By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, Janaury 16, 2013
It's hard for a lot of people, particularly on the right,
to recognize that the conservative movement's problems are mostly problems of
success. The Republican Party's problems are much more recognizable as the
problems of failure, including the failure to recognize the limits of that
movement's success.
American conservatism began as a kind of intellectual
hobbyist's group with little hope of changing the broader society. Albert Jay
Nock, the cape-wearing libertarian intellectual -- he called himself a "philosophical
anarchist" -- who inspired a very young William F. Buckley Jr., argued
that political change was impossible because the masses were rubes, goons,
fools or sheep, victims of the eternal tendency of the powerful to exploit the
powerless.
Buckley, who rightly admired Nock for many things,
rightly disagreed on this point. Buckley trusted the people more than the
intellectuals. Moreover, as Buckley's friend Richard Weaver said, "ideas
have consequences" and, consequently, it is possible to rally the public
to your cause.
It took time. In an age when conservative books make
millions, it's hard to imagine how difficult it once was to get a
right-of-center book published. Henry L. Regnery, the founder of the publishing
house that bears his name, started his venture to break the wall of groupthink
censorship surrounding the publishing industry. With a few exceptions, Regnery
was the only game in town for decades.
That's hardly the case anymore. While there's a higher
bar for conservative authors at mainstream publishers (which remain
overwhelmingly liberal), profit tends to trump ideology.
And publishing is a lagging indicator. In cable news,
think tanks, talk radio and, of course, the Internet, conservatives have at
least rough parity with, and often superiority to, liberals. It's only in the
legacy institutions -- newspapers, the broadcast networks and most especially
academia and Hollywood -- where conservatism is still largely frozen out.
Nonetheless, conservatism is a mass-market enterprise these days, for good and
for ill.
The good is obvious. The ill is less understood. For
starters, the movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money
from stirring rage, paranoia and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little
concern for the real political success that can only come with persuading the
unconverted.
A conservative journalist or activist can now make a
decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people
only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it's possible to be a
rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal
argument. Many liberals lived in such an ideological cocoon for decades, which
is one reason conservatives won so many arguments early on. Having the right
emulate that echo chamber helps no one.
Ironically, the institution in which conservatives had
their greatest success is the one most besieged by conservatives today: the
Republican Party. To listen to many grassroots conservatives, the GOP establishment
is a cabal of weak-kneed sellouts who regularly light votive candles to a
poster of liberal Republican icon Nelson Rockefeller.
This is not only not true, it's a destructive myth. The
Rockefeller Republicans were purged from the GOP decades ago. Their high-water
mark was in 1960, when the Goldwater insurgency was temporarily crushed.
Richard Nixon agreed to run on a platform all but dictated by Rockefeller and
to tap Rockefeller's minion Henry Cabot Lodge as his running mate. When the
forebears of today's tea partiers threatened to stay home or bolt the party in
1960, Sen. Barry Goldwater proclaimed, "Let's grow up,
conservatives!"
It's still good advice. It's not that the GOP isn't
conservative enough, it's that it isn't tactically smart or persuasive enough
to move the rest of the nation in a more conservative direction. Moreover,
thanks in part to the myth that all that stands between conservatives and total
victory is a philosophically pure GOP, party leaders suffer from a debilitating
lack of trust -- some of it well earned -- from the rank and file.
But politics is about persuasion, and a party consumed by
the need to prove its purity to its base is going to have a very hard time
proving anything else to the rest of the country.
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