I've just read NYRB editor Sam Tanenhaus' new book, The Death of Conservatism. In many ways it's not very good; it's one of those tiny little overpriced hardbacks that (I assume) are fantastic moneyspinners for the author and publisher on a price to word ratio, written by individuals already able to trade on their name and reputation, but generally rushed together. The argument at times feels a little skewiffy, and the individual chapters still seem like the separate articles they were cobbled together from rather than parts of a whole.
But the essential point Tanenhaus is making is an important one: that even while it pays empty homage to the title, the brand of right wing politics governing the Republican party today has little to do with traditional conservatism. Tanenhaus provides a number of quotations that remind us just how far today's politicians and pundits have moved from their roots in the conservative resurgence in post-war America, and how far today's Republican values differ from those of their forefathers.
Whittaker Chambers: "A conservatism that will not accept [the rise of big government] ... is not a political force, or even a twitch: it has become a literary whimsy... Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms."
Irving Kristol: "the idea of a welfare state is in itself perfectly consistent with a conservative political philosophy ... In our urbanized, industrialized, highly mobile society, people need governmental action of some kind if they are to cope with many of their problems: old age, illness, unemployment, etc. They need such assistance; they demand it; they will get it."
George Will: "Conservatives rightly defend the market as a marvelous mechanism for allocating resources. But when conservatives begin regarding the market less as an expedient than as an ultimate value, or the ultimate arbiter of all values, their conservatism degenerates into the least conservative political impulse, which is populism."
Why has this happened? It's because the old form of conservatism, which many look back on with nostalgia in comparison to today's politics of invective, represented a patrician sort of politics. It thrived in a society where the people making decisions about running the country could come together in a single building and talk amongst themselves, and where the intellectuals' job was to fill up a few minds deeply rather than many minds shallowly. In this climate, consensus and nuance was not only possible, it was an essential mode of working.
Like it or not, the modern form of right wing politics is a more democratic form than traditional conservatism, formed from the expansion of the Midwestern populist wing of the Republican party and the old Democratic South and the new Southwest, precisely at the expense of the older patrician elites. It is democratic, that is, in the sense of representing a popular movement, rather than in the sense of respecting the principle of majority rule (since they probably represent about a third of the country and yet are basically unwilling to compromise with the other two thirds.)
The new right has risen to power since the 1960s because it was able to capture the Republican party from the old elites and because it could deliver victories in elections. And that, I suspect, is why we've not seen the last of it, either; and why calls to return to an older style of conservatism are on a hiding to nothing.
Think Of the Children
51 minutes ago
