Jonah Goldberg chiding his fellow NROniks for their McCain-bashing seems pretty persuasive to me. I don’t like John McCain, and I can see why he’s not the conservatives’ favorite, but he’s clearly a conservative and one with high electoral appeal so it’s not clear to me why you’d throw a fit over the prospect of him running.
Then again, I actually think it’s strange that Goldberg is the one with sensible views on this. Working within the frame of Goldberg’s expansive definition of “fascism” I think it’s pretty clear that John McCain comes much closer than any other major American political figure to fitting the bill. He offers a pure kind of politics-as-salvation where we’re supposed to find a higher purpose through submission to the needs of the Nation. He doesn’t just pay lip service to supporting the troops, he clearly believes that military service — preferable in wartime — is more virtuous than other pursuits (thus his dissing of Mitt Romney’s business background) and he’s thus sometimes led to seem to see war as a worthwhile end-in-itself.
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