Conservatism is Not Quite Dead

May 23rd, 2008 at 02:16am Mark Noonan

As Yuval Levin notes:

George Packer of The New Yorker has penned the latest in a long line (reaching back many decades) of obituaries for conservatism. Like so many in the genre, it consists of a description of a movement in the midst of intellectual turmoil, searching for ways to apply its basic insights about government, human nature, and the culture to changing times, and it takes this turmoil to be a sign of decay or self-destruction. Packer discusses some of the younger conservatives (he mentions Ramesh Ponnuru, Ross Douthat, and Reihan Salam, among other examples) who are working to apply conservative principles and insights to the moment we’re living in, and yet he takes these signs, too, to suggest only gloom and doom for the Right. He points to intellectual fatigue (a phrase he quotes me using in the piece) but not to promising signs of resurgence and revitalization.

Let me suggest two things he might have noted. First of all, the kind of intellectual turmoil and self-searching he cites would be almost unimaginable on the left, today or at most points in the past half century. Conservatism is an intellectual movement in a way that American liberalism generally hasn’t been. For a long time, American liberals could draw their ideas from the European Left, and from the socialist experiment. The fall of communism—which certainly ended an era for the Right, and left many conservatives searching for a clear purpose—was far more of a challenge to the Left, and one the left has yet to recover from, or even fully engage. Clintonian triangulation helped pass the time for a while in the 90’s, and anti-Bushism has helped since, but what is the worldview underlying Obama’s and Clinton’s platforms today? The relative absence of heated arguments about that question on the left is not a sign of strength.

Second, he might note the character of the Democratic resurgence in Congress, evident in 2006 and in the much-discussed triad of Republican defeats this year. The general pattern suggests a concerted effort by the Democrats to recruit socially conservative but economically populist candidates to run against Republicans. This is a smart tactic for building strength in Congress (engineered largely by Rahm Emmanuel, a former Clinton lieutenant) but it is hardly a sign of strength for the Left (which has come to define itself first and foremost in cultural terms in recent years), or of weakness for conservatism. Democrat Travis Childers, who won a once-secure Republican seat in Mississippi last week, took every possible opportunity to describe himself as “pro-life and pro-gun” and to distance himself from Barack Obama.

We GOPers may, indeed, end up clobbered this November - and that would usher in a very liberal period under a President Obama coupled with a Congress headed up by liberals (ie, Reid and Pelosi)…but that would not mean we conservatives are out of the game.

I think that Levin does miss a bit of what is happening - I don’t think that the left is failing to redefine itself and adjust to modern times so much as the left is anti-intellectual through and through and doesn’t want to think about things. Leftists are un-intellectual sheep…if you try to introduce into the discussion anything which clearly refutes their views, they scamper into the bunker….these days, its the anti-Bush bunker…if we point out, say, that the Iraqi army clearly did beat the Sadrists, their response will be to condemn some aspect of President Bush; they lack the intellectual ability and desire to engage in the free exchange of ideas (side note: this is 90% of leftists…there are a very few who can think, such as Christopher Hitchens, and you can see how most of the left views them…you’d think the few thinking lefties would grab a clue here on what this means about leftism…but even the most intelligent on the left have some glaring blind spots).

Meanwhile, we conservatives are a throng of competing ideas and willingness to argue intensely about what is best - in a very real sense, to be a thinking person means to be a conservative these days. If anything, conservatism is the victim of its own success these days…we won the Cold War, won the debate on how to deal with crime, won the debate on gun control, won the debate on taxation, won the debate on deficit spending (yes, I know the GOP went on a spending binge…but for Democrats in 2008 to pose as fiscal hawks is absurd…but their saying they are is proof that we won the debate on deficit spending), won the debate on military strength, won the debate on welfare. We’re still arguing with the left about entitlements, the War on Terrorism, gay marriage and abortion; we’re arguing amongst ourselves about immigration (liberals want open borders - they won’t say it, but that is what they want)…and as the issues have narrowed to these, stresses in the conservative movement have become noticable.

You see, some conservatives figure that the cultural issues (abortion and gay marriage) should fall into the libertarian aspects of conservatism and are best left alone…other conservatives (and I’m one of them) view the cultural issues as crucial…in fact, more important than anything else in the long run. The debate over what to emphasize and what to downplay is causing some divisions - but the debate will go on until a conservative consensus is reached (which may be a lot quicker than most people imagine), and then a unified and intellectually strong conservatism will do battle with the left, and we’ll win those arguments, too (the real battle is internal - the right fighting the left in a battle of intellect is like the Dallas Cowboys taking on your local Pop Warner team). Not only is there life in conservatism, it is the only alive intellectual, political, moral and economic movement in America…the rest are all dead, dead, dead…

So, be of good heart, fellow conservatives. We may get our butts handed to us in November at the ballot box (though I’m not at all sure about that), but come what may we will win in the end - because the dead mind of liberalism can hate and be very nasty, but it can’t actually provide anything for the people…eventually, a triumphant liberalism will fall apart (and probably pretty quickly), and we’ll come back. Fight on and fight hard - don’t worry about immediate outcomes…just keep your eyes firmly on the prize of an America governed entirely from the conservative paradigm…where we’ll debate which free market policy to follow; where we’ll debate which pro-life policy is best; where we’ll debate which muscular American foreign policy will better secure our interests…and the sad, dead liberalism which stinks up the place today is nothing but a bad memory…

Tags: Conservatism

Entry Filed under: Campaign 2008, Popular Culture, Religion, Social Issues

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