Celebrating Phyllis Schlafly

Although I’ve never made a secret of my opinion of Jonah’s pseudo-scholarship or my annoyance with his self-importance as a “conservative” thinker, I now feel sorry for this guy. Let me explain! Jonah has just posted a eulogy for longtime conservative advocate Phyllis Schlafly, who died on September 5 at age ninety-two. Phyllis, who was kind enough to have had me on her radio program, embodied what was the gold standard of American conservatism in my youth. She favored traditional gender distinctions, although she was clearly not averse to women like herself practicing law and standing up for conservative principles.

She was also an American patriot but was opposed to military interventions that she didn’t think served the national interest. Phyllis worked in an ammunition factory throughout World War Two; and although a non-combatant participant in that struggle did not think women should serve in combat roles or be drafted into military service. As Jon B. Utley, publisher of The American Conservative, stresses in a moving eulogy, Phyllis Schlafly was devoted to America but was neither a feminist nor war-enthusiast. She also showed other habits of the Old Right. For example, she never used the term “liberal democracy” to describe her country but insisted that the Founders had set up a “constitutional republic.” Our governing powers, if properly exercised, would be distributed between the states and the federal government as well as among the federal branches.

Like her friend Pat Buchanan, Phyllis was an immigration restrictionist and took that controversial stand not only to protect American jobs. She also believed that the American government, as originally designed, required a certain civic culture to remain what it was intended to be. Phyllis never held that signature neoconservative view that the US should be treated as a “global democracy” or “propositional nation.” The stable constitutional government required what Aristotle called an “ethos,” a shared disposition of mind. It was not diversity, but a self-disciplined and self-reliant citizenry that allowed the US to prosper as long as it did, within a framework of ordered freedom.

Although Phyllis was hardly an uncritical admirer of the Republican nominee, one of her last achievements, which she struggled to complete while being ravaged by cancer, was a short book making The Conservative Case for Trump.  Jonah doesn’t find this tract especially palatable, and he lets us know at the outset: “I had my disagreement with the legendary conservative activist, particularly of late.” Jonah also suggests that his stated feelings about Trump were reflected in Phyllis’s “squabbles” with her daughter and with some of her erstwhile friends, who shared Jonah’s dislike for the GOP nominee.   But Jonah’s “disagreements” with Mrs. Schlafly do not stop with Jonah’s Never-Trump posture or with his predictable identification with Republican establishment candidates. Although the teaser to his eulogy indicates that Phyllis Schlafly’s life shows that “conservatism matters,” in point of fact Jonah and the subject of his eulogy agreed on very little. His muddled eulogy is the kind of word cluster that I might have composed for George Soros if circumstances had forced me to produce such a text.  (I do, by the way, like Soros’s name, which means a “brewer” in Hungarian, “sor” being the Magyar word for “beer”.)

This lack of agreement underscores the total disconnect between what self-described conservatives believed in the past and where the neoconservatives and establishment Right have been moving for about the last thirty years. Phyllis led the successful struggle against the Equal Rights Amendment and did so with particular dedication in her (and then my) state of Illinois. But Jonah, who favors all kinds of “anti-discrimination” legislation for women, is not really moved by this well-known accomplishment. He, therefore, damns with faint praise what Mary Ellen Bork chooses to emphasize in celebrating Phyllis’s life in First Things.

After all, it’s hard to talk up someone for opposing what one would have been happily endorsed in substance—if not specifically as an amendment. Jonah calls on us not only “to celebrate the fruits of feminist success at home,” but to carry our feminist success “overseas.” Phyllis was also famously against the legalization of gay marriage; while Jonah and his collaborators at NR have supported this measure. In Jonah’s “conservative” worldview, “it’s progressed that gay activists and left-wingers are celebrating the institution of marriage as essential.” Although Phyllis criticized Obama’s decision to pull our troops out of Iraq, while exposing the remaining soldiers to extreme danger, she also emphatically opposed the invasion in 2003. Jonah thought that invasion was at worst “a worthy mistake”, and has generally provided neoconservative justifications for American intervention all over the planet. Finally, I find no evidence that Jonah’s views on immigration are the same as those of Schlafly. Unlike her, he wishes to increase the legal immigration from Latin America so that we can become more diverse.

I certainly don’t want to disparage what Jonah has accomplished as a eulogist. I’ve no idea how given what he believes or publicly professes he could have written anything more convincing. He is a well-paid spokesman for something that has very little to do with his subject’s fixed principles. Jonah may be more in line (and I’ve no doubt that he is) than Phyllis Schlafly (or I) with where we’re now moving as a country. And I’m sure he can appeal to Millennials much more effectively than the women whom he attempts to eulogize. But that’s still no reason to believe the two were ever on the same page or that Jonah could praise his subject without appearing to be uncomfortable and even ridiculous. Let’s imagine that Barack Obama set out to celebrate Thomas Jefferson as an ancestor of the present Democratic Party. What exactly would Obama be able to say that was not utter nonsense? And those listening who had not entirely drunk the Cool-aid would know the obvious, namely that the connection that Obama strained to make between the democratic localist Jefferson and his own party of government centralization and unlimited social engineering was entirely made-up.

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