On the other hand, Bramwell would be entirely obscure except for being the major beneficiary of nepotism (what’s the right word, exactly, anointing?) from WFB and shortly thereafter the whole thing turned into a big pissing match. On a substative level, his gripe is that contemporary conservatism is too ideological, I guess. Give him that I suppose, but does he have a point, or am I missing something?

I don’t claim to know what motivates Bramwell, but I assume his distaste for Goldberg’s entire project is tied closely to his general antipathy to anything like this sort of intellectual history argument, which he has also shown in the past. My early objection to it was that it seems as if it is going to overuse and expand the word fascism to the point where it can mean almost anything. I am going to read the book, and I will come back with my assessment of whether it is any good as political theory or as a work of intellectual history, and then I will be better-suited to judge whether and how Bramwell got things wrong. Considering that I am not exactly a fan of Goldberg’s, I think I have been pretty fair towards the core of his thesis as I have understood it from early descriptions and reviews, and I intend to keep trying to be fair. I can’t speak for anyone else, but what motivates me in these matters is a respect for the truth and an interest in accuracy and the proper use of language.

I don’t buy it. If that’s all there is, then it just illustrates that right wing dissidents are mostly motivated by personal petty grievance.

I thought the review, as a polemical review, was pretty devastating in its ridicule of the book, but I certainly have my disagreements with parts of his argument. I may disagree with more of it once I actually finish the book. There are plenty of other historical problems with the book from what I have seen of it that Bramwell never addresses, and I think that makes the review weaker than it could have been. There was something to the opening sections of Bramwell’s take, but it did read like a more specific version of the article he did two years ago for the Left/Right symposium, which I criticised pretty strongly at the time for its “pox on all your houses” approach to various kinds of conservative arguments.

http://flyingspit.blogspot.com/2007/11/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go.html

Btw, are you still behind Bramwell’s review of Jonah’s book?

What the hell are you talking about? If you had actually bothered to read this blog before commenting, you would have known that its author is one of America’s most eloquent opponents of the war in Iraq. Do your homework.

And a lot of the stuff that took place under saddam was the result of the sanctions, not from saddam directly.

Yeah, saddam was not a good guy, but being are suffering all over including right next store in Mexico. Go to any Mexican jail to find out.

You need to take responsibility for your actions, my friend.

The nature of this response showed me that the speaker was so insistent on not recognising any American role in creating the current situation that he was seemed ready to condemn Huckabee for saying what the administration and probably most elected Republicans in Congress have said at one time or another. There is support for the war, and then there is this sort of denial that the invasion and post-invasion policies had anything to do with the present situation. The latter seems quite excessive to me. The way that it was applied to Huckabee also seems rather unfair, since it did take this statement of the context of his broader views on the war.

What’s wrong with this, unless you want to argue that Iraq was broken before Saddam took over, which obviously wasn’t the context here. I think it’s in fact a very important point that isn’t circulated enough.