The Death of Conservatism. By Sam Tanenhaus. Random House; (book review)

Economist ^ | August 20, 2009 | Economist

[ex-snook]

American conservatism

Overdoing it Aug 20th 2009 From The Economist print edition

The Death of Conservatism. By Sam Tanenhaus. Random House; 144 pages; $17. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

THE recent implosion of the conservative movement is one of the great puzzles of American political history. Four years ago the Republican Party was in charge of the White House and both chambers of Congress. Today the party is locked out of power in Washington entirely, confused about its future and dominated by its know-nothing fringe.

Is Bill O’Reilly conservatism’s mortician?

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, is well qualified to explain this extraordinary debacle. His biography of Whittacker Chambers, a Communist turned conservative hero, was first-rate, and he has been working on a magnum opus on William Buckley, a more recent conservative hero, for years.

Mr Tanenhaus argues that the Republican Party’s losses in 2008 were not mere temporary setbacks but the death throes of a political movement. Conservatives may continue to produce a great deal of sound and fury. But they signify nothing. They are locked in the past: obsessed by problems that the rest of the country has gone beyond (such as gay marriage) and incapable of offering solutions to real calamities, such as the recent economic crisis. As policymakers struggled to save the economy from collapse earlier this year, conservative activists railed irrelevantly about “liberal fascism”.

Many conservatives blame their recent failures on George Bush’s “betrayal” of the conservative movement. Mr Tanenhaus is right to give this argument short shrift. Mr Bush did more than any other American president—certainly more than the sainted Ronald Reagan—to give the various divisions of the conservative army what they wanted: tax cuts for the anti-government brigades; a ban on stem-cell research for the evangelicals; war with Iraq for the neoconservatives. The subsequent mess revealed the movement’s internal incoherence and the difficulty of turning a protest movement into a governing coalition.

The author argues that the debacle has been a long time a-coming. Over the past 50 years or so American conservatives have transformed themselves into latter-day Jacobins—slogan-spouting ideologues who want to destroy government rather than reform it. They are so blinded by partisanship that they are incapable of seeing any vices in their own side or any virtues in their opponents, and so consumed by anger that they define themselves by what they want to destroy rather than to preserve. American conservatism is dying as a movement precisely because it has abandoned the principal insights of classical conservatism: for example, that government is a precondition for civilisation.

It is hard not to sympathise with Mr Tanenhaus’s distaste for the likes of Bill O’Reilly, a commentator from the populist right. But his analysis is nevertheless unsatisfactory. Part of the problem lies in balance. Mr Tanenhaus has lots of fascinating things to say about the early contributors to the National Review, the magazine founded by Buckley. But he tells us little about the right’s more recent reactions to big structural changes in American society, such as the browning of the population. His book is all preface and no body.

Then there is his otherworldliness. Mr Tanenhaus has no time for the shrillness of the political right. But what about the shrillness of the political left? He condemns the conservative movement for its anti-government fundamentalism. But doesn’t somebody need to be pushing in the opposite direction from all those empire-builders in the bureaucracy? “The Death of Conservatism” is essentially an appeal for unilateral disarmament by the right masquerading as a fair-minded report on the state of the battle.

[ex-snook]

"Oh, almost forgot the question. Ideology or results?"

Thanks for noticing! {;-)

Methinks Freeper Conservatives may be creeping more toward ideology rather than results. Results are evaluated on Election Day. The greatest good for the greatest number for the longest time would suit me as the Conservative aim.

[org.whodat]

In English, that would be brown stuff, sort of like green bs, correct???

[Chi-townChief]

Don’t believe the hype.

[Chi-townChief]

So when was this written?? 1948???

[lakertaker]

They also predicted the end of conservatism after the LBJ 1964 landslide

[zeestephen]

Without political “ideology,” there is no political “practice.”

Not for Conservatives, anyway.

In “practice,” every Conservative compromise since Teddy Roosevelt has moved America further to the Left.

Compromise by Democrats simply means Democrats agree to postpone the Leftward movement for a year or two.

