“I confess that I know who is a conservative less surely than
I know who is a liberal,” William
F. Buckley wrote in 1963.
When a friend responded a few days ago to my recent
blogs, I first questioned myself if I even wanted to reply. (It's close to election
time and we're tired, are we not?) After thinking on it a few days I decided I
should, because over the past four years, the grounds for his (and others)
sentiments is something I've tried to learn more about. From his one paragraph
response, I have divided it in five parts and highlighted certain phrases to
focus clearly on his accusations. An excerpt from his last sentence, "and
that is why I am a conservative in my ideology not republican --Conservative..,"
is symptomatic of the "conservative movement" which has evolved over
the last four decades. (My reply, with Sam Tanenhaus' help, continues below my
friend's response)
Sorry for no replies in
awhile been really busy. I admit that I have not seen the movie but I have to
let you know ---you have a large group of liberals that are advocating the decline of America/Capitalism and are
anti-Semitic to the point of over reacting with so call tolerance of
Islam- looking the other way and denying is not a course of action.
So I recommend either take sides for America or
against America and right now the Democratic party is dangerously close
to going over the edge. I know the left likes to charge us of being radical
(Tea Party) but radical are among us on both sides. Romney is the not the answer either but we
definitely cannot live another 4 more years of this divide, envy and
slander instead of the hope and change he blowed up every one skirt.
If I thought we could
recover after 4 more years and somehow recover from the failure it will become
I would say let him do it so
I can show you how wrong you and the Liberals are with this policy but this is not Academia and liberal idea of an experiment
with changing America has and always will be a failure.
Must have common ground and government must take step back
in our lives and get back to basics and uphold freedom for the people from
their government. Government is out of control on spending and foreign
affair adventures and buying
votes.
I ask who will the President blame for
his failed policies if he is re-elected- I will tell you --he will blame
America for his failure. Congress
did not do this, business' didn't do that, China, Europe not recovering,
natural disasters, another large scale terrorist attack and always liberal democratic line
--everyone racists or bigots Blah Blah Blah. I can write the headline now-Liberals never take responsibility they
always have to blame and why I am a conservative in my ideology not republican
--Conservative..
JD
Traditionally, "Republican" was, at the least, synonymous with "conservative." But the conservative label grew a hodgepodge of non-traditional issues, and over the years it became merely an "embellished mantra" for the right, instead of truly representing conservatism by any reasonable definition. Hence, my friend and many others, to whom "true conservatism" is at the heart of their ideology, no longer, legitimately can claim Republicanism as their standard bearer. For many who try to remain loyal, the label is an ill-fit, non-identity, with the National Party ---- where "core beliefs" are not cohesive. (Of course that's true to some extent with Democrats.) Republican campaign rhetoric on various topics is contradictory from one year, month, or day to the next. It is the ill-fated tea-party reconciliation, wanting to be all things!
The conservative identity was lost,
perhaps, beginning with a follower of the classical, intellectual conservative
William F. Buckley: "As Garry Wills, who broke with the
movement in the 1970s but continued to call himself a conservative, observed in
his memoir Confessions of a Conservative (1979): “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 Death of Conservatism)
Continuing into the 80s with a president enthroned, adored by the
larger populace: "The tribune of this new polarity was Ronald Reagan,
whose denunciations of “big government” and the underclass it coddled—through
“entitlements” and “giveaways”—were softened by his soothing assurances to
those “delighted and unsure about their new affluence,” as Richard Goodwin put
it in 1967, no less dependent than the poor and unwilling to give up
budget-draining “insurance” policies like Social Security and Medicare. In Dead
Right, his withering deconstruction of the Reagan years, David Frum notes that
“not one major spending program was abolished during the Reagan presidency.
Only one spending program of any size was done away with, and even that—the
worthless Comprehensive Employment and Training Act—was instantly replaced by
another program, the Jobs Partnership Training Act, meant to achieve almost
exactly the same end.” (The Death of Conservatism)
"During the Clinton years,
right-wing intellectuals, reversing their long-standing contempt for the politics
of “class warfare,” became the most adept practitioners of that same politics,
now rechristened as the “culture wars.” Even notably secular writers became
“image consultants for Protestant fundamentalists,” Michael Lind wrote in his
essay “Why Intellectual Conservatism Died,” published in the quarterly Dissent
in 1995. Lind, a onetime protégé of both Irving Kristol and William Buckley,
offered a bleak tour d’horizon of the movement’s intellectual condition in the
1990s: “In 1984, the leading conservative spokesman in the media was George
Will; by 1994, it was Rush Limbaugh. The basic concerns of intellectual
conservatives in the eighties were foreign policy and economics; by the early
nineties they had become dirty pictures and deviant sex.” They not only
abandoned Burke. They had become inverse Marxists, placing loyalty to the
movement above their civic responsibilities." (The Death of Conservatism)
"It was the alliance of neoconservatives and evangelicals that formed the movement’s core during the Bush years and responded most exuberantly to the administration’s policies—from its “faith-based” initiatives through the war on terror and the crusading mission to “democratize” Iraq.
