memex/areas/books/The Death of Conservatism - Sam Tanenhaus.org

* The Death of Conservatism - Sam Tanenhaus
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:NOTER_DOCUMENT: ../../../library/books/Sam Tanenhaus/The Death of Conservatism (13614)/The Death of Conservatism - Sam Tanenhaus.epub
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** This is what we have done in Egypt
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:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 18849)
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Conservatives today face a choice: Will they shine in reflected radiance or spin futilely on their
lonely unlit orbit? If they seriously mean to offer more than nihilism, they must accept the
obligation history places on the party exiled from power: the obligation to rethink and
reevaluate, to undergo the serious work of self-examination and preparation.

Conservatives did exactly that during the long period that extended from the 1930s through the
1960s, a “down” cycle that prefigured this current one. At first many on the right, like Rush
Limbaugh today, promulgated the dogmas of grievance and resentment, insisting in words like
Limbaugh’s own that “the enemy within” had committed “treason” against the United States.

But the movement’s best thinkers grew to understand that such denunciations amounted to a
denunciation of America itself. They chose instead to address the authentic, rather than
invented, crises of their time and tried to fashion serious rather  than merely expedient
arguments. They became analysts and critics, theorists and prophets. They observed politics from
an engaged, constructive distance, made their outer orbit a useful vantage point from which to
calibrate where the nation, under liberal rule, might be headed. And they exerted whatever
influence they could through the vehicles of ideas and arguments. Unwelcome in “the
mainstream media,” they could easily have retreated into an alternative universe and limited
their conversation to preachments aimed at the like-minded few. They rejected that course,
electing instead to seize whatever openings they could to join the larger quarrels, adapting their
voices to the idioms and vocabulary of the day. When at last conservatives gained a foothold
within the establishment, political and intellectual, it was because they had earned their way.
They rejected extremism for centrism, purism for pragmatism, revanchism for realism. The
public—including much of the liberal public—deemed them ready to govern. The moon had
become a sun.

Are conservatives prepared to travel this route again? No, to judge from current evidence. The
figures now contending for movement leadership—Limbaugh; the GOP’s new Lazarus, Newt
Gingrich; the aspirant governors Bobby Jindal and Sarah Palin—seem contentedly nestled within
their fringe orbit. Even when they speak of reclaiming the center, they do so in the discredited
idioms of the discarded past. This is equally true of the movement’s intelligentsia. Journals like
Commentary, National Review, and The Weekly Standard, once sophisticated publications, are
now mouthpieces of the Republican Party at its most revanchist. During the 2008 campaign one
could read—at times scarcely avoid—effusions like those of Michael Barone inveighing against
“the coming Obama thugocracy” and Jonah Goldberg  railing against Obama’s “pals from the
Weather Underground who murdered or celebrated the murder of policemen.” Most unsettling
of all, perhaps, was the case of William Kristol, the founding publisher and editor of The Weekly
Standard, who in his election-year column for The New York Times debased this valued space
into a shabby storefront for the Republican presidential campaign. These conservative
intellectuals recognize no distinction between analysis and advocacy, or between the competition
of ideas and the naked struggle for power. To them the Democratic Party and all manner of
liberals are simply the enemy, and if the majority of the country joins the “wrong” side, then
they are the enemy, too, or its manipulated pawns.

All movements have life spans. They spring into existence in response to particular conditions,
and when those conditions change, often as a result of movement successes, they either disband
or lose their relevance. The abolitionist movement effectively ended once Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proc lamation. The progressive movement lasted only fifteen years (from 1900 to
1915), but in that time transformed American politics, shaping two of the great
twentieth-century presidencies, Theodore Roosevelt’s and Woodrow Wilson’s, and making
possible a third, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s.

