# The Death of Conservatism? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 10, 2009, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508 "2009-09-10T02:32:58Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 4:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/61 "2009-09-10T16:40:31Z")
> [@Oakminster](#): > > I really believe it. I’m a conservative/libertarian…especially by the standard of this board, where pretty much everybody to the right of Karl Marx is considered a Nazi. > > That noted, I have a long history on this board and elsewhere of supporting gay marriage, opposing Bush the Younger’s Sandbox Adventure, and I’m solidly pro choice. I plan on keeping my guns. I want my taxes lower, my government smaller and less intrusive into my private life. > > I believe the power of the State should be strictly limited to those powers granted in the Constitution, and maximum liberty preserved for the citizens. I’m a devout atheist. > > I am not an evil person. I’m not a racist. I’m not a homophobe, or any of those other horrible things that have been broad-brushed over all conservatives in this thread. Maybe, but your party is their home. Until the conservatives kick out the crazies and run proper campaigns they will be seen as wallowing with the pigs. In order to compete the repubs have opened their doors to the religious right , the homophobes ,the gun nuts and other single issue groups. You can not just disown them between campaigns. There are not being brushed with anything. The mixture of weirdness is the paint. ---
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/62 "2009-09-10T16:42:59Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > Until the conservatives kick out the crazies The crazies are _in charge_ there now. The people getting kicked out are the sanes. That won’t be easy to fix. They don’t even think it’s a problem. ---
**Author:** ![jayjay](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jayjay/32/6765_2.png) [@jayjay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jayjay)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/63 "2009-09-10T16:46:43Z")
> [@Jackmannii](#): > > McCarthy (Joe, not Eugene), those toads on the House Un-American Affairs Committee and everybody else who kept up the heat on the cold war and arms race through the '60s, plus digging a big hole in Vietnam must all have been liberals then (To be sure, some were. But many were right-wing). The Cold War, like the Drug War, is bipartisan. Both parties delighted in taking credit for any successes and deflecting blame for any failures. For 90% of the duration, you couldn’t find a major party to denounce the Cold War if you tried. McCarthy was a blip, as was HUAC. About the only places they actually had any effect that lasted more than a year or two were Hollywood and Broadway, and both of those blacklists were more or less expired by the mid- to late-60s. Vietnam was a warmer part of the Cold War, and again, it was Democrats who got us into it in the first place. I’m not one of those who blame Vietnam on Nixon…he just did mop-up. ---
**Author:** ![Oakminster](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/77aa72/32.png) [@Oakminster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Oakminster)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 5:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/64 "2009-09-10T17:08:46Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > Maybe, but your party is their home. Until the conservatives kick out the crazies and run proper campaigns they will be seen as wallowing with the pigs. In order to compete the repubs have opened their doors to the religious right , the homophobes ,the gun nuts and other single issue groups. You can not just disown them between campaigns. There are not being brushed with anything. The mixture of weirdness is the paint. It’s not my party anymore. I cut ties with the Pubbies in 2003. I’ve made a total of two political contributions in my life, both within the last election cycle, both to local Democrats. Also voted for a Blue Dawg Dem in the local House race. I’ve pretty much voted a split ticket going back to the first time I could vote…Reagan’s second term. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/65 "2009-09-10T17:18:21Z")
The reason conservatism seems to be on the wane today is because people have forgotten what liberalism leads to. We’ve had almost three decades of nearly continuous growth, and we’ve been living basically under a Pax Americana since the Soviet Union collapsed. Under those conditions, people tend to forget that peace requires vigilance and a strong defense, that you cannot become prosperous by punishing the people who create things and rewarding people who don’t, and that politicians are not capable of running complex economies. This happens every time we go through a period of relative peace and prosperity. After WWII, we entered a period like this. The U.S. avoided going down the path as far as some, but many countries experimented with state industrial policy, protectionism, highly progressive taxes, and unions gained enormous power. The result was a mess. If you want to see where this leads, look at Britain in the 1970’s. Unions ran amok, there were constant strikes and marches and riots. Welfare ran out of control. Economic growth stagnated. The problem with liberals today is that not enough of them lived through the 1970’s. But they’ll find out. Unfortunately, it will cost us a lot for them to learn the lesson again. I highly recommend this web site: [The Commanding Heights](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/). It’s one of the coolest E-learning web sites around. Produced by PBS, it’s a history of economic development and globalization in the post-WWII 20th century. It includes videos, interactive timelines, interviews with movers and shakers, etc. It has a direct bearing on the subject of this thread, showing the ebb and flow of various political ideas and their consequences. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 5:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/66 "2009-09-10T17:56:01Z")
