A Ship For All The Rats
Posted on October 14th, 2008
by Daniel Larison |
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Ross:
And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I’d be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back.
In fairness to the denouncers, there is a certain satisfaction in the knowledge, or at least the assumption, that you have held out despite everything and remained on board the ship to the very last. I have had plenty to say against party loyalty, but there is a kind of mad integrity in the reflexive partisan who will back his party no matter how sorry or ridiculous the candidates and no matter how vapid the message. It doesn’t make any sense, but then it’s not supposed to make sense. Of course Ross is right that conservatives should be more interested in making converts than finding heretics. The bit about finding heretics rather than making converts used to be the accusation conservatives hurled against the left, and it was always something of an exaggeration (there has long been something of a fortress mentality among conservatives that lets you forget that two-fifths of the public even now identify by that label), but now it has been completely reversed. Perhaps this is simply what happens as coalitions fragment and political alignments are in flux, but it seems to me that this is not inevitable.
For a long time, conservatives have been blinded by optimism, and I think many of them began to expect success to follow success. In the future, many of his former supporters may look back at Bush’s re-election and see it as the greatest disaster to befall their cause in a generation, and not simply because he presided over so many debacles in his second term but because his winning re-election taught them to expect victory when there was no good reason to expect it. In their expectation of success, conservatives have tended to become complacent, to congratulate one another and to preach to the crowd–this is the cocoon effect Ross has criticized before–and to react with bewilderment and disbelief to any setbacks. Many conservatives have mistaken optimism, which masks weakness, for confidence, which reflects strength. In politics as in everything else, confidence is attractive, while the arrogant presumption that comes from optimism commands deference only so long as you and your allies wield power. Once you are dethroned, you cannot command much respect at all. I think this is why the Republican ticket seems particularly sad this time around, because the nominees practice the sort of bluffing and blustering that once carried the field and now just seem exhausted.
What is instructive about all this is what it tells us about loyalty. For the denouncers, loyalism ultimately seems to mean keeping your mouth shut, ignoring reality and not breaking ranks. In another era, these would be the legitimists who would have defended the rights of an imbecile heir rather than a competent claimant on the throne. What we see is that it is not loyalty that is being defended, but rather conformity. The loyalist is bound by devotion, and the conformist by fear, usually fear of an enemy or opponent. We see the former when people rally to a monarch or leader they genuinely admire, and we see the latter in support for a dictator as the lesser of two evils.
Filed under: politics
‘there has long been something of a fortress mentality among conservatives that lets you forget that two-fifths of the public even now identify by that label’
Yeah but it’s because they think it’s the cool team not because they understand the ideology. The right has demonized the word liberal to the point that liberals won’t even call themselves that so why would the low information voter. I don’t know what circles you run in but in mine there are tons of people who will spout off about tax cuts but who can’t even give a high level definition of supply side economics. All they know is what Rush tells them to hate. These are your two thirds. The movement is a myth. It only seems like a movement and not a cabal because of identity politics. Strip away culture war BS and what is your movement? Right wing mags penning essay after essay saying the New Deal must go and blowhards on tv and radio telling the unwashed that liberals are the cause of all the worlds problems. After all you’ve written these past weeks about the collapse of the GOP it’s kind of sad to see this post. It’s not the GOP that’s crashing, it’s your movement. This is not to say that the things you care about are not important, it’s to say that the belief that there were millions who shared in it that’s gone. It was always just a collection of people who cared about their own thing seeming to be moving in the same direction.
‘In another era, these would be the legitimists who would have defended the rights of an imbecile heir rather than a competent claimant on the throne. ‘
Or those who felt we should stay loyal to King George. Conservatives don’t start revolutions, they quash them.
Actually, the Loyalists had the better of the constitutional argument, which is why the patriots had to lean so heavily on made-up notions of consent of the governed and natural rights. You’re right that conservatives oppose revolutions. I’ve never been clear on why that is supposed to be a bad thing.
When was it ever my movement? Then again, when was the last time you saw anyone in a major conservative magazine railing against the New Deal? At least if people were railing against the New Deal there would be some sort of argument about the role of government. No, what we’ve been seeing are the people who hate liberals more than they love liberty, as Lukacs has put it, which in the end means that they have nothing to fall back on.
‘You’re right that conservatives oppose revolutions. I’ve never been clear on why that is supposed to be a bad thing. ‘
Revolutions involve throwing off an oppressive government. Our country was founded on such a revolution and according to you 2/3rds of the people identify with a party that is opposed to this (while oddly hoping for and expecting one in Iran). Small issue there.
This is why I maintain that the only valid ideaologies in the US are liberalism or libertarianism. Conservatives don’t agree with the foundations of this government. They pretend to and act like Americans are conservative because we’re descendant from a conservative monarchy but it’s crap.
‘Then again, when was the last time you saw anyone in a major conservative magazine railing against the New Deal? ‘
Social security privatization. Welfare is socialism. You won’t find an article titled I Hate The New Deal.
Conservatives, if they’re serious, support the protection of constitutional liberties, and there is something to be said for the War for Independence as a genuine defense of those liberties. Our war was an anti-imperial war and a war of colonial independence, but it was not terribly revolutionary. Revolutions typically involve destroying institutions and customary rights. Defending those things against usurpation may be violent, but it isn’t meaningfully revolutionary, at least not by the standards of the last two hundred years.