American Conservatism has never been defeated, just demoralized.

We have had no national political leadership since Newt began to move to the political Center in 1996.

We have had no national intellectual leadership since William F. Buckley retired from National Review.

Our politically and economically insane immigration policies, which are supported by much of the GOP leadership, have added almost 30 million voters to the Democratic Party since 1980.

I think much of the grassroots anger and passion we have seen at the Town Hall meetings can be traced directly to that lack of leadership.

I know many Freeper Conservatives passionately support Sarah Palin and Huckabee, but many other Conservatives, like me, worry that they do not have the gravitas to become national leaders.

This is a dark time for Conservatives.

But the strength and endurance of our movement is based on timeless principles and on looking reality straight in the eye.

I will never back down from those principles, even if the best I can do is post comments at Free Republic.

[Huck]

What we need are tea parties regardless of what party is in power. Conservative opposition popped up a few times during GW's tenure--immigration, Harriet Miers, Dubai ports. But on the most important issue, gubmint spending, there was no noticable outrage. There were some complaints, but no outrage.

The TV conservatives on Fox News all justified the deficits (it's war time, there are always deficits, as a % of GDP it's not that bad, etc etc). That's one reason why the DEMs now can complain that the tea parties are about party, not principle.

If conservatives want to win on principle, we need to have tea parties protesting GOP spending just as vigorously as we have them now. But the trouble is, when the GOP gets power, conservatives circle the wagons, and consider any criticism of the GOP as helping the DEMs. That was the prevailing attitude here on FR as well, and we're paying for it now. Literally and figuratively. The day we start protesting both parties is the day we start to have credibility with the broader public.

[rbg81]

More than any other reason, Conservatism is in trouble because it got outflanked. It abdicated the culture (Hollywood), MSM, and the education system to the Left. Then, for good measure, it allowed the military industrial complex to be dismantled. After that, it was just a matter of time. Now, as we see with the ECLA, the Left is also going after religion. Bottom line — the Left has been very good at infiltration and Conservatives have been lousy at countering it. This is because Conservatives are fundamentally fair while Liberals (despite what they say) are fundamentally unfair.

[Huck]

It abdicated the culture (Hollywood), MSM, and the education system to the Left.

Good points.

[Cicero]

A book on conservatism by the Book Review Editor of the New York Times is kind of like a book on the evils of mice written by a cat.

[Mister Da]

“THE recent implosion of the conservative movement is one of the great puzzles of American political history. Four years ago the Republican Party was in charge of the White House and both chambers of Congress.”

The author confuses Republicans with Conservatives. Pubs are just less liberal. The expansion of gov’t, spending, & debt by both Bushes was only marginally less than Clinton, Carter, & LBJ.

Conservatives have been reluctantly supporting Pubs because they SEEM to be the lesser of 2 evils.

I personally have abandoned that false choice. I'd rather an open liberal like Obama destroy this country than have a closet liberal like McCain do so in the name of conservatism.

Like the Carter years, we need to get a good bellyful of big, greedy, wasteful gov’t, hopefully to realize just how bad it really is, & be willing to do something about it.

Namely, vote them ALL out - Pubs & Rats, and replace them with representatives pledged to repeal & abolish the welfare & nanny state; pledged to stop deficit spending immediately & payoff the debt ASAP; and pledged to outlaw pork barrel spending. (That's just my short list)

[Darth Reardon]

Are Freeper conservatives more focused on ideology or results? What say you?

Fascinating question that I have been wrestling around with for awhile. The fact that I couldn't decide what I would do in Hank's position really made the book enjoyable for me.

I'd say the balance has tipped for me, and I'm heading down the ideological path. The Constitution is, IMO, little more than wallpaper these days, and while that fact both bothered and disappointed me, I was willing to live with the system we had. But lately, the more the left pushes, the more I push back. Actually, I think they may have pushed me from conservative to libertarian, but I'm still working out for myself just what those labels mean.

