Is Conservatism Brain-Dead?

The real reason intellectual conservatism is on life support is that the Republican Revolution and their Great Experiment failed. Medicare is so mainstream that Teabaggers shout, "Keep the government out of my Medicare!" John McCain rails against Social Security while quietly collecting his checks monthly.

Social security, Medicare and the federal school lunch program succeeded. Roosevelt's heavy regulation of the financial markets succceeded until dismantled by the Republican Revolution.

Conservatives now have fallen back on Gore Vidal's "Socialism For rich; capitalism For poor!" and Nouriel Roubini "Gains privatized & losses socialized." Dean Baker in his book, "The Conservative Nanny State," debunks the myth that conservatives favor the market over government intervention. In fact, conservatives rely on a range of “nanny state” policies that ensure the rich get richer while leaving most Americans worse off. Corporate welfare has been maintained while other welfare programs have been pared. Conservatives have used the government to distribute income upward to higher paid workers, business owners and investors.

http://www.conservativenannystate.org/cnswebbook.pdf

They've lost their principles in an effort to do anything to win.

That about covers it.

I don't think so.

And I reject the comparison between "grassy knollers" and "birthers." There is at least some basis in fact for the grassy knoll theory. There is none whatsoever for the birthers. This is the difference between the two, and an important distinction to be made.

who would like no doubt to see us return to his era.

I would be careful about paying too much attention to him.

In this same column, he claims that Glenn Beck is inviting an intellectual conservative on his show regularly and if he keeps it up, rather than the showy rodeo-clown antics, the true shallowness of the liberal philosophy may actually be exposed.

He's kind of like a liberal who thinks Keith Olbermann spends too much time namecalling and imitating voices, and Rachel Maddow spends too much time using silly props and talking about cocktails.

He has no problem with conservatism as a philosophy that works. He just doesn't like the current packaging in which it's being sold.

. . . is garbage. I had hoped for some semblance of sanity in this column, but it ended right there.

which has transmogrified into a hostility to ideas in general.

The New Deal-style liberalism that Buckley started railing against in the late 40's was closely tied to modernism and early 20th century ideas of progress. It was based on the belief that human beings were blank slates and you could engineer society into any shape you chose. It was generally well-meaning but all too often ruthless and top-down and out of touch with ordinary human needs and the wisdom of long-established social institutions.

That flavor of liberalism was still around in the 60's. It was behind the assumption that you could implement school desegregation through massive busing and that neighborhood schools were of no importance -- that neighborhoods themselves, with their deep family ties and cultural roots, were of no importance.

But that sort of liberalism no longer exists. It got hammered from all sides -- by the critiques of Buckley-style conservatives on the right, by grassroots community organizers on the left, and by a general cultural sea-change down the middle.

The conservative writer quoted in the OP still thinks it exists. He says, "The single largest defect of modern conservatism, in my mind, is its insufficient ability to challenge liberalism at the intellectual level, in particular over the meaning and nature of progress," and goes on to decry "the left's belief in political solutions for everything."

But he's fighting ghosts -- thinking that if the right went back to its arguments of 40 years ago, the liberal targets of 40 years ago would still be there to hit. This is why even the teabaggers have to rant about socialism and government takeovers. They're living in a dream of the last glory days of conservatism and not in present-day realities

It may also be one reason why they show such a virulent hatred for ACORN and for community organizes in general. These bottom-up anti-poverty groups are the absolute antithesis of old-fashioned liberalism, and the right has no intellectual basis for arguing against them, so all it can do is try to destroy them.

At the same time, it's becoming clear that the corporations have all the socially destructive impact that even a conservative should hate. They destroy long-established communities by pulling out industries those communities are dependent upon. They weaken families by destroying leisure. They pervert venerable institutions into sources of profit.

But today's right-wing doesn't seem to care about any of that -- to a degree where it's probably an insult to conservatism to continue to call them conservatives. They don't actually seem to want to conserve anything, except for "traditional" (which is to say, 19th century) forms of marriage. For the rest, they're perfectly happy living rootlessly in the land of trailer parks and fast food, with no sense of community and no cultural memory.

Conservatism, liberalism are labels, while these labels might have had a meaning a while back, today they are being used mostly to divide people, it's getting clearer everyday the agenda is predetermined and controlled by a banking and corporate elite, the ideological narrative is wearing thin and people are waking up.