And now let us speak of how National Review has finally donned some silk undies, and begun their regimen of hormone shots.
When I first subscribed to National Review I was in high school, which puts that time at almost fifty years ago. In other words, it was a lot closer to the time when WFB was standing athwart history yelling stop, than it was to the present, when apparently some of the editors are standing on the running boards of history, waving their hats and yelling go.
Comes now J.J. McCullough to urge conservatives to play the pliant accommodationist role—which we have gotten pretty good at, remember—which means realizing that transgenderism is here to stay. Glad that’s settled. What’d it take? Eighteen months? And that means in turn that we should return to our conservative roots, pick up the burden of our central animating principle, which appears to be that of doing everything we can to make their craziness not look so darn crazy.
The progs comes up with the cockamamie ideas, which promise to come a cropper, and then the conservatives move in with sleeves rolled up and the promise to make the screwball thing workable—appealing to that sense of modesty and decorum that enables conservatives to put up with a lot, and all while conserving almost nothing.
So when the progressives tell us that all enlightened parents should be chill with hiring 4 strippers for their kindergartner’s birthday party, and the parents react to this new chapter in the sexual revolution by kicking a little, by murmuring in that sotto voce hate-crimey sort of way, may we rely on National Review to have one of their online columnists weigh in with the advice that a Burkean solution could be to hire two strippers instead of four?
Now some might feel as though I have overstated my case. Did not David French, also on NRO, answer McCullough cogently? He sure did, and thereby lost the debate. Michael Brendan Dougherty also answered magnificently, just the way he ought to have, but also lost. No, neither he nor French lost because of any frailty in their arguments. No, the arguments themselves were not wearing silk undies.
They lost because this transgender lunacy is now officially an intramural debate among conservatives at National Review. But it is not the job of conservatives to salvage the previous Great Leap Forward.