within their borders or else face internal revolt. By polarizing the Islamic [community] what the Osama bin Ladens of the world really achieve is to enhance their factional power. In order [for that] to work, however, America must act precipitously against the Islamic world in general, and one or two scapegoats in particular. The bigger America’s reaction the better chance bin Laden has of succeeding, and of course to provoke a really big reaction he had to commit an extraordinarily great atrocity. He has done his part and now he expects us to do ours.

We must not let the terrorists outsmart us. We must not react the way they want us to. Let’s think before we react. How would bringing back the draft, as Stanley Kurtz has opportunistically urged, prevent this? How will beefing up airport security stop terrorists armed only with razors and the bluff of having a bomb? How will “troops on the ground,” presumably in Afghanistan, solve anything — did it work for the Soviets in 1979?

A committed terrorist will always be able to kill innocent people, to fulfill his tactical objective. But terrorism will fail in its strategic objective if we do not react as expected. If we do not do what the terrorists want they will have failed in their mission and will have that much less reason to expect terrorism to work in the future.

The terrorists behind Tuesday’s attack want war. By all means we should punish those directly involved, but we must not give them the war they want. These terrorists have attempted to discredit the peace party in the Islamic world, to polarize that civilization for the advantage of the war party. The peace party in America must stand firm in the face of both the terror and of accusations of disloyalty from our own countrymen. That is what will foil the ambitions of the terrorists whose real goal is war and the power that war always brings to the wicked.

This essay originally appeared here on 9/14/2001.

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What’s Worse Than Leviathan

The always stimulating David Gordon writes in a recent issue of Young American Revolution:

Hobbes is certainly right that disorder is undesirable; but the dangers of an unchecked sovereign far exceed the discomforts of the state of nature. Hitler, Stalin, Mao–the historical record teaches an unmistakable lesson. Hobbes had constantly in mind the need to avoid the passions of civil war; but the English Civil War, after all, was not an example of his state of nature. Rather, two competing sides struggled to obtain sovereignty. It is the existence of a powerful state, not its absence, that leads to war and massacre.

There’s plenty of truth here, but the 20th-century totalitarians may not provide quite the case against Leviathan that they appear to do. Hobbes might well observe that the conditions that gave rise to Hitler, Stalin, and Mao were those of weak sovereignty and outright civil war. (In the case of Weimar Germany and Kerensky’s Russia, violence by brownshirts and Bolsheviks had the character of a low-intensity civil war.) A sovereign following the authoritarian playbook would have crushed the radicals, but the German and Russian states were too feeble to break the factions. That’s not the same thing as the state of nature, but it’s something Hobbes would have understood quite well. In these instances, as in the English Civil War, you can’t really say there was already a powerful state over which the opposing sides were warring because a powerful state would not have been subordinated to factional disputes in the first place. Leviathan doesn’t tolerate competition.

Once a Hitler or a Lenin or Stalin had gained power, however, wasn’t the result the kind of strong state that Hobbes always wanted? Not exactly — what Hitler, Lenin/Stalin, and Mao created were leviathans of a kind unimagined by the philosopher from Malmesbury. They created party states, which combined the very worst elements of leviathan and civil war. That is, they had all the power of leviathan, but retained the mentality of factions. How strange this was is suggested by a story told about Italian far-right philosopher Julius Evola. At one point, il Duce or one of his underlings asked Evola why he hadn’t joined the Fascist Party proper. Evola replied that the continued existence of the party proved the failure of fascism. After all, if the state had become all and absorbed all lesser allegiances, how could there be such a thing as a “party,” which, as the word indicates, represents a partial or special interest?

We Americans are often taught in school that parties are a natural and benign feature of popular government. They represent disagreements, even very intense ones, but avert civil war. Trouble is, as Donald Livingston reminds us in his essays on David Hume, not all kinds of parties are so benign. Parties of “interest” merely try to exploit their countrymen; these, say Hume, are “the most reasonable, and the most excusable.” Parties of “affection” — “founded on the different attachments of men towards particular families and persons” — might seem nearly extinct in the 20th and 21st centuries, though demagogic Caesarism and nationalism share some traits with this older sort of faction. (“We are apt to think the relation between us and our sovereign very close and intimate,” Hume observes, “And when a man’s good-nature does not give him this imaginary interest, his ill-nature will, from spite and opposition to persons whose sentiments are different from his own.”)

Parties of “principle” are something else again: they insist upon bringing an intransigent world into conformity with abstract principles through the use of state power. Hume cites religious conflicts as examples of clashes between parties of principle:

Two men travelling on the highway, the one east, the other west, can easily pass each other, if the way be broad enough: But two men, reasoning upon opposite principles of religion, cannot so easily pass, without shocking; though one should think, that the way were also, in that case, sufficiently broad, and that each might proceed, without interruption, in his own course. But such is the nature of the human mind, that it always lays hold on every mind that approaches it; and as it is wonderfully fortified by an unanimity of sentiments, so is it shocked and disturbed by any contrariety. Hence the eagerness, which most people discover° in a dispute; and hence their impatience of opposition, even in the most speculative and indifferent opinions.

