Reading conservatives

Take a look at this article by Bill Kauffman in The American Conservative. I might get hammered for this by some readers, but I think we could generally use a dose of reading sites such as AmCon rather than paying any attention to Bill O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Coulter, Malkin, and other blowhards. Bloggers for the most part spend their time excoriating these easy targets. They appeal to the really really drunk and falling down in us all. AmCon, however, often makes decent arguments worthy of engaging. This particular essay is on the importance of George McGovern. You might not agree with it all, but it's worth mulling. Take these quotes of McGovern, cited approvingly in the article:

But at its not-frequent-enough best, McGovernism combined New Left participatory democracy with the small-town populism of the Upper Midwest. In a couple of April 1972 speeches, he seemed to second Barry Goldwater’s 1968 remark to aide Karl Hess that “When the histories are written, I’ll bet that the Old Right and the New Left are put down as having a lot in common and that the people in the middle will be the enemy.”

“[M]ost Americans see the establishment center as an empty, decaying void that commands neither their confidence nor their love,” McGovern asserted in one of the great unknown campaign speeches in American history. “It is the establishment center that has led us into the stupidest and cruelest war in all history. That war is a moral and political disaster—a terrible cancer eating away the soul of the nation. … It was not the American worker who designed the Vietnam war or our military machine. It was the establishment wise men, the academicians of the center. As Walter Lippmann once observed, ‘There is nothing worse than a belligerent professor.’”

And then check out this final line by Kauffman:

At 83, George McGovern remains a voice for peace and freedom in a party that looks ready to nominate the militaristic schoolmarm Hillary Clinton as its next standard-bearer. Oh, how the Democrats could use a bracing shot of McGovernism.

Literally, this couldn't have been better said by a Democrat.