It's getting to be embarrassing to be a conservative

These days it's getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.

These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They're dumb and crazy.

Conservative pundit David Kilnghoffer has a great op-ed in today's LA Times that nicely captures what I'm on about:

Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.

What has become of conservatism? ... With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of "neocons" versus "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons. ...

Conservatism wasn't just a policy agenda, a set of partisan gripes or a football team seeking victory on the electoral field. Above all, it was a satisfying, sophisticated critique of modern, materialist culture, pointing a way out and up from liberalism.

Let's tick off ten things that make this conservative embarrassed by the modern conservative movement:

1. A poorly educated ex-sportwriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a -- if not the -- leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination.

2. Tom Tancredo calling President Obama “the greatest threat to the United States today" and arguing that he be impeached. Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies--however misguided--is an impeachable offense is just nuts.

3. Similar nonsense from former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, who IBD column was, as Doug Marconis observed, "a wildly exaggerated attack on President Obama’s record in office." Actually, it's more foaming at the mouth.

4. As Doug also observed, "The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine." Indeed, "when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, and the White House in 2000, the desire to use the levers of power to create “compassionate conservatism” won our over any semblance of fiscal conservatism. Instead of tax cuts and spending cuts, we got tax cuts along with a trillion dollar entitlement program, a massive expansion of the Federal Government’s role in education, and two wars. That’s not fiscal conservatism it is, as others have said, fiscal insanity." Yet, today's GOP still has not articulated a message of real fiscal conservatism.

5. Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to out=st Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?

10. The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?

Update: Patterico says the foregoing are "reasons that conservatives should not support the Republican party," not reasons for being embarrassed about being a conservative. Fair enough. I'd accept that as a friendly amendment, but we're not friends.

I am reminded of Russell Kirk's great essay on Republican errors, in which he wrote that "in my lamenting of the present state of Republican leadership in Washington, I am more moved by sorrow than by wrath." Unfortunately, the present GOP leadership in Washington continues making many of the same errors of which Kirk complained 20 years ago. As such, sorrow begins to give way to wrath.

Follow up article by the "good" professor:

Tom Smith Replies to my Embarrassment Post
Much of the right side of the blogosphere through[sic] a collective hissy fit [that would be us, fellow FReepers - Yo-Yo] over my post about how its becoming embarrassing to be associated with the conservative movement. Much of it was stiff and nonsense. Most of it served just to prove my point about the add combination of viciousness and vacuity pervasive in today's right. As an old-fashioned conservative whose role models were people like Buckley, Kirk, Reagan, Kemp, and their ilk, I find it off-putting, at best. But I've got too much on my plate to respond item by item. (having three book contracts hanging over one's head may not focus the mind quite so much as the prospect of being hanged, but it's a close second.)
I do want to take note of Tom Smith's post, however. It's a fair and constructive critique. I commend it to your attention.

And the good Mr. Smith's missive:

Thoughts on conservative style and substance
Tom Smith

My friend Steve Bainbridge has attracted a lot of outraged attention for his lament that conservatives are no longer as old school stylish as WFB was back in the day and for his implication that many currently on the Right are embarrassing. Some of this comes down to purely personal tastes and preferences but some of it is political in interesting ways, and thus I am moved to share some thoughts on what some are saying has already become a tedious discussion. Alas this is usually the point at which I enter an argument.

I should disclose that I consider Steve a friend and I'm an admirer of his scholarship, use his book in my class and so on and so forth. At the risk of diverting any wrath from him to me, which I certainly do not want to do, I think we should acknowledge that he has some points, but then qualify or discount some of them. Also, I don't want to be putting words into his mouth -- I am working with my interpretation of what I take to be the gist of his general inquietude about current conservative style.

So there is a tradition is this country of a sort of old school, Tory, elitist conservatism and there was a strain of that in Bill Buckley's conservatism that he revived after the War. I think his was an idealized version of it. He was the son of a wealthy Catholic businessman, more cosmopolitan and intellectual than the crusty old WASP Bonesman conservatism that he seem to affect. Though, in truth, I think the Buckley style was just an invention of his own, analogous to the partly fictional Old North Country aristocratic Catholic style that Evelyn Waugh invented and affected in Brideshead Revisited. This is the style of a conscious traditionalism and it is has long been a part of anything you could call conservatism in this country and personally I think a very valuable part.

