Like Allahpundit - and, surprisingly to me, for the same reasons - I have no idea whatsoever what the newly-released Mount Vernon Statement is supposed to accomplish.  It amounts to a statement that the old Three-Legged Stool remains coherent and relevant.  Why?  Because they said so, that’s why.  There are no details, no attempt to resolve the conflicting interests of social conservatives, economic conservatives, hawks, and libertarians.  Just a blanket statement that somehow these groups all have the exact same interests, and all agree with a very generalized vision of the Constitution.  As Allahpundit points out, “the principles here are so broad as to be almost meaningless,” and noting further that the Statement doesn’t even attempt to provide a framework for bridging the gap between libertarians/paleocons and neo-conservatives on foreign policy (see Larison for a more fully developed argument on this point), nor does it provide any guidance as to how one would determine whether a particular policy fits within the notion of “Constitutional conservatism.” 

Compare this Mount Vernon statement, drafted by the old lions of movement conservatism, with the Tea Partiers’ proposed “Contract From America,” which doesn’t attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable but instead tries to keep a tight focus on fiscal and economic issues, and you get the feeling that the old school movement conservative leaders have ceased to be relevant in any meaningful way.

Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate.

Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.

Sun Tzu – The Art of War

I’m still trying to decide if Conor is willfully misreading me or if this is simply a rhetorical tit-for-tat.  Conor pounces on the title of my “strategy” for taking responsibility for the conservative movement – which I flippantly called the Trojan Horse Strategy.  If you recall, the Trojan Horse is a story from Homer.  In it the Greeks (think dissident conservatives) built a big wooden horse and filled it with some Greek fighters and then left it on the doorstep of the city of Troy.  They then pretended to sail away.  The Trojans (think: conservative movement) unwittingly brought the horse inside thinking it was a parting gift and were roundly beaten by the Greeks who sneaked out, unlocked the gates, and let their hiding army inside.s

Okay – so it’s a terrible analogy for what I’m trying to do.  I’m not trying to “defeat” the conservative movement, after all.  Just change it for the better.  My point is simply this: quit hurling spears at the walls of the conservative movement in vain.  Don’t you see, the only way to make a real, lasting difference is to get inside?  And to do that you use this big wooden horse and then….yeah.  Terrible analogy.

But that was my point, bad analogy or no.  I fleshed it out with some nice bullet points like 1) don’t alienate the base; 2) don’t alienate the independents; 3) try to reconcile social, fiscal, and defense conservatives; 4) try to nudge these groups in a more practical, productive, and ultimately good-for-the-country direction – etc.  (Nudge is key here.  I think it is more effective than denouncing people as racists or calling their radio show hosts out as bigots or as “rude” or whatever…see the above Sun Tzu quote….)

Anyways.  Here’s Conor’s take: [Read more →]

I had the good fortune yesterday afternoon to attend a panel discussion on the future of conservatism featuring Ross Douthat, David Frum, Daniel Larison, and Virginia Postrel.  It was a rather enlightening discussion, but at the same time also a discussion that drove me to the conclusion that we are a long way from seeing a Republican Party capable of garnering a coalition that is serious about the task of governing. 

One thing that made this panel so worthwhile was that it provided a good cross-section of the various schools of thought that have largely made up the conservative coalition for the last 30 or so years.  Equally notable was that even though each speaker represented an individual strain of conservatism, each speaker was also something of a dissident that would be readily labeled a RINO by most movement conservatives. [Read more →]

So, lately I’ve been trying to branch out a bit more – to see what the movement conservatives have to say and pay it a little more heed (rather than focusing only on the really silly things) and not just wander about the realms of the dissidents and libertarians and localists (even though these are typically the more serious voices out there, and the only voices which I think promise any real reform agenda, any real possibility of limited government and liberty, and all that jazz).

The thing is, I sometimes begin to feel a little bit too contrarian, or as Kara Hopkins put it a while back: “I snipe much and affect little.”  As easy as it is for the movement types to demonize and excommunicate the dissidents, it is just as easy for the dissidents to do the same.  (Thus my post a while ago on ‘the big tent.’)

