Death of Conservatism (eBook)

RIGOR MORTIS American history is the record, we're often told, of beginnings-- dating back to the first settlements planted on the 'fresh, green breast of the new world,' as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby, his classic tale of self-reinvention. The aura of newness was not merely a sentiment but also a statement of purpose inscribed in our republic's founding documents and asserted in the legend novus ordo seclorum, 'the new order of the ages,' stamped on the Great Seal of the United States. This ideal has been repeated in an almost unbroken series of rededications of political purpose: Lincoln's 'new nation, conceived in Liberty,' Theodore Roosevelt's 'New Nationalism,' Woodrow Wilson's 'New Freedom,' Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'New Deal,' John F. Kennedy's 'New Frontier,' and--circling back to the Great Seal's inscription-- George H. W. Bush's 'New World Order.' Through all this reinvention runs the theme of American exceptionalism, of a people liberated from the dragging chains of the past. But of course history is also about endings, and so it has been in America, too. Our cherished myth of continual forward motion rests on dramatic breaks with what came before, whether the suppressions of a state church and the injustices of distant monarchy or our own discarded legacies of slavery and willful isolation from the outside world with its imposition of 'entangling alliances.' This cycle of beginnings-in-ends is being repeated again today. We stand on the threshold of a new era that has decisively declared the end of an old one. In the shorthand of the moment this abandoned era is often called the Reagan Revolution. In fact it is something larger and of much longer duration: movement conservatism, the orthodoxy that has been a vital force in our political life for more than half a century and the dominant one during the past thirty years, vanquishing all other rival political creeds until it was itself vanquished in the election of 2008. This moment's emerging revitalized liberalism has illuminated a truth that should have been apparent a decade ago: movement conservatism is not simply in retreat, it is outmoded. The evidence is not recorded merely in election returns and poll ratings. Those are unreliable and unstable measurements, spontaneous snapshots, subject to sudden change. The more telling evidence is in the realm of ideas and argument. It is there that conservatism is most glaringly disconnected from the realities now besetting America. Even as the collapse of the nation's financial system has driven a nation of 300 million to the brink of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression, conservatives remain strangely apart, trapped in the irrelevant causes of another day, deaf to the actual conversation unfolding across the land, in its cities and towns, in red and blue states, in the sanctuaries of the privileged and tented 'Bushvilles.' This conversation has yielded a new vocabulary--rather, instilled fresh meaning in a familiar vocabulary. It includes phrases like 'sensible limits,' 'sound choices,' 'shared sacrifice,' and 'common ideals' and stresses the delicate balance between 'mutual obligation' and 'individual responsibility.' These words, though sometimes vague to the point of abstraction, are firmly anchored in concrete human facts: job layoffs and implausible tuition payments, dwindled savings and parched retirement funds. In aggregate they form the undertone of what Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination, called 'a culture's hum and buzz of implication'--a buzz and hum most audible today in gallows humor and nervous asides, in the anxious tones of people, tens of millions if not...