Victor Davis Hanson points the finger at the right culprit for the conservative defeat 2006-08:
Conservatives created Barack Obama and his vision of the Europeanization of America, and so have themselves to blame for the current recessional, as the present as we have known it fades into the past..
Let me explain. Yes, I know that the 2000-01 recession, Hurricane Katrina, two wars, and a $1 trillion hit after 9/11 made fiscal discipline hard. But being a conservative in America these days is hard—and one gets very little leeway or second chances. Not disowning a Ted Stevens and instead pointing to a Charles Rangel or John Murtha or William Jefferson is fatal for a conservative. We expect such things from a promiscuous spender, but cannot tolerate it from a professed budget hawk. (emphasis added)
Not just these days, but all the time. It is always hard to be the conservative – conservatism is a defense of hard, you-can’t-get-out-of-it, must-do-the-right-thing-even-if-it-hurts, Truth. Who do you want as your friend: the guy who says you have to mow the lawn before you head to the beach, or the guy who lets you off the hook for lawn mowing? Sure, we know the lawn has to be mowed, but its such a nice day…we conservatives are the people who throw the cold water of truth and responsibility on to the blazing fires of liberal hopes and dreams. Makes for a tricky bit of politics.
Hanson goes on through the linked article to talk about what, exactly, we messed up on and I highly recommend reading the whole thing. What I’d like to do is put my two cents in on what we might do in order to advance conservatism in such a manner as regains power.
At bottom, as I’ve said before, conservatism is a defense of Judeo-Christian civilization. This is what conservatism arose to defend – once liberalism started to question the basics of our civilization (the existence of God, the existence of revealed morality, the worth of inherited traditions, etc, etc, etc) in the so-called “Enlightenment”, conservatism arose to defend the basics against this assault. It is a curiosity of politics that liberalism, as a thing, pre-dates conservatism. There was no need for a conservative defense of what everyone accepted as the basics – there were political arguments, but they were about how to apply the basics to current conditions, not over whether the basics were true, or not. Liberalism changed all that, and we’ve been engaged in this battle ever since.
And in this battle we have won at times, and we have lost at times – but over the past 100 years its been mostly plain ruination of Judeo-Christian civilization. This is because conservatism, round about the turn of the last century, ceased to be a defense of eternal verities and became a rear-guard action seeking to merely slow down liberalism’s advancement. As liberalism advance from foolish lie to absurd lie, conservatism became more interested in just ameliorating the effects of the absurd lie, rather than going after the foolish which underpinned the absurd. Reagan, Thatcher and a few others attempted to arrest this continual ratchet to the left and even try to turn it back a bit, but they ended up being, at best, only partially (and temporarily) successful. Faced with the heavy lifting of turning back liberalism, Reagan, Thatcher et al were weakened by conservatives who didn’t understand that liberalism, in and of itself, is the problem and/or who simply didn’t want to do the hard task of advancing conservatism – its seems nice to be liked, and a lot of conservatives just didn’t want to bother doing things which would get them insulted in gross terms.
There is a curious bit of good fortune we’ve now run into – it is Judeo-Christian civilization which is now the revolutionary threat to the established order. Especially as President Obama seeks to remake America in a completely liberal image, it is our views which assert a radical change to society is necessary for justice and peace to be established. In losing the fight to maintain Judeo-Christian ideals as central to our civilization we have now placed such ideals in the exact position they were when they first became the rather earth-shaking idea – ie, we’re back now, in a sense, to the 2nd century, attempting to convince a world gone mad with a degenerate paganism that we offer the only real solution to the problem. The thing about the revolutionary is that there is an inherent romance about being on the outside, battling desperately for a cause.
What is Obama doing? Propping up the status quo – he’s going to bail out the banks which are part of the problem, bail out the mega-corporations which are part of the problem, bail out the unions which are part of the problem, protect the political ruling class which is part of the problem…and all to the cheers a pagan popular culture which also part of the problem. Obama just promises to do more of what messed us up to begin with – and as it all falls apart, and it will, that will be our opportunity to show that its all bad, and all of it has to go and be replaced by what we offer – sobriety, solidarity, hard work, thrift and self-sacrifice. A world with, perhaps, a lot less glamor, but with a lot more happiness and peace.
A drunken, diseased society will soon be entirely out of options and casting about for a life line – we offer it. Or, more accurately, we can offer it. We can offer, that is, pure conservatism – purified from its liberal accretions, no longer trying to be “less of the same” and no longer concerned with the insults which will be hurled at it. We can offer solid families rather than loose collections of individuals, genuine work as opposed to corporate/bureaucratic paper shuffling, charity rather than welfare, service rather than dependency, art rather than obscenity. Or we can try to trim our sails and become “liberal-lite” – well dressed and well-mannered tax collectors and military defenders of a dying people.
The choice is ours.
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