For a conservative populism

Well, I wish Daniel and the rest of these "decentralized populists" the best of luck in trying to be heard above the voices of the conservative elite. As much as you may wish to believe that a path exists to bypass the "gatekeepers of institutional conservatism," you need to face the fact that the vast majority of the conservative base gets their news from FOX. Until and unless you can get FOX to pay attention to your efforts, you will continue to fight an uphill battle.

I'd love to see the demographics of the support for Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee. My bet it's not nearly as Middle America as Larison suggests. My guess the support is more educated, more religious (in the case of Huckabee) and has higher income than the "average Middle America" resident, whoever that is.

What populist conservatives need to do in the coming years is to make sure that Middle Americans are presented with a credible, substantive populism from the right that provides a genuine alternative to the left's agenda and does not settle for the false comfort of empty anti-elitist rhetoric.

Not the "left's agenda" (whatever that may include), perhaps, but at least some elements of what might be considered "left" would, I think, have to be part of this "credible, substantive populism"--or, as Patrick Deneen and I once called it, a "true and defensible" populism--if it were truly going to incorporate and articulate all the varying Middle American sentiments out there.

This article (http://www.amconmag.com/blog/2008/11/13/a-response-to-ross/) makes a good point:

Conservatives, by contrast, have sought to create a whole alternative institutional world. The movement offers entire career tracks for aspiring conservatives. Moreover, the movement preaches hostility to non-movement institutions. From the moment a movement conservative starts his career at his college conservative paper, he learns to conceive of conservative organizations as the City of God and traditional establishment institutions as the City of Man. The two Cities, he believes, are antagonists. Hence, movement conservatives have not generally succeeded in reaching sympathetic outsiders – if anything, they have actively sought to alienate them.

And that is why "conservative populism" is an oxymoron. Because you can't have "populism" without the "populous," and most people do not, or do not want to, live in the sanitized "bubble" that is much of the "conservative alternative dimension."

Dr. Fox: [A]t least some elements of what might be considered "left" would, I think, have to be part of this "credible, substantive populism" ...

I think there is ample opportunity here to construct an agenda that represents an ideological as well as regional synthesis.

Ideologically, this would mean pursuing economic subsidiarity in tandem with political federalism. In other words, decentralization on both fronts.

Regionally, this would mean framing this agenda in terms of the Northern bias towards "ordered liberty" (freedom for self-government). This would be sold to Southerners and Westerners as the best way to ensure "natural liberty" (personal freedom of choice). [I'm sorry, you're going to have to read David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America to understand these regional differences in the notion of liberty.]

Politically, this would allow "freedom-loving" libertarians to work with "community-loving" social conservatives to construct a coalition able to tap into a rising popular hostility to corporate and government "gigantism" -- especially after the current economic crisis has run its ugly course.

I realize this idea needs to be fleshed out more, but I've got to get back to work.

Stefanie's citation is too important to be overlooked. If conservatism is inherently oppositional, and too focused on building a City of God to reach out to impure mainstream voters and leaders, then it cannot expect to succeed except when the public revolts against the failures of conventional politics and rulers (cf. Clinton).

Recent history suggests this might be true. It's often pointed out that Reaganites like GWB don't really believe in government, so it's no wonder they run it very badly. Further, the heart of the conservative movement is in social issues such as abortion, so it's no surprise that the only economic issue they speak to with any real passion is taxes. (Which again is a reaction against government, not a desire to make government work.)

Combine this disdain for government itself with a disinterest in the issues most important to mainstream voters and it's no wonder "the movement" turns off voters. Perhaps if we return to prosperity the salience of abortion and taxes and law and order will return, but until then one has to wonder if a conservative populism is even really possible.

"Regionally, this would mean framing this agenda in terms of the Northern bias towards "ordered liberty" (freedom for self-government). This would be sold to Southerners and Westerners as the best way to ensure "natural liberty" (personal freedom of choice)."

when the heck has the american south EVER been about personal freedom? except as to property and contract rights and weapon ownership to "defend" said property?

Wow. My head is spinning with semantic inversions. In case you haven't seen that term before, think of it as a linguistic black hole into which any possible meaning is trapped in a vortex of infinite definitional possiblities.____Sorry. I'm in a hurry-up-and-wait for the SNAFU mode at work. I'll try to avoid obscure references.____"Populist" has long carried the implied prefix "liberal", at least to my ear. I've also considered it to be, at best, antagonistic to "conservative". I'm being tugged out of my comfort zone with this thread, and that's always a good thing, but it also makes me wonder: are conservatives ready to remove the antagonism from the defintion, or are they intent on taking control of the dialogue? I may not be phrasing that very well, especially if the reader sees it as hostile, but the core principle for me in populism is not the results. It's the process.____Conservatism opposes change. That is its function, and it is both honorable and necessary. Populism's function is promoting and facilitating dialogue that leads to consensus, and while any decision process can have the potential for preventing change, it can also create change.____Call me cynical, and I'll sit still for it, but I just don't see conservatives sitting down at the table thinking that they will immediately be forced to concede that change will occur. I do emphatically agree that leaving the liberals in charge of the decision process is equally bad. It's not that we must find a middle road, it's that we don't have any trustworthy guides (that I know of).