> [@aldiboronti](#): > > The Republican party has a flair for reinvention as it has shown time and time again in the past. The Republican Party can recover if it manages to reinvent itself as a genuine limited-government party. However, to do so would require it to shuck much of its Religious Right baggage. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/67 "2009-09-10T18:03:38Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > The reason conservatism seems to be on the wane today is because people have forgotten what liberalism leads to. We’ve had almost three decades of nearly continuous growth, and we’ve been living basically under a Pax Americana since the Soviet Union collapsed. Hmm, you mean the kind of “Pax Americana” that includes a [long-term global war](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4753225&postcount=66)? :dubious: > [@Sam Stone on 4/13/04](#): > > I happen to think we ARE at war. Not just the U.S., but here in Canada, and in Britain, and Australia, and Europe, and Japan, and the Middle East. This war was declared by Osama Bin Laden. He’s been at war with us for years. It took WTC for some of us to realize it and to join the battle. Some of you haven’t realized it yet. [… cue trumpets …] > > This is a war. Battles are fought. Battles will be won - and lost. Many more people will die. That’s what happens in war. But the key thing to remember is, we didn’t choose this war. Bin Laden did. Bush chose to make Iraq one of the battle grounds, for what I think are sound strategic reasons. Plenty of mistakes have been made in the aftermath of that war - and plenty more will be made. War is a messy business, and we’re writing the book on how to win this one as we go along. But of course, that was back when you were trying to boost approval of Bush’s Iraq adventure. Now that you want to portray the past thirty conservatism-dominated years as some kind of Golden Age of “relative peace and prosperity”, in order to scare people about the alleged spooky doom-laden consequences of liberal policy, you conveniently gloss over those grim and messy war years and sweep them under the rug of the phrase “basically a Pax Americana”. ISTM that this sort of both-sides-of-the-mouth argument, where the focus is on spinning the “big picture” for one’s current rhetorical purposes rather than on articulating some kind of honest and consistent large-scale ideological and strategic vision, is one of the major reasons that conservatism is struggling right now. Many conservatives seem to have simply forgotten how to debate an issue instead of propagandizing it. (Not that all liberals are immune to that failing themselves, of course, but today’s conservatives seem to be disproportionately afflicted by it.) ---
**Author:** ![Dick\_Dastardly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/c4cdca/32.png) [@Dick\_Dastardly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dick_Dastardly)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/68 "2009-09-10T18:32:12Z")
If Obama was a politician in another country he’d be a conservative. If British Conservative Party leaders were in America they’d fit quite happily into the Democratic party. Right now on presidential power, foreign wars, lots of other stuff, he’s basically a third Bush term. America is a very conservative country compared to pretty much anywhere else, but that’ll gradually change over the next few decades and America will end up with a GOP that supports socialised healthcare and so on. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/69 "2009-09-10T20:05:04Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > The reason conservatism seems to be on the wane today is because people have forgotten what liberalism leads to. We’ve had almost three decades of nearly continuous growth, and we’ve been living basically under a Pax Americana since the Soviet Union collapsed. Under those conditions, people tend to forget that peace requires vigilance and a strong defense, that you cannot become prosperous by punishing the people who create things and rewarding people who don’t, and that politicians are not capable of running complex economies. Among other problems with that argument; there isn’t much prospect for liberalism any time soon in America, only somewhat less conservatism. Obama is no liberal. We’ve have decades of “growth” that have left much of the population behind. The “Pax Americana” has been a long collection of wars and tyranny, often at our instigation. It presumes that liberalism IS “politicians running the economy”; liberalism isn’t communism despite how the Right loves to pretend it is. And the claim that liberals are into “punishing the people who create things and rewarding people who don’t” is nothing more than the standard class warfare claim that the rich and powerful ARE the “people who create things”. And the people who actually build and design and all the real work are just parasites feeding off the Greatness of their Glorious Leaders. ---
