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What's Killing Conservatism?
Carl T. Bogus reviews The Death of Conservatism
Four days after Barack Obama's decisive victory in November 2008, I attended a conference at Yale University titled "The Next American Conservatism?" The conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute organized the conference in advance of the election -- in the face of oncoming doom, as it were -- to try to figure out what sort of conservatism might rise from the ashes. But although the intellectuals on the program seemed to take for granted that conservatism as we know it is dead, none of them ventured an opinion as to why it died, whether it deserved to die, or what was, or should be, next.
Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review as well as the author of an acclaimed biography of Whittaker Chambers, offers his postmortem in an elegant little volume. Tanenhaus would not have been surprised that the participants at Yale did not even attempt meaningful speculation. "Today's conservatives," he writes, "resemble the exhumed figures of Pompeii, trapped in postures of frozen flight, clenched in the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology." When a volcano erupts in your face, it is difficult to be reflective.
COMMENTS (1)
There's something a little weird about this free floating discussion of "the movement." There is no "conservative movement"--there are voters, and ideologues, and con men, and corporations, and newspapers and writers who are wholly owned subsidiaries of either true believers, con men, or corporations (or all three). At different times--even at different moments in the campaign and election cycle, one or the other may be in the ascendance. But if you follow the money trail you will see the same basic players from the new deal to the present--and its not open, honest, freckle faced farm boys who authentically hate the eastern establishment. Then notion that the "real" or heartland, unethnically mixed america suddenly discovered the teeming, identity politicked, urban areas during the new deal is just weird. People have been fleeing the mid west almost as long as they were entering it--begging for government handouts at the same time that they were settling the west. This was interrupted by the dust bowl, among other things. And again by world war II and the war footing that drove people into the cities to build the war machine.
There's way more going on in the rise of faux populist anti government conservativism than some natural antipathy to the 'eastern establishment' which was, in any event, also composed of republicans and conservatives as much as it was composed of a fantasy stew of upper class jewish traitors.
aimai
aimai
Posted by: aimai | October 23, 2009 11:39 AM