press for a project I help with


Most of you probably don't know this, but for a few months now I've been contributing to the staff of a fledgling online journal, the New Pantagruel, as assistant editor. Although we're only two issues old, the publication was recently mentioned prominently in a New York Times article about the new face of conservatism. For those of you familiar with the now-defunct Regeneration Quarterly (sniff, sniff), tNP was actually intended to carry on the work it had begun, and around which such a loyal readership had sprung up.

Click here for full text or read the excerpt below.

July 17, 2004
Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

In 1954, when he was 28, William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review to bear the standard of a fledgling conservative movement defined by three commitments: to fight Communism, to diminish the federal government and to uphold traditionalism in social affairs.

That formulation held the movement together for five decades, as Ronald Reagan brought conservatives to power, George H. W. Bush declared victory in the cold war and Bill Clinton pronounced the end of big government.

Now, many conservatives say, the current Bush administration is testing that definition of conservatism as it has never been tested before, from the expansion of federal health and education programs to the campaign to remake Iraq. And as Mr. Buckley prepares for retirement by handing over control of National Review, a new generation of young would-be Buckleys is debating just what conservatism means when their side has taken over Washington, and yet they still do not feel that they have won.

"Conservative is a word that is almost meaningless these days," said Caleb Stegall, 32, a lawyer in Topeka, Kan., and a founder of The New Pantagruel, newpantagruel.com, an irreverent Web site about religion and politics named for the jovial drunkard created by Rabelais. "It tells you almost nothing about where a person stands on a lot of questions," he said, like gay marriage, stem cell research, the environment and Iraq.

The debate among members of the young right is unfolding on Web sites like Mr. Stegall's and Oxblog, oxblog.blogspot.com, set up by three Rhodes Scholars. It is discussed at roundtables and cocktail parties organized by groups like America's Future Foundation in Washington. In journals for young conservatives, they tackle subjects as heterodox as the perils of Wal-Mart and urban sprawl, the dangers of unfettered capitalism to family life, and the feared takeover of their movement by hawkish neoconservatives.

[...]

Mr. Stegall, an evangelical Presbyterian and the son of a minister, said he shared Mr. Cohen's support for government social programs, but for religious reasons. He said he and other theological conservatives had founded The New Pantagruel as an alternative to the politics of the older generation of Christian conservatives.

"If I could sum up what we stand for in one word, it would be sustainability," he said. By that, he explained, he meant theologically conservative views on sustaining family life, as well as typically liberal views on sustaining the environment and local communities and helping the poor. "For us, those two halves are inextricably linked," he said.

Note from Caleb:
What I basically said in talking about sustainability was that a true conservatism would seek to preserve and sustain local communities of tradition: socially, religiously, politically, economically, and evironmentally. Kirkpatrick apparently translated that into "support for government social programs." I also said that I thought the mainstream political left and right were holding hands under the table in the pursuit of their mutual exploitation and destruction of local particularist beliefs, practices, and places. I wish he had used that instead of trying to translate it into that "theologially conservative/typically liberal" language.

posted @ 02:30 PM on Sat - July 17, 2004 remark! Email |  as quoted:
before I said ...  but more recently: 

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