**Author:** ![Sam\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Sam\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sam_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/70 "2009-09-10T21:22:46Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Hmm, you mean the kind of “Pax Americana” that includes a [long-term global war](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4753225&postcount=66)? :dubious: > > But of course, that was back when you were trying to boost approval of Bush’s Iraq adventure. > > Now that you want to portray the past thirty conservatism-dominated years as some kind of Golden Age of “relative peace and prosperity”, in order to scare people about the alleged spooky doom-laden consequences of liberal policy, you conveniently gloss over those grim and messy war years and sweep them under the rug of the phrase “basically a Pax Americana”. > > ISTM that this sort of both-sides-of-the-mouth argument, where the focus is on spinning the “big picture” for one’s current rhetorical purposes rather than on articulating some kind of honest and consistent large-scale ideological and strategic vision, is one of the major reasons that conservatism is struggling right now. Many conservatives seem to have simply forgotten how to debate an issue instead of propagandizing it. (Not that all liberals are immune to that failing themselves, of course, but today’s conservatives seem to be disproportionately afflicted by it.) Historically, this is the most peaceful time we’ve ever seen. Vietnam cost 10 times the number of American lives than did Iraq. The Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was much more violent than the current U.S. occupation. The last century saw two major world wars and many large regional wars. Communism killed tens of millions of people. Cambodia had the killing fields. The Middle East was in constant armed conflict with wars between Iraq and Iran, Arabs and the Israelis, etc. The current conflict is a ‘long war’. It’s not a global conflagration - it’s an ideological struggle marked by almost constant low-intensity conflict. It’s more akin to the border incursions and picking at the edges of the Roman empire during the Pax Romana period. It’s important, but it’s not the same as filling the skies with bombers and missiles. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/71 "2009-09-10T21:23:33Z")
> [@DigitalC](#): > > This is part of the problem, “conservative” applies to several wildly different belief systems that have almost nothing to do with each other. When you can apply the same label to white power advocates and black people then you are talking about a very big umbrella. Still, what we’re talking about in this thread is the modern American ideological-conservative movement, which coalesced around the Goldwater candidacy in 1964 and triumphed with Ronald Reagan in 1980. About that, some generalizations can be made. From [_The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America,_](http://www.amazon.com/Right-Nation-Conservative-Power-America/dp/0143035398/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1224007314&sr=8-1) by conservative British journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge: > [@](#): > > The exceptionalism of the American Right is partly a matter of its beliefs. The first two definitions of “conservative” offered by the Concise Oxford Dictionary are “adverse to rapid change” and “moderate, avoiding extremes.” Neither of these seems a particularly good description of what is going on in America at the moment. “Conservatism” – no less than its foes “liberalism” or “communitarianism” – has become one of those words that are now as imprecise as they are emotionally charged. Open a newspaper and you can find the word used to describe Jacques Chirac, Trent Lott, the Mullah Omar and Vladimir Putin. Since time immemorial, conservatives have insisted that their deeply pragmatic creed cannot be ideologically pigeonholed. > > But, in philosophical terms at least, classical conservatism does mean something. **The creed of Edmund Burke, its most eloquent proponent, might be crudely reduced to six principles: a deep suspicion of the power of the state; a preference for liberty over equality; patriotism; a belief in established institutions and hierarchies; skepticism about the idea of progress; and elitism.** Winston Churchill happily accepted these principles: he was devoted to nation and empire, disinclined to trust the lower orders with anything, hostile to the welfare state, worried about the diminution of liberty and, as he once remarked ruefully, “preferred the past to the present and the present to the future.” > > To simplify a little, **the exceptionalism of modern American conservatism lies in its exaggeration of the first three of Burke’s principles and contradiction of the last three.