J.P., while
you were pondering Buckley, coincidentally so was I --
reading his final book,
The Reagan I Knew.
It occurs to me that Buckley enjoyed the great advantage of
beginning a movement ex nihilo. Yes, there were others
at mid-century discontented with liberal hegemony at home and
Soviet aggression abroad. But conservatism in the 1950s had very
little in the way of an institutional base -- the think tanks and
advocacy groups and policy journals and so forth. Buckley burst
upon the scene in 1951, four years later launched National
Review and from that point forward held an unrivaled
preeminence in the public mind as a conservative intellectual.
Now I am sure that, had you asked the embattled Buckley in 1955
if he thought his isolated position to be an advantage, he would
have rather had the help of many more allied forces than he then
had. Yet at least he did not have to deal with the problem of we
now have of a conservative Babel, where one can find people
calling themselves "conservative" who advocate anything and
everything, including many things quite the opposite of
conservatism.
Al Regnery has pointed out how the success of conservatism has
attracted hordes of opportunists, so that people who dream of
Cabinet posts and congressional seats have an incentive to attach
themselves to the banner, motivated mkore by personal ambition
than by philosophical agreement. And as Mr. Regnery says, there
were few opportunists in 1951 because there were few
opportunities. We've seen a few rats (e.g., Ken Adelman)
jumping off what they perceive to be a sinking ship, and one good
reason to permit pessimism about a conservative revival --
WE'RE DOOMED BEYOND ALL HOPE! -- is to encourage more
rats to jump ship.
Sanchez makes many good points, but to describe support for Sarah
Palin as a "death spiral" strategy is to completely misunderstand
the causes of Republican woe.
Sanchez has a very good point here:
Washington is absolutely crawling with snake-oil salesmen
who've discovered that you can make a tidy living extracting
cash from credulous politicos who didn't learn anything from
the last dot-com bubble, provided you're able to sling Web 2.0
jargon passably.
This is true, and as John Hawkins pointed
out, the current wave of Republican technophilia is based on
a profound misinterpretation of the Obama phenomenon. The
high-tech stuff didn't drive the enthusiasm, the enthusiasm drove
the high-tech stuff. And, uh,
who has a growing online army of more than 60,000 enthusiastic
supporters? The same person who is
odds-on favorite for the nomination in 2012? It seems to me
that a fairly obvious plan of action is at hand, if only the
damned snobs would stop whining about it.