I've been neutral on the question of supporting the Republicans (stopping the Democrats) while allowing the party to slide left. We've got to stop the slide, and it's gonna hurt but this time around we had to protect the SCOTUS, and last time it was, well, "there's always an Arquillian battle cruiser". I THINK I would have voted for McCain, but there was a chance I would not have -- but then Palin came along and I was able to avoid the question. (I really wish we could vote either for OR AGAINST a candidate, I'd have been happy to vote against Obama but not for McCain -- but then we could have someone win with negative votes).

[Jeff Chandler]

tax cuts for the anti-government brigades;

TEMPORARY tax relief which kept the economy from crashing.

a ban on stem-cell research for the evangelicals;

Repeating Leftist talking points. There was never any "ban". Since when does a rufusal to commit tax dollars constitute a ban?

war with Iraq for the neoconservatives.

The war was to be proactive against Islamic terror. (Actually, a credible case could be made against the war on conservative grounds.)

[Blind Eye Jones]

Ideology or results? I believe there is a shift in the landscape to the left. Many Americans believe that Americans by nature are progressive — technological as well as values: gay marriage, abortions, European type socialism, etc. — and they see conservatism as essentially un American. Conservatism is an embarrassing relic for these people. Great society is their key word not nation state. These Americans are farsighted citizens of the world, therefore, any mention of patriotism makes them cringe — it’s a gauche concept, a holdover from darker, more primitive times. This type of Americanism is what is advanced through MSM in different forms and the public has bought into it. It has trickled down from the European styled elites to the masses and American street fashion — tattoos and body piercings — have trickled up to the elites. America will be a wondrous sight to behold in 20 years, if anybody can still recognize it.

[ex-snook]

"If conservatives want to win on principle, we need to have tea parties protesting GOP spending just as vigorously as we have them now. But the trouble is, when the GOP gets power, conservatives circle the wagons, and consider any criticism of the GOP as helping the DEMs."

True. It seems to me that Freeper conservatives have not yet come to grips on what caused Democrat victories in 2006 and a win by a most inexperienced candidate in 2008. In the end principle has to convince hearts and minds by being effective. Bush was not effective. The polls told him he was going in the wrong direction. Staying the course led to defeat. They circled the wagons but were outnumbered.

[EternalVigilance]

his elementary error of conflating the GOP with conservatism. It goes downhill from there.

You took the words out of my mouth, almost verbatim.

The next clue this guy is "off" was in calling a majority of Americans a "know-nothing fringe."

File this one under *a million and one reasons the GOP is deader than a doornail*.

Conservatism is alive and well, though, thankfully.

[EternalVigilance]

A book on conservatism by the Book Review Editor of the New York Times is kind of like a book on the evils of mice written by a cat.

Or one by Bill Clinton on the wonders of chastity and faithfulness in marriage.

[EternalVigilance]

The only problem the conservative movement has is in having believed the Republican Party when they claimed to be conservative.

A very fixable problem.

[VRWC For Truth]

The author is a fool. RINOs sabotaged Conseratives. When the federal gov’t stops growing and shrinking for two decades, lets evaluate the results. It’s been 80 years of Liberalist folly.

[WVKayaker]

This book was printed in 1969, and is prescient, at least! The whole thing is worth buying and passing along!

THE RETURN TO REALITY, Clarence B.Carson, 1969

... The crisis of the American Republic is, from another angle, the threatened dissolution of society by fraud and other less subtle devices of violence. We have examined the fraud practiced by inflation. It is but one of many. It is commonplace today that the promises and platforms of politicians are empty promises. When they promise to provide their goodies without additional taxes, what man can believe them? Promises to stay out of foreign wars by Presidents at election time have at least twice been casually ignored. More generally, the debt of the United States constitutes a promise to pay, yet no fund exists for its retirement. The massive promises of the government by way of Social Security rest only on the government&'s future potential for taxation. The bonds of the United States are worth less at maturity than they were at the time of purchase, because of inflation, at least some of the time.

