The Answer is Yes
Steven L. Hayward of the conservative American Enterprise Institute asks the question “Is Conservatism Braindead?” in yesterday’s Washington Post. Hayward’s thesis is that today’s conservative movement is dominated conservative bomb-throwers and activists without any input from intellectual conservatism. To that I say – you’re just noticing this now?
During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s to its success in Ronald Reagan’s era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.
ad_iconToday, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites.
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Consider the “tea party” phenomenon. Though authentic and laudatory, it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics. Meanwhile, the “birthers” have become the “grassy knollers” of the right; their obsession with Obama’s origins is reviving frivolous paranoia as the face of conservatism. (Does anyone really think that if evidence existed of Obama’s putative foreign birth, Hillary Rodham Clinton wouldn’t have found it 18 months ago?)
Today’s Republican party has turned into the anti-Obama party. They have no intellectual coherence and no ideas on how to solve the real problems facing this country. In fact, very few of them will actually acknowledge the problems faced by our country. The Republican answer to the health care crisis is absolutely nothing. Their answer to the economic problems is to offer the same old ideas that got us into these problems in the first place. When Republicans do offer opposition, they don’t talk about the policies, they talk in scare tactics. Opposition to universal health care is because of “socialism” or “death panels” and nothing about the actual policies themselves.
Argument from emotion may appeal to many people, especially people who are scared because of the precarious state of the economy but it is not a governing strategy. The ultimate goal of a political party should be to govern, which means offering solutions to the real problems facing the people in this country. Sometimes that might actually mean working with the majority party.
stop telling everyone they have to follow the dear leader! being american means opposing everything the president wants to do NO MATTER WHAT!
He loves his wife and kids? time for a divorce and adoption!
So we can call conservatives “brain dead idiots” and just say that a conservative told us it was ok? cause that would be ducky!
They’ve become the party of anti-anybody but themselves. And when your sole idea is to just be against everything, you’ve demonstrated the the governing failure that was the BushCo years is pretty close to becoming written in your party’s DNA. Hayward’s article has its own problems — as in including Jonah Goldberg’s attempt at revisionist history as some sign of intellectualism. He also finds something intellectual in Glenn Beck and Hugh Hewitt. Or even including Charles Murray in the same company as Fukuyama or Friedman strikes a pretty bad note. This interests me, even tho its author is typically part of the Brain Dead Caucus:
Hayward has alot good to say here, but it is a sign of how starved for intellectual heft the right has when this guy points to Hewitt, Beck and Goldberg as the new leading edge of thinkers.
I have said many times that this knee-jerk anti-Democrat reaction by the right had a role in September 11th. The intel that the Clinton admin had gathered was basically thrown in a corner with a label “Get to this when you get a chance” because it was done by a Democratic President.
That’s an interesting point, lg. Bush did have an “ABC” policy when he got in office (anything but Clinton). This may be why Obama has been so much more cautious about replacing Bush appointees.