Talking To The Wall
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Will at Ordinary Gentlemen is puzzled by something:
I can’t offer any empirical evidence, but after trolling the dank alleys of the blogosphere for a few years, I’m always surprised by the lack of interaction between dissident conservatives and their mainstream counterparts. Which is odd, because if anything, the last eight years have highlighted the importance of decidedly non-mainstream perspectives, from the libertarian critique of Bush’s excessive domestic ambitions to the traditionalist take on runaway consumer culture to the renewed relevance of conservative non-interventionism.
Perhaps I can help explain. There is relatively limited engagement between the two because dissident conservatives have increasingly come to the conclusion that their mainstream counterparts have little or nothing of interest to say and that the mainstream conservatives have no interest in learning from any of their errors, and because the mainstream conservatives have concluded that the dissidents are crypto-leftists (or something else undesirable) who want to destroy America precisely because of most of the critiques Will mentions. To the extent that they refer to anything we say, it is usually to repeat this sort of trash as if it were a serious argument. The latter tends to reinforce the dissidents’ assumption that they are correct that the mainstream has nothing of interest to say, which is otherwise confirmed on a daily basis by a quick browse of the mainstream outlets and re-confirmed by their near-absolute deafness to any significant criticism from the right. Put another way, it is very difficult to talk to people who live inside a multi-layered cocoon and never want to come out.
In fact, the disengagement between the two has become more pronounced as mainstream conservatives have become more and more irrelevant to current debates over the last few years. They prefer to operate in their own universe where the “surge” has solved everything in Iraq, bankrupt petro-states threaten to dominate the world, and Jimmy Carter somehow created the housing bubble. The gap has widened still more as dissident conservatives have stopped bothering to attack mainstream conservatives with the same regularity as we once did. There was a time when refuting mainstream arguments or criticizing mainstream follies was a major, constant part of dissident conservative writing, but as their political fortunes have ebbed our attention has been turning elsewhere. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still a fair amount of criticism, but there is less of it than there used to be. It has almost always been a one-way conversation in this way for the last 15 years and maybe more than that, so this state of affairs is not really anything new. Probably the last time there was real engagement or an alignment of interests was in 1992, and the divide has been growing ever since.
Simply put, I think the reason there is so little “respectful engagement” between mainstream and dissident conservatives is that there isn’t much mutual respect that would serve as the basis for such engagement. Instead of dissolving during the early years of renewed Democratic rule and liberal ascendancy, the lines have hardened. For my part, this is why I am much more interesed in talking to and engaging with heterodox, meliorist conservatives who tend to break with the movement in other ways, because at least they are interested in ideas and policy discussions, which seem to be incidental at best in mainstream conservative discourse nowadays. If that changes, there might be more engagement in the future, but I doubt that this will happen.
Filed under: politics
I don’t consider myself a dissident or a conservative, so perhaps I’m unqualified to comment.
But I will, anyways!
There’s a touch of sharpness in this post, and I think I can relate. Fighting rationally against an irrational creature; it recalls the oft-repeated trope from Dilbert (of all places) about arguing with an idiot.
A microcosm of this would be my experience as a community gardener. Obviously, we’re talking about a left-wing community, but they’re every bit as nutty and immune to reason.
Grant that the degree of acrimony between mainstream and dissident conservatives is at an all-time high. Grant that “mutual respect” is notably lacking in intramural conservative scrimmages. The Left was mired in a similarly bitter dispute circa 2004 and still managed to reopen lines of communication between the progressive base and center-left moderates. Why can’t the GOP do the same? Are mainstream conservatives that much more stubborn than their center-left counterparts? Leaving aside the issue of whether the National Reviews and Weekly Standards care about intellectual diversity, the political logic of reconciliation seems pretty persuasive.
“The Left was mired in a similarly bitter dispute circa 2004 and still managed to reopen lines of communication between the progressive base and center-left moderates. Why can’t the GOP do the same?”
The Left had the Howard Dean campaign, though futile in capturing the Presidency, was absolutely crucial in solidifying the trajectory of the American Left. Basically, the Demo base pulled rank over the Demo political establishment.
The GOP base has not done this (to its discredit), and imo that’s a large part of the disconnect between the dissident and mainstream conservatives. It might be hard for paleos or crunchy cons or whoever to grok this, but from the pov of the mainstream Right, the Bush Administration looks like another bunch of dissident conservatives.