** The American Right exhibits a far deeper hostility towards the state than any other modern conservative party. . . . The American right is also more obsessed with personal liberty than any other conservative party, and prepared to tolerate an infinitely higher level of inequality. (One reason why Burke warmed to the American revolutionaries was that, unlike their dangerous French equivalents, the gentlemen rebels concentrated on freedom, not equality.) On patriotism, nobody can deny that conservatives everywhere tend to be a fairly nationalistic bunch. . . . Yet many European conservatives have accepted the idea that their nationality should be diluted in “schemes and speculations” like the European Union, and they are increasingly reconciled to dealing with national security on a multilateral basis. American conservatives clearly are not. > > If the American Right was merely a more vigorous form of conservatism, then it would be a lot more predictable. In fact, the American Right takes a resolutely liberal approach to Burke’s last three principles: hierarchy, pessimism and elitism. The heroes of modern American conservatism are not paternalist squires but rugged individualists who don’t know their place: entrepeneurs who build mighty businesses out of nothing, settlers who move out West, and, of course, the cowboy. There is a frontier spirit to the Right – unsurprisingly, since so much of its heartland is made up of new towns of one sort of another. > > The geography of conservatism also helps to explain its optimism rather than pessimism. In the war between the Dynamo and the Virgin, as Henry Adams characterized the battle between progress and tradition, most American conservatives are on the side of the Dynamo. They think that the world offers all sorts of wonderful possibilities. And they feel that the only thing that is preventing people from attaining these possibilities is the dead liberal hand of the past. By contrast, Burke has been described flatteringly by European conservatives as a “prophet of the past.” Spend any time with a group of Republicans, and their enthusiasm for the future can be positively exhausting. > > As for elitism, rather than dreaming about creating an educated “clerisy” of clever rulers (as Coleridge and T.S. Eliot did), the Republicans ever since the 1960s have played the populist card. Richard Nixon saw himself as the champion of the “silent majority.” In 1988 the aristocratic George H.W. Bush presented himself as a defender of all-American values against the Harvard Yard liberalism of Michael Dukakis. In 2000, George W. Bush, a president’s son who was educated at Andover, Yale and Harvard Business School, played up his role as a down-to-earth Texan taking on the might of Washington. As a result, modern American conservatism has flourished not just in country clubs and boardrooms, but at the grass roots – on talk radio and at precinct meetings, and in revolts against high taxes, the regulation of firearms and other invidious attempts by liberal do-gooders to force honest Americans into some predetermined mold. The question for debate is whether **that movement** has now marginalized itself permanently or semipermanently, as Tanenhaus contends. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it by any means – it is too well-organized, with its grassroots groups and astroturf groups and think-tanks and wholly-owned media outlets and lavish corporate funding – but I think it might well be doomed to see its electoral support slowly but irreversibly declining in every election cycle from here on out. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 9:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/72 "2009-09-10T21:25:30Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > Historically, this is the most peaceful time we’ve ever seen. Vietnam cost 10 times the number of American lives than did Iraq. I hope you realize how telling, indeed disturbing, it is that you felt obliged to include the word “American” in the latter sentence; and would it still be true if you had left it out? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/73 "2009-09-10T21:32:53Z")
> [@ElvisL1ves](#): > > Exactly. Is the OP referring to minimal-government conservatives, or balanced-budget conservatives, or isolationist conservatives, or Christianist “family values” conservatives, or who? They form a coalition under the banner of the elephant. Which ones are dying off? Surely not all of them together? See post #71. The factions you describe are indeed very different and don’t always see eye-to-eye. Nevertheless, they have enjoyed some shared success since the 1970s by a “no enemies to the right” coalition strategy. Now . . . cracks may be appearing in the coalition. That’s not something Tanenhaus comments on, but it is possibly very important. See the defection of paleocon Pat Buchanan, first into the Reform Party and then to his own [America First Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Party_(2002)); and the emergence of the theocon [Constitution Party](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_Party_(United_States)) as, now, one of the three largest third parties in America (sharing that distinction with the Libertarians and the Greens – see [here](http://www.politics1.com/parties.htm)). If the America First Party and the Constitution Party were to merge . . . the result . . . well, actually, the result would be to draw off even more Pubs and further strengthen the Dems. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [September 10, 2009, 9:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/74 "2009-09-10T21:36:01Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > I hope you realize how telling, indeed disturbing, it is that you felt obliged to include the word “American” in the latter sentence; and would it still be true if you had left it out? [Wiki](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War) seems to think so - > [@](#): > > The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities, including 3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both sides, 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,159 U.S. soldiers.[15] Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2009, 1:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/75 "2009-09-11T01:32:56Z")
