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Main Forums => Politics => Topic started by: MicroBalrog on September 03, 2009, 01:51:24 AM
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Requiem for the Right
The biographer of Whittaker Chambers and William Buckley on a dying movement.
By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK
Published Aug 29, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Sep 7, 2009
The editor of The New York Times Book Review and the paper's "Week in Review" section, Sam Tanenhaus is the biographer of Whittaker Chambers and is at work on the life of William F. Buckley Jr. In a new, short book, The Death of Conservatism, he argues that the right needs to find its footing for the good of the country. In an e-mail exchange with Jon Meacham, Tanenhaus reflected on the book's themes. Excerpts:
Meacham: So how bad is it, really? Your title doesn't quite declare conservatism dead.
Tanenhaus: Quite bad if you prize a mature, responsible conservatism that honors America's institutions, both governmental and societal. The first great 20th-century Republican president, Theo- dore Roosevelt, supported a strong central government that emphasized the shared values and ideals of the nation's millions of citizens. He denounced the harm done by "the trusts"—big corporations. He made it his mission to conserve vast tracts of wilderness and forest. The last successful one, Ronald Reagan, liked to remind people (especially the press) he was a lifelong New Dealer who voted four times for Franklin D. Roosevelt. The consensus forged by Buckley in the 1960s gained strength through two decisive acts: first, Buckley denounced right-wing extremists, such as the members of the John Birch Society, and made sure when he did it to secure the support of conservative Republicans like Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and Sen. John Tower. This pulled the movement toward the center. Second: Buckley saw that the civil disturbances of the late 1960s (in particular urban riots and increasingly militant anti-Vietnam protests) posed a challenge to social harmonies preferred by genuine conservatives and genuine liberals alike. When the Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan called on liberals to join with conservatives in upholding "the politics of stability," Buckley replied that he was ready to help. He placed the values of "civil society" (in Burke's term) above those of his own movement or the GOP.
Today we see very little evidence of this. In his classic The Future of American Politics (1952), the political journalist Samuel Lubell said that our two-party system in fact consists of periods of alternating one-party rule—there is a majority "sun" party and a minority "moon" party. "It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out," Lubell wrote. Thus, in the 1980s, Republicans grasped (and Democrats did not) that new entrepreneurial energies had been unleashed, and also that the Cold War could be brought to a conclusion through strong foreign policy. This was the Republicans' "sun" period. The reverse is happening today. The Democrats now dominate our heliocentric system—first on the economic stimulus, which is already proving to be at least a limited success, and now on the issue of health-care reform. These are both entirely Democratic initiatives. The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don't have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh's stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.
Is there an analogous historical moment? Conservatives argue that this is 1965 and that a renaissance is at hand.
I disagree. Today, conservatives seem in a position closer to the one they occupied during the New Deal. The epithets so many on the right now hurl at Obama—"socialist," "fascist"—precisely echo the accusations Herbert Hoover and "Old Right" made against FDR in 1936. And the spectacle of citizens appearing at town-hall meetings with guns recalls nothing so much as the vigilante Minutemen whom Buckley evicted from the conservative movement in the 1960s. A serious conservative like David Frum knows this, and has spoken up. It is remarkable how few others have. The moon party is being yanked ever farther onto its marginal orbit.
Would Chambers recognize the right as it stands today?
He might recognize it, but with dismay. Even in 1959, Chambers withdrew from National Review—where he had been writing occasional essays—because it seemed out of step, for instance, in its failure to see that the Soviet Union must be negotiated with, not simply threatened with nuclear extinction. Chambers opposed the arms race, favored civil liberties, distrusted the unregulated free market. His model was Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century English conservative who regarded unchecked capitalism, and the upheavals it wrought, as a potential threat to the social order. Above all, Chambers was a humanist intellectual, deeply learned in the literature of several languages. He urged Buckley (his young protégé) to read the radical novels of André Malraux. He admired Nabokov's Lolita.
Is there an inherent contradiction in the idea that conservatives need to put forward an agenda for the future?
I don't think they need to put forward such an agenda. The best policies are formed through cooperation between the two parties. Most voters aren't ideological. They choose leaders for reasons of trust and affinity. It's worth remembering that even at this supercharged moment, with so much fervor in the air, this country elected a relatively inexperienced African-American product of Hawaii, Kenya, Columbia, and Harvard, with some years spent as a social organizer on the South Side of Chicago. And a majority voted for him for they same reason they have voted for other presidents, because they liked and trusted him, and because he seemed attuned to them and their problems. Hannah Arendt identified the ability to listen—to place oneself inside the mind of others—as the essential requirement of democratic statesmanship. The function of conservatives is not to meet every liberal program or scheme with a denunciation or a destructive counterscheme, but rather to weigh its advantages and defects, supporting the first and challenging the second. A declaration of ideological warfare against liberalism is by its nature profoundly unconservative. It meets perceived radicalism with a counterradicalism of its own.
One criticism of your book will no doubt be that you are an egghead sellout from The New York Times and aren't a true conservative anyway.
