Eric Liddell and "Obama's national socialism"

Over dinner one night at Trinity College, Cambridge, I found myself talking politics with some of the Fellows. One asked me to what I attributed Obama's success so far. I told him that the lack of a credible alternative from the Republicans was his main advantage, as well as the depressing (to me) fact that the Republican side cannot help but make Obama look reasonable and even normal by comparison. Every time some conservative hothead opens his mouth to accuse Obama of being a socialist or somesuch thing, and then people see the actual Obama talking on TV, it makes the Republicans seem that much more extreme and out of touch with reality. This, I explained to them, is pretty much what happened to the political left under Ronald Reagan (I know, I was part of the campus left then). Many of us were so out of touch and extreme in our rhetoric -- we really did think Reagan wanted to start World War III -- that we must have struck normal people as nutbags, and we certainly were a useful set of opponents for Reagan to have.

So it is today with many of the loudest voices on the Right. Boarding the flight for Dallas at Heathrow, I saw a stack of American Spectators free for the taking. I saw on the cover a story titled, "Obama's national socialism." I picked up the magazine anyway, and was glad I did, because there's always something worth reading in the Spectator. The article in question was rather milder than the fright headline would lead you to believe. It was a piece about the Nazi banker Hjalmar Schacht, and how his policies resemble deficit-spending US policies today under Obama (which, inconveniently for conservatives, differ from the late Bush administration's response to the economic crisis in no meaningful way I can discern). So why would you tout a cover story on how our Democratic president is really a Nazi? The question answers itself: you're throwing red meat to the Base.

Now, I decided to read that issue of The American Spectator because I know the magazine, and know that it's usually got some sound stuff in among the Base-bait. And I wasn't disappointed. But what if you were a normal person looking for something to read on a long flight, and you eyeballed that magazine near the gate. Would you think a magazine that called Obama an exponent of "national socialism" had anything interesting and important to say to you? Or would you be more likely to think it was a scream-sheet of the loony right, one safely ignored?

I raise the issue here for a couple of reasons, one more important than the other. First, there was a piece in the NYTimes over the weekend about how conservative magazines are staying above the fray in the battle over the future of conservatism. I found this paragraph telling:

At The American Spectator, R. Emmett Tyrell Jr., its founder and editor, agrees. "I'm writing a series of articles on the fundamental principles of the conservative movement," he said. As for discord on the right? "Our major concern is that conservative philosophy permeate the country, and if the Republican Party doesn't want to go along with it, that's their business."

The mistake here is assuming that "conservative philosophy" is what Tyrrell says it is. These guys act like there is only one conservatism, and Ronald Reagan is its prophet. If conservatism in power has waned, well, that's only because its exponents have strayed from the straight path. The only debate to be had is over on what terms those calling themselves conservatives can be browbeat back to Reaganism. They are avoiding having the kind of important internal debate among conservatives that will cause us to rethink our principles and how they might feasibly be applied in light of new realities -- including, yes, the failures of Reaganism. The pessimistic Tory political philosopher John Gray wrote in a 1995 essay called "The Strange Death of Tory England":

Conservative thought, in this new historical circumstance, is likely to be a mixture of fashionable techno-utopianism -- such as the proposition, recently seriously advanced, that the virtual communities of the Internet can replace the local communities that free markets have desolated -- and opportunistic fundamentalism. This is not a form of thought from which enlightenment or guidance can reasonably be expected. The enduring human needs which conservative philosophy once acknowledged are not now addressed by conservatives, partly because meeting them entails radical and -- for today's conservatives -- unwelcome changes in current economic institutions. Meeting these human needs -- for deep and strong forms of common life, fulfilling work and a rich public environment -- demands re-embedding the market processes which neo-liberal policy has emancipated from any kind of political control or accountability in the cultures and communities they exist to serve. And this is a project, little short of revolutionary in its implications, that no form of conservative thought today is willing to contemplate.

Until and unless conservative magazines and opinion leaders are willing to undertake a serious rethinking of what it means to be a conservative in 2008, it is unreasonable to expect that they will offer any enlightenment or guidance. It is insufficient to find out what Obama stands for, and to oppose it. To avoid the arguments over what it means to be conservative is to try to find a safe place from which to placate the Base, without taking the kinds of intellectual risks necessary to reshape conservatism for a new era. Besides which, it's boring.

But to my mind, there's a more important reason why this thing is bad news. Read on, past the jump.