Posted on 12/09/2008 9:45:07 AM PST by Alex Murphy
Conservatism RIP?
American conservatism has crashed and burned and its carefully constructed religious cornerstone, based on an uneasy alliance of white evangelicals and “blue collar Catholics,” sits atop the ash heap.
This reality is not attributable solely to Obamaism, though that is part of it. Rather, it is about the past, namely the contradictory impulses of American conservatism, and the future, specifically a demographic tidal wave that threatens to bury a once powerful political tradition.
The history is effectively explained in White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement (Atlantic Monthly Press). American University history professor Allan Lichtman refutes the idea that modern American conservatism dates back to the 1955 founding of National Review, the erudite and pugnacious product of William F. Buckley’s vivid imagination and abundant energy.
The Catholic Buckley, according to one version of history, purged the conservative movement of its anti-Semitic and isolationist roots (think Charles Lindbergh and the 1930s America First movement), placed militant but not kooky anti-communism at the center of its concerns, advocated smaller government, and defended capitalism against the welfare state.
The reality that Lichtman recounts, however, is far different. Modern American conservatism’s roots are more aptly traced back to the 1920s, an era of business-friendly, nativist, pro-traditional-family government he describes as “anti-pluralist.”
“The right has held together as a political movement since World War I through its core commitment to conserving white Protestant values and private enterprise, not free enterprise,” writes Lichtman. “Ultimately conservatives have engaged in a struggle for control over American public life against a liberal tradition they have seen as not just wrong on issues but sinful, un-American, and corrosive of the institutions and traditions that made the nation great.”
Fast-forward to today. President-elect Obama’s “rhetoric is postmodernist, and marks an agenda and vision that are aggressive, disruptive and apocalyptic,” Cardinal Francis Stafford told a Washington audience last month. “Gethsemane will not be marginal” during the Obama years, he added.
Writes syndicated conservative Catholic columnist George Weigel: “This year’s election cycle clarified decisively that the great public fissure in these United States is between the culture of life and the culture of death.”
Stafford and Weigel’s words recall another American conservative, the morose but brilliant Whittaker Chambers, invoker of a secular end times in which he feared, having left the Communist Party, that he had “joined the losing side.” Whatever its merits as theology or philosophy, such rhetoric -- and the ideas behind the words -- are unlikely to capture the American electorate’s imagination.
Twenty-first century America is simply less white, less Protestant and less male, in terms of the electorate, than it used to be. Two-thirds of Hispanic voters embraced Obama, as did 95 percent of African Americans, 77 percent of Jewish voters, a majority of women, and 70 percent of young voters.
But what of those “culture of life Catholics,” those “Reagan Democrats,” said to be key to the election? Obama won not only a majority of the Catholic vote, but -- in a blow to the conservative dream of equating religious fervor with Republicanism -- split evenly with Sen. John McCain among weekly Mass attendees.
Political scientist Norman Ornstein writes: “For Republicans, the danger is that their only reliable voting bloc may remain older white guys. Make that older Protestant white guys. Ouch.”
President-elect Obama, in response to a question on the First Family’s quest for a pet, said his preference was for “a mutt, like me.” The United States is increasingly and irrevocably a nation of mutts.
Can a political movement founded on preserving what it sees best about white Protestant America thrive in such an environment? It is hard to see how.
But what of those “culture of life Catholics,” those “Reagan Democrats,” said to be key to the election? Obama won not only a majority of the Catholic vote, but -- in a blow to the conservative dream of equating religious fervor with Republicanism -- split evenly with Sen. John McCain among weekly Mass attendees.
....Political scientist Norman Ornstein writes: “For Republicans, the danger is that their only reliable voting bloc may remain older white guys. Make that older Protestant white guys. Ouch.”
This guy’s got it drop dead correct. I’ve seen it coming for years. The people who support the GOP live in a fantasy world. The “Country Club” set of the GOP don’t give a hoot about anything except offshoring their profits and ensuring they don’t miss the last plane out. The GOP is done; when they call I tell them I only want them to do me a favor..............I want my refund!
The real problem is that conservatives have not spent a penny, nor given a minute, to the idea of cultivating conservative candidates. They always work off the idea that they just spring up out of nowhere. This is like hoping you grow corn when you haven’t planted corn.
Conservatives of all varieties should set up a perpetual 20 year plan for candidates. Most of the year is schooling about how to be both candidates and congressmen and senators. Then they have to act as part of successful incumbents campaign staffs for at least one election before they can run themselves.
This would mean that not only would they be prepared to run a race with a good expectation of winning, but they would also enter the job knowing how to do their job, and also knowing how to avoid pitfalls.
And throughout the whole thing, the lesson that is pounded into their heads is that party discipline wins all the way around. Going off on your own, unless the party authorizes it, which sometimes it does, is a recipe for both individual and collective disaster.
If conservatives would do this, it would guarantee conservative rule for decades.
The “conservative” movement in this country has been infiltrated and divided by socialists, thereby causing it’s downfall.
We let the media define “conservatism,” which is now thought of as “the FAR religious right.” It will be the death of our country.
the GOP don’t give a hoot about anything except offshoring their profits and ensuring they don’t miss the last plane out.....
The unhinged leaders in the whack left do the same thing.....
Frankly, I can’t blame them. We live in a heavily armed society driven largely by envy, hate, and lust for drugs and money. The U.S. is another Beirut waiting for the lid to blow off.
Wonder what the male - female ratio and average age are on FR?
Does anyone know?
An excellent point and suggestion!
I think it is wrong focus: I mean, on race and Protestantism.
He is correct that the Buckley/Reagan conservative coalition is broken, but the fault lines are fiscal conservatism vs. militarist globalism and cultural conservatism vs. permissive libertarianism. These are diverse worldviews and McCain lacked a unifying message, so the old coalition wandered off in various directions. I, for example, wrote in Chuck Baldwin.
I’d be the first to say that theological differences between Catholics and Protestants are profound. I would also venture as far as to say that they ultimately will find their expression in politics. But I don’t see the present rightwing politics reflect the theological divisions, not yet.
With John McCain, and a bunch of other RINOs in 2008 and 2006, the Republicans did not give Catholic or Reagan Democrats anyone to vote for.
As long as RINOs are running the party, the Republicans will be out of touch with the bulk of honest, moral hard-working Americans who are overwhelmingly conservative.
Even as the party sinks lower into an abyss with RINO policies, its leadership and the suck-up pundits are demanding the party further depart from its conservative values and adopt Democrat-lite ones.
Don’t expect much change until the whole leadership cabal - RNC, RNCC, RSSC, etc. is cleaned out.
—As long as RINOs are running the party, the Republicans will be out of touch with the bulk of honest, moral hard-working Americans who are overwhelmingly conservative.—
This assumes that there is a definition of just what a “RINO” is; there is, after all, no clear definition of just what a “Republican” is. Until 1980, after all, people like Gerald Ford, Bob Michel, and Nelson Rockefeller were the face of the GOP, and all were squishy moderates. Even Nixon was no conservative (unless compared to McGovern). Basically he was LBJ redux; hawkish on Vietnam, but bloated the federal government all to hell. I fear that conservatives are grasping at a thin reed in relying on the GOP, but I’m not sure what the alternative is.
I’ve said it before. “RINO” really applies to us, not the big-government, Democrat-Lite “Rockefeller Republicans.” We conservatives are the true “Republicans in Name Only.” It may be time to cast the Republican party aside and develop something that will truly promote the values that I still believe the majority of Americans actually hold. The American Party, anyone?
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