> [@Sam Stone](#): > > Historically, this is the most peaceful time we’ve ever seen. […] > > The current conflict is a ‘long war’. It’s not a global conflagration - it’s an ideological struggle marked by almost constant low-intensity conflict. It’s more akin to the border incursions and picking at the edges of the Roman empire during the Pax Romana period. It’s important, but it’s not the same as filling the skies with bombers and missiles. I personally think this is a reasonably accurate assessment, if you’re using a rather narrow definition of “we”, but it sure is different in tone from your assessment in [your earlier post that I linked to above](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=4753225&postcount=66): > [@Sam Stone ion 4/13/04](#): > > There is a large movement of Islamist radicals who have declared war against Western Pluralism. There are millions of them, and they want us all dead. They are trying to get their hands on weapons that could kill us by the millions and destroy our economies. In the era of nuclear and biological weapons, it doesn’t take a large nation-state to destroy our way of life. You worried about civil liberties? Think about what will happen if a nuclear bomb goes off in North America. Worried about jobs? Think of the shape the economy will be in if weapons of mass destruction are used in the west. My concern is not specifically about which part of your broad-brush rhetoric concerning the “War on Terror” is most accurate, but rather about your apparent willingness to spin your broad-brush rhetoric in whatever direction suits the current conservative talking points. As I said before, ISTM that this trend appears in a **lot** of conservative discourse these days: they paint whatever picture happens to serve their purposes of the moment, and to hell with whether it’s consistent with the picture they were painting one or two or five years back. Can today’s movement conservatives as a group still build their arguments on a coherent and consistent vision of what they honestly think are the major political and economic realities of modern times, or have many of them now just fallen back on pushing whichever anti-liberal propaganda button suits their cause du jour? > [@Shodan](#): > > Wiki seems to think so - Are you sure you’re answering the question that **BrainGlutton** asked? **Sam** noted that “Vietnam cost 10 times the number of American lives than did Iraq”, which AFAIK is quite true. Then **BG** asked if that would still be true if the “American” qualifier were removed: in other words, would it be true to say "“Vietnam cost 10 times the number of lives than did Iraq”? As you noted, the Vietnam conflict involved an upper bound of about 6 million fatalities overall, so for the Iraq conflict to be only one-tenth as costly in terms of lives lost, it would have to involve fewer than about 600,000 fatalities in total. Although it’s admittedly [very difficult to get an accurate estimate of the total Iraq casualties](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Iraq_War), I don’t think we can be confident that their total number to date is less than 600,000. Estimates from the _Lancet_ study and the ORB both exceed that number. So if you look at total lives lost rather than just American ones, Vietnam **may** have been ten times more costly than Iraq to date, but then again it may not. ISTM that **BG** ’s question is in fact not definitively answered, and perhaps not answerable. ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2009, 6:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/76 "2009-09-11T06:53:05Z")
> [@Sam\_Stone](#): > > The reason conservatism seems to be on the wane today is because people have forgotten what liberalism leads to. We’ve had almost three decades of nearly continuous growth, and we’ve been living basically under a Pax Americana since the Soviet Union collapsed. Under those conditions, people tend to forget that peace requires vigilance and a strong defense, that you cannot become prosperous by punishing the people who create things and rewarding people who don’t, and that politicians are not capable of running complex economies. On the contrary, the reason so many voters have fallen for these lines for the last 30 years is that they forgot what laissez-faire[sup]1[/sup] led to in the 1930’s, & somehow get cause & effect scrambled & think FDR caused the Depression. I was a kid in the USA in the 1970’s. My mother raised money for her mission trips c. 1980. I remember some startling levels of inflation, but also relatively cheap air travel & a country with clearly first world living standards. It wasn’t all that bad. The GOP want taxes low because they don’t accept the difference between redistributive taxes & taxes for the operation of the government. Social Security is not primarily lining bureaucrats’ pockets (despite the fact that FICA