I am, finally, back from CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, aka
the Blunderdome, aka
PullUpTheLadderPalooza, aka
The Great White Mope, aka The Place That Still Likes Sarah Palin. I am coherent and all of my limbs are still attached, so I consider it a fine success, even if a little piece of my soul died during the last day. That was when they put many of the most hard-hard-right speakers, who rose to the occasion with verbal cannons filled with the reddest of meat and not much else.
If nothing else, CPAC is a good opportunity to see what the most hard-core of conservatives are thinking, in handy bulk form. The conference is for the hard-right base, and is conservative first and foremost and "Republican" only as a distant second. Most of the audience and nearly every speaker not currently planning on running for something has harsh words for the party, and gets ample applause from the audience for those harsh words. The loyalty to the GOP here is incidental, not causal; the preponderance of big GOP names here is because the conference has a distinct starf*cker quality to it, and all the big conservative stars are, of necessity, Republicans.
This was the first CPAC I have personally gone to. I sat in the panels, and chatted very politely with the other attendees, and listened to agonizingly silly things being tossed around as gospel truth by various vendors. I have no doubt there are some good people speaking and attending. There are also a few sneering bigots, more than a few batshit insane conspiracy theorists, a good chunk of bona-fide theocrats, and a vast swath of very respectable people who might not believe any of that stuff, fully, but would be willing to embrace all of it at once if it meant success at getting their own two cents of agenda in there as well. A heaping helping of post-convention thoughts await you below the fold:
On Thursday things looked good, or even outright dull: The first sight on Thursday morning is of a sea of people capped by a liberal foam of very young men in near-identical black suits, and much of the discussion centers around their own postmortems of the last rotten election and why this-or-that group does not like Republicans. There is no consensus, and while the problems of demographic suicide and other issues are understood intellectually, the prescriptions are universally shallow tweaks . By Friday, the aura of forced intellectuality begins to creak as it becomes clear that every last bleeding panel will consist of dire warnings against the obviously insane liberals who hate America and who supposedly want an unending stream of cartoon-villian level things; by the late afternoon, after incessant talk about Iran-bombing and freedom-loving and severe, slashing budget-cutting that obviously would never touch any of the things anyone ever liked about government, like the bombing parts, and after a panel on how not to be called a racist gets hijacked by an outright white nationalist, it is clear that a foul undercurrent of wacko cuts through the whole thing.
And on Saturday, all that effort at soul-searching and message-tweaking and minority-courting gets beaten with a sack of bricks and left on a curb somewhere, and we close things off with all the craziest people who ever uttered a conspiracy theory about anything: Bachmann and Steve King, and Ann Coulter, and a Breitbart panel explicitly highlighting all the loons and bigots that even the official conference couldn't stomach, and Sarah Palin, who gets more revered the less she does, and Ted Cruz, patron saint of bizarre McCarthyism, U.N. conspiracy theories, the invisible dangers of imminent sharia law, and anything else that anyone might ever toss into his cavernous head.
The two stars of the conference were, undoubtably, Rand Paul and Sarah Palin. Rand Paul for the recent filibuster, which finally seems to have cemented conservative heads around the post-Bush notion that maybe presidential power should not be absolute after all, and welcome to the party on that one. Sarah Palin, who has done nothing of note for four years, remains just as much a crowd hero as ever. I have no doubt whatsoever that the Big Gulp she used as prop in her speech will appear on eBay within the week, if it hasn't already. (Note for the authenticity record: When Palin produced the drink from below the podium, it was perhaps around 70 percent full; when the emcee produced the cup again, saying he had found it abandoned backstage, it was still 70% full, so apparently Sarah Palin had no intention of finishing off her rebellious drink. Individual teaspoon-sized portions of the remaining soda will be placed in glass vials and available for purchase as relics in the lobby; payment shall be in silver or gold coinage only, please.)
The Bloomberg soda ban was a very popular topic throughout the weekend, and repeatedly cited as evidence of all the petty, ridiculous things The Liberals wanted to do to the nation. The White House tours being cut due to sequestration were also a prime and commonplace indignation, an obviously mean and manipulative move by the White House to insult people, while few other sequester effects were noted at all. Abolishing the Department of Education was a another never-fail applause line. Sen. Ted Cruz, whose closing speech was greeted as almost an afterthought after the tour de force appearance of Sarah Proud and Tall, got his most enthusiastic applause of the entire speech (including a full-room standing ovation) for his demand that the department get axed. This is apparently one of the dominant drives of the conservative movement, and like other things that go without saying, explaining exactly what was so all-fired offensive about it always went without saying.