But a couple thing keep tripping me up in this quest to expand and broaden my horizons.  A couple not-insignificant obstacles remain between any meaningful alliance of the dissident and movement conservatives.  Probably the most glaring is the hawk and owl divide – or if you prefer, the realist/neocon divide.  You see, to me no true conservatism can embrace the sort of hawkish, militaristic policies that the neoconservatives lay claim to.  These are liberal internationalist policies sprinkled heavily with right-wing machismo.  Conservatives are supposed to be wary of “statism” yet nothing says statist like a security or police state built on the back of the global war on terror overseas contingency operation.  Nothing promises Big Government like a Really Big Military.  (Well, except for maybe Really Big Bailouts and Really Big Entitlements…) [Read more →]

Shorter me:

Above all else, movement conservatives want to retain custody of what it means to be a conservative.  They claim to hold the keys to the city, and they guard them jealously – which is why someone like Conor is met with such unrestrained bile when he challenges the status quo.   Anyone who strays from the accepted talking points becomes an apostate.  Anyone who criticizes the movement or its hallowed leaders – as Conor did – is railed against with feverish abandon.

This smacks of fear and pride.  A sort of blind, intellectually bankrupt hubris.  And it’s exactly what’s rotting out the conservative movement from the inside.  Conservatives shouldn’t worry about “traitors” like Conor or Rod Dreher.   Those who care enough about conservatism to point out its flaws aren’t working for the opposition – they’re trying to reshape conservatism, much as William F. Buckley did not so long ago, into something viable and vital and above all else, relevant.  They’re trying to push the conversation in a new direction, whether or not they’re met time and again with resentment, calls of “RINO” etc.  All the misleading quotations, strawmen, and ad hominem lobbed in their direction won’t change that fact.  The tent that Reagan built is getting smaller and smaller.

This is what happens when you paint yourself into such a narrow ideological corner.  It’s easier to hurl insults than to attempt to come up with new ideas, easier to impute bad faith to others than to argue in good faith yourself.   That’s why the movement needs to be broken, burned, unwoven – so that it can rise up from the ashes.  Otherwise we’re left with a one-party America, and an overly powerful Democratic majority.  That’s something that dissident conservatives and mainstreamers should both be afraid of.

And the big tent just keeps shrinking.

[Too much invective for my own taste in the first edition of this post.  Thanks to several Gentlemen who shall not be named for speaking reason to reaction. Thus the (unprecedented) edit.]

Lots of blame to go around in the current decimation of the conservative movement.  I wanted to just break down my own thoughts on some of the competing interests here.  So far we have social cons blaming hawks and neocons; hawks and neocons blaming social cons; fiscal cons blaming hawks and social cons; paleocons blaming the movement; the movement blaming the paleos.  So who’s to blame?  I mean, Michael Steele doesn’t want any more apologizing (was there any?) about the GOP’s past mistakes, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be lots of blame-shoveling.  I say the blame falls predominantly amongst the leadership of the conservative movement over the past eight? sixteen? years, and this falls into two camps: the social conservatives and the neocons.

The Social Conservatives

The social conservatives – namely the religious right, the moral majority, the evangelical partisans, whatever you want to call them – got into bed with the hawks early on in the Bush administration.  There have been many social conservatives who have adopted a “who me?” attitude now that the war in Iraq has proved so unpopular, but in the beginning the social conservative/neoconservative marriage was one of convenience, and both sides played a big role in the Bush policies.  I don’t recall much opposition to Bush policies coming from the social conservatives, who it must said, are largely in the movement camp.  Those who remain outside it – generally paleo-catholics and other indie-cons like Daniel Larison – are the exception to this unholy alliance, not the rule.  So yes, blame can be laid at the feet of the social conservatives for much of the mess the conservative movement finds itself in. [Read more →]

The decision by Arlen Specter to “cross the aisle” and become a Democrat has drawn a pretty broad array of reactions from a variety of interested parties. Some folks like Rush Limbaugh and Ross Douthat have deemed the defection good riddance to bad rubbish. While others like Olympia Snowe have tended to see the move as an unmitigated disaster for the Republican Party.

Specter himself seemed to assess the situation as equal parts realpolitik and principles. In part he acknowledged that he had taken a good hard look at the polling data and the hospitality he’d been receiving from the Party and saw the writing on the wall. On the flip side, he has spent a good deal of time pointing the finger folks like the Club for Growth, whose hard line stances he says have been steadily and surely pushing Republican moderates out of the Party for some time now.

