Posted on 08/22/2009 7:59:20 AM PDT by 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.
Tanenhaus belongs on IMUS and MSNBC where he will try to push this book.
Best literary work on the subject of the Hiss-Chambers Case is still 'Witness'.
I'm not talking about Bush. I'm talking about the rank and file American people. The tea parties. The town hall meetings. Where were they during the Bush years? For the most part, silently on his side, choosing to resist the Democrats with all their might. Even here, it was dangerous to criticize GW and his policies. It was wagon circling in the extreme, and it was conducted by the same people who now rise up. I'm saying we, the conservatives, need to be independent of the GOP. Clearly, our best hopes lie there for results, but we must consider ourselves separate from them. We must have our own nuclear option, which in the end, is Obama and a DEM congress. We must take to the town halls when the GOP spends more than it has. We must go full bore on BOTH parties. Neither party has a record worth defending on the central issue, which is spending, and scope of power. We must keep the heat on, and on, and on, and aim it at the entire operation.
...and later on...
The tea parties. The town hall meetings. Where were they during the Bush years?
You are absolutley right. Conservatives were asleep at the wheel, resting on our laurals, or just enjoying the good economy.
I'm probably like a lot of other people...I had high hopes for George Bush..voted for him 2x, defended him. And while he did the country a lot of good, he also did a lot to hurt the country.
If the Conservatives are able to get their foot back in the political door in 2010, we will still fail IF WE DON'T KEEP UP the town halls, or at least significant pressure on the politicians. I don't care if Republicans wind up taking the presidency, house and senate in 2012, the pressure from us CANNOT stop.
I don't think that's it. I think it was more that conservatives made a calculated decision to defend GWB against the left and discourage criticism. Events conspired to make it so. First, the Florida debacle, then 9-11, then war in Iraq, all induced the "circle the wagons" defensive posture that characterized the era. There were just a few exceptions--immigration, Harriet Miers, and Dubai. Anyway, it wasn't resting on laurels. It was a defensive posture brought on by the hostility and tactics of the left, and by events that seemed to require extreme loyalty. In my view, this grass roots movement must keep on the Congress. Why only the most extreme proposals like health care? Clearly the meetings had an impact. Why not keep pressing, and pressing, and pressing, all on the core issues--spending and scope of power.
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