The Weekly Standard has officially abandoned Burke-Hamilton elitism in favor of Limbaugh-Palin populism, which was probably inevitable. What's puzzling is that they've enlisted contributing editor P.J. O'Rourke, of all people, to make the final break.
O'Rourke's most recent article takes The Washington Post to task for talking ill of those fellow citizens of ours who have spent so much time shouting things in auditoriums as of late. One Post piece in particular prompts P.J.'s prodigious political, uh, criticism:
Then, to add idiocy to insult, the Post sent Robin Givhan to observe the Americans who are taking exception to various expansions of government powers and prerogatives and to make fun of their clothes... Meeting with Givhan's scorn were "T-shirts, baseball caps, promotional polo shirts and sundresses with bra straps sliding down their arm."
We learn, then, that making fun of other people's clothes now constitutes "idiocy" according to O'Rourke, who must not recall anything he himself has written over the past quarter century.
Luckily, I've committed most of it to memory. P.J. O'Rourke once began an article on the 1990 Nicaraguan elections with a multi-paragraph critique of the sort of clothes worn by those visiting American liberals who supported the Sandinistas. He included similar critiques of liberal dressing habits in an article on the 1994 Mexican elections. He spent a good portion of a piece on a general increase in world travel decrying the fashions of tourists in general and the French in particular, and elsewhere took issue with the appearances of those among the Great Unwashed who now fly on commercial airliners. He made fun of those who appeared before the Supreme Court in opposition to a flag burning ban for their general ugliness. He spent much of the '90s micking youngish leftists for wearing nose rings and black outfits - in fact, he did this so much as to actually ruin it for everyone else through overuse - and did so on at least one occasion in the pages of The Weekly Standard itself. He's written an entire article in which he and his girlfriend roam around an Evangelical-oriented theme park and make fun of everyone present for their general slovenliness. And he once wrote that Hillary Clinton should stop messing with her own hair and instead "do something about Chelsea's."
He was right. Aging liberals who run around Latin America and Mexico dress like idiots. Half of the people one today encounters on a domestic flight would have been correctly barred from the plane by the captain in a more civilized age. I don't even know where to start with the sort of French people who wander Manhattan in August. Earnest young leftists should be wearing suits or at least a button-down shirt instead of whatever the fuck they think they're doing now. You can probably imagine what a bunch of Middle American Evangelicals look like when they're at the mall. And Chelsea Clinton's hair was all nuts way back when.
Sarah Palin is elevated to a realm once frequented by Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, and suddenly the most capable among the conservative commentariat must pretend that the masses are above reproach and their passions completely reliable, assuming that those passions happen to coincide with the aims of the Heritage Foundation. Seeing William Kristol pretend to admire the innocent primitivism of the sort of people with whom he would rightfully never associate is one thing; Kristol has never been of value. But O'Rourke was once the greatest political humorist of the conservative movement, as well as a strong advocate of taste back when taste still favored Republicans.
[Cross-posted from True/Slant]