POLITIKS

A 'CON' AMONG US

SUNIL ADAM finds out if the conservative ideologue of the prestigious ‘National Review’ is a paleocon, neocon or just a ‘mainstreamcon.’

Like any archetypical conservative, Ramesh Ponnuru talks passionately about abortion. “It can’t be justified in any circumstances, barring the context of mother’s health, rape or incest.” Like any anti-liberal Vulcan, who is writing a book on the “sanctity of life and American politics,” he thinks life begins at conception. “It’s a biological fact. There is no dispute about it.” Like any Missouri-born, Kansas-raised Republican, he thinks abortion is murder. “Women have a right to choose, only if they have the right to kill.”

So, like any anti-tax, free-market ideologue, he’d think a fetus should be eligible for a dependent-child tax credit, right? Wrong. Ponnuru’s somewhat pronounced nasal drawl sharpens when he irritably ripostes, “It’s a silly question.”

He doesn’t smile, even when moments later it becomes apparent that the query was meant to be a teaser. Perhaps, one cannot take up non-progressive positions without taking oneself too seriously – how often do you see Charles Krauthammer smile during his neocon punditry on the Fox News channel, or George F. Will conflate his baseball lacquered erudition with a hint of humor in the Washington Post? Where Dennis Miller failed, what chance does Bob Novak have? Let Maureen Dowd or Molly Ivins try to be a conservative for one column.

As senior editor of the influential conservative journal, National Review, the 31-year-old Ponnuru is not part of the right-wing first responders against the vast left-wing conspiracy to make America a Godless, U.N.-supporting, gay-embracing, socialist-leaning, CNN-watching, rap-loving, Clinton-electing, weak-kneed elitist democracy.

That is left to the pulpcons like Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Matt Drudge or Michael Savage. Ponnuru is not even a part of the second line of telegenic defense obvious in Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin, the Candace Bushnells of Republican politics. Or the blogosphere hangers-on with a perennial five o’clock shadow, like Christopher Hitchens, or Andrew Sullivan – horribly British and gay. Or is it the other way round?

Ponnuru, who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton’s history department (as his official bio declares) is more of a policy wonk, who delights in deconstructing every domestic and foreign policy formulation from his disheveled office at the journal’s Washington bureau. Agree with him or not, one cannot mistake his prodigious knowledge of politics and policy, about which he writes with clinical clarity and an evangelical zeal.

He has an impressive resume of contributing his views to a number of influential publications, including the Atlantic Monthly and Policy Review, not to mention his voluminous repertoire from the National Review. Ponnuru and George F. Will are “two most incisive conservative columnists,” attests Franklin Foer of the liberal New Republic.

Then again, Ponnuru positions himself closer to the safe center of what is now a multidirectional conservative ideological spectrum, ranging from compulsive isolationists (like Pat Buchanan), and pragmatic internationalists (like Brent Scrowcroft and Jim Baker) to unfettered neocons who might be accused of putting the con back in conservatives by propounding the doctrine of pre-emption (like Bill Kristol). Maybe that gives him a chance to support the war in Iraq and yet, distance himself from the distractions and, as the CIA leak investigation has borne out, distortions that have been used to justify it.

Fashioning himself after his mentor and boss, the legendary William Buckley Jr., founder and editor-at-large of the National Review, Ponnuru describes himself as a “mainstream” or a “conventional” conservative who believes in a fiercely nationalist foreign policy. Meaning, the United States is not obliged to do good around the world for the sake of doing so. That is, there need not be any humanitarian component to foreign policy. The “loadstar” should be just national interest.

His coiffured contempt for the United Nations, possibly tutored in the Jeane Kirkpatrick school, is a natural extension of his worldview. Ponnuru would rather rely on NATO to ensure global stability insofar as it is necessary for the pursuit of American national interests. (If he thought the French should be out if it, he didn’t say.) But it is not clear how these notions jell with the Wilsonian “nation building” and “promoting freedom and democracy” agenda of the Bush administration, which Ponnuru supports with gay abandon. Unlike his role model Buckley Jr.

After all, the children of the Reagan Revolution, to whom Ponnuru can trace his political lineage, are at best reluctant supporters of what some critics see as President Bush’s cavalier excursion in the Middle East. Not unless, that is, they have since turned into neocons. In the 1980s, legions belonging to the New Left, and Young Democrats disenchanted with the American diffidence of the 1970s, followed President Ronald Reagan into the Republican fold.

But leading Jewish intellectuals who emerged from the New Left camp and closeted in conservative institutions like Commentary, the Weekly Standard, and the American Enterprise Institute, retrofit the Middle East as the muscle-flexing theater to consolidate America’s status as the unquestioned superpower in the post-Communist world. It is a matter of debate whether Israel and/or American oil interests were the intended or indirect beneficiaries of this strategy.

But Ponnuru, writing in the National Review, disagrees with this widely-held view: “If one tries to sort out the camps by ignoring the historical origins of neoconservatism – if, that is, one pays no attention to who is Jewish, who used to be a liberal, and who published in Commentary in the 1980s, and instead looks at what foreign-policy views people have been advocating in recent years – it is possible to divine a sort of “neo-neoconservative” position.”

He thinks the differences that exist among foreign policy intellectuals – like Bill Kristol, David Frum, Charles Krauthammer, Joshua Muravchik, Max Boot, Michael Ledeen, Lawrence Kaplan, and Norman Podhoretz – on the nature of America’s role and mission in the world, are a sufficient reason not to label them together. That’s “neo-nonsense.” Ponnuru cites their disagreements over President Bill Clinton’s Kosovo mission and President Woodrow Wilson’s legacy as evidence of intellectual diversity! Surely, the intervening 70 years should amount to something.

Of course, Ponnuru buttresses his ‘mainstream’ credentials and shields himself from Buchanan’s charge of ‘semitic sympathies’ by distancing himself from some of President Bush’s domestic policies, particularly those that led to the unbridled expansion of federal government and spending over the past five years. Never mind if that contradicts his hero-worship of President Reagan whose eight years also resulted in an exponential expansion of the federal government.

And then there are the pet issues on which he’s firmly in the “mainstream,” including Social Security reform, affirmative action, judicial activism – which, incidentally, is attributed to only rulings that favor liberal points of view. Ponnuru thinks even the Rehnquist Supreme Court was left-of-center. It is safe to assume that he was chagrined over Harriet Miers and relieved about Samuel Alito.

So, is there a theoretical contradiction in his conservative political philosophy – is there some incongruity between the principles that govern his views on domestic and foreign policy? If yes, is it because his ideological underpinnings are vulnerable to partisan pressures?

And is that because a true conservative cannot always be a supporter of the Republican Party? Is that why the libertarians, who have remained ideologically and politically the most consistent, have no party platform of consequence?

Maybe it’s not so important to be a paleocon or a neocon or, as Ponnuru would have us believe, a mainstream con. Maybe, it’s better to be just levelheaded – like George H.W. Bush, who said, “I’m conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.”