Death of conservatism gorefest!

From the essay:

Ed Rollins said, “Rove knew his voters, he stuck to the message with consistency, he drove that base hard—and there’s nothing left of it. Today, if you’re not rich or Southern or born again, the chances of your being a Republican are not great.” As long as Bush and his party kept winning elections, however slim the margins, Rove’s declared ambition to create a “permanent majority” seemed like the vision of a tactical genius. But it was built on two illusions: that the conservative era would stretch on indefinitely, and that politics matters more than governing. The first illusion defied history; the second was blown up in Iraq and drowned in New Orleans. David Brooks argues that these disasters discredited both neo- and compassionate conservatism in the eyes of many Republicans. “You’ve got to learn from the failures,” Brooks told me. “But Republicans have rejected the entire attempt. For example, after Katrina, House Republicans wanted nothing to do with New Orleans. They were, like, ‘We don’t care about those people.’ ”

You've got to learn from the failures. That was the thing that finally turned me against that bunch. The way they handled Katrina was the catalyst, at least for me, because it made me face the fact that this administration didn't care about good government; it cared about politics. It cared about winning. And they way you win is you gut it out, you never give your opponent any quarter, and you keep repeating the same idiotic mantras over and over. To admit error is to show weakness, in this view. Very damn few of those Republicans in Congress stood up to George W. Bush either. How can you learn from failure when you don't have the self-awareness to recognize it?

Packer talks about how Richard Nixon and his team perfected the art of wedge politics by practicing what they termed "positive polarization" -- highlighting and exploiting cultural anxieties and resentments to break the Democrats apart. Packer writes:

“Positive polarization” helped the Republicans win one election after another—and insured that American politics would be an ugly, unredeemed business for decades to come.

I don't think that's a fair criticism. Nixon didn't create those divisions -- he simply gave voice to them. In the full context of this Packer passage, it seems to me the writer assumes goodwill and rationality from the Democratic side (this was the late 1960s), and Machiavellian conniving from the Republicans. He assumes, I think, that the resentments that Nixon's "silent majority" held were illegitimate or immoral on their face. You can't go broke betting on the nastiness of Dick Nixon, but this concedes far more than the Democrats and the left-liberals deserve. They helped create the cultural (countercultural) and political climate that produced President Nixon.

Packer:

The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another “limousine liberal.” But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead. Among Republicans, there is no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people.

Boy, is that ever true. I find myself immune, finally, to Obama's charms, and able to see him for what he is: a conventional liberal who is smart and immensely likeable. In any other year, it should be easy to tear him up over his political positions, and certainly over his radical associations (Rev. Wright, for example). But I have no stomach for it. Once again, I'm reminded of the questioner at the 2006 conservative dinner who asked panelist Phyllis Schlafly about prospects for conservatives going forward. Schlafly let fly with the same old same old about public schools, the judiciary, and so on. I didn't disagree with the substance of her points, but damn, they seemed so pro forma and ill-suited to the political moment. The thrill has gone away.

In its final year, the Bush Administration is seen by many conservatives (along with seventy per cent of Americans) to be a failure. Among true believers, there are two explanations of why this happened and what it portends. One is the purist version: Bush expanded the size of government and created huge deficits; allowed Republicans in Congress to fatten lobbyists and stuff budgets full of earmarks; tried to foist democracy on a Muslim country; failed to secure the border; and thus won the justified wrath of the American people. This account—shared by Pat Buchanan, the columnist George F. Will, and many Republicans in Congress—has the appeal of asking relatively little of conservatives. They need only to repent of their sins, rid themselves of the neoconservatives who had agitated for the Iraq invasion, and return to first principles. Buchanan said, “The conservatives need to, in Maoist terms, go back to Yenan.”

The second version—call it reformist—is more painful, because it’s based on the recognition that, though Bush’s fatal incompetence and Rove’s shortsighted tactics hastened the conservative movement’s demise, they didn’t cause it. In this view, conservatism has a more serious problem than self-betrayal: a doctrinaire failure to adapt to new circumstances, new problems. Instead of heading back to Yenan to regroup, conservatives will have to spend some years or even decades wandering across a bleak political landscape of losing campaigns and rebranding efforts and earnest policy retreats, much as liberals did after 1968, before they can hope to reëstablish dominance.