runs massive surpluses). It’s going back into citizens’ hands. But those who don’t get that or reject the idea will always call for lower taxes because to them taxes are always too high. The problem, of course, is that Social Security & Medicare are popular programs–good programs, even. So they pretend that low taxes “help the economy.” Which they don’t. This might be tolerable if they targeted taxes on workers. But they want to cut taxes on investors & owners, on millionaires & billionaires, while they leave FICA higher than it’s needed to be. But it is not the wealthy investor that produces; it is the engineer, the designer, the seamstress, the welder, the carpenter, etc. The wealthy man is a facilitator, & as anyone who’s worked in academia (where government grants run rampant) can tell you, not the only kind of facilitator possible. If you want excess money to flow into the hands of capitalists, just as bakers’ children tend to have enough bread; then build a UK-style welfare state, where money is not that important to housing or medical care. Let money just be a kind of economic lubricant. But if you want money to flow to the deserving, to be a reward for work & productivity, & an indication of one’s importance to the economy–well, the CEO’s with their golden parachutes aren’t that deserving nor that vital. Don’t mistake the kind of “importance” which means one has put himself in the path for the kind of importance which means one is necessary. [sup]1[/sup](Or whatever we get instead of idealized laissez-faire when the leaders are pretending to be laissez-faire. I don’t expect theorists’ idea of “real” laissez-faire to be more real than the corruption of the Gilded Age.) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2009, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/77 "2009-09-11T14:44:07Z")
BTW, [_The Nation_](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090928/phillips-fein) has an enthralling overview, by Kim Phillips-Fein, of academic/scholarly analyses of the history and dynamics of American conservatism. Tanenhaus is treated briefly near the end: > [@](#): > > What does recent historical scholarship say about the future of the right? On the one hand, there undeniably is a crisis–of leadership, of faith, of constituency–among conservatives at this point in history. Although the movement institutions (think tanks, talk-radio stations, churches) remain powerful forces, they are also catering to a narrow and frustrated segment of opinion. The far right’s resentment is deepening: it angrily denounces Obama as a socialist, holds “tea parties” to protest taxation and has turned to Rush Limbaugh as a leader. “Birthers” seek to delegitimize the Obama presidency by attempting to prove that he was born in Kenya, not Hawaii. True believers on the right seem to be sinking deeper within their movement, insisting that George W. Bush failed to adhere sufficiently to first principles but never considering whether the principles themselves were the problem. Yet as they consolidate their faith, they also become more marginal, less a central part of American politics. > > Meanwhile, the intellectuals who have brought conservatism to a broader public have been moving away from their old certainties. Ross Douthat, the young conservative tapped as an op-ed writer by the _New York Times,_ has argued that Republicans need to win back the “Sam’s Club” voters and convince working-class people that family values are actually in their economic interest–even though doing so may mean abandoning a hardline laissez-faire position. _Times_-men David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus have described a putative “Burkean” strain on the right, a restrained, moderate and sentimental tradition whose adherents objected to the “excesses” of the Great Society but were willing to preserve the established structures of the New Deal out of respect for tradition and settled norms. (Whittaker Chambers, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and even Richard Nixon, in the first years of his presidency, are supposed to be a few of the people who practiced this politics, not all knowingly so.) > > But this attempt to reinvent the right is fraught with difficulty. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke–who wrote in the heat and fury of counterrevolution–really held such genteel commitments, it is hard to make the case that the American conservative movement can easily be divided between moderates in the Burkean mold and radical reactionaries. Brooks’s and Tanenhaus’s turn to Burke recalls George Nash’s 1976 classic _The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945._ Like many conservatives who tell their own history, Nash placed the greatest emphasis on the history of ideas and the fusion of traditionalist, anticommunist and libertarian strains of conservatism. By portraying a conservative world teeming with ideas, he was able to refute the enduring 1950s image of conservatism as intellectually dead, even as he glossed over the social and political bases of the movement. Indeed, as Tanenhaus has written, the people who have always determined the course of American conservatism have been the passionate ideologues, the “revanchists” who are less interested in what they can “conserve” than what they can raze. > > Although Tanenhaus has argued that left-leaning social historians, having abandoned intellectual history, are ill equipped