Egghead? I wish. I'm a working journalist, plus biographer and self-taught historian. I claim no expertise as a political thinker, and even less in the realm of policy. As for my having sold out to the Times, anyone masochistic enough to review my writings over the years will see my point of view has changed very little. Nothing I say in my new book conflicts with anything I wrote in my biography of Chambers. I'm not registered with either party and never have been. I'm interested in politics as a theater of ideas and as a place where intellectuals now and again exert some visible influence. It is this confluence of ideas and action that I like to write about.
Who do you see as the plausible leaders of the right in the next decade? for that matter, will there be one "right," or possibly a Palin party and a Pawlenty party, to put it very roughly?
This is the crisis now facing the right and principal reason I wrote this book. The movement has exhausted itself and depleted its resources. Before the GOP finds a new leader, it will need a new vocabulary. Political ideas don't change much over time and political debates don't either. (Remember, TR, FDR, and Truman all favored national health care. So did Nixon.) But the tonal difference between a Joe McCarthy in 1950 and a Reagan in 1980 is enormous. And it is the intellectuals who must reinvent the conservative vocabulary, by thinking hard again. I once asked Bill Buckley what brought him to Goldwater and then Reagan. He said, "They came to me." Bill Buckley had the ideas and the language. These ascendant leaders needed to master both.
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/214253
MicroBalrog says:
It would be easy to claim that this man is "not a conservative". Rather, I would argue he is a conservative, just one belonging to a different faction; one focused less on a conservatism in terms of free market economics or small government, but in terms of preserving the status quo and defeating "radicalism".
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It's a good, well thought-out article but I believe it is wrong in that it fails to acknowledge that the right is merely radicalizing in response to the left. We are threatened and are responding accordingly.
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This is where the who essay fell off the track:
The Democrats now dominate our heliocentric system—first on the economic stimulus, which is already proving to be at least a limited success, and now on the issue of health-care reform. These are both entirely Democratic initiatives. The Republicans, so intent on thwarting Obama, have vacated the field, and left it up to the sun party to accept the full burden of legislating us into the future. If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don't have them. This could marginalize the right for a generation, if not longer. Rush Limbaugh's stated hope that Obama will fail seems to have become GOP doctrine. This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.
Economic stimulus= epic fail
Social Security= Bush tried to fix this but democrats stonewalled him
Health care reform= only a small minority of people want this, and it will bankrupt our system far quicker than SS or the Stimulus plan.
The Republicans may be tagged for something along the lines of not standing in the way of the death of our country.
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It would be a shame if the Republicans, after grinding the Obama-Kennedy Health Care Bill into dust, do not propose a bill of their own to liberalize the health care system.
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Whenever I encounter the term "unchecked capitalism," I know I've been foolish enough to cross the border into Marxist territory.
If not for capitalism, the leftist extremist whiners would still be serfs in Europe.
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The Republicans would be standing in the way if the majority of the country supported the stimulus bill and nationalized health care. Polls, and the very raucous town hall meetings, show that the majorities are not on the side of moving the country further toward socialism.
If the Republicans want to be seen as the party that takes care of things, they can address the health care issues by first explaining to the public who it is that is without health care (some 10-15 million) and how we can help them at a marginal cost to our system. As for stimulating the economy, throwing money at it is not the solution. Reducing taxes and regulations would do much better.
The author's suggestions would be apt if the Democrat's policies merely needed some tweaking, but Obama & Co are heading full speed toward a full socialist system. There's no way to compromise with that.
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I can't take a man seriously as a conservative if they think Teddy Roosevelt was a conservative.
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What the writer from The Times fails to mention is whether the present democrat party and Obama's administration has the best interest of the vast majority of the people they represent, or are rather interested in reducing this country and it's people to the lowest common denominator and thus securing their leftist agenda in perpetuity. The democrats did not come to power because they are a party of better ideas. They came to power because of a massive knee jerk reaction to an epic fail of republican elected officials to be what they say they are, and the willingness of democrats to obfuscate their true agenda with high sounding, emotional propaganda.
(The 43 million number of people with no health care is an example. Notice that the writer perpetuates that fraud)
He's no conservative. Neither is he a credible thinker.
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What's this? A mainstream media source pissing all over conservatism?
Huh.
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I'll take "egghead sellout" for 500, Alex.
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This is the attitude not of conservatives, but of radicals, who deplore the very possibility of a virtuous government.
What on earth does he mean by 'virtuous government'?
Is this guy what they call the 'country club republican'? The kind of people who thought McCain was a good choice, since he was much more 'stable' than the 'radicals' who were running against him?
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If the Republicans want to be seen as the party that takes care of things, they can address the health care issues by first explaining to the public who it is that is without health care (some 10-15 million) and how we can help them at a marginal cost to our system.
I'm sure the Republicrats will stick their big ugly noses into it one way or a dozen others; none of that, however, will alter the simplest fact of all: medicine is none of government's business in the first place.
