https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/15/the-dishonest-and-dishonorable-disagreements-of-former-friends/
Most of us, at some point or another, fall out with friends. It’s a painful and, perhaps, inevitable part of life. It’s especially disquieting when former friends turn on you suddenly and publicly, devoid of any goodwill, charity, or benefit of the doubt that one might think were warranted by years of amity. All this, however disagreeable, is at least “normal” in the sense that it has been going on forever—though it massively intensified in the Trump Derangement Era.
About four years ago, I was finishing a small book, the centerpiece of which was an article I had already published. The new material consisted of a shortish defense/explanation of the classical idea of “natural right”—that is, the doctrine or assertion that good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, legitimate and illegitimate, etc.—exist by nature and are not mere products of human will or preference. This idea undergirds not merely the regime of the American founders and the very idea of “human rights,” but also the entire notion that anything political can be good or bad, right or wrong. For example, when Never Trumpers speak of the alleged danger from Donald Trump to “Our Democracy™” and declare this to be bad, they are—wittingly or not—endorsing natural right.
You’d think this would be, if not uncontroversial, at least well within the bounds of civic discourse. Nonetheless, I predicted to some friends that at least one of our former friends would denounce natural right simply because I had defended it.
I didn’t need to wait long for that prediction to come true. Shortly after the book’s publication, it was scathingly reviewed by Gabriel Schoenfeld, a man I had known for something like 20 years. We were never the best of friends, but we had been friendly, meeting occasionally for meals or otherwise seeing each other at events in Manhattan’s small but close-knit community of conservative intellectuals and fellow travelers.
Needless to say, Gabe and I no longer speak. Trump, naturally, is the reason. Still, given that long history, one might have assumed some charitable consideration in a review by a former friend. A good review was not necessarily expected; reviewers of course ought to say what they think. But it was odd, to say least, to see a review so jaundiced as to reject out of hand a core foundation of Western Civilization out of anti-Trump spite.
I let that review go at the time, and wouldn’t even mention it now, were it not for similar attacks from the same quarter. I am half-persuaded to let those go, too, but another friend pointed out that a continuous stream of libels not responded to eventually constitutes a kind of public record.
I’m also motivated to respond because, irrelevant or distasteful as one may think these people are, they are actually quite powerful. They, and many others like them, form authoritative opinion in our time. In an age, and a regime, in which propaganda and censorship are foundational sources of rule, the power to police opinion is quasi-governmental. They are information warfare specialists, backed by big money, and their role is to constrain what you get to hear in part by smearing and slandering dissidents. One may not pay them much heed, but others who also have power over what the public gets to hear do, hence their vitriol matters.
Viciousness and Vitriol Demanding a Handshake?