But these are, in a sense, at the surface of the pervasive fraud. What is fraud? It is the result of varying from the truth. It is prevarication-the successful telling of a lie in essence, But what if there is no truth? Then all statements purporting to be true are fraudulent, Or again, Ihere is no fraud because there is no truth, That is not quite the guise in which the matter presents itself.

On the one hand, we have been brought along on the flight from reality by the claims that there are no fixed realities. On the other, there is a body of thought that says that truth is relative to the person who sees it. This position is generally known as relativism. In essence, though, this is the position that there is no public truth. Fraud is surely licensed by such a position. To the extent that this doctrine has been spread, to the extent that its implications have begun to be realized, to that same extent fraud has become prevalent.

No contractual society can exist without public truth. Contracts are only enforceable to the extent that the words in them have fixed meanings. Any contract may be readily evaded if one may put whatever meaning to it that suits him. Indeed, this destroys the whole purpose of a contract,for it involves commitments which will occasion inconvenience to the parties. One's word can only be his bond when that word given has conveyed a proposition accurately to someone else. Historians have sometimes made fun with Calvin Coolidge's statements vis a vis the European war debts of World War I to the United States: "They hired the money, didn't they?" And he was saying: "They should pay it back." The humor should escape all honest men. Nations should not commit themselves to debts, and then claim that they should not have to pay them back. At any rate, contracts depend for their validity upon public truth.

In another way, the assault upon the bonds of society has gone on by way of the introduction of force into area after area of life. The family ties have been loosened by government intervention: compulsory school attendance, compulsory Social Security, taxation at such levels that many have difficulties meeting their family obligations. The so-called Generation Gap has been and is fostered by government. Young people are virtually forced into "peer group" surroundings by governmental school policies. They are freed from dependence on family by government scholarship programs. Government aid to the aged relieves the young of their responsibilities for their parents and grandparents. Aid to dependent children, so-called, frees women from dependence upon men. Communities lose their vitality as responsibility for looking after and caling for the indigents among them has been assumed by impersonal government agencies. At the deepest levels, the relations among men lose their free and voluntary character asgovernment prescribes more and more about what their character shall be.

The American Crisis

The crisis of the American Republic, then, is the threatened dissolution of the bonds of society. The violence, the disorder, the crime, the divorce, the juvenile delinquency, the riots, the strikes, the disruptive demonstrations, are the outward signs of the progress of an inward dissolution. Underlying these is the disintegration of the free individual contractual society. The American crisis is part of a world crisis-the crisis of a civilization disintegrating because its modes of relating man to man and community to community have been underrruned. Disillusion and delusion are rampant. The disillusion is with the modes of operation which are still half-way preserved in our institutions , with freely entered contracts, with marriage, with voluntary churches, with communities, with so-called bourgeois society, with international treaties , with nation-states, with law courts, and so on.

These cannot work, of course, as they are increasingly hampered by the intervention of force which has come to prevail. The delusion is that larger measures of force-by demonstrations. by riots, by the compulsive state-can bring accord. No wonder that crime increases, when men have been taught by generations of intellectuals that private property is theft, that one has a right to a "decent" living, that it is proper to take from those who have and distribute to those who have not, that freedom is the absence of responsibility, that entrepreneurs are sophisticated robbers, that wealthy nations should redistribute their wealth to poor nations, and so on.

Those who turn to overt violence are taking to heart the lessons they have been taught. If the state may use violence for such ends, why lay not individuals and groups? They are cutting out the middle man. All of this, again, is grist for the mills of Communists, who may and do use such disorders to advance their ends. Neither society nor civilization can survive without viable and enforceable contracts. Indeed, society itself depends at its most rudimentary level upon defined relationships which are, in effect, contracts. Society is that setting within which men exchange, converse, commune, succor, and benefit from the presence of one another. All of history testifies that men will serve and/ or be served by one another. The modes for this are four: (1) by contracts expressed in terms of money or in kind; ( 2) by service contracts, which is serfdom; (3) by out-and-out slavery; (4) by combinations of these. ...