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It's a good, well thought-out article but I believe it is wrong in that it fails to acknowledge that the right is merely radicalizing in response to the left. We are threatened and are responding accordingly.
Liberals can say the same thing, Bush was in power for 8 years; that is plenty of time for the left to have radicalized in response to neo-con's.
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I'm still trying to figure out what a Neo-Con really is...
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If the Democrats succeed, Republicans will be tagged as the party that declined even to help repair a broken system and extend fundamental protections—logical extensions of Social Security and Medicare—to some 46 million people who now don't have them.
That's where I stopped reading.
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I'm still trying to figure out what a Neo-Con really is...
Are you familiar with Irving Kristol and his doctrines?
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I'm still trying to figure out what a Neo-Con really is...
It's sort of like "assault weapon." It's whatever or whomever the user of the term wants it to be.
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It's sort of like "assault weapon." It's whatever or whomever the user of the term wants it to be.
Neoconservatism is a well-defined and extant ideology. I fail to see why we can't call people neocons if they call themselves neocons.
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It's sort of like "assault weapon." It's whatever or whomever the user of the term wants it to be.
That. It's used as a general catch-all pejorative against anyone right of center.
Neoconservatism is a well-defined and extant ideology. I fail to see why we can't call people neocons if they call themselves neocons.
Then somebody'd better tell the rest of the world, 'cause that's not how the term is used by everyone else.
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Theoretical "definition" != actual usage. Because some guy wrote a book saying "This is what X term means" doesn't make it accurate. Hard for the people who form their world views based on Wiki entries to fathom I know (zomg they haz sources!!!11!one1!!).
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Amazingly, I've actually got a copy of Kristol's “New Conservatism” on my table as I write this. The man is generally credited with founding the neo-conservative movement.
In brief, neoconservatism is composed of a belief in social conservatism (often 'moderate' social conservatism), a belief in an interventionist foreign policy, and, most importantly, a refusal (on an ideological level) to oppose the existence of the welfare-state. Rather, the neconservative wants the superstate to exists, but he wants it to pursue 'conservative goals'. 'Moderation' and 'slow, non-revolutionary change' are beloved by Kristol.
Obviously, this ideology is very handy not just for people who really are ideologically neo-conservatives, but also for moderate politicians who need to justify their stances. Even a relatively socially liberal moderate Republican can easily throw-in with this.
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That. It's used as a general catch-all pejorative against anyone right of center.
"Fundamentalism" is also used by some people to describe anybody more religious than they are.
That's not what that means, either.
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"Fundamentalism" is also used by some people to describe anybody more religious than they are.
That's not what that means, either.
That's exactly what it means to the people who use it that way, which is most of 'em.
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Sure. And?
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When everyone uses a term one way, and the dictionary defines it different way, it means the dictionary is wrong.
You can say all you want about "neo-con" or "fundamentalist" meaning whatever your books say they mean. In real life, they rarely mean anything at all like that.
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In brief, neoconservatism is composed of a belief in social conservatism (often 'moderate' social conservatism), a belief in an interventionist foreign policy, and, most importantly, a refusal (on an ideological level) to oppose the existence of the welfare-state. Rather, the neconservative wants the superstate to exists, but he wants it to pursue 'conservative goals'. 'Moderation' and 'slow, non-revolutionary change' are beloved by Kristol.
Which simply proves the point that it means anything anyone wants it to mean.
Clinton seems to meet those criteria. I think the Mogadishu situation qualifies as interventionist foreign policy. Clinton certainly didn't oppose the welfare state.
If you want examples of Clinton as a (moderate) social conservative, I'd point to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy, the firing of Dr. Joycelyn Elders, and the fact that Clinton is a Christian (the stereotypical liberal is a Godless heathen). I guess it depends on what your definition of "moderate" is. :)
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And "liberal" has an actual meaning closer to "libertarian." Tell you what, I'm gonna write a book defining "conservative" as actually meaning "socialist." Once it gets cited on Wiki it'll be the truth!
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And "liberal" has an actual meaning closer to "libertarian."
There's a reason historians and political scientists differentiate between "North American liberals" - which are essentially what people in America normally mean when they say liberal - and European Liberals, who are sort of like the German FDP and similar parties.
When everyone uses a term one way, and the dictionary defines it different way, it means the dictionary is wrong.
Most people out there think AR-15's are assault rifles. They're not.
Most people think "regulated" means "controlled by the state", but that's not what the Constitutional phrase means.
I'm betting a lot of people still think dolphins are fish. They're still mammals.
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One dude writing a book != definitive.
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One dude writing a book != definitive.
Would you feel better about my argument if I used the term "moderate conservatives"?
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Given that your argument is concerning the term neo-con, using a different term is sort of self-defeating innit?
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My argument is this.
Neo-conservatives - and other moderate Republicans - have been very prominent with the previous Presidential Administration.
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When did the previous administration become part of this conversation?
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When did the previous administration become part of this conversation?
Since this post. (http://www.armedpolitesociety.com/index.php?topic=20902.msg397401#msg397401)