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By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in Culture | The Supposed Death Of Conservatism — Comments (2) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

So George Packer has written a tome of sorts on "The Fall of Conservatism." The piece has received a lot of attention in the Blogosphere, with the right-of-center half expressing some dismay and wringing its hands (this reaction is not universal but it is prevalent) and the left-of-center half expressing undiluted delight and happiness (this reaction is much more prevalent). Then, there are the outliers; Andrew Sullivan, that well-known "Conservative of Doubt" whose Burkean tendencies naturally caused him to support the ultra-Burkean Barack Obama for President is also taken with the Packer piece. Meanwhile, I'm just writing to point out that much of the piece is overwrought and that the alarmism of the title is inversely proportional to the article's accuracy.

There's a great deal more. Read on . . .

Packer states that the beginnings of modern-day conservatism could be traced to "1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history." This is a curious history, to say the least. Most conservatives trace the beginnings of modern day conservatism to William F. Buckley, Jr.'s heroic efforts in creating National Review and the 1964 Presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, which lost but which set the stage for the revival of the conservative movement and the electoral triumphs of Ronald Reagan. Of course, Packer's reasons for doing this are obvious. He wants to revive Nixon's reputation as an angry and resentment-driven divider and to slyly imply--as he does--that conservatism is just like Nixon in that it pits American against American. The problem Packer's thesis runs into is the fact that Nixon was, at best, a non-ideological President. At worst--at least from the standpoint of conservatives--Nixon was a "me too" Republican, acceding to the wishes of the remnants of the New Deal coalition far more often than he showed a willingness to break up that coalition. A President who imposes wage and price controls--as Nixon did--can hardly be called a modern day conservative, and yet Packer seeks to carry off portraying the Nixon-Buchanan political partnership as the beginnings of modern conservatism, presumably with a straight face.

Incidentally, a Control-F of Packer's article finds that he referenced Buckley fifteen times, with most of the references coming at the end and one of them found as part of a caption to a drawing at the top of Packer's article. With all of those references, one would think that Packer would find it in himself to acknowledge the genuine history of the conservative movement and place Buckley ahead of the Nixon-Buchanan partnership as one of the chief progenitors of conservatism. Still, one must count one's blessings. Packer mentions Goldwater merely six times, all of them in passing and one of them as part of the aforementioned drawing caption. There is no real effort whatsoever on Packer's part to grapple with Goldwater's legacy as one of the progenitors of the modern conservative movement.

Packer seeks to argue that "positive polarization"--begun by Nixon--is part and parcel of the conservative movement. He explains:

. . . Because we can't anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era's key words--"élite," "mainstream," "real," "values," "patriotic," "snob," "liberal"--seem as potent as ever. Indeed, they have shown up in the current campaign: North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another "limousine liberal." But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that's brain-dead. Among Republicans, there is no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people.

When I read this, a question naturally pops in my head: Where is the "energy," the "fresh thinking," the "ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people" on the left side of the partisan divide? Honestly. What new ideas have liberals come up with recently? The closest thing to a transformation that contemporary American liberalism experienced in recent times was represented by the advent of Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1990s. That has been cast to the side; Hillary Clinton ran away from her husband's New Democrat legacy on a whole host of issues--most notably trade policy. Bill Clinton has helped her in this regard, a fact that is as momentous as any recent political phenomenon. Al Gore, another New Democrat, has also cast off this particular legacy and Joe Lieberman, who in many ways was the original New Democrat--garnering an endorsement from William F. Buckley himself when he beat Lowell Weicker and got elected to the Senate in 1990--has now gone over to endorse John McCain. Contemporary American liberalism has gone back to its tired Rooseveltian incarnation and now provides nothing new in the realm of policy. It's all about taxing "the rich" (and the definition of "rich" is quite generous), class warfare, a resumption of protectionist attitudes, a dramatically adversarial relationship with private enterprise, a dramatic expansion of government--seemingly in order to prove anew that the words "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" are some of the most dangerous words in the English language and the same unwillingness to take on foreign and national security challenges that we saw from the Mondale contingent of the Democratic Party back in the 1980s. I suppose that this is the reason why contemporary liberalism has its own "key words" to describe the conservative enemy; "wingnuts," "Repugs," "plutocrats" and all sorts of euphemisms to claim that anyone who is not a contemporary liberal is stupid. One could therefore turn Packer's words around on him and argue that "[a]mong Democrats, there is no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people." I presume that condemnation of contemporary liberalism will come in the next edition of The New Yorker. It is, after all, as justified as Packer's condemnation of contemporary conservatism.

