Conservatism is dead. Long live conservatism!

The discussion of the present and future of conservatism continues at Tory Anarchist, who says:

There are some keen minds among the generation of conservatives ages 25 to 60, but few of them seem as keen as the minds of the conservatives who are in their 60s or older. (Maybe that’s not quite right: you could get another Stephen Tonsor or another Jeffrey Hart. But you won’t get another Robert Nisbet, I suspect.)

Part of the problem on the theoretical side is that too many of the best young minds in conservatism have followed Buckley’s example by shunning grad school and embracing journalism or the movement instead. That’s what I’ve done. (Daniel Larison is one of the few who hasn’t — he’s somehow writing more than anyone else and getting a Ph.D. too.)

In politics, the situation is even more embarrassing for conservatives. The failure to produce a single conservative leader of a caliber even close to Goldwater or Reagan (as flawed as both of them were) over the course of some five decades — for that’s how long the movement has been around — is conspicuous.

I think our own friend Scott Lahti goes far toward explaining the relative lack of intellectual distinction among the contemporary right in the Tory Anarchist's comboxes:

Too often, there is a sort of looking back in sorrow among the paleo crowd, an elegiac rearguard echo of Kipling’s “All our pomp of yesterday/Is one with Nineveh and Tyre”, or, worse, a “say it ain’t so, Joe” disillusionment, when a bit more skepticism and stoicism, and distancing from one’s reflexive attachments ought be the order of the day and life. One needs to grasp above all the fact that orbit of talent, such as it is, within the conservative movement is a function of the larger culture in its historical moment spawning it.

One also thinks back to a passage from Goethe’s Conversations With Eckermann, quoted by Robert Nisbet in Prejudices, to the effect that genius of the first order does not appear in splendid isolation, but as the highest peaks within the larger mountain range spawning it in organic, dynamic interaction: Shakespeare, yes, but not without Jonson, Marlowe, &c., the works of which latter, set in any other Bard-free time, would have easily qualified as the very Shakespeares of their transplanted eras…

Back in ‘02, I had an on-air three-way on C-SPAN with columnist Mona Charen, and my old Pentagon City-Brentano’s bookstore customer, and C-SPAN chief Brian Lamb. Over the phone, I asked Charen to compare the stature of the right-wing generation of the mid-1950s with that found in our current decade. Her diplomatic reply saluted the earlier cohort as giants, whose necessary moral and intellectual heavy lifting in historical time was denied those whose rise amid, say, 1970s suburbia allowed them to coast, comparatively. The 50s crowd was elbow-deep in the fight not just against Roosevelt, et al, but against Hitler and Stalin, and had at its back the immense gale of Winston Churchill.

The 1990s- crowd was hip-deep in the fight against President Clinton, and had at its back the immense wind of…Rush Limbaugh.

[snip]

I’ve often said to my (imaginary) Democrat friends pining for “another FDR” or another Lincoln (!) what I might say to my (equally imaginary) friends in the right-wing ghetto who pine for “another Buckley”: you don’t get another FDR without another Depression and Hitler to blow breath into his clay, and as for another Lincoln, well, good luck with *that* renewal of “National Greatness Conservatism”; I’ll take the flabby 2000s over the “heroic” 1860s for my home, thanks all the same, and confine my bloody shirts to the backyard barbecue…

I take Scott's point. Great leaders emerge from difficult times and extraordinary circumstances. John Paul II emerged from Nazi and then Soviet repression; you could not easily imagine his like emerging from bourgeois France, say. Better for us all to live in relatively dull times and suffer relatively dull leaders.

Still, it's worth exploring further Scott's point that greatness in our leaders -- whether in the arts, in letters, in politics and so forth -- depends on the context of the times and the culture that formed them. We have seen no greats emerge on either the right or the left in the last generation because the kinds of questions that have preoccupied our culture have been relatively trivial.

"But what about abortion?" you say. True, abortion is about as non-trivial as you can get. But the way society has chosen to approach the issue is through the prism of individual rights: it's all about Me, Me, Me. Is there anything more dull than a politics deriving from self-identity, and an obsession with personal minutiae? Is there anything more laughable than a liberal whose mind has been colonized by race/sex/gender theory? On the conservative side, having failed to conserve anything, or even to have engaged at any deep level with the more fundamental questions arising from the way we live, we find ourselves pining not only for Reagan, but for Reagan's world, when the challenges were so clear, and the enemies so plain. I was having lunch the other day with a conservative friend, and we were talking about how sick and tired we are of Republican politicians gassing on about tax cuts as the Holy Grail. Said my friend, "It's like it's 1985 all over again."

