I've been prodded to read and comment on this Sam Tanenhaus
essay pronouncing conservatism dead. Tanenhaus is a smart guy
who knows quite a bit about the conservative movement, much more
than most liberal writers. But I'm not terribly impressed by his
eulogy for the right. Uncharacteristically, Tanenhaus makes
little effort to understand conservatives on their own terms.
Instead we get embarrassingly tendentious liberal cliches like
this:
Today, the situation is much bleaker. After George W. Bush's
two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a
presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent
commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist
foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall
Street-centric market; the harshly punitive "culture war" waged
against liberal "elites."
This completely airbrushes out the "responsible" center-left's
initial support for the Iraq war, the fact that the biggest
"deregulation" relevant to banking was signed into law by Bill
Clinton, the left's own role in the "harshly punitive 'culture
war'" (which side imposed their will on the electorate via the
courts?), and of course any distinctions between Bush's crony
capitalism meets Sarbanes-Oxley meets bailouts and the laissez
faire wild west of Tanenhaus' fevered imagination.
Then there's this:
There is instead almost universal agreement--reinforced by the
penitential testimony of Alan Greenspan and, more recently, by
grudgingly conciliatory Republicans--that the most plausible
economic rescue will involve massive government intervention,
quite possibly on the scale of the New Deal/Fair Deal of the
1930s and '40s and perhaps even the New Frontier/Great Society
of the 1960s. All this suggests that movement doctrine has not
only been defeated but discredited.
But the reason the wingnuts of the conservative movement gained
power in the first place was because the mangerial liberalism of
the New Frontier/Great Society ultimately did not solve problems
that confronted millions of Americans at the time: stagflation,
social unrest, family breakdown, crime, concern about the United
States' power. I'm obviously not arguing that Bush proved equal
to the challenges of his time either, but it is telling that
liberals don't have anything more to offer than warmed-over
versions of the programs that helped throw them out of power in
the first place. Is liberalism dead too?
Of course, Tanenhaus doesn't even acknowledge the problems
liberalism failed to solve. The "culture war" is presented as if
it reflected nothing more than resentments of the "liberal
elite." Clinton's work on welfare reform is just "collaborating"
with the Republicans. The closest we get to an acknowledgment of
liberal failure is a lament that "liberals unwittingly squeezed
themselves into the stereotypes conservatives had invented." For
an essay recommending a less ideological conservatism, a
pragmatic application of Disraeli and Burke, Tanenhaus has more
to say about ideological politics than he does about right or
wrong, good policy and bad policy, and problems or solutions.
I'll post more later on some areas where I think Tanenhaus is
closer to the mark.
