Alan Wolfe decimates the GOP, its sad and motley crew of apologists, and conservative ideology in this month's Washington Monthly.
Where to begin? This article's a virtual smorgasborg and it can be found here:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/...
I think I'll take the chronological approach.
More...
Wolfe invokes those liberally-biased things called historical facts:
The United States, as the political scientist Louis Hartz argued in the 1950s, was born liberal. We fought for our independence against Great Britain and the conservatism that flourished there. In Europe, a conservative was someone who defended the traditions of the monarchy, justified the privileges of the nobility, and welcomed the intervention of a state-affiliated clergy in politics. But all those things would be tossed out by the revolutionaries who led the war for independence and then wrote the Constitution. We chose to have an elected president, not an anointed monarch. Our Constitution prohibited the granting of titles of nobility. We separated church and state.
Having failed to carry the day on separation of church, Wolfe argues that the only significant early American conservatives were the southern slaveholders.
...the only significant conservatism left would come from defenders of slavery such as John C. Calhoun. Once the advocate of a strong national government, Calhoun, putting the rights of slaveholders first, viewed this country as a compact among states, not as a unified society. His ideas would live on in the voices of those thinkers, primarily Southern, who objected to relying on national power to promote equal rights for all.
Contrasting American conservatism's long association with "lost causes" (like slavery) with real Americans innovative, increasingly urban and entrepreneurial experiences, Wolfe observes that:
Deprived of both a church and state to defend, American conservatives became advocates for privileges determined by birth, suffrage restricted to an elite, and rural virtues over urban realities.
And so conservatives faced a dilemma from the moment the first shots were heard around the world. They could be true to their ideals and stand on the sidelines of political power. Or they could adjust their principles in the interests of political realism and thus negate the essential conservative teaching that principles are meant to be timeless. All the conservatives that played any role in America's history since the age of Jackson chose political relevance over ideological purity.
. . .
A conservative in America, in short, is someone who advocates ends that cannot be realized through means that can never be justified, at least not on the terrain of conservatism itself.
Having compromised their first principles to achieve a measure of political viability in the real world, conservatives (in both parties) by the 1950's had accepted the idea of a federal government that accepted and dealt with new challenges as they arose.
Barry Goldwater, the last conservative purist in America, paid a huge political price for his frank disdain of government; abolishing mandatory Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority was not the way to win votes among the elderly in the South. In the 1970s, the conservative impulse went underground, incubating in a string of new think tanks funded by conservative philanthropists and sympathetic corporations. Although some of those who followed in Goldwater's footsteps--Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and then Bush--professed to share his distaste for government, none stood in the way of its growth. When given the opportunity, they shied away from enacting the think-tank talk of washing government down the bathroom drain.
Which brings us to BushCo. As Wolfe sees it:
If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government--indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government--is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.
Examining BushCo's handling of FEMA, Medicare, and Iraq Wolfe concludes that "[s]o long as conservatives denigrate government while relying on government to achieve their objectives," we can only expect gross miscalculations and miserable failures.
There's a lot in this article but one of the most important is Wolfe's observation that:
Political parties expend the time and grueling energy to control government for different reasons. Liberals, while enjoying the perquisites of office, also want to be in a position to use government to solve problems. But conservatives have different motives for wanting power. One is to prevent liberals from doing so; if government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. The other is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors; business will lavish cash on politicians (called campaign contributions) while politicians will throw the money back at business (called public policy).
This has led the conservatives to their current conundrum. Pundits from Buchanan to Noonan are incorrectly decrying Bush but not conservatism, and Wolfe sums it up this way:
Behind the surge in right-wing criticism of the Bush presidency is the hope that après le deluge, Americans will give conservatism another chance. But even if Americans were inclined to do so, what kind of conservatism could be offered to them? If it somehow defied all laws of political gravity and carried through on its promise to shrink government, conservatism would add considerably to the level of misery at home and abroad--and lose whatever majorities it may have had in the process. If it managed to return to its roots in a South that no longer exists or a New England losing population to the rest of the country, conservatism would return to the marginalization that characterized its history. If it retreated behind its borders, it would lack the means to protect itself against threats emanating from overseas. The conservative dilemma, omnipresent in the past, looms over conservatism's future. It can reveal its true face and consign itself to oblivion or it can govern without conviction and produce unending incompetence.
I know I haven't done justice to the article. It's a must read.