James Joyner admonishes me over my FDL post last night. As the post was not especially intended to please a "conservative" ear, it is understandable that Joyner's response is what it is -- essentially, a reasonably civil raspberry. Fair enough. However, the post betrays certain misapprehensions which are worth identifying.
FDL's Thers is piling on the "has conservatism run out of ideas" bandwagon and inadvertently helped demonstrate why conservatism will never die....
It turns out that conservatism was never "an intellectual movement at all" but rather "an essentially nihilist politics of vicious opportunism, where the entire goal is power for its own sake." The forty percent or so of Americans who self-identify as conservative? "[C]ompletely crazy idiots."
Like political parties, political movements in the ascendancy invariably overreach. Too many conservative Republicans interpreted a narrow Electoral College victory in 2000, which gave them nominal control of the policymaking apparatus, as a universal mandate. A cottage industry of books insulting the forty percent of Americans who voted the other way as stupid (If Democrats Had Any Brains, They’d be Republicans), traitors (Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism), both (The Enemy Within, Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder) or barely worth talking to (How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)).
Now that the Republicans are down, too many on the other side are making the same mistake. Conservatism has been rejected! Everyone agrees with progressive ideals now! Only the stupid, racist few disagree these days!
It's not inconceivable that the November elections return the White House to Democratic hands, increase the party's House majority, and even provides a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate. But it's a lead pipe cinch that they'll screw it up, became the corrupt, power-at-all-costs goons that they now accuse their opponents of being, and piss off enough of the country that they'll be thrown out on their butts. Not because they're bad people who hate America but because that's what people in power do.
I never said that "everyone agrees with progressive ideals now." I didn't say it because I don't believe it. Neither do I especially need to be reminded of the fecklessness, past or present, of the Democratic party. I'm not sure why Joyner considers it an especially profound insight vouchsafed to only an enlightened few that entrenched political parties or movements tend to become corrupt, sclerotic, and thereby unpopular. I mean, well, duh. That's not a rebuttal to anything I said, but rather the recitation of a banal truism.
I was instead focusing upon "movement conservatism" and its conceptual relationship to a supposedly "pure" and "timeless" Platonic Ideal Conservatism, as in the formulation of noted tool Michael Goldfarb. [Correction; it was even bigger tool Dean Barnett, and thanks to Our Paul in comments for politely pointing this out.] But let's stress that Movement Conservatism is a specific, well, movement; the term identifies a specific group of people who did and said specific things for specific reasons -- and that current notions of what an Ideal Conservatism might be come from what these actual people actually said, and what they actually say.
As I said, Packer's article has its faults. But the complaint of its right-wing critics, that Packer fails to draw a distinction between the GOP and Ideal Conservatism, is so much wishful thinking. Joyner makes much of the tendency of "movements" to become corrupt, a point that Pat Buchanan recites in Packer's article somewhat more pithily:
Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."
And again, this is a perfectly banal observation, not a profound insight. What is really remarkable about the remark is that this is Pat Buchanan saying this about his time in the Nixon administration, and that he's just more or less gleefully informed us of how he and his accomplices successfully pulled off the Southern Strategy. What "Great Cause" did that serve?
Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s. Movement conservatism has nothing without Hatred of the Liberal, a point reinforced not least by the image with which Joyner chooses to adorn his post.
It's quite nice that Joyner deplores Coulter-level books and says their crudity is part of the reason the GOP is in trouble. However, this class of stuff is just a less sophisticated version of commonplace rhetoric you see emanating from everywhere else on the right these days. And if Joyner wants to dump it, fine, but the brute fact is that without accusations like, say, that Barack Obama is an un-American socialist, well, the GOP might as well just concede the election immediately. And everyone knows it. The right just cannot win if it renounces the politics of resentment, and that's all there is to it. You can't scrub ugly. You can't reboot Soviet Communism without perpetrating once more its rottenness, and you can't retool movement conservatism without it eventually fucking up royally.
Which is why I see no reason to believe that invocations of a "pure, timeless" conservatism are anything more than so much self-serving horseshit. If there were any substance or value to it as an intellectual concept, first of all, it would sound a lot less vapid. Sorry, "a belief in free markets, free people, and in the greatness of the American people and the American nation" is sonorous doxa, pure and simple. None of these terms means anything as far as policy goes and in the real world can be used to justify pretty much any absurdity, like, say, an immensely disastrous, ill-conceived invasion and occupation of a foreign nation justified by utterly disingenuous bullcrap.
I lack patience for invocations of ideological purity in the context of serious analysis. As I said at FDL, if "movement conservatism" were truly guided by lofty principles as opposed to nihilistic opportunism, history would have turned out differently. It sure would have been nice to see "movement conservatives" put their "principles" into action in say the fall of 2002.
"Intellectual movements" that end up unable to cope with empirical scientific data (global warming), that end up making excuses for torture, that depend upon self-flattering fantasies such as a belief in a partisan "liberal media," that delight in the sort of race-baiting nonsense we've already seen in this election season, have nowhere to go. It is eminently reasonable to draw the conclusion that there is just nothing to "movement conservatism" except a dead end. "Conservatism" as it is currently embodied just cannot handle the truth. It can't afford to.
This is why when someone like Sullivan strays from the fold on an issue like torture (!) he's given The Business; and it's also why when he tries to grapple with something like global warming, he ends up, well, wanking. (There's nothing essentially Burkean about a fucking carbon tax, Andrew). It's also why the "forward thinking" conservatives Packer discusses are able to say "this isn't working" but can't offer any solutions that aren't mere policy tinkering. Too many false premises.
And yes, liberalism has its problems too, but I wouldn't get too excited by that if I were a "conservative." When the other side can come up with "no more stupid wars" as a winning policy issue, you've dug yourself into a pretty deep hole. And, you know, when you've found yourself in a hole, stop wanking.
UPDATE: Rick Moran offers a rebuttal of my FDL piece.
The energy comes from George Packer’s New Yorker essay on the “Fall of Conservatism” which is still echoing around the blogs. In fact, it was this laughably shallow piece at Firedoglake that got me thinking about writing a series of blog posts on Packer's thesis. I thought I could do a much better job than this fellow if only because 1) my vocabulary allows me to get through an entire post without once using the word "f*ck"; and 2) I am not a half-crazed, obscenity spewing, ignoramus who missed the point of Packer’s essay and substituted a thesis of dubious logic and intellectually incoherent arm chair psychology for reasoned analysis.
Oh wait, that's not actually a rebuttal. I look forward to Moran's series of posts on Packer's article perhaps more than I can say.
Incidentally, Moran's claim that he has a larger vocabulary than I do because I like to say "fuck" is perhaps not defensible, but it's still fucking funny.