Goodbye 20th Century
This week in the New Yorker, George Packer writes about “the fall of conservatism”. Usually, such screeds amount to little more than “progressive” triumphalism, one-dimensional “analysis” of the failings of the Bush Administration, or barely-informed rants about “neocons”, but Packer avoids most of that and an awful lot of his piece rings true.
“Conservatism”, at least of the classic Nixon/Reagan variety, is a spent force, a movement that lost its raison d’etre the moment the Soviet Union collapsed and after which it itself collapsed into an uneasy alliance of “libertarians, evangelicals, neoconservatives, Wall Street, [and] working-class traditionalists”. It was the remains of a movement that found itself holding the reins of government and realized it had no idea what to do with them.
Conservatives (or at least Republicans), Packer argues, had figured out how to win elections — look no further than the machinations of Karl Rove — but what we ended up with was President Bush, whose entire term in office has consisted of a series of stupefying blunders — a political thrashing-about, if you will, that has had the effect of destroying whatever credibility “conservatism” had left with the public (and let’s be frank, whether or not “Republican” really equates to “conservative” these days is irrelevant to a public that almost always conflates the two).
I’m not going to attempt to summarize the whole of Packer’s article; it’s a fairly substantial piece that deserves to be read in full. I will, however, state that I largely agree with his conclusions (though in this election year that has, in so many ways, celebrated the “spirit of ’68”, I disagree with him when he claims that liberals have really engaged in many serious “rebranding efforts” or “earnest policy retreats”, but I digress). For years, the “conservatism” I encountered resembled little more than intellectual parochialism and slavish Reagan-worship.
I think it should be pretty clear to everyone that those days are over. If John McCain wins this election — and I seriously doubt he will — it won’t be because he’s a great candidate with fresh new ideas; he’s a Republican in the post-Reagan, post-Gingrich, George W. Bush mold. If he wins, it’ll be because Barack Obama will have been unable to overcome working-class white distrust, feminist bitterness over his triumph over Hillary Clinton, and simple, brute racism. A win for John McCain basically means political stagnation.
Still, I’d be lying through my teeth if I claimed I had all the answers (or any answers, for that matter). But Packer’s article has got me thinking. If conservatism is going to have any chance of regaining any sort of credibility, it’s going to have to come in a form not of a kind with what we’ve become accustomed to since Nixon. Instead of hearkening back to the halcyon days of Reagan, some new ideas are going to have to be laid on the table for once.
Got any?