And by their lights, they were
fully justified in doing so. Bush, so often labeled a traitor to movement
principles, was in fact more steadfastly devoted to them than any of his
Republican predecessors—including Reagan. Few on the right acknowledge this
today, for obvious reasons. But not so long ago many did. At his peak, following
September 11, Bush commanded the loyalties of every major faction of the
Republican Party. The central domestic proposal of his first term, the $1.3
trillion tax cut, extended Reagan’s massive “tax reform” from the 1980s. His
massive Medicare prescription drug bill was in line with Reagan’s continuation
of Social Security and Medicare. And the huge deficits Bush amassed, though
they angered small-government conservatives, had a precedent, too. As David
Frum points out in Dead Right, “federal spending rose explosively during the
golden age of Reagan.” Shortly before the Iraq invasion, Martin Anderson,
Reagan’s top domestic policy adviser, told Bill Keller (writing in The New York
Times Magazine) that Bush was unmistakably Reagan’s heir. “On taxes, on
education, it was the same. On Social Security, Bush’s position was exactly
what Reagan always wanted and talked about in the ‘70s,” Anderson said. “I just
can’t think of any major policy issue on which Bush was different.” The prime
initiative of Bush’s second term, the attempt to privatize Social Security,
drew directly on movement scripture: Milton Friedman denounced the “compulsory
annuities” of Social Security in Capitalism and Freedom. Buckley noted the
advantages of “voluntary” accounts in his early manifesto, Up from Liberalism.
So did Barry Goldwater during his presidential campaign in 1964. Bush went
further than Reagan, too, in the war he waged against the federal bureaucracy.
And his attacks on the “liberal-left bias of the major media” were the most
aggressive since Nixon’s.
Classical conservatives have all
either deserted the Right or been evicted from it. A striking difference
between conservatism past and present is the reverse flow of intellectuals away
from the movement. The converts of yesteryear—Burnham and Chambers, Moynihan
and Kristol—have been succeeded by writers and thinkers like Mark Lilla and
Michael Lind, Francis Fukuyama and Fareed Zakaria, David Brooks and Andrew
Sullivan, who have defected in the opposite direction, fleeing the cloistered
precincts of the Right. Another serious conservative journalist, David Frum,
though still a loyal Republican, has lamented that “a generation of young
Americans has been lost to our party.
Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger,
the governor of California, advised others in his party to do “what the people
want you to do rather than getting stuck in your ideology.” Florida governor
Charlie Crist agreed. Another moderate Republican governor, Jon Huntsman Jr.,
of Utah, found he had more in common with the Obama administration than with
his own party." (The Death of Conservatism
2009-08-22)
Now, if you (my friend) have read
this far and absorbed the history, you have a better understanding of your party
disillusionment. When people desert or are evicted from the party, their "core
values/beliefs" do not align with that of the muddled beliefs of party. On
the other hand, people of either party leave, at times, even when core values
do align; they are shamed out of their party. For Democrats
it has been a denigration that they are supporting some socialistic, commie
organization. (Because of disparagement
and disenchantment, large numbers, in both parties, turned to Unaffiliated of which
90% are "closet partisans," only 10% truly are non-partisan.) Such
has been the case, beginning with the fall of classic conservatism, when people
like Jesse Helms, succeeded by a host of inclined Libertarians or others, such
as Shawn Hannity, Michelle Bachman, Joe Walsh, Jeff Kuner, Wayne Allyn Root, Allen
West, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh. (Add
any number of other revanchist Republican office holders who have joined in, in
one way or another.) It is the great-host of conspiracy theorist to capitalize on
the right-airwaves. All the things they are saying has got to be the truth,
because you have heard it so many times and nobody bothers to check it out;
it's all the hated-liberal's fault. (It's the Joe McCarthy era again, except
the 1st amendment is more alive than it's ever been; no one will be punished
except eventually by their own humiliation.)
And no one is taking your guns
(e.g. AmeriPAC) or giving up vigilance against terrorist attacks (e.g. Act For
America) or jeopardizing religious freedoms (e.g. ConservativeActionAlert) as these bracketed examples suggest. These are
right-wing political fronts masquerading as real life threats, to strict fear
in people for their personal safety and loss of rights. That's just a few
examples of the right's internet-unsavory-propagandist ongoing campaign. They
bombard unsuspecting citizens that the liberal is destroying the country.
Yet, as you say, we know there are
fringe elements on each side, and each of us should work to mitigate the
extremes. The truth is, however, instead of admonishing the conspiracy
theorist/extremist, you justify them to project
your failures on the liberal (Or the
party that you now refute does). This is to deny history of the struggling
conservative movement, of the last forty years, and how it has decline to
sordid, political tactics. (Which by the way has a long record that I wrote
about in Selling
the Soul, which is so evident in this campaign.)
It was one of the authors of the New Deal, a Mormon Republican, Marriner Eccles, who came to learn the importance of the social safety-net and upholding the middle class to undergird the capitalist, free-market foundation. Into the 70s, under Richard Nixon, the last New Deal president, the Right had become the guardian of all it had once pledged to undo. As Gary Wills wrote, “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.” So, now, will the right completely undo the social order; will it voucherize and privatize in favor of crony capitalism, furthering a plutocracy?
That is certainly the aim of the
plutocratic Libertarian Koch Brothers and their ilk who financially back the
tea parties. Many partiers got caught in the emotional flow of revanchist
politics -- for naught so-call conservative ideology. All that mattered was they
take back the country, in the aftermath of a failed Bush administration in
which they acquiesced.
There is much going on in the Republican party that attributes to identity uncertainty, at the front position is Rush Limbaugh --- and Grover Norquist, who, as he says, "Wants to drown government in a bath tub." Certainly not classical conservatives!
Could William F. Buckley find a real traditional/classical conservative, with just a little intellect, in the Republican party today, an authentic
conservative who seeks not to destroy but to conserve? Yes, I believe he
could, there are a few left.
Our country needs them. Therefore, my advice to my friend, who is a smart family loving man, is that while you
can't believe in your party's presidential candidate, you should not give up
on your party. It needs you more than ever. When the party reclaims William F. Buckley's Classical Conservative, and again believe in government, believes
that government can be better, our country will be the winner. We can have a civil
debate about what in government is so vital and what's not.
I have an affinity for the classical conservative, for in my ideological heart is the
fiscal-essential conservative.