I don’t know why you keep saying two-thirds when I wrote two-fifths.
Someone who opposed the New Deal would want to scrap Social Security entirely, not find a way to privatize part of it. I think I won’t find any real anti-New Deal writing because most magazines have long since abandoned the old grudge against FDR. I haven’t, but I’m not at all representative.
Daniel, I know what-ifs are impossible, but how would it have played out if Bush had:
* Cut taxes without expanding Medicare — still eating into the budget surpluses but not running at such huge deficits
* Fought the war with more troops, possibly restoring order years quicker but paying a higher short-term political price than relying on existing troop levels?
Would he have still defeated Kerry in 2004 without prescription drug benefits, a vanished surplus and a higher-troop level war? Would there be the 2006 Congressional realignment?
I think he had a good shot (and I am a knee-jerk liberal) at winning in 2004, and who knows about 2006? And obviously conservatism would be on stronger footing.
I agree with those who think that where things went wrong was Congress and the rest of the right following Bush down into some serious black holes. Had he maintained conservative principles, there would not be the quite the mess we have. That argues for competence no matter which side of the fence you are on. I hope Obama, if he holds on, and the deep blue Congress (which I do think is inevitable) don’t make the same mistakes (which I would characterize as ‘making decisions as if they had no repercussions’ rather than ‘failing to hew to any political philosophy’).
Of course, the kind of anger we are hearing anecdotally in response to the financial crisis may mean that the question of whether abandoning conservative principles is not only impossible to answer, but moot.
I like the way you write. We certainly come from different sides of almost everything, but Andrew Sullivan turned me onto this site and you make some excellent points. Let me ask you this, do you think the Republican Party will purge enough members from their party that they will cease to exist as a major party? They seem to be getting rid of members of the party I remember, the party that was libertarian more than authoritarian, almost in a Jeffersonian sense and now they are authoritarian almost in a Stalinist sense. No disagreement because with disagreement you are banished, it doesn’t make sense, I mean how can the party survive with only religious zealots?
Well whatever, these are unanswerable questions until we see how this election plays out aren’t they.
I’m not sure how not expanding Medicare would have played out. Presumably Kerry would have used that as a bludgeon, but it would have put Bush in the unlikely position of defending fiscal responsibility, which he might have then tied to a broader concern about long-term entitlement reform. Why not? This is a crazy parallel universe we’re talking about, after all. It is very difficult to defeat an incumbent President in what were still good economic times and in the earliest, more successful stages of a war, and I think Bush came as close as he did to losing because of the poor handling of the first year and a half of the war. Had he invaded with larger numbers of soldiers and a serious plan for the post-invasion phase, the charges of incompetence and mismanagement would have been much weaker.
In this counterfactual, I’m not sure that Kerry necessarily wins the nomination, which could change what happens in this alternative general election. If Iraq were less chaotic in ‘04, Kerry’s ostensible edge of national security among Democrats could have been blunted. Domestic issues might have come to the fore and we might have seen Dean in his more technocratic reformer role or Edwards in his weepy do-gooder role have more success. Dean might never have taken off without being a leading antiwar candidate, so better management in Iraq might have prevented Dean’s candidacy from driving the online activist grassroots movement on the left. That movement would still have happened, especially if Bush had been re-elected, but it might not have been as well-organized as it became.
“Let me ask you this, do you think the Republican Party will purge enough members from their party that they will cease to exist as a major party?”
Thanks for your kind words. Movement or institutional purges are a bit different from the party making entire groups of people turn away from the GOP, but both are the result of a failure of imagination. I think it is possible that writers and scholars in the rising generation and the one after them will be even more discouraged by the climate they find in movement circles and in the GOP as a whole, so there will be something of an ongoing brain drain (or lack of a brain gain, if you like). The GOP’s larger problem is that it is losing blocs of voters without which it cannot be a national party.
The GOP has been accomplishing exactly the opposite of what Ross and Reihan advise them to do, which as I understand it is to develop an agenda that serves both the lower middle class and the mass upper-middle. Palin was always a symbolic pander to working and/or middle classes, but what strikes me about the choice now is that McCain avoids talking about the middle class and lets Palin stand in for his argument that he represents them. Once the crisis was upon us, that substitution no longer worked very well and McCain’s basic neglect of his own middle-class constituents became clear once again.
Honestly, Daniel, how can the GOP develop an agenda that serves both the lower and middle class? In theory, tax cuts should mean greater job creation, but we’re dealing with human beings. At the upper levels, most of the money gets hoarded away and squirreled into investments and never reaches Main Street. There are only so many homes that these people are willing to buy. There might be an uptick in the luxury goods market, but how much of GDP is that? How many jobs does that create? Tax cuts to the middle class typically go right back into the spine of the economy - businesses on Main Street. This is why many Americans are skewing left on this issue. Some commenter somewhere said that the trickle down economy is really the tinkle down economy (or something like that). Looking at the last 8 years, and the last 30 in general, how can the GOP credibly set forth an economic plan that really works for all Americans?