to understand the appeal of conservative ideas, the project of inventing a tradition of conservative intellectual moderation as the road not taken for American politics seems to have more to do with the present dilemma of the movement than with historical inquiry. That Brooks and Tanenhaus find the motif of Burke appealing is largely a sign of their longing to revive a serious, sophisticated and mature conservatism, and their sense that, thanks to the radicals, the right is in desperate straits and has entered a period of decline. This situation holds a special irony for Tanenhaus, who believes we are living in a conservative era, “perhaps the most conservative since the Eisenhower years,” as he writes in his new book, \*The Death of Conservatism. \* > > But this narrative of conservative defeat and retrenchment–tightly focused on backlash politics and movement conservatism–is only one part of the story. The recent turn in scholarship toward economic change offers another way of understanding the fate of the movement. For despite the financial crisis of the past year, the faith in laissez-faire that conservatives promoted throughout the postwar period continues to exercise a deep hold on American politics. Think tanks, business organizations and corporate lobbying groups still wield great influence in Washington and throughout the country, their confidence hardly shaken by the disasters that their politics helped bring about. Wealthy individuals who financed the movement are still donating their dollars to fight healthcare reform. Companies such as Citibank are battling labor-law reform even as they take bailout funds. The self-righteous chutzpah of bankers who insist on paying themselves tremendous bonuses even after driving the country into financial turmoil reflects the triumph of an ideology in which the private sector can do no wrong. And the economic assumptions that the conservative movement advanced throughout the postwar period continue to prevail in our culture and politics overall, where it is hard for people to imagine a check on, much less an alternative to, a merciless market-driven world. Even the Obama administration is well stocked with Wall Street veterans and economists committed to preserving high-octane financial capitalism. > > History has a strange way of rescuing the defeated. As a self-conscious movement, conservatism has sunk into one of the deepest crises in its history. But it may be only in this moment of apparent ruin that we can for the first time assess the full significance of all that the right has won. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2009, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/78 "2009-09-11T14:50:01Z")
> [@Hamlet](#): > > “Conservatism” isn’t dead. It is, and can be, an incredibly important, intelligent movement that helps our country. Small government, restrained spending, and an emphasis on individual rights can, and should, be a large part of our nation. > > Don’t write off conservatism, because our country needs it to truly flourish. That sounds like you are telling me that conservatism is ALREADY dead. Only about 10%-15% of the federal budget (not counting this year with the stimulus and all that) goes into non-military discretionary budget items. The three largest items (by FAR) are milkitary spending, social security and medicare. Over the last few months, self proclaimed conservatives had a chance to stand up next to the democrats and say “we need to cut medicare before it breaks us” and instead they decided to scare the hell out of old people. Only a Democratic president with a Democratic congress can ever cut these entitlements and rather than support what conservatives have purported to support for decades, they are now the most ardent defenders of just about every dime spent in medicare. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2009, 2:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/79 "2009-09-11T14:51:43Z")
> [@Maia\_s\_Well](#): > > That’s funny. It worked the other way around for me. It worked that way for me too but it hasn’t worked that way for the baby boomers. ---
**Author:** ![Damuri\_Ajashi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/898d66/32.png) [@Damuri\_Ajashi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Damuri_Ajashi)\ **Post date:** [September 11, 2009, 2:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508/80 "2009-09-11T14:58:48Z")
> [@Rhythmdvl](#): > > Small government, lower taxes, freer markets, etc. We all have access to the federal budget. Not countingall this stimulus stuff, how would you balance the budget without raising taxes? We can’t really nationalize the debt (I forgot to include debt service along with military, social security and medicare/medicaid as the three largest budget items) can we? Conservatives of ALL stripes have proclaimed their nundyong support for medicare so that’s out isn’t it? The military could be trimmed a bit but not nearly enough to cover the gap, if we got rid of all non-military discretioary spending, that still wouldn’t cover the deficit. So what would you cut to get to a balanced budget where you wouldn’t have to raise taxes (never mind CUTTING taxes)? BTW in what way do you want to make the markets freer? It seems to me that a lot of trouble is the result of too much free rein being given to the markets. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-death-of-conservatism/509508.md?page=5)