Friday, June 15, 2012
My daughter learned a neat rhetorical trick to avoid
eating things she doesn’t like. “Daddy, I actually really like spinach, it’s
just that this spinach tastes different.”
Democrats and the journalists who love them play a
similar game with Republicans and conservatives. “Oh, I have lots of respect
for conservatives,” goes the typical line, “but the conservatives we’re being
served today are just so different. Why can’t we have Republicans and
conservatives like we used to?”
Q: What kind of Republicans are extremists, racists,
ideologues, pyschopaths, radicals, weirdos, hicks, idiots, elitists, prudes,
potato-chip double-dippers, and meanies?
A: Today’s Republicans.
“The Republican Party got into its time machine and took
a giant leap back into the ’50s. The party left moderation and tolerance of
dissent behind.” So reported the Washington Post’s Judy Mann — in July of 1980.
Today, of course, the 1950s is the belle époque of
reasonable conservatism. Just ask New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, or,
for that matter, President Barack Obama, who insists that the GOP is in the
throes of a “fever” and is displaying signs of “madness.” It’s his humble wish
that the GOP will regain its senses and return to being the party of
Eisenhower.
Today’s intellectual conservatives, likewise, are held
against the standard of yesterday’s and found wanting. New York Times Book
Review editor Sam Tanenhaus wrote a book on “the death of conservatism” a few
years ago (inconveniently, right before conservatism was dramatically
revivified by the Tea Party, which helped the GOP win historic victories in the
2010 elections), in which he pined for the conservative intellectuals of the
1950s and 1960s.
Of course, the Tanenhauses of their day were horrified by
the very same conservative intellectuals. Within a year of William F. Buckley’s
founding of National Review in 1955, liberal intellectuals insisted that the
magazine’s biggest failure was its inability to be authentically conservative.
The editor of Harper’s proclaimed the founding editors of NR to be “the very
opposite of conservatives.” Liberal titan Dwight Macdonald lamented that the
“pseudo-conservative” National Review was nowhere near as wonderful the old
Freeman magazine.
Again and again, the line is the same: I like
conservatives, just not these conservatives.
As far as I can tell, there are competing, or at least
overlapping, motives for this liberal nostalgia for the conservatives and
Republicans of yesteryear. Some liberals like to romanticize and glorify
conservatives from eras when they were least effective but most entertaining.
Some like to cherry-pick positions from a completely different era so as to
prove that holding that position today is centrist.
But whatever the motivation, what unites them is the
conviction that today’s liberals shouldn’t cede power, respect, or legitimacy
to today’s conservatives. Hence when compassionate conservatism was ascendant,
liberals lamented that the GOP wasn’t more libertarian.
When, in response to the disastrous explosion in debt and
spending over the Bush/Obama years, the GOP enters a libertarian phase, the
same people who insisted they’d love Republicans if they became libertarian are
horrified by their “social Darwinism.”
The latest twist on this hackneyed hayride is the renewed
caterwauling about how Ronald Reagan couldn’t even get elected today.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush reignited the topic by
lamenting how Reagan couldn’t be nominated today because the GOP has become too
rigid and ideological for even the Gipper. I think Jeb Bush is one of the best
conservative politicians in the country, but this was not his best moment.
Assuming Mitt Romney gets the nomination, here are the GOP nominees since
Reagan left office: Bush I, Dole (Gerald Ford’s running-mate in 1976), Bush II,
McCain, and, finally, Romney — the Massachusetts moderate the Tea Party spent
much of the last months lambasting as, well, a Massachusetts moderate.
Look at all those crazy right-wingers!
Looking at that record, any rational person would
conclude that Reagan couldn’t get elected today because the party has become
too liberal.
Of course, the reality is more complicated than that. But
the idea that Reagan’s problem today would be his moderation is quite simply
ridiculous.
Look where G. W. Bush’s moderation got him: denounced as
a crazed radical by much of the liberal establishment, despite having run as a
“compassionate conservative” and, once in office, expanded entitlements and
worked closely with Teddy Kennedy on education reform.
Right on schedule, Dubya is now entering the
rehabilitation phase.
It’ll be some time before liberals bring themselves to
say, “I miss George W. Bush.” But already the New York Times is proclaiming
that Bush represented “mainstream conservatism,” unlike today’s Republicans, of
course.
As always, the problem with conservatism today is today’s
conservatives.
No comments:
Post a Comment