As to Will’s question, I think that the Dem elected officials circa were rational actors who had bought into the need to cave into the GOP in order to preserve their popularity. A substantial minority of Democrats in Congress voted for authorization of the Iraq invasion. When the political winds clearly changed, the politicians were easy enough to bring around. The DLC approach that had carried the day in the Democratic Party since at least 1992 was a pose reflecting an absence of convictions.
The GOP, by contrast, is animated by a few deeply held, unpopular, and irrational policy views: for example, never ever raise any tax ever, and always be willing to attack Villainous Country X. (Certainly it’s nothing that, say, Eisenhower would have accepted). It would make a great deal of sense for them to change, as you say, Will, but today’s GOP doesn’t do sense, it does resentment.
from the pov of the mainstream Right, the Bush Administration looks like another bunch of dissident conservatives.
That is not true. Bush had a 34% approval rating as he left office, but 75% approval among Republicans. To say nothing of the “The Right Man”/”Rebel in Chief”/etc. nonsense that movement conservatives shoveled and rank and file conservatives swallowed.
“The Left was mired in a similarly bitter dispute circa 2004 and still managed to reopen lines of communication between the progressive base and center-left moderates. Why can’t the GOP do the same?â€
If by “the left” you mean the Democrats, we were in a bitter dispute after the Vietnam/ Johnson/ McGovern debacle. It never stopped. To an extent it still hasn’t stopped. The Carter Administration was the moment when we began to realize that we were almost as intellectually bankrupt as the Republicans said we were. Even then we thought if we could just be more persuasive salesmen, America would eventually buy our superior dogfood. We forgot that we had to win elections first and that political parties usually aren’t there to lead the people but rather to give a voice to what is already present.. The Howard Dean thing was just a convenient punctuation mark to the Clinton/Lieberman faux-centerism.. The “right”, whatever that is these days, is in for a similarly long walk in the dark unless they wise up.
i watched an interview with some of the attendees at a a Tea Party today….can you guess what it reminded me of? A Code Pink rally crossed with an ActUp event. The hysterical rhetoric was identical and even the very signboards were the same. If one had substituted the words ” Obama” for ” Bush” or “Reagan” one would have been hard pressed to tell the difference. The wingnuts and moonbats have valuable roles to play in both camps and it is always a mistake to silence them, I think. But it is suicidal to let them set all of the policy. In some ways the Republicans have gone even further down that road than the Democrats did during the 1970s.
Why do the so-called mainstream republicans feel so free to mock and deride, Douthat, Frum, Brooks. Larison, Buchanan and ,as of the other day, Goldberg? None of these guys are even slightly liberal nor do they have all that much in common. What could they be saying that is so frightening or offensive to the self-proclaimed movement conservatives?
@jetan
The Democrats were in the “wilderness”? Really? That’s why they effectively controlled Congress for almost 40 years, until the comparatively short-lived Republican revolution up ended them?
The myth that Democrats have been the party “out of power” is as dangerous as the toxic brew mainstream Republicans have been drinking that they were insanely popular during their years of ruling the roost. Republican control was always tenuous at best, as indicated by the nail-biting elections of 2000 and 2004, and the drubbing in 2006 and 2008 are an indication that the comparative aberration of Republican control of the House and Senate is at an end. It is extremely hard to see, demographically speaking, where Republicans can somehow take back large enough segments of the electorate to win enough House seats to regain control of that chamber. The Senate, with its staggered elections, will take many election cycles to turn around.
I mean how can anyone look at the major functions and programs of the federal government, most enacted under Democratic Congresses and Presidents, and not realize that most of what we call policy today IS Democratic legislation (a fact that conservatives point out when they rail against entitlements, progressive taxation, and other facets of the Democratic party plank for the past 60 odd years).
I think its high time that liberals, the left, and other people in the complicated coalition of the Democratic Party realize that the Republican Party’s recent tenure was a dead cat jump in their political fortunes, and the ascendancy they claimed it was (which I never understood when their own victories were so weak) never existed. I’m a betting man, and I usually do pretty well at the track, and I can safely say I will probably not be eating crow in the next 4 years.
Sean, I wish I could agree. But the left lost ground on the issue of progressive taxation….so much so that even the economic classes that benefit from it tend to perceive flatter taxation as fairer. Socialized medicine got stopped dead in it’s tracks. Welfare “got ended as we know it” and all that. The Bankruptcy Code was eviscerated jut in time for the recession. The Prescription Drug Benefit and improved relations with Asian Communist block countries were areas where the credit or blame belongs primarily to the GOP. The War on Drugs is still doing fine and the Cuban Embargo remains in place even with complete Democratic control. On energy and transportation policy….issues where the facts are strongly in the Democrat’s favor….progress is simply glacial. As to Defense policy, the only national figures I hear advocating actual reductions in force size are PJB and Ron Paul.