As Livingston argues, however, within Hume’s own lifetime parties of principle were becoming more philosophical than religious. Conflicts between ideological parties in the modern world are bitter: the absolutism of supposedly rational principle does not permit accommodation. People who reject the party’s principle are at best in need of re-education — particularly of the Maoist sort — and at worst, if their very existence is contrary to the principles of the party, they must be removed from the body politic or killed outright. Kulaks were contrary to the principles of Soviet Communism; Jews to the principles of Aryan Nazism.

For Hobbes, the benefit of leviathan is that the monster puts an end to factional struggle. Small-scale insurrections might still occur, certainly riots and crime would not go away, but organized, institutionalized groups competing with one another to seize the state are forbidden in Hobbes’s design. That means even religion must come entirely under the control of the state in all its public aspects. The party state, however, doesn’t draw the line where Hobbes does — it continues to behave as a faction even after it has attained supreme power. And indeed, the structure of the party state reflects this: to hold high rank in the Nazi or Communist Party in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia was at least as good as, and often better than, holding high rank within the offices of the state. The party is a government over the government — a faction over the state.

Is it the case in such circumstances that the state itself is the primary problem, or is the state merely the instrument, even the victim, of a greater evil? In practical terms it makes no difference, but there’s a philosophical distinction to be explored. Hobbes might not accept that Communist Russia or Nazi Germany were wholly realized states at all — it might be argued that they were weak states overawed by parties or indeed no true states at all but only armed factions vastly more powerful than their opponents. (It’s interesting to note that the USSR ultimately collapsed when a traditional branch of the state, the army, defied a Communist Party junta.)

None of this should soften one’s view of state power and brutality. But there are times when a strong traditional state is preferable to the ravages of ideological factions — this is what William Lind was getting at when he wrote a while back that we have a great interest in seeing the state survive in the Middle East. (He may or may not be right about that, but this is his reasoning.) And ideological faction is itself a potentially deadly danger. James Madison, of course, argued that “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires” and “it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.” Drawing on Hume’s “Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,” Madison thought he found a solution to the problem of checking faction without circumscribing liberty in the notion of large republic led by a representative political elite. He was horrified to see, however, that factionalism emerged anyway in the young not-so-United States.

Luckily for us, factions of interest — and typically, factions of not very different interests — have tended to overshadow factions of principle over the past 200-odd years of U.S. history. But that might not always be the case.

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Who Would William F. Buckley Vote For?

Todd Seavey has a surprising, if not altogether implausible, idea: “If Buckley had outlived the 2008 presidential campaign, I could imagine he might even have become an ardent Ron Paul fan in time, which would have helped speed the right’s education along immensely. He was anti-Iraq War, after all.” Well, John Derbyshire in 2007 also argued that the gulf between National Review‘s founder and the Texas congressman was not as great as might be thought, a sentiment Andrew Sullivan echoed.

I don’t agree, for reasons that the “Firing Line” episode below ought to make clear. But that didn’t stop me from hatching a plan when I worked for the Paul campaign in 2008 to net WFB’s endorsement. He had said some encouraging things about Paul, so I leaned on a friend of mine whom Buckley had begun to cultivate as a protege (he had many) to lobby for his imprimatur. We never went through with it, for the very good reason that WFB was failing fast — this was in mid-February, and Buckley died Feb. 28. If he had recovered, though, we would have put to the test whether his frustrations with conservative movement he had done so much to build would have led him to make a revolutionary endorsement.

It should be noted, though, that at the height of his prestige WFB was reluctant to support insurgent conservative candidates. In 1964, James Burnham had convinced him that Goldwater simply couldn’t win in November, which led Buckley to the brink of throwing National Review‘s support behind Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican primaries. If Goldwater lost in California, Buckley decided, NR would call for him to drop out. Bill Rusher, Bill Rickenbacker, and others were prepared to tender their resignations, though in the event Goldwater pulled through and Buckley relented.

Despite all that, there’s some reason to think WFB was getting more unconventional toward the end. Asked by Corey Robin in 2001 what kind of politics a young 21st-century William F. Buckley would embrace, he replied, “I’d be a socialist. A Mike Harrington socialist. I’d even say a communist.” He was mostly joking, but the remark suggests he was aware of how stale movement conservatism had become.

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Peter Stanlis, RIP

On Monday, July 18, one of the titans of postwar American conservative scholarship died. Peter Stanlis was a key figure in the revival of interest in Edmund Burke in the 1950s, and his Edmund Burke and the Natural Law was a powerful influence on Russell Kirk and other traditionalist thinkers. Stanlis also devoted much study to the poetry and thought of Robert Frost, whom he had known. I had the great pleasure and honor of editing Stanlis’s Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher while I was at ISI Books in 2007.

He was an exemplary man, and he took part in many of the controversies and political battles of his time. He served on the National Council for the Humanities in the 1980s, when the panel was sharply divided between traditionalists and neoconservatives, and he even had a hand in writing the constitution of Michigan while he was at the University of Detroit. The Rock River Times has an obituary here.

Update: There’s a good interview with Stanlis on Burke and Frost here.

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Talking Paulitics

Last week I discussed “prodigal conservatives” — prodigal in both senses of the term — with the Daily Paul’s Kurt Wallace. Listen here.

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