Far from betraying its conservative core, the Republican Party has returned to its roots: a listless, nonideological vehicle of the business class, clasically denominated at Rockefeller Republicanism. It has drifted into unprincipled mediocrity, electing Republican cheats, pederasts, and war-mongerers solely for the sake of keeping the party leadership in power and, to a lesser extent, to pursue the pseudo-conservative principles of the neoconservatives–a bellicose bunch of highly ideological ex-liberals.
Peter Brimelow notes that the conservative movement, which achieved its hoped-for dream of a Republican-controlled government, soon found that the new bosses were not much better than the old ones. Worse than that, it misgoverned under the banner of conservatism, damaging the credibility of conservatives and damaging their chief political apparatus since at least 1965, the Republican Party:
I regard the conservative movement as the flower of the Free World and its first fruit, Ronald Reagan, as the greatest President of the twentieth century. But every stage of its development was paid for in bloodââ¬â in sacrificed careers, in social ostracism, in endless hours of unrewarded toil.
For most of that period, the idea that the Republican Party might one day control both the White House and the U.S. Congress seemed an impossible dream.
Now that dream has turned to ashes.
The full measure of Tuesday nightââ¬â¢s disaster is not simply that the self-appointed leaders who leaped on board the movement as it came to powerââ¬âthe Bush dynasty, the ex- (and no doubt future) Democratic neoconservative publicists and intellectualsââ¬âhave led it to shattering electoral defeat.
Instead, the full measure of the disaster is that the conservative movement has essentially nothing to show for its moment in the sun. The discontents of the Religious Right are well-known. Economic conservatives are confronted with relentlessly increasing federal government spending. To mention one of my pet interests, far from being willing to break the power of the teacher unions and introduce market forces into public education, the Bush Administration has done exactly the opposite: moving to federalize the K-12 system in a way that is certain to be captured by the education Establishment. And, of course, Bush turned out to be bent on actually increasing immigration, already running at record nation- (and party-) breaking levels.
In place of all of this, conservatives were offered war, and the acquisition of what are in effect colonies, in the Middle East. I can honestly say that in more than three decades in the movement, I never heard this objective even mentioned, let alone agreed upon. Yet it suddenly became the centerpiece of the Bush Administrationââ¬â¢s political strategy. And, because Americans are patriotic, it did indeed reverse the GOPââ¬â¢s increasingly chronic failure to turn out its white base, already threatened by inundation through immigrationââ¬âalbeit modestly and, as it turns out, temporarily . The problem with war, however, is that you can lose. And defeat is demoralizing. The plain fact is that, for the effort it put into conquering an empire in the Middle East, the Bush Administration could have sealed Americaââ¬â¢s borders and ensured Republican hegemony for a generation. Instead, we face the very real possibility of a post-Vietnam style national funk.
10 Nov 2006 at 5:55 pm
I’m betting the Democrats don’t realy change anything about Iraq, or globalization or economic policies that benefit the CEO classes. Instead we’ll get more multiculturalism and diversity, and Immigration DEFORM, welfare for non-citizens, boondoggles for Education cartel, etc… Bush is the gift to Liberalism that will keep on giving for the next 20 years….
12 Nov 2006 at 3:39 pm
‘Far from betraying its conservative core, the Republican Party has returned to its roots: a listless, nonideological vehicle of the business class, clasically denominated at Rockefeller Republicanism. It has drifted into unprincipled mediocrity, electing Republican cheats, pederasts, and war-mongerers solely for the sake of keeping the party leadership in power and, to a lesser extent, to pursue the pseudo-conservative principles of the neoconservatives–a bellicose bunch of highly ideological ex-liberals.’
Interesting rhetorical hyperbole, but how are these criticisms fundamentally any different than those the Republicans hurled at the Dems in 1994 when they took their turn at the top?
I think it’s interesting that no matter what ideology is swept into power, they all end their term of power looking pretty much the same.
If I were a libertarian, I might invoke Lord Acton’s famous quote, and let it be done at that.
But, I don’t think that answer is sufficient. I think there is something structurally in the American system that demands these kinds of politics from anyone who is in power.
That’s the structural questions conservatives need to address. Some kind of “return to the roots” approach won’t ever solve this problem.
12 Nov 2006 at 4:18 pm
I’m not sure I agree. Maybe the system is just self-correcting in this respect, and this is only a problem if you think there is some institutional contrivance to prevent this sort of thing. Kings, dictators, aristocrats, representatives, judges, and the like all seem to suffer from a certain amount of corruption and drift from principle when they’re in power too securely for too long.
It’s true, the government is too big, too powerful, and too involved in too many things not to invite a great deal more corruption than is healthy. And this seems to have corrupted a group that at least for a number of years managed to keep government from growing too large under Clinton. Maybe the answer is divided government. But in a time of war that division is ordinarily best to put an executive in the hands of a Republican. That has gotten kind of screwy with Bush, who has essentially had a liberal and activist foreign policy. It seems he is trying to rectify some of that with Baker & Gates & co., but that remains to be seen. The real solution is to get real conservatives elected in Republican primaries and for conservatives not to sacrifice electability for principle. This was a conscious decision with Bush, especially in 2000. No more.
12 Nov 2006 at 11:08 pm
I think you’re a bit off base here, Chris. The Republican Party has been the more conservative of the two parties, in many senses, for some time, but it is not a conservative party of itself. Unlike a parliamentary system, the factions in the United States make their deals and coalitions before the election in the form of relatively big-tent political parties. Political conservatives, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, foreign policy realists, foreign policy “American idealists,” business interests, and most libertarians constitute the coalition of the Republican Party. Political conservatives – by which I mean those who subscribe to the political philosophy of conservatism a la Burke – have never been the dominant faction of this coalition, though they have contributed a good amount of the heavy thinking that has gone into Republican policy. What we have seen since Republicans have taken power is that other factions – those that find the power more useful or instrumental than political conservatives – have ascended further within the party. It is neither surprising nor odd; we would expect that those with the most to gain from power would seek it most forcefully. It is disheartening to those of us who hoped that political conservatism would be more of a force within the coalition.