Packer's arguments notwithstanding, there are certainly fresh ideas that Republicans and conservatives can embrace in order to appeal to the public and elevate public policy discourse to boot. Many of them can be found here. But one of the things that Packer ignores is that much of the intellectual energy on the conservative and right-of-center libertarian side of the ledger must now be devoted to fighting for ideas that are already out in the public square and have not been tried--school choice and tax reform being prime examples. Pushing for the implementation of these ideas is as important--if not more so--as coming up with "new ideas." And again, it is necessary to ask why, if new ideas are so important and it is so fashionable to attack conservatives for supposedly not having "new ideas," it is not equally fashionable to attack liberalism for being "brain-dead." The epithet is as fitting on the other side of the partisan divide.

Packer also brings out the old canard that "[c]onservatives knew how to win elections; however, they turned out not to be very interested in governing." This is fatuous nonsense that feeds into a common liberal shibboleth, which goes as follows: Because conservatives don't like Big Government, they should not be put in charge of any government. It's a clever attempt to keep conservatives out of power but there is no intellectual coherence to the argument. There is no prerequisite to liking government in order to be able to run it. Indeed, the political fortunes of Republicans have fallen precisely because once many Republicans got into power, they ended up liking government all too much and using its considerable resources to build personal empires--a project that included bringing home the pork as avidly and religiously as any Democrat ever did. Contra Packer's arguments and the implication behind them, it is even more necessary now than it has been in the past to have conservatives and right-of-center libertarians in office who possess a healthy skepticism--if not an outright dislike--of government. Such an attitude will enable conservatives and right-of-center libertarians to pare down government's reach and scope, re-orient its mission to the plainly minimalist version spelled out in the Constitution, to devolve power to states and localities and to ensure that this state of affairs remains, backed up by a political coalition with at least as much staying power and electoral appeal as the one that brought us the New Deal and the Great Society.

Doubtless, Packer realizes the political danger to his side of the political debate inherent in my consummation devoutly to be wished. Thus the statements by him and others that if a certain political class does not like government, they should not be elected to public office. It's a convenient trope that if accepted, will allow for big-government liberals to continue getting elected, for government to continue to expand and for the inflation, the onerous tax rates, the recessions and the weakened military and national security state the United States suffered during the 1970s to come back with a vengeance and a fury. If you think that current socioeconomic conditions are tough-sledding, you ain't seen nothing yet and with the use of lousy argumentation, George Packer is determined to show you.

We also get this:

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, in his new book, "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008" (Harper), argues that Reagan "learned how to seize and keep control of the terms of public debate." On taxes, race, government spending, national security, crime, welfare, and "traditional values," he made mainstream what had been the positions of the right-wing fringe, and he kept Democrats on the defensive. He also brought a generation of doctrinaire conservatives into the bureaucracy and the courts, making appointments based on ideological tests that only a genuine movement leader would impose. The rightward turn of the judiciary will probably be the most lasting achievement of Reagan and his movement.

In retrospect, the Reagan Presidency was the high-water mark of conservatism. "In some respects, the conservative movement was a victim of success," Wilentz concludes. "With the Soviet Union dissolved, inflation reduced to virtually negligible levels, and the top tax rate cut to nearly half of what it was in 1980, all of Ronald Reagan's major stated goals when he took office had been achieved, leaving perplexed and fractious conservatives to fight over where they might now lead the country."

Assuming that this is true, conservatives are entirely right to wonder if there ever was a time when contemporary liberalism was "a victim of success." Up until now, of course, the victimization of contemporary liberalism has come from its manifest failures on a whole host of policy fronts. Conservatives may not like being "victims" of their own success, but we will take it over being victimized by failure any day of the week.