If the crowd was any indication, you can expect a certain Dr. Ben Carson to be a rising star in the conservative movement. Note, however, that who this crowd likes does not necessarily translate to overall Republican success, and vice-versa. Conference audiences were dominated by young libertarians, who as one might expect had no particular fondness for social conservative obsession with gay marriage and the like. The tea partiers were the other dominant factor, and those people were the craziest, and the dumbest, and the most conspiratorial-minded. The theocrats (and there seemed to be a strong overlap here with the tea partiers) had a solid presence, headed by Rick Santorum's group Patriot Voices, and were generally the most belligerently insistent on spouting false facts. They are "faith based," which, translated, apparently means that if you yell loud enough you can just go with whatever claims you want—reality is for scientists, atheists and other people going to Hell.
It's not even that the Republican Party has devolved into a bunch of John Birchers; there's multiple groups competing even to be the proper John Birthers, most of the base has gone so far off the rails. William F. Buckley wouldn't want anything to do with most of these nuts.
As for the crowds? On Thursday it looked like a sea of professionals. A vast number of Young Conservative types dressed for church or for job interviews. Policy discussions are rare; each group is about networking. This is, after all a trade show about selling conservatism (or, rather, the various sub-sub-offshoots of it, since most of these groups are in direct or indirect competition with each other. Everyone is here to see and meet everyone else who is here, and typical hallway conversations are the usual how are you, what are you doing banter. Oh, you're working there now? That's great, I should introduce you to SoAndSo. Yes, I can make Bob SuchAndSuch available for an interview. That Thursday seemed so dominated by the young men in suits makes a bit more sense when you learn, from the day's first welcoming announcements, that 250+ students were bussed in from Michigan and Ohio for the event. The Friday and Saturday audiences include many more apparent day trippers, in more casual clothes and not as uniformly, Children-of-the-Corningly of the "ambitious Congressional page" demographic. This is especially true on Saturday, with the big-name, total-red-meat speaker lineup (there are very few panels on Saturday, compared to the other two days; if you're going on Saturday you're going to see the big speeches and the big speeches alone.)
The Tea Party Patriots and other tea partiers have the slickest convention presence. Makes sense, since their fundraising goes for funding themselves. The NRA is less slick, and the Republican Party official presence exists primarily as roving bands of young volunteers clustered here and there, handing things out or welcoming you to the large but sparsely populated GOP-sponsored lounge, a wide area of matching couches, chairs and beanbag chairs in a far corner of the exhibition floor. Citizens United is omnipresent sponsors of panels, speakers, etc.
This is Conservatism, Inc. It is the think tank and astroturf mechanism of the movement, the professional conservatives who either spend their lives being professionally conservative or are looking for a gig at just that. The recent scandal over conservative editorialists taking pay to write columns praising the government of Malaysia does not entirely surprise me; we just had a conference panel on the environment staffed almost entirely by members of the Heritage Foundation, and isn't that close to the same thing?
A last thought: the current conservative schism seems, if anything, underestimated. It is a split between young and old (not good, for a group already losing badly among young voters) and between corporate (e.g. "fiscal libertarian") conservatives, who care only about fiscal things, and "tea party" conservatives who care about taxes and a further litany of very crazy things quite often rooted in extreme conspiracy theories. It's the tea partiers who are the most nuts. It's a split between young libertarians and older, much louder theocrats; the theocrats have the upper hand now, but the young libertarians have the advantage of more decades in them.
The problem presented by that is the very one we see in the House, even now: the policies that the crazy base demands are not policies that are conducive to effective, or competent, or even barely functional government, and the crazy base won't accept anything else as an answer. That the only polices the party can elucidate are on cutting taxes and very, very generic demands to cut spending is no accident; on everything else, from foreign policy to "entitlement" programs to social issues, even the staunchest of conservative base has no coherent single policy to offer.
The only way to keep this fragile coalition of libertarians, corporatists, ambitious political realists and fundamentalist godbotherers together on a national level is to say and do absolutely nothing that would piss any of the groups off. As the groups diverge from each other, the task gets harder—so tax cuts it is.