But, and this is a critical point I think, something new and interesting is happening at the moment in this country, or maybe something not so new, but happening in a new way. And here one has to be careful not to go all dopey and Noonanesque. I don't think any of it makes sense except against the background of new communications technologies that are just transforming our society. Progressive historians love to go on about the transportation and communications revolution of the nineteenth century, but we are really in the middle of a gigantic communications revolution now. One thing we are seeing is an enormous expansion of the intellectual engagement of ordinary people, many of whom turn out to be not so ordinary, in national politics. Legacy institutions and affiliations and the prestige and style that go with them mean something but not what they used to. But it's not all good. The disruption caused by this revolution creates opportunities for all sorts of people. Indeed, I think our current president is one who would never have stepped into an office he really is not qualified for except for the fact that we are living through a time of profound disruption in many ways. And one of the things that means is that many shrill, rude, out of key and downright offensive voices are getting heard that before would have been filtered out by various intermediary institutions. That's not an unalloyed good.

Just to take one of Steve's points -- I agree with him in a general way that the legacy conservative media of talk radio (if this is what he is saying, otherwise it is just me) has lost a lot of its freshness and has matured into a medium that leaves a lot to be desired as any sort of thought leader or opinion shaper. I'm reluctant to be specific but I will just say a lot of time, right wing radio talkers just seem to be selling schtick, using conservatism the way some insincere televangelists use religion. And that's to be expected. If people were angels, we should indeed support progressive government. It's only in the real world that we need such strict limits on power.

Or take Sarah Palin, who graduated from the University of Idaho, whose alma mater was sung at my father's funeral, so don't neg the U of I around me. She's not as well educated as Michelle Obama. She's not as well educated as a President or Vice President should be. But had she gone to Harvard Law her ideas about the constitution would be a lot less sound than they happen to be. That is what we have come to. The prestige of such ancient institutions as we have are now used as weapons against the most fundamental principles of our frame of government and really our way of life. This means we are in a bad way. It's as if we have to defend ourselves against invaders and for the last 50 years West Point had been teaching that war is wrong and love is all you need. We have just put a former dean of the Harvard Law School on the Supreme Court in the certain knowledge that at the first opportunity she will rule that absolutely nothing in the Constitution prevents the federal government from requiring a person to buy insurance from some private company. Nothing. And it was probably the right thing to do because there were many far worse people our president would have been happy to nominate, all of them with resumes to die for.

One could go on. So does it embarrass me that talk radio conservatives, some of them some of the time are ranting hucksters selling prostate vitamins or gold or their latest semi-literate screed and rolling over every nuance in sight? Sure. Do I wish Sarah Palin could go through a time warp, spend ten years getting finished at say Oxford in 1920, Notre Dame in 1950 and the University of Chicago Law School in 1970? Sure. But there are others, too, like Mitch Daniels with his reading list and Chris Christie with his massive gonads. They are not embarrassing but encouraging. But the point is, being embarrassed in the least of our problems. I'm sorry I have to run around in my underwear trying to extinguish my burning house, but my house is on fire.

But at the same time, the embarrassments point to some genuine concerns, just not the most urgent ones perhaps. Those fighting the progressives, the statists, the current administration, have to be aware of the needs to build new institutions, educate up and comers, and trim old, dead wood. If somebody has become or is an embarrassment to good, old cause, then that's a problem. Embarrassment is your good sense and taste trying to tell you something.

Yet it needs to be remembered that embarrassment is also a weapon that the enemies of liberty and our best traditions have used with great effect. We are supposed to be embarrassed to, for example, believe in God, to think that Queer Theory is a joke, that Derrida is a fraud, that John Donne is a much better poet than Sylvia Plath let alone that ubiquitous African American woman who is always showing up knowing why the caged bird sings, and who writes the most dreadful drivel. To be embarrassed is to have standards and so much of whatever it is you should call the left these days is about the abandonment of moral standards, in which I include those of taste. So one can be a little embarrassed about the low points of current conservatism, but one has to consider the alternatives.

Tom Smith, this is for you:

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