Packer says that of leading conservatives, the "younger ones—say, those under fifty—uniformly subscribe to the reformist version. They are in a state of glowing revulsion at the condition of their political party. Most of them predicted that Republicans will lose the Presidency this year and suffer a rout in Congress. They seemed to feel that these losses would be deserved..."

Glowing revulsion -- I like that. I have a bout of Republican reflux two or three times a day. I subscribe to the reformist version, obviously, though the purist version contains some truth. I hope CC blog readers who have gotten this far will weigh in on the comments page with which team they side with, and why. I do look forward to the years to come because they will be a time of real intellectual creativity on the Right, provided the defeat is so strong as to shatter the rigid orthodoxies that prevent creative thinking from getting a hearing among the traditional elites of the movement and the GOP.

This is what I mean:

When I met David Brooks in Washington, he was even more scathing than Frum. Brooks had moved through every important conservative publication—National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Washington Times, the Weekly Standard—“and now I feel estranged,” he said. “I just don’t feel it’s exciting, I don’t feel it’s true, fundamentally true.” In the eighties, when he was a young movement journalist, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union seemed “true.” Now most conservatives seem incapable of even acknowledging the central issues of our moment: wage stagnation, inequality, health care, global warming. They are stuck in the past, in the dogma of limited government. Perhaps for that reason, Brooks left movement journalism and, in 2003, became a moderately conservative columnist for the Times. “American conservatives had one defeat, in 2006, but it wasn’t a big one,” he said. “The big defeat is probably coming, and then the thinking will happen. I have not yet seen the major think tanks reorient themselves, and I don’t know if they can.” He added, “You go to Capitol Hill—Republican senators know they’re fucked. They have that sense. But they don’t know what to do. There’s a hunger for new policy ideas.”

The Heritage Foundation Web site currently links to video presentations by Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, “challenging Americans to consider, What Would Reagan Do?” Brooks called the conservative think tanks “sclerotic,” but much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown.

[snip]

The orthodoxy that accompanies this kind of insularity has had serious consequences: for years, neither National Review nor Commentary was able to admit that the Iraq war was being lost. Lowry, who received the editorship from Buckley before he turned thirty, told me that he particularly regretted a 2005 cover story he’d written with the headline “WE’RE WINNING.” He said, “Most of the right was in lockstep with Donald Rumsfeld. We didn’t want to admit we were losing and said anyone who said otherwise was a defeatist. One thing I’ve loved about conservatism is its keen sense of reality, and that was totally lost in 2006.” Last year, National Review ran a cover article on global warming, which Lowry, like Brooks, Frum, and other conservatives, listed among the major issues of our time, along with wage stagnation and the breakdown of the family. Although the article, by Jim Manzi, proposed market solutions, the response among some readers, Lowry said, was “ ‘How dare you?’ A bunch of people out there don’t want to hear it—they believe it’s a hoax. That’s the head-in-the-sand response.”

Stop watching so much Fox. Stop listening to so much talk radio. It may not tell you what you need to know! Seriously, many rank-and-file Republicans have spent so much time listening to propagandists tell them what they want to hear -- including that liberals are always and everywhere wrong, and generally evil too -- that they are paralyzed when confronted with evidence that the world isn't like they thought.

Packer:

[P]olitical ideas don’t materialize on command to solve the electoral problems of one party or another. They are generated over time by huge social transformations, on the scale of what took place in the sixties and seventies. “They’re not real, they’re ideological constructs,” Buchanan said, “and you can write columns and things like that, but they don’t engage the heart. The heart was engaged by law and order. You reached into people—there was feeling.”

Interesting point. What issues engage the heart today like law and order engaged the heart in 1968? I'm hard pressed to think of one. There's a lot of free-floating anxiety and unhappiness in the political culture today, but I can't pin it to a single concept. Can you? I see the Democrats' strength now to be based mostly on the fact that so many people are sick of the Republicans, period.

About working-class whites who are alien to Obama, Packer says that "above all, Obama should absorb what the most thoughtful conservatives already know: that these voters see the economic condition of the country as inextricable from its moral condition."

And defenestrated conservatives should probably spent less time trying to get back into political power, and more time trying to reform the moral condition of the country as part of reforming its economic condition.