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** Notes for page (7 . 28288)
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:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 28288)
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The movement conservatives of our time seem the heirs of the French rather than of the
American Revolution. They routinely demonize government institutions, which they depict as
the enemy of the people’s best interests. But to classical conservatives the two entities,
government and society, are mutually dependent. Burke drew no meaningful distinction
between the state and society—that is, between the formally established institutions of
government and those institutions rooted in patrimony, custom, and habit. The two were
coterminous, at times almost interchangeable. “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom
to provide for human wants,” he wrote, adding a few sentences later, as if following a single arc
of thought, “Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but
that even in the mass and body as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should
frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection. This can
only be done by a power out of themselves … [T]he restraints on men, as well as their liberties,
are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times
and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract
rule.”
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** Get Kendall's article
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:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 32922)
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Practically, this vision of orthodoxy amounts to war fought by other means. This was the
argument put forth by Kendall, a disillusioned ex-Trotskyist who emerged as one of the Right’s
most fertile thinkers during the Cold War period. His essay  “What Is Conservatism?,” published
in 1963, drew a bright line of demarcation between the Left and the Right. “The line in question
is a line of battle,” Kendall wrote, “a line of battle moreover in contemporary American politics
and a line of battle between two sets of combatants, each fighting to defeat the other.”
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** Democrats in Congress deferred to Reagan
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:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 36723)
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The struggle between consensus and orthodoxy illuminates as well the contrasting approaches
favored by each party’s congressional  caucus. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he
presented a program of steep tax cuts that many Democrats found radical. Yet forty-eight
Democrats in the House and thirty-seven in the Senate voted for it. They did so partly in
acknowledgment of the sweeping victory Reagan had won—51 percent of the vote, less than
Obama won in 2008, but ten points more than the Democratic incumbent, Jimmy Carter, got.
Still, Democrats had a fifty-vote advantage in the House in 1981. They could have stopped
Reagan—or at least made a strong case for opposing him. Instead, they deferred to the popular
will and to the tradition of allowing a new president to pursue his agenda.
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** Clinton was a conservative
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:NOTER_PAGE: (7 . 40166)
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As it happened, the Republicans were vindicated. The recession cycle had all but ended by the
time Clinton took office, and the economy rebounded. Clinton, recognizing this, adjusted course
and oversaw a period of remarkable prosperity. Unemployment decreased in each of the eight
years he was in office. Like Dwight Eisenhower forty years before, he was a genuine Burkean.
Both presidents struggled to neutralize movement forces in Congress through “a computing
principle.” Both succeeded. And both left office with soaring approval ratings. They are the
modern era’s two true conservative presidents—and the two best.
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** Look up these two authors
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:NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 4856)
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#+BEGIN_QUOTE
That the nation should turn to professors in its time of trouble was an affront, a confession of
weakness. To an intellectual like H. L. Mencken, the figure who presided over this change was,
variously, a “dictator,” “chartered libertine,” and the “King in the White House.” Roosevelt
really believed, to Mencken’s astonishment, that “the nation would be vastly benefited if its
present scheme of government could be radically overhauled,  and the safeguards now thrown
about property eliminated, and all power and prerogative handed over to men of vision, sworn
to serve and save the lowly.” In fact, the New Deal was “a political racket … and nothing
more,” Mencken wrote on the eve of the 1936 election. “Its chief practical business is to search
out groups that can be brought into the [Democratic Party] machine by grants out of the public
treasury, which is to say, out of the pockets of the rest of us.”
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** The machine made the economy socialistic
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:NOTER_PAGE: (8 . 36074)
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And with good reason. To Chambers, an avid student of history, well schooled in Marxist
argument, it was obvious that the growing dependency on government was a function of the
unstoppable rise of industrial capitalism and the new technology it had brought forth. “The
machine has made the economy socialistic,” he wrote. And the Right had better adjust. “A
conservatism that will not accept this situation … is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has
become a literary whimsy.” It might well be “the duty of the intellectuals … to preach reaction,”
but only “from an absolute, an ideal standpoint. It is for books and posterity. It does not bear on
tactics or daily life … Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms,
must maneuver within its terms. That is what conservatives must decide: how much to give in
order to survive at all; how much to give in order not to give up the basic principles.”
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