Sorry, I can’t claim credit for that title. It comes from a Newsweek article about the writings of an influential British conservative, Henry Fairlie. He predicted the state of today’s GOP presciently in the 1980s.
Fairlie’s critique of American conservatism began with a GOP heresy: that by embracing the free market so completely, the party had gone calamitously awry. “The conservative can all too easily drift into a morally bankrupt and intellectually shallow defense of those who have it made and those who are on the make,” he wrote. Without a humanizing tory influence, conservatives were apt to forget “the ugly face of capitalism”—the way that the market tends to coarsen and destabilize society, making the gross national product fodder for our “gross national appetite.” Republicans, he argued, could never succeed in uniting the country as long as they supported business interests so completely with both their policy choices and their rhetoric: “The nation cannot be brought to you, as if it were Masterpiece Theatre, by a grant from Mobil Oil,” he wrote.
Fairlie had a more conservative populist view of conservatism. The writer of the article describes Fairlie’s beliefs this way:
Fairlie’s views of toryism, like his views of most things (America, women, Parliament, Scotch), were deeply romantic. He described his kind of conservative as one who stands alongside “the King and the People, against the barons and the capitalists.” In other words, government’s role was to preserve tradition and social order, not to speed the accumulation of great power and wealth among the elites or to enact sudden or overreaching reforms. He warmed to this view as a boy, when summers on a family farm in Scotland taught him that “nothing very much changes, and then changes only slowly.” He refined it as an adult, coming to revere the leadership of Winston Churchill, whom he called “the greatest tory of them all,” and absorb the writings of Michael Oakeshott, “the most formative conservative political thinker of his generation.” When he arrived in America, he expected to find conservatives with similar beliefs. Instead he found the Republicans.
Fairlie was dismayed at the direction of the GOP under Reagan. He warned Republicans about free market worship, hyperindividualism and social conservatism (pretty much what we’ve been telling conservatives as well). Fairlie believed that conservatism needed a “soul.”
I think this is an article well worth your time to read. I was a bit skeptical of the premise because I thought that it fit into the new genre of “conservatism can’t fail, it can only be failed.” In a way it is that type of article, but it doesn’t trace the failure solely to George W. Bush. The article acknowledges that today’s GOP failures are directly attributable to the course they chose under Reagan.