Is Conservatism Dead? No – Its Resting

In the current New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus offers a long analysis of the state of conservatism under the provocative heading: “Conservatism Is Dead” – minus the customary editorial precaution of a protective question mark.

There are two obvious rebuttals to Tanenhaus’ claim.

The first is that the social and cultural basis of American conservatism remains very much alive and active. Conservatives may have lost their majority, but that is not the same thing as disappearing outright.

The second is that conservative ideas continue to be relevant – and will soon re-emerge more relevant than ever. The current US administration and congressional majority seem determined to forget every economic lesson learned in the years since 1966. They are rapidly expanding social spending in the name of “stimulus.” They are redirecting investment from high productivity to low productivity uses in pursuit of “green jobs.” They are toying with “buy American” protectionism while repudiating “hire American” enforcement of immigration laws. They are so eager to restore the dominant liberalism of the 1930s that they cannot see that they are repeating their own errors of the 1970s.

So Tanenhaus overstates his case. Yet within that overstated case, there is contained an ominous truth.

Tanenhaus warns that the dominant mood of what we still call “movement conservatism” is alienation and anger.

As Garry Wills, who broke with the movement in the 1970s but continued to call himself a conservative, observed: “The right wing in America is stuck with the paradox of holding a philosophy of ‘conserving’ an actual order it does not want to conserve.”

The attack on the “new class,” rooted in cultural hostility, dominated movement conservatism for the next 30 years, up through the administration of George W. Bush. On one side, as [William] Rusher described it, were “businessmen, manufacturers, hard-hats, blue-collar workers, and farmers.” On the other: “a liberal verbalist elite (the dominant media, the major foundations and research institutions, the educational establishment, the federal and state bureaucracies) and a semipermanent welfare constituency.”

This conservatism was not a philosophy of government – for these conservative governments felt little interest in governing. They lived to oppose and to overturn. For them, politics amounted to a series of exciting crusades: stop ERA, defeat the Panama Canal treaty, reverse Roe v. Wade, halt the assault weapons ban, impeach Clinton, topple Saddam, build the Mexico fence, pardon Ramos and ??

Once done, it was either on to the next or time to go home.

As Tanenhaus puts it, in an important passage that opens with a quotation from Irving Kristol:

American conservatism is a movement, a popular movement, not a faction within any political party. Though, inevitably, most conservatives vote Republican, they are not party loyalists and the party has to woo them to win votes. This movement is issue oriented. It will happily meld with the Republican party if the party is ‘right’ on the issues; if not, it will walk away. (Kristol wrote in 1995.)

By this calculus, all the obligations flow in only one direction. Parties are accountable to movement purists, while purists incur no reciprocal debt. They determine the “right” position, and the party’s job is to advance it. Kristol does not consider whether purists might be expected to maneuver at all or even to modify their views–for the good not only of the party but also the larger polity.

In this, Tanenhaus observes accurately that the unending and harassing burdens of governance are fiercely uncongenial to many conservatives. The Republicans profiled by Geoffrey Kabaservice in his series for NewMajority – Republicans like Henry Stimson and Thomas Dewey – understood that some important political problems can only be managed, never solved.  They appreciated that compromise must sometimes be accepted or even sought. They did not wage “culture wars,” but accepted and defended their society in all its inevitable imperfections. They were men of responsibility, not men of wrath.

And it is this tradition that many modern conservatives reject and repudiate.

For an example of this rejection and repudiation, turn to another important article in another important magazine: Yuval Levin’s “The Meaning of Sarah Palin” in the current Commentary.

Levin’s article has two contradictory points to offer, and it tip-toes indecisively between them.

One prong of Levin’s argument – postponed deep into the body of his essay – is an admission (grudging and evasive, but unmistakable) that Sarah Palin was indeed inadequate to the presidency that she might have inherited at any moment. While offering many excuses and palliations for these inadequacies, Levin does eventually concede, “There could be no denying Palin’s real deficiencies.” Actually there was quite a long of denying, and there still is, and Levin continues to contribute his mite.

Still, after a hiatus, Levin does return to this first point.

Palin was a problematic candidate. … [S]he ended up at the center of a political and cultural vacuum of her own creation. She began by opening up a huge space for herself, and then was unable to fill it. …

Palin’s reformism, like McCain’s, was essentially an attitude devoid of substance. …

[McCain and Palin] offered no overarching vision of America, no consistent view of the role of government, no clear description of what a free society should look like, and no coherent policy ideas that might actually address the concerns of American families and offer solutions to the serious problems of the moment. …

In the end, [Palin] was no more able than McCain to offer a coherent rationale for his presidency. …

You might think it wrong and reckless to gamble your nation’s future on a potential president who offered “attitude devoid of substance” and who lacked “policy ideas that might … offer solutions to the serious problems of the moment.” You might think it no compliment to describe a politician as occupying a “vacuum of her own creation” or as incapable of offering a “coherent rationale” why anyone should vote for her presidential ticket.