Sean S., on April 15th, 2009 at 10:18 pm Said:
…..While I wouldn’t go all the way with you I’d say that broadly speaking you’re correct. The Democrats basically created not only most of the social programs and legislation we take for granted but also the entire modern system of govt. Wilson, FDR, Truman and Johnson were the people who put in place, or transformed the power of, literally every major domestic and foreign policy institution in the country. They also created all the basic domestic and foreign policy strategies and programs that these institutions have implemented. Despite this fact the country has remained slightly right of center largely because of the political peculiarities of the congressional system with its almost infinite capacity for obstructionism. It’s true that for much of the last 75 years the congress has been controlled by the Democrats but that ignores the fact that for much of that time a large part of the Democratic coalition was Southern based and was as conservative as they come particularly on racial matters. In fact It was an alliance between northern conservatives who wanted, for example, anti union legislation, and southern democrats who wanted to preserve segregation that for so long blocked progressivism in the US. Desegregation and the southern strategy has actually had the effect of rebalancing the congressional political system so that the most conservative bloc in the country which is in the south has ended up where they should have been all along which was in the GOP. The danger of course with the change in ethnicity and demographics, and cultural shifts, is that it will condemn the Republican party to fringe regional status. You only need to look at some of the crosstabs of these presidential polls where Obama’s approval ratings are in the forties while everywhere else they are in the seventies, to realize the starkness of the divide. I’m really coming around to the view that those paper written by people like Texeira weren’t far off the mark. The Republican congressional victories were something of a reaction against 40 years of Democratic dominance and the Republicans soon succumbed to an arrogance and hubris that made Tip O’Neil look positively benign. Bush eaked out only the narrowest of victories in 2000 and 2004 and Obama’s win while not a landslide in share of vote terms was a very comfortable win for an attractive candidate, but one with a lot of negatives. Assuming the economy is on the mend by next Spring, and I think it will be, then I’m expecting the Democrats to make further sizeable gains particularly in the Senate but also in places lke California where heavily gerrymandered seats are starting to look vulnerable. Obama without any major errors, which he shows no signs of making, will be re-elected in 2012 and we’re therefore, looking at eight years of solid Democratic rule during which our society is going to undergo substantive changes. Obama is a liberal progressive, there’s no doubt about it in my mind. He’s also a highly competent exec with outstanding political talent who has surrounded himself with a highly competent bunch of people. The Republicans simply have no antidote to this and in any case seem intent in cooperating with the administration’s desire to present them as clownish and irresponsible. The pendulum will swing back at some point but for it to happen the GOP is going to have make some major adjustments and this could take a very long time.
When the Texas Governor suggests that “leaving the Union” is a viable political strategy, I would suggest taking the short position on near term Republican political prospects.
The Alternative Right seems focussed on ideas and philosophical purity, while the Movement types and the large mass of middle right voters always have the next election cycle in their peripheral vision. And the Neocons control the right wing media, such as it is.
From the point of view of the movement, Neo’s and GOP establishment, there is no reason to talk to us. Their salaries and positions are dependent on their continued control of the conversation.
My attempts to reason with these folks almost always resulted in being stiff-armed, censored or being called a liberal. Politically, I can understand their reluctance to go “off message.” Now that the whole right of center movement is best described as a cluster f**k, they need a new departure from their old model. They aren’t there yet because as opportunists, they are not sure what sort of line the public wants to hear. And the public does not hear our line because we are not a coherent movement with a set agenda, and we have a tiny presence in the media and an even tinier media of our own.
In short, they are about getting and holding power, and we are about critiquing power. Our critque will not get Joe Bow elected to Congress. This will be the equation until we coalesce into a coherent movement and find a way to speak directly to the public. If we do this, the GOP establishment will listen to us, if only to attempt our co-option and manipulation. That’s grim but it beats where we are now.
“… ideas and policy discussions, which seem to be incidental at best in mainstream conservative discourse nowadays”
Nailed it. The GOP is like a corporation that’s been so great at sales and marketing that it could still shift stinking fish and obsolete lemons for an impressively long while and forget about R&D.
To compound this, conservatives who despair of the GOP struggle to distinguish between doable policy and impressions of Canute.