Alasdair MacIntyre is worth quoting here:

Liberalism is often successful in preempting the debate . . . so that [objections to it] appear to have become debates within liberalism. . . . So-called conservatism and so-called radicalism in these contemporary guises are in general mere stalking-horses for liberalism: the contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place in such political systems for the criticism of the system itself, that is, for putting liberalism in question.

Point is, all discussions cede the basic assumptions of liberalism at the start. If our problems derive from those assumptions -- and I think they do -- it will not be surprising that late conservatism finds itself boxed in and tapped out. Conservatism long ago ceased to challenge the liberal status quo in any meaningful sense, though Reagan, obviously, was a limited and laudable exception. The reason neither party is any threat at all to the status quo is because that's what most people want. They don't want to have to change their lives, but rather to be told that all would be well if others were made to change their lives, and to be assured that those bad people who need to change aren't holding power. The epitome of conservatism's intellectual bankruptcy was the statement by Rep. Mike Pence a few years ago, which went something like, "Yes, we're the party of big government" -- the Republicans -- "but they're the party of really big government." It had the ring of truth to it. But you know, the GOP accomodated itself nicely to what the electorate wanted, which is how it's supposed to work in democratic politics.

But what if what the electorate has wanted these past few decades turns out to have been bad for it? Eighty-one percent of the country thinks we're headed down the wrong path. Well, how did we get here? Where did we take the wrong turn? How might we reverse course?

Conservatism has answers to these questions, and not only answers, but the correct answers, or at least the most insightful ways to discern what the answers might be. But in order to see more clearly into the crisis of our time, and to offer ways through it to better times, it seems to me that the rising generation of conservative thinkers needs to consciously and deliberately cease to identify the interests of conservatism with the maintenance of the Republican Party.

The risk, obviously, is that conservatism would become a precious (in the pejorative sense) thing, untainted by the real world, and untested too. A conservatism that is too pure to have anything to say about or to the real world -- that has no application to real life -- is not a conservatism that is of use to anybody outside of a political theory class. That stipulated, the problem with conservatism today is not that it is too unworldly, but that it has become too worldly. When you have the conservative party having run up unconscionable budget deficits and gotten the country stuck in a quagmire of a war in the Middle East, and when there was no effective right-wing opposition to these trends as they were playing out because deficit spending and militant nationalism were popular -- well, it seems pretty clear that the problem is that conservatives have traded principle for the maintenance of power. Which is why we're at a dead end today.

Conservatism's only consolation is that liberalism hasn't found its way out either. Barack Obama is by far the most attractive candidate they've had in my lifetime, but what is his program? We know he's for hope, and change, and good feelings, but does he really challenge the status quo in the way that Reagan of 1980 did? I can't see it. (Then again, the country had gone through a terrible patch from about 1965 through 1980, and people were ready to have the status quo challenged.)

I think Tory Anarchist is right here:

There’s some real intellectual fermentation going on in the exile quarters of the Right — among reactionary radicals and some of the more daring libertarians.

I think, to cite one example, the reason why Daniel Larison is so widely read, even among the smarter left-liberal commentators, is because whether you agree with him or not, he's usually got something interesting to say, it's been well thought through, and derives from a coherent set of rightist principles. It's why The American Conservative is fast becoming the most interesting magazine on the Right -- and the most relevant to the conservatism that is and will be emerging out of mainstream conservatism's collapse.

Anyway, I once again go back to MacIntyre's famous paragraph:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of the imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead - often not recognizing fully what they were doing - was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. ...This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers, they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are not waiting for Godot, but for another—and doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

Borrowing from that, is it too absurd to propose (as Tory Anarchist does) that the ideas that will reinvigorate conservatism as a viable approach to politics will come -- will have to come -- from thinkers who are willing to engage the conservative tradition outside the channels and forms (and forums) that have been created over the past 30 years or so? Or can the reform of conservatism take place within the framework of existing institutions (which is the temperamentally conservative response)? To what extent does the maintenance of those institutions within the movement politics of conservatism prevent the kind of fresh, even radical, thinking apparently necessary to revive intellectual and applied conservatism? Where will the new institutions come from, especially insofar as they are not likely to advance the interests of large corporations, which fund the existing institutions on the Right? Where will the new thinkers come from -- and the new journalists (like Buckley in his day) to publicize and popularize their ideas? (Well, easier to produce the latter than the former). Where will the patrons come from, men and women of means and conservative convictions that challenge the liberal economic order?

This is actually a great time to be a conservative, despite what it looks like. Conservatism is dead. Long live conservatism!

UPDATE: Shorter version of this post: "More ISI, less CPAC."