Much of the rest of the article is devoted to quoting GOP and conservative denizens to show that the GOP--and by extension, conservatism--are in trouble. As Jonah Goldberg rightly points out, "GOP" and "conservatism" are not interchangeable terms. He also points out that much of the supposed conservative "crisis" stems from the temporary political misfortunes of the Republican Party. When the economy has slowed or contracted, the President's party naturally gets blamed (never mind that this current "recession" has been exceedingly mild thus far and that unemployment is still at a shockingly low 5%). When the nation is engaged in an unpopular war, the President's party naturally gets blamed (never mind that the implementation of the surge and the current counterinsurgency strategy are working to augment the American military reconstruction effort). These facts may currently weigh down the GOP's political fortunes but they do not necessarily entail "The Fall of Conservatism."

Let us remember that we have heard similar death knells for the GOP (and for conservatism, if Packer insists on the terms being interchangeable) in the past. Theodore White's brilliant opus on the 1980 Presidential campaign contains the following passage on the state of the Republican Party after the 1976 elections:

. . . Whether an election is won or lost by the narrowest of margins, we of the press must write the ritual follow-up story, headlined as in November and December 1976: "The 'Profound Inadequacy' of the GOP" (Washington Post), "Politicians Find GOP Fighting For Its Survival" (New York Times); "Southern Republicans: Their Plight Is Growing Worse" (Washington Post); "The GOP: Dying For Real?" (National Observer); "Feeble Grand Old Party" (New Republic). And finally, the words of one of the Republican party's veteran wisemen, John Deardourff, a manager of the Ford campaign, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal: "It takes a long time for a party to die or be killed, and I assume that there will be a lot of ferment of a couple of years. But the party's prospects certainly are not very bright."

Four years later, Ronald Reagan was elected President of the United States.

You see, there are no permanent victories in politics. Neither are there permanent defeats. Indeed, so long as people like the subject of this post mouth off about "The Autumn of Wingnuttia," conservatism's revival and return is practically assured. And consider the excerpt found here:

Republican John McCain's game plan for beating Democrat Barack Obama rests on one huge assumption: Despite an unpopular war, an uncertain economy and the GOP's beleaguered status, the country still leans more to the right than to the left.

"There are going to be stark choices between a liberal Democrat and a conservative Republican," McCain says at nearly every turn as he seeks to portray Obama as out of step with the nation. The more the GOP nominee-in-waiting can frame the debate along those lines, and capture a larger chunk of the electorate's center, the better his chance to eke out a victory in an extraordinarily challenging political environment.

[. . .]

"Both candidates will represent change. The question will be the right type of change versus the wrong kind of change," said Steve Schmidt, a senior strategist for McCain. "Senator Obama's inexperience, his lack of judgment, his naivete, his lack of accomplishment will all be part of the debate."

So will ideology.

"There is an overwhelming difference between the right-of-center John McCain and the most liberal member of the Senate, Barack Obama," said Frank Donatelli, the Republican National Committee's deputy chairman. "The contrast is great on the issues."

Indeed, the GOP already is portraying the Democrat - who honed his political skills in Chicago after attending Harvard University - as a big-government advocate who wants to raise capital-gains taxes and recklessly pull U.S. troops out of Iraq and is willing to meet with leaders of U.S. enemy nations.

"By all yardsticks, this man is a legitimate leftist candidate," said Ron Kaufman, a veteran GOP strategist. "The good news is you don't have to paint him as that. You just need a mirror."

Dismissing the criticism, Obama spokesman Bill Burton said: "This is less about left and right. It's about which candidate is going to take this country in a new direction."

(Emphasis mine.) George Will once said that if you asked a conservative whether he/she was a conservative, the answer would be "Darn tootin'!" When a liberal is asked the same question, the answer is "Labels don't matter!"

Now, read the Burton quote above one more time. Will's observation continues to hold, doesn't it? And so long as it does, in the long term, conservatism will do just fine.

Heck, maybe it will have the chance to be "a victim of success" yet again!