My former friend’s column has definitely proved me hilariously wrong and naïve.
My former colleague Kevin Williamson probably initiated my tenure at NR by writing a cover story that began “Michael Brendan Dougherty is bitter.” It wasn’t true. Not then, at least.
Today, he takes up a flip little tweet I wrote. Tucker Carlson had now infamously said Russian cities are better than American cities. This was inspiring some jokey commentary on X, formerly Twitter. My contribution was only to note that Russian girls that work the watch boutiques in New York used to complain to me that New York was dirty compared to their hometowns. I only mentioned it because it was a thing that happened. I’ve never been to Moscow save for a connecting flight in the airport. My arrival was late, so I had the joy of hearing my long name pronounced amidst a whirlwind of Russian language announcements as I ran through the terminal. Now that we’ve brought it up, I remember another of those shopgirls complaining that American saunas weren’t the real thing, either. In any case, Kevin spins this little nothing of a tweet into the accusation that I admire Vladimir Putin and his gulag state. Odd, since it didn’t express or report on my views at all. Strangely, he does this in a column in which he has far harsher things to say about American cities than I ever have. And strangest of all is his assertion that those girls are — or should be — conditioned by terror into relating their opinion to me. Does Kevin imagine I have a direct line to the Kremlin to report on these things?
I’ve written extensively on U.S.–Ukraine–Russia relations going back to 2014. Surely, if what Kevin says is true, he could find something in those writings to better substantiate the charge. But, this isn’t the first time Kevin has made such an accusation. When I merely noted that countries naturally take an interest in the military alliances of their neighbors, Kevin started pounding wildly that I can’t take my country’s own side, and denounced me for not being nationalist enough. I thought, enough’s enough. If at the very first scratch of substantive talk about foreign affairs, he starts throwing his shoes around like this, the better to leave it.
Kevin’s outburst is part of a larger wave of histrionics this week. The House has been handed a bill by the Senate that appropriates more money to support the war in Ukraine. There are some obvious questions to ask about this bill. What do we expect it to accomplish? Last year, we sent Ukraine nearly twice as much in aid and organized an unprecedented and now unrepeatable wave of donations of matériel from a handful of other nations. The counteroffensive stalled. Now, we’re sending less money to a more depleted and demoralized armed force. Incongruously, after lambasting the administration for its handling of the war, Mitch McConnell praised the appropriation as the most important work the Senate has done. Tillis and Romney joined in with a level of football-spiking that would be appropriate if the three men had themselves dragged the Russian army out of Ukraine and deposited them on an ice floe near Vladivostok. In reality, the bill meekly demurs and asks “the White House to submit a detailed strategy for Ukrainian victory.” (Funny: I thought the White House was full of foot-dragging bums, and that Ukraine was supposed to design its own strategy, being a sovereign nation. Never mind.)
In any case, unable to answer basic questions, and unwilling to speculate about how it will change facts on the ground, the bill’s enthusiasts have nothing to offer but demagogy. “If your position is being cheered by Vladimir Putin, it’s time to reconsider your position,” Mitt Romney said, pathetically, in the Senate chambers this week. Or they blame Americans for being too thick or immoral to appreciate their grand geostrategic genius. So too, now, Kevin Williamson, on the flimsy evidence that I didn’t rebuke the shopgirls at Breguet and Jaeger-LeCoultre with the finest trash statistics.
I’m sorry, but this trick just doesn’t work on me anymore. I’m old enough to have been accused of loving Saddam Hussein, and Bashar al-Assad, and — most preposterous of all — Moammar Qaddafi. Once the war fever breaks, most grown-up people forget that they once stupidly willed themselves to imagine my bookshelves were filled with Baathist literature, or speculated that I might admire Qaddafi’s fashion sense. Of course debates about war stir deep passions. But normal people slowly internalize that there are serious moral costs to wars, even ones they thought just. They grow embarrassed of this rhetoric, and we all try not to bring it up again. Likewise, I try not to bring up things like Fred Barnes writing that the U.S. operation in Iraq was “the greatest act of benevolence one nation has ever performed for another” at every single gathering of conservative minds. That’s how grown-ups get along in this vale of tears.
When Kevin was getting canceled by the Atlantic in a frenzy, I tried — fruitlessly — to ask readers to read him in good faith:
I’ve said before that I like disagreeing with Williamson. Here’s why. Finding out that Kevin Williamson had just written something taking you to task was usually enough to make one worried. Worried you slipped up logically, worried you wrote something with no self-awareness, or with sentimentality. You know what I never worried about when I disagreed with Kevin? That he would deliberately or opportunistically misread my work, the way so many others did to him this week.
At least on that count, my former friend’s column has definitely proved me hilariously wrong and naïve.