I see Gabe Schoenfeld has attacked me again. I usually try to let these things go, but sometimes a little context is demanded.
The piece is, as usual, filled with bile and unrelieved nastiness. What Gabe leaves out is that we used to be friends, or at least friendly acquaintances. We met through Manhattan conservative circles, where we had many friends in common, including the late, great Fred Siegel (whom I am confident would be distressed at what Gabe has become).
Gabe snidely writes that one should not pity me. On this we agree. I do not need or deserve any pity. My life has gone and is going quite well.
Not so for Gabe. His first disappointment (that I know of) came when he finished a PhD in Soviet studies…just as the Berlin Wall fell. Like many disappointed academics, he bounced around the nonprofit sector until landing as an editor at Commentary. This was the Neil Kozodoy Commentary, when the magazine was good. I wrote for them back in the day. Gabe did not edit me; Gary Rosen did. But even then, Gabe and I were friendly enough.
I well recall seeing Gabe in Manhattan after Kozodoy retired, and Gabe (and Gary) was passed over for the editorship. Gabe was bitter about that, and I sympathized with him. He seemed (as did Gary) more deserving than the person who got it, but these kinds of injustices happen all the time, and what can you do? Except offer the sympathy of a friend, which I did.
Our next sustained interaction centered around Republican presidential politics, in which we were both involved—in the 2008 cycle, me centrally and him peripherally, and in the 2012 cycle, the reverse. During the latter cycle, Gabe became convinced that he had been somehow wronged by one Lahnee Chen, Mitt Romney’s 2012 policy director and later a candidate for statewide office in California. Gabe became further convinced that Chen had plagiarized his (if memory serves) Harvard dissertation and set himself the task of exposing this alleged fact in order to destroy Mr. Chen’s reputation, which Gabe thought to be a public service of some kind.
During this period, Gabe consulted me frequently. I listened (or read; some of it was over text) patiently and asked what I thought were reasonable questions. It did not seem to me that Gabe “had the goods” as the saying goes, and I told him so. I further said that the whole endeavor seemed like a waste of time, bound to reflect more poorly on Gabe than on Mr. Chen. I gently advised Gabe to drop it. Which, eventually, he did.
This was some time after Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election, which Gabe blamed entirely on Mr. Chen. Gabe and I still saw one another at social and intellectual events in Manhattan but otherwise drifted apart. I can’t remember the last time I saw him.
I do, however, remember joking to several friends after I became “controversial” among the anti-Trump, former-right that “You watch; one day these people will denounce natural rights for the sole reason that I endorse them.”
I didn’t have to wait long. In early 2019, I published a small book, the most substantive chapter of which lays out how the classical concept of natural right, singular, became in the modern world natural rights, plural, and how the American Founders memorialized that understanding in the Declaration of Independence and operationalized it in the Constitution. That is, standard conservative thought that used to be uncontroversial on the Right, or at any rate is hard to spin as some radical departure from Americanism conjured up from hell by Trump.
Right on cue, along came none other than Gabe Schoenfeld to trash the book as unrelieved garbage from beginning to end, without so much as an attempt to refute a single point. I privately noted at the time the irony of the so-called “principled conservatives” now running from natural rights, the Declaration, and the Constitution just to score cheap points against Trump and those who see much good in what he is doing.
Gabe in that piece, as in this one, did not mention our former association. He did not in fact mention that we ever met at all. Isn’t that considered journalistic malpractice? Especially from someone whose whole schtick is trumpeting his allegedly Himalayan-high principles?
I did not respond to that piece then. I wonder if it is even wise to respond to this piece now. But I thought there might be some value in shining a light on the low character of the kind of person who could write publicly with such unrelieved viciousness and nastiness about a former friend, without even acknowledging we used to know one another.
I have lost contact with and even fallen out with a number of former friends over Trump. Many, I think, have behaved very badly toward me and others. After repeated attacks on my character, I wrote about that experience exactly one time—in nine years.
Yet I have never written anything like what Gabe has repeatedly written about me. Read him for yourself and ask: Would you write publicly this way about a former friend? Even one with whom you now vehemently disagree? Without so much as mentioning the former connection? What kind of a person does that?
Gabe would no doubt chortle, “Oh-ho! A servant of Trump complaining about viciousness!” Gabe, like most of the rest of the NeverTrumpers, sanctifies his own viciousness by appealing to Trump’s alleged viciousness. Even if one accepts his terms (and I don’t), he still has forgotten the elementary truth—no doubt once imparted to him by his mother (as mine imparted it to me)—that two wrongs don’t make a right.
As to substance, such as it is, Gabe calls me “outstandingly mediocre.” Did he not notice my alleged mediocrity throughout our dozen-plus years’ association? Did he not notice it when he was seeking my advice? If he did, he was then too polite to mention it—a politeness he has since discarded. But especially if he did notice back then, and asked me anyway, what does that say about his judgment? More likely, Gabe says it now simply out of bitterness and bile. Again: What kind of person does that? At any rate, far be it from me to defend myself against the charge, which is for others to judge. So I leave it to others. Read my stuff, read Gabe’s stuff, compare our resumes, and decide for yourself. For my part, I am not particularly concerned that I have failed to live up to the standard that Gabe’s career has set.
More specifically, the “point” (apart from insults and character assassination) of Gabe’s article is to condemn in advance a document he hasn’t seen. I can well understand why. Leaving aside whatever part I may (or may not) play in the Trump Administration’s eventual National Security Strategy, one thing is certain: that document will not be an endorsement but a repudiation of the disastrous neoconservative adventurism that President Trump has been rightly critiquing since at least the summer of 2015. Gabe was and remains a stalwart partisan of that failed policy, which disordered the world, cost thousands of American lives, killed hundreds of thousands of others, and wasted trillions of dollars.
Knowing that one played a role, however small, in such a titanic disaster is a heavy burden to live with. People cope as they can. Gabe copes by attacking me and others. I might say I pity him; but on the other hand, I am reminded of the wise words of Cardinal Lamberto: “Your sins are terrible, and it is just that you suffer.”