Rich Lowry’s latest essay features the two villains of American Conservatism: ‘liberal analysts’ and the scourge of ‘a valueless international relativism’! Mr. Lowry suffers from an advanced case of a self-serving ideological myopia, because those ‘liberal analysts’ are in fact die hard Neo-Liberals, not to speak of craven apologists for the American Empire. But just not in the way that Mr. Lowry finds acceptable. Those ‘liberal analysts’ and Lowry share a wholehearted belief in American Exceptionalism.
On the question of ‘a valueless international relativism’: the first query of this assertion of Conservative belief , just presents itself as ‘relative’ to what? The careful reader might look to this notion as the nebulous specter,that has haunted ‘Conservatism’ since the various European Enlightenments. The charge/condition, the propaganda against ‘relativism’ dates from Burke, de Maistre, Disraeli, Oakeshott, Schmitt, Strauss, Kirk and even Wm. F. Buckley Jr.! The defense of established power, whether a landed aristocracy, or the bought and paid for republicanism of present day America, is what Mr. Lowry is defending: the Empire mired in a War on eight fronts, and a political class confronted by its self-created reality of this political Know-Nothing.
Mr. Lowry’s defensiveness of Trump takes its inspiration for the fact that daffodils grow out of soil enriched by the careful application of manure, yet he fails to address the fact that very destructive weeds also take nourishment from this enriched soil.
Committed Observer
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/20/rich-lowry-sovereignty-trump-un-215629