There’s a temptation in the punditry business to attach too much meaning to the present, to excitedly say "never before,'' and to declare the "fall of'' and "death of'' this or that. And in my time I've seen too many premature pronouncements _ of the death of God, of the decline and fall of liberalism, and even the end of history _ to get too excited. But George Packer in the latest New Yorker has written an eminently readable treatise about “The Fall of Conservatism.’’ It was referenced in a Star Tribune editorial Saturday about the Minnesota Republican Party’s state convention, and the Packer piece promises to be prime grist for the mill this summer.
Packer quotes conservatives themselves who fear that the movement is out of ideas and intellectually fatigued and he draws some amazing admissions out of Patrick Buchanan about how Republicans consciously and aggressively exploited southern white fury over the civil rights movements to build their counter-attack in the late 1960s. Packer also does a good job sketching out broader and more defensible non-economic motivations for the rise of conservatism: concerns about “the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young and the insults to national pride.’’ I've always maintained that "liberalism'' got to be a dirty word because of "free love'' and drugs and flag-burning and goofy dalliances with Marxism, not because of its efforts to alleviate poverty and social problems and gross inequalities in wealth and income.
And Packer gets closest to explaining the conservatives' strategic mistake when he cites David Brooks’ analysis about how conservatives overreached with their hostility to government. “An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American…People want something melioristic, they want government to do things.’’ And in the end, because of a very contradictory conservative view of government as limitless when it comes to security and national defense, conservatives after almost 30 years of dominance “hadn’t made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality.’’ Packer goes on to quote conservative David Frum as saying that “smaller government is no longer a basis for conservative dominance.’’ And he points to young conservatives like Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam who are pushing progressive ideas like wage subsidies for low-income workers and tax credits for children with families.
I don’t want conservatism to fall or die, anymore than I want yin to wipe out yang or night to eclipse day. And it doesn’t matter what I think because conservatism and the great ideas it stands for _ individual and market freedoms, personal responsibility, family values, respect for the past, and religious convictions _ will and should always be with us as we try to build a better world. I just think conservatism needs to return to the healthy accommodation its adherents used to have for other principles _ equality of opportunity, social justice, and a respectful faith that community and the “we” are at least as important as the individual and the “I”.
Dane Smith
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