But be warned: if you do think any of those things, you will be deemed a member of a cultural elite with an “unfortunate and unattractive propensity” to “treat those who are not deemed part of the elect with condescension and contumely.”

While Levin himself acknowledges Palin’s flaws, he chafes when others do so. In all those other cases,

the overheated response to Palin’s presence on the national stage, from both friend and foe, was oddly disconnected from Palin’s actual actions, statements, and record.

Levin is tough on Palin’s left-wing critics.

The reaction to Palin revealed a deep and intense cultural paranoia on the Left: an inclination to see retrograde reaction around every corner, and to respond to it with vile anger.

But he does not have a lot more tolerance for those conservatives and Republicans who were dismayed by her selection. Dismissing the stated grounds of objection offered by Palin’s conservative critics, Levin reveals our concealed motives:

[T]he implicit charge was that Palin’s failure to speak the language and to share the common points of reference of the educated upper tier of American society essentially rendered her unfit for high office.

We were misled by a false theory of the proper qualifications for high office.

Palin’s detractors were animated by an

unstated assumption that governing is fundamentally an exercise of the mind: an application of the proper mix of theory, expertise, and intellectual distance that calls for knowledge and verbal fluency more than for prudence born of life’s hard lessons.

Sarah Palin embodied a very different notion of politics, in which sound instincts and valuable life experiences are considered sources of knowledge at least the equal of book learning.

This excessive regard for expertise and knowledge pushed us into a “kind of manic outburst … triggered by a false understanding of who Palin was.”

Now it might be said in reply that Palin’s career in government has demonstrated nothing like the prudence praised by Levin. She governed Alaska as if the price of oil would remain high forever. Palin used the windfall of 2006-2007 to double the per-citizen payout to more than $2,000. Cutting that payout is the obvious response to the decline in the price of oil, but also the least politically palatable. So Palin instead used her 2009 State of the State speech to demand that the Legislature produce large budget cuts – transferring responsibility for the cost of her own decision.

On the campaign trail in 2008, Palin took credit for tearing up a pipeline deal to extract better terms for the state. The terms were so favorable that the deal has now fallen through – and the state’s $500 million investment in the deal looks likely to be lost.

In her 2009 State of the State address, Palin proposed that the state generate 50% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025 – without offering any details or even any suggestion of how such a thing might be done. Palin has “sound instincts” all right, but they are the instincts of the shrewd vote catcher looking to move up the ladder, not the instincts of the manager or builder.

And I am convinced that Yuval Levin knows all this. He is an intelligent man, who has served in government and thought long and hard about public policy – one of the right’s few bright intellectual hopes in the generation born after 1970. He sees as plainly as I do that Sarah Palin would be a disastrous president. And yet … he cannot bring himself to say so in a direct, uncontorted manner. Why not?

You’d think that after eight years of George W. Bush, conservatives would have discovered a new respect for the difficulty of successful governance. Yet just as Tanenhaus diagnosed: it is cultural hostility that still most excites our passions.

Here’s Levin again:

The reaction of the intellectual elite to Sarah Palin was far more provincial than Palin herself ever has been, and those who reacted so viscerally against her evinced little or no appreciation for an essential premise of democracy: that practical wisdom matters at least as much as formal education, and that leadership can emerge from utterly unexpected places. The presumption that the only road to power passes through the Ivy League and its tributaries is neither democratic nor sensible, and is, moreover, a sharp and wrongheaded break from the American tradition of citizen governance.

Isn’t this a strange thing to write about a candidate whom Levin himself has said displayed little or none of that “practical wisdom” he admires?

Notice too Levin’s transition from the uncontested truth that talent can emerge anywhere to the insinuation at the end of this passage that talent can be found everywhere: that any citizen has what it takes to be a successful president. As we’ve all witnessed, that is not the case – not even if the unsuccessful president has two Ivy League degrees.

But of course the crackle in passages like these comes not from Levin’s wan defense of Palin, but his angry and energetic attack on her critics. His essay corroborates with almost too perfect timing Tanenhaus’ observation that the modern American right

defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy–”statist” social programs; “socialized medicine”; “big labor”; “activist” Supreme Court justices, the “media elite”; “tenured radicals” on university faculties; “experts” in and out of government.

These particular resentments as we have seen provide a very poor basis for governing. Increasingly, however, they are also proving a very poor basis for politics. While Levin optimistically detects grand future possibilities in Palin’s combination of social conservatism and cultural populism, he offers no justification for that emotion. As a candidate, Palin was a disaster, plunging 20+ approval points in key demographics in just two months in the public eye.

Cultural populism comes in many forms, and it’s not at all clear that Palin’s particular style of populism has much shelf life.  The resentments of the future are much more likely to be expressed with a Latino accent.

In one respect, at least, I very much agree with Levin. The Palin story was always less about Palin, and more about the response to Palin. And the continuing inability of even our conservative best and brightest to elevate their concern for the responsibilities of government over their cultural animosities suggests that this story’s most painful chapters remain to be written.