Give it up. It'll never work because Obamania will never die. Oh Yeah!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xkw8ip43Vk&feature=related

Ron Paul is the only Republican that could have won this year. Public disgust with the war put the GOP into a huge hole. Ron Paul might have been able to overcome this. His economic message does have a populist appeal to it. Talking about how only the rich and bankers benefit when the currency is devalued.

Ron Paul's biggest problem was that the Neocons are dug in like a tick in the so called conservative media and think tanks. He had to be demonized because of his belief that the United States should have a non interventionist foreign policy. Conservative blogs from Red State, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air, Ace of Spades etc etc all insinuated that he was a Jew hater and closet Nazi. Rush Limbaugh said he wasn't a conservative because he didn't support the war. Never mind that in his memoirs, Ronald Reagan wrote the United States should be neutral in the Middle East.

http://orangepunch.freedomblogging.com/2006/07/21/reagans-wisdom-on-the-middle-east-leave/

Until the Neocons are confronted head on I'm afraid the GOPs fortunes will continue to decline!

I'm afraid until the Neocons are confronted head on the GOP will continue to decline.

Pyrrho for President!

3 Successful Republicans Caution Against a Move to the Right
By CARL HULSE
Published: November 13, 2008

WASHINGTON — As Congressional Republicans lick their political wounds and try to figure out how to bounce back in 2010 and beyond, they might want to consult with Susan Collins, Lamar Alexander and Peter T. King.

Representative Peter T. King is one of three Republican House members in New York State.
Senator Susan Collins of Maine easily defeated an experienced Democratic opponent.
Senator Collins, Senator Alexander and Representative King were among Republicans who defied the odds in a terrible year for their colleagues. Their re-elections provide a possible road map for how the party can succeed in a challenging political environment. The answer, the three veteran politicians agreed, is not to become a more conservative, combative party focused on narrow partisan issues.

“What doesn’t work is drawing a harsh ideological line in the sand,” said Ms. Collins, of Maine, who early in the year was a top Democratic target for defeat but ended up winning 61 percent of the vote while Senator Barack Obama received 58 percent in the presidential race in her state.

“We make a mistake if we are going to make our entire appeal rural and outside the Northeast and outside the Rust Belt,” said Mr. King, of New York, who easily won re-election in a region shedding Republicans at a precipitous rate.

“We can stand around and talk about our principles, but we have to put them into actions that most people agree with,” said Mr. Alexander, of Tennessee, a self-described conservative who was able to attract African-American voters.

Their comments go to the competing visions for the party’s future that will confront Republicans as they return to Capitol Hill next week to elect House and Senate leaders and begin the process of adjusting to a second consecutive round of resounding losses on Capitol Hill.

Inside and outside the Capitol, many Republicans are calling for the party to retrench to a more conservative posture, resist initiatives from the new Obama administration seen as too liberal and restore the vision of President Ronald Reagan.

“We must be forward thinking, develop winning conservative strategies and communicate them effectively to the American people,” said Representative Mike Pence of Indiana, a leader of the conservative bloc who is poised to be the No. 3 Republican in the House, in letter to colleagues seeking their support.

Mr. Pence is a staunch supporter of keeping a tight rein on federal spending; he opposed the $700 billion bailout and has joined a handful of House conservatives in crusading against the pet projects known as earmarks that many lawmakers seek.

Some Republicans have expressed concern that the leadership shuffle could be interpreted as a distinct rightward shift when they think the party needs to appeal instead to moderate Republicans and independents who abandoned Republicans on Election Day.

Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, who is in line to be re-elected as the House Republican leader, said it was premature to judge what direction House Republicans would turn, saying they must first examine why they lost and then go from there.

“At the end of the day, there are issues that people care about,” Mr. Boehner said, “and I think we as a party have to have solutions to those issues built on Republican principles. It is a big job ahead of us.”

But the relatively few Republicans who prospered on Election Day said party lawmakers could make their task easier by focusing more on issues that voters can relate to in their everyday lives rather than on partisan gamesmanship. They say Republicans need to demonstrate that they can work with Democrats and stay connected to their constituents while emphasizing issues like energy and the environment.

“What people were listening for in this election is, what are you going to do about my pocketbook, my health insurance, my electric bill,” said Mr. Alexander, a former governor and presidential candidate who is seeking to return as the No. 3 Republican in the Senate. “We need to step back and fundamentally change the way we talk about issues and be focused more on what we can do to help the country rather than what we can do to help the Republican Party.”

