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.
"The Tories should stop worrying about whether their view of the world works in theory and concentrate more on generating ideas that work in practice. They can live without ideology; what they urgently need is balls." --------------- Are Freeper conservatives more focused on ideology or results? What say you?
It wasn’t conservatism that failed. What failed were people who pretended to be conservative, but were nothing of the sort.
Mr. Tanenhaus is full of excrement.
Conservatism was never dead, in fact the failure of Bush and Obama just reinforce that true conservatism has always been the answer. Militant global socialism, by any name, will always fail. At least more and more Americans are realizing it.
Bingo to both of you!
Best he stick to his neck of the woods.
This is more an apt description of the Democrats. This is horse sh!t pure and simple.
I basically see this as someone saying “Do as I say, not as I do.” In other words, get rid of all opposition, no matter if it is right or wrong.
Wishful thinking on their part.
Oh, almost forgot the question. Ideology or results?
Well, it takes both I think, but right now, Conservatives are DEMANDING results...
Conservative ideology is like a “test tube” and the “demand” is bubbling out of it like one of those high school experiments in which fire and smoke belch from the test tube while everyone in class is standing way back.
Now, we just have to point the test tube in the right direction...and keep the test tube supplied with the materials needed to continue the flame and smoke!
“Is Bill O’Reilly conservatism’s mortician?”
***********************
he sure ain’t doin it no good!
Within the next year there will be a book that covers the split in the Democrat Party as it moves inexorably to the left and assumes the de facto title of Social Democrat Party.
It was OK, but Weinstein's is better.
Conservatives...want to destroy rather than to preserve.
Right. That's why every Tea Party and Townhall meeting Conservatives are arguing for preservation of and return to a Constitutional Republic and adherence to the virtues of liberty, freedom and individualism as opposed to failed collectivism.
This guy is completely out of touch with reality. Its the communists who want to totally destroy the Republic and replace it with Soviet style oppression and tyranny.
YEAH YEAH....this is the same BS that the idiot class tried to sell after NIXON..... Didn’t hold true then and it CERTAINLY is not going to hold true now.
I’m sure we will get 100’s of these fake obits before the 2010 elections.
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