UPDATED: Another Letter to Jonah Goldberg

I was working away on this piece when VO suddenly raced past me and got his retaliation in first. I thought about binning my scriblings, but changed my mind in the end. We cover different aspects of his column, so perhaps the two are best read together as one collective effort.

Dear Jonah,

You’re blowing up the conservative movement.

We’ve never met, though I have published the occasional article on your website NRO and have met some of your colleagues at various functions over the years. I’ve been known to forward some of your pieces to friends and colleagues. You use humor to great effect, and combine a firm grasp of conservative first principles with an open mind and a combative spirit. You’re a fine product of the American conservative intellectual revolution. You have every right to be proud of your accomplishments.

Unfortunately, these accomplishments are turning into a serious problem. I say this after reading your latest column, an open letter to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. I will ignore your glib comments about her becoming a “laughing stock”, or her “whining” about press coverage, though I think they are unbecoming of a serious commentator such as yourself and are a clear violation of Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment. Our readers are much better placed than I am to refute these and other accusations you make in the course of your article, so I suggest that once you’ve finished reading my post, you check out the comment section for a point by point rebuttal of your accusations.

My purpose, however, is not to defend the Governor but to ask you whether you seriously considered what it was you were hoping to achieve in writing this letter before actually publishing it. Let’s consider the options. Formally speaking, your piece is couched in the language of advice. You suggest she should avoid doing and saying certain things, and actively seek to do others. But the abovementioned glib remarks, and your opening and closing statements (“You’re blowing it”, “you won’t win the nomination. More important, you won’t deserve to”) and your main piece of advice to her (“Stay home and do your job and your homework”) suggest that this wasn’t really meant as a letter of exhortation. So if not a letter of advice, what then?

Having read your letter several times, I can’t escape the notion that it reads more like a declaration of war. You are angry, and you seem to think you have every right to feel that way. But angry about what? I think it boils down to this. You fully recognize that Governor Palin has a special political talent that in the course of human events only comes round once in a generation or so. Reagan had it, Clinton had it, Obama has it and Palin has it. 'It' being, of course, charisma. No one in the current Republican Party even comes close to her when it comes to working a room or moving a crowd. As you yourself observe, “[i]f money could buy what you have, Romney would have bought it all by now. Good politicians can learn how to win over audiences, but the great ones are born with the ability.” Quite so. Where the anger comes in is in your feeling that somehow this tremendous gift is wasted on the wrong politician. There is, you claim, a hunger for Republicans who can "effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy,” and well, Governor Palin is not that type of Republican - or so you have concluded. While the situation requires a “policy wonk”, all she’s capable of is “peddling a few platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government.”

Let’s take a step back. You say there’s a hunger for politicians who can “effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy.” I’m sure such a hunger exists. But where exactly? Out there in what people in the DC-NYC corridor lovingly refer to as Flyover Country? I seriously doubt it. The reason people there responded so viscerally to Governor Palin’s candidacy was precisely because she was capable of addressing their everyday concerns in their language – the same platitudes and truisms about free markets and limited government that you talk about so condescendingly. And the reason they responded to it with such emotion was that this was the first time since Reagan that they encountered a politician who made them feel that she was for real about these things. Not just in the sense that she understood their concerns and believed in the things she said, but also in the sense that once elected, she was actually going to do what she promised to do. I don’t think a single person at her rallies expressed doubts about her ability to “effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy” - or even cared about it.

The only people who did that, were based in the DC-NYC corridor. It’s there that you find this “hunger” for “wonks” that you talk about. It exists among a new class of people who, through their actions, threaten to destroy the entire conservative movement. I am referring to a conservative intellectual class that has developed over the last few decades. During the Goldwater years and the Reagan revolution, the policy wonks were just part of the gang. There weren’t too many of them anyway, because conservatives were mainly men of action, not men of letters. Through the works of people like William F. Buckley they did, however, develop a sense of appreciation for the importance of ideas and of how ideas can help to change society – together with actions of course. Their donations and endowments helped to create a network of conservative intellectual institutions: think tanks, magazines, colleges. These were meant to create an army of foot soldiers to help fight – and ultimately win – the battle for people’s hearts and minds. But the foot soldiers are no longer willing to serve. Instead, they believe that they are destined to lead. Like Plato’s golden class, they consider themselves at once both removed from and elevated above the rest of the conservative movement. And they will accept no leader who isn’t one of them, able like them to “effectively articulate and sell our policies and philosophy.”

Jonah, I’ve actually worked in government, and I’ve got news for you: these men make at best unremarkable and at worst utterly useless administrators. To borrow from the works of the great Isaiah Berlin: a hedgehog (like Reagan), who knows a few things really well, generally makes a much better president than a fox (like Obama) who knows so many things that he can’t tell which ones really matter. A president doesn’t need to be clever. A president needs to have backbone, and an iron will to actually do what he - or she - said he/she would do. Things like giving the country back its sense of pride. Cleaning up the budget mess. Keeping the country safe. And making America once again that shining city on a hill that its founding fathers had meant it to become. For everything else you have speechwriters, and one page briefing notes.

So where do we go from here? You basically have two options now. One is to continue down the path that you have now set out on: to seek to destroy the electoral hopes of the one candidate who can deliver your movement the two terms in office that you need to reshape your country’s fortunes because she doesn't meet your exacting intellectual standards. If you do that, you will most likely end up in open war with your party’s grassroots and the talk radio hosts who collectively seem to have adopted Governor Palin as their champion. Even if you win – which you won’t, by the way, because intellectuals can never match the zeal of truly committed activists – it will be impossible for the ‘wonkish’ candidates that you admire to rebuild the party around their candidacy. The grassroots would rather vote for the other guy than support the candidate of the faction that destroyed their political hero and expressed contempt for their common sense ideas and ideals. [This, btw, is the reason why I think Mitt Romney has no chance to win the presidency while Governor Palin is around. He has allowed himself to be defined as the anti-Palin candidate, thereby alienating the grassroots on which his eventual presidential campaign would depend. His campaign would be like McCain 2008, only without the Palin factor].

There is, though, another option, one that would actually help to heal the rift that you – and people like you: the Peggy Noonans, Charles Krauthammers, George Wills etc - created and that might even help to further the cause you claim to defend. That option is to do what your great predecessor William F. Buckley did with Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, namely to actually take Governor Palin seriously as a presidential candidate. To challenge, rather than insult, her intelligence. To invite her opinion on issues, perhaps even to actively engage her in discussion about the ideas you care about. Radical perhaps, but worth a try, don’t you think? As her meetings with the editors of that other conservative magazine, and her informal policy lunch at CSIS with people like Frank Carlucci and Strobe Talbot during her recent visit to Washington DC have shown, she's certainly interested in meeting with people who deal in ideas. And the good news is: she’s only a tweet away @AKGovSarahPalin. Give it a try, why don’t you?

Kind regards,

Joshua Livestro

Update JL: Goldberg's response to his (many) critics fails to convince me, I'm afraid. The issue isn't whether Governor Palin (or any other politician for that matter - apart from the perfect Mitt Romney, of course, about whom more anon) needs sound advice. Of course she does. The question is whether sentences like "You're blowing it" and "Stay home and do your job and your homework" really qualify as 'advice'. You're talking to a governor and a former vicepresidential candidate, after all, not to a dog. Any adviser who doesn't know the difference has no business advising anyone.