While colleagues like Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina were coming out on the losing end in part because of a strong African-American vote for their opponents, Mr. Alexander, who had a record of appointing blacks to government and education positions, was able to win about 26 percent of the black vote.

Mr. King, one of three remaining Republican House members in New York State, said one reason he secured 64 percent of the vote in his Long Island district was his solid relationship with organized labor — not an ally that most Republicans cultivate — and a proven ability to deliver federal benefits for his district. He thinks the Republican campaign against earmarks, which did not pay dividends for Senator John McCain, undercuts candidates and the party as a whole.

“Everything is collapsing around us and we find a small earmark in a Western state and say the country is falling apart because of that?” Mr. King said. “We are marginalizing ourselves.”

Ms. Collins faced an experienced opponent in Representative Tom Allen, who was backed by national Democrats and allied groups in a state where Mr. Obama was highly popular. But she cruised to victory while a fellow moderate Republican, Gordon Smith of Oregon, lost in a similar environment. She attributed her victory to a reputation for working with Democrats on issues like port security, health care and postal reform.

“The people in my state are sick and tired of the hyper-partisanship and the gridlock that has blocked action on so many important issues that affect their lives directly,” Ms. Collins said. “The message from this campaign is a rebellion against excessive partisanship and a call for people to work together.”

Please do not put those people in a group with Dr. Ron Paul. Dr. Paul has years and years of doing & standing for the right thing and the Constitution of The United States of America.

Kit Stoltz, thank you for the kind words.

Pyrrho, as far as the Victorians go, for one thing, Victorianism was limited to England and to a *lesser* degree, the United States. Entire swaths of Europe (France, Prussia, Scandinavia) were not "Victorian" at all.

Even so, the nineteenth century, in my opinion, is no place to look for inspiration for either cultural or "conservative-movement" renewal. Prostitution was rampant; there were child brothels in Belgium and France, with British Victorian gentlemen going on "sex tours." You could buy guidebooks of the Parisian brothels, classified by various tastes. The Victorians might have put skirts on the piano legs, but they had some ideas about women, about their subject colonials, about social control, that I for one don't want to see adopted in the United States.

Further, that era also saw a huge wave of what many here would *not* like - the further fracturing of Catholicism as a consequence of the first Vatican Council; the virtual demolition of the Papal States; the rise of German "higher criticism" and historical approaches to Biblical exegetics. Not to mention the mutation of Darwinism into Spencerian "social darwinism," and the rise of racialist movements in France and German-speaking areas.

Finally, I'm not sure how British "Victorianism" is relevant to the United States at the beginning of the 21st century anyway.

Polistra and "Your Name",

Thanks for the nomination! I'm flattered. But I'd rather be moderator of Town Meeting and director of a credit union.

I've got to tell you this ... I have a friend who is moderator in a town just north of here. He is Grover Cleveland's grandson, but is only in the late fifties! (Grover had a son when he was an old man and so did his son.) Anyway, the guy looks exactly like Grover Cleveland. It's really, really startling! The grandson is a Democrat and sometimes performs a one-man show about his grandfather and the NH Jefferson and Jackson dinner. (Old Grover spent his summers up here in northern NH and also retired here.)

That should be at the NH Jefferson and Jackson dinner.

If you'd like a fascinating literary take on a possible late 21st century rise of Neo-Victorian social mores (with a bit more political decentralization than I think even Larison would be comfortable with thrown in), try Neal Stephenson's science fiction novel The Diamond Age, written in 1994, if I recall correctly.

Of course, in that imagined future it is only the elite who revert to a new moralism upon the withering away of nation-state power--the great unwashed still live in a Blade Runner meets Jerry Springer trailer trash planet. Instead of states, the world's productive classes are now grouped into many "phyles", also known as tribes. There are three Great Phyles; Han Chinese, the Neo-Victorians (consisting largely of Anglo-Saxons, but also accepting Indians, Africans, and others who identify with the culture), and Nippon (consisting of Japanese). The novel deliberately makes it ambiguous whether Hindustan (consisting of Hindu Indians) is a fourth Great Phyle or an association of microphyles. In addition to these larger phyles, there are countless smaller phyles. Membership in some phyles, such as the Han and Nipponese, has an ethnic requirement, but the Neo-Victorian phyle and many lesser phyles accept anyone who aspires to live according to the phyle's mores.

Re: I'm sure you're also aware that Enlightenment secularism gave way to Christian "Victorian" morality.

Victorian culture was based on the Enlightenment. Even at its most reactionary it took for granted the Enlightenment's accomplishments, notably in science but also in politics. The Victorians made no attempt to restore the ancien regime of the late 1600s-- and they had no desire to. And when they really got their dander up they could become rather radical themseles: abolitionism, women's rights for example.

Total oxymoron.

Sorry, but this is the kind of thing that comes of thinking too much.