What's Killing Conservatism?

from the American Prospect:



What's Killing Conservatism?
Self-destruction is inevitable when a rigid ideology of disdain for government fully comes to power.

Carl T. Bogus | October 23, 2009


The Death of Conservatism by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 123 pages, $17.00


Four days after Barack Obama's decisive victory in November 2008, I attended a conference at Yale University titled "The Next American Conservatism?" The conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute organized the conference in advance of the election -- in the face of oncoming doom, as it were -- to try to figure out what sort of conservatism might rise from the ashes. But although the intellectuals on the program seemed to take for granted that conservatism as we know it is dead, none of them ventured an opinion as to why it died, whether it deserved to die, or what was, or should be, next.

Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review as well as the author of an acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, offers his postmortem in an elegant little volume. Tanenhaus would not have been surprised that the participants at Yale did not even attempt meaningful speculation. "Today's conservatives," he writes, "resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology." When a volcano erupts in your face, it is difficult to be reflective.

Tanenhaus' book is an account of the life of modern conservatism -- its birth, youth, adulthood, and senescence. He is a fine writer who recounts the tale knowledgeably and well. The story opens in the 1930s, when conservatives were trying to find an answer to the New Deal. According to Tanenhaus, the Old Right had no answer to give: Not only did it lack policy alternatives; it could not explain "why and how the world had changed." The Old Right had come out of "a pastoral land of rural communities and small towns," and it was bewildered by "an urbanized industrial nation with ever-more-complex constituencies -- the teeming ethnic populations in northern cities, the increasingly organized and disciplined labor unions."

Thus a New Right emerged. According to Tanenhaus, its central argument originated with James Burnham. In 1941, Burnham, a former Trotskyite, wrote an international bestseller called The Managerial Revolution, an exercise in futurology in which he predicted that the Axis would win World War II, after which three superpowers would dominate the world -- Japan, Germany, and the United States. (The book's thesis inspired George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.) Burnham also argued that "in terms of economic, social, political, and ideological changes from traditional capitalism, the New Deal moves in the same direction as Stalinism and Nazism." The New Right adopted Burnham's equation of the New Deal with totalitarianism as the centerpiece of its ideology. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=whats_killing_conservatism

.....its not.

It hasnt been conservative since Bush Sr.'s run in 1988 where he would have lost to the most liberal Governor in the US if it wasnt for the dirty tricks used in the waning days of the campaign.

When people willing vote for a black candidate claiming to represent change, you cant say the majority is conservative any longer.

:shrug:

that and the fact that the worst (Bush Sr, Bush Jr, Cheney, etc) seem to rise to the top in conservatism - should be a real clue that that way of thinking is.. well... totally wrong.

*edited for spelling

Therefore, ultimately it is completely self-referential and, thus, impotent.

T.S. Eliot got it right in The Hollow Men "... This is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper."

a bastian of outdated, controlling, close-minded asses.

was anathema to their long held M.O. of divide and conquer; for exploitation purposes.

their daily over the top "preaching" certainly does not help, IMO.

Slowly people have begun to see the Republicans on the Hill for
what they are--The Business Party. Businesses are the only
interests they protect.

They only protect big business.

The New Right was always based on resentment. Resentment of the East Coast financial elite, of the Hollywood film elite, even of academics and intellectuals. Whatever it was, if it had any kind of prestige or status, the New Right resented it.

This resentment appears to have been based in a combination of low self-esteem and pride in one's own inadequacies. Remember whichever unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee (Carswell?) Nixon defended by saying the mediocre also deserved represenation on the Court?

People like that hate Obama doubly because not only does he have the Harvard Law School diploma and the rock star charisma, but he got there on his own from uncertain beginnings and refused to settle for anything less. He reminds them of their own failures, and they detest him because of that.

The slogan of today's conservatives might be "Inadequate -- and proud of it."

Because they have no faith in their own chance of getting ahead through personal ability and determination, conservatives find it perfectly acceptable to lie, cheat, and steal instead. It's kind of like a teenager's "I didn't ask permission because you'd have said no" syndrome.

Half the time they justify what they do by believing that their opponents cheat as well -- which is why the birthers and their kind are irrationally convinced the proof is out there if they just keep digging. And the other half of the time they believe their opponents get ahead because of some kind of unfair favoritism -- which is one reason they've been so set on outlawing affirmative action and destroying ACORN.

The real question may be how this pack of inadequate losers ever came to take over modern conservatism. I suspect it started with Nixon, who was one of them himself. He resented John Kennedy's easy grace and popularity, was ashamed of his own background, and saw no problem with cheating to win.

Nixon's southern strategy was, among other things, a license for the Republican Party to go after the loser bloc by wooing and flattering them and telling them they were the salt of the earth. How else, after all, would you get a majority of the American people to trash their own interests in favor of those of big business?

But as a result, the kind of distrust of the Establishment which may have started out as a natural and healthy reaction in the 40's and 50's got warped into something very rancid and ultimately lawless. And I frankly can't see any way for conservatism to reconstitute itself at this point. There are certainly going to be political differences in the future, but the arguments are going to be on entirely different terms which will look nothing like those of the late 20th century.

Those idiot right-wing douchebags make my blood boil sometimes.

Something a conservative would say to someone who needs help.