Lost Identity! Blame the Liberal.

“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.