In turning the various factors over in my own mind, I found that I encountered a surprising amount of contradiction in my own thinking.

I’ve made no bones about my own distaste for the direction in which the Republican Party seems to be headed; as much as I might be interested in the potential applications of conservative ideology as a piece to our every expanding political puzzle, I, along with pretty much everyone on this site, find the current formulation of movement conservatism to be simply unpalatable. In that regard, I suppose it is true that we don’t cover ever single inch of the political spectrum.

And so, on some level I can’t fault Specter for jumping from that sinking ship, from a particular angle it would appear the only sane thing to do. And, of course, I have spent no small amount of time on this site bemoaning the trappings of an overtly ideological perspective. I have also refused to articulate my own placement in a particular political camp for fear of short circuiting a process of political discourse that I see as not only important, but in many regards as vital to the functioning of any democracy. So one might expect that upon hearing news of Arlen Specter’s decision to jump ranks I could hardly contain the urge to jump to my feet and shout, “Yeah! You go boy!”

One would be wrong in that assumption. [Read more →]

Okay, I’m still trying to figure out why these Tea Parties bother me so much.  There’s a number of things that just feel wrong, on a sort of intangible level.  I’m constantly reminded of the way I always felt so ill at ease watching the Palin rallies.  So I thought a list might be handy…

[Read more →]

“Children’s Tea Party,” Morton H. B. Bly, 1919

by jfxgillis

R.S.V.P.

Wednesday, April 15th, Tax Day (reminder to self: file tax return or else), is also the day designated by grass-roots conservatives as a day of protest, the “Tea Party” movement. Intriguingly, the Tea Parties have inspired much discussion and debate–but almost none of which is related to the actual issues ostensibly the subject of the protests. That, I contend, is because the purported “issues” supposedly driving the protests are the least of the forces driving them.

Andrew Sullivan, for example, has spent a week collecting suggestions for what the Tea Party protests are supposed to be “about.” What policies do they want to implement or obstruct, he wonders? as he then dismisses them as fated to futility.

Some of the sharper-witted Tea Partisans like blogger Dan Riehl, however, understand the purpose at least one level deeper when he suggests that “The Left can’t quite figure out the script for the Tea Party movement because there isn’t one beyond what is being written as it grows.” Which means, of course, that the Right can’t figure out the script yet either because, as he says, it hasn’t been written yet. But on the other hand, other highly-engaged conservative polemicists like Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs justifiably point out that that absence of policy focus represents something of a danger to the conservative movement, the danger that people will write their own scripts and that those scripts may be absurd or even insane.

The ironic resonance of Riehl’s contention that the script hasn’t been written yet is that it very much echoes one of the Right’s favorite–and truth to tell, most accurate–insights about the Obama campaign last year, that it was in many respects simply a vessel into which many Obamaniacs poured their own fears and desires. [Read more →]

I suppose the reason I haven’t commented much on the resurgence of Rush Limbaugh into the national spotlight, is I have never, ever taken the Great Bloviator seriously.  He’s always been just another talk-radio windbag to me, representing not just an ideological demographic that I find unappealing, but also a tone and style that is at once hyper-partisan and inflexibly loud.  To listen to Rush is to listen to total certitude, to have all the answers laid out at your feet, and all the blame tucked away in all the right places.  This is why people listen to the man.  He is not thoughtful in his approach.  He is unapologetic and verbose.  He combines the unflinching, non-introspective politicking of George Bush with a much cannier oratory.  Oh, and he’s much more “movement” than Bush ever was.  He has his Reaganisms down to an art form.

No wonder he’s found his way to the top of the conservative movement.  That the movement is failing is beyond a doubt, and that this direction, the Rushifying of the Right, is only going to help speed it on its way to intellectual and political insignificance remains fairly certain as well.  But the movement has become a self-serving institution, and right now no more charismatic presence exists.  There is a vacuum that only Rush can fill.  Or, rather, that only Rush can hope to fill.  Even in his rotundness, I have my doubts that Rush is the right man for the job.  Then again, right or wrong, perhaps he’s exactly the man who will do what’s necessary in the long run.  Bear with me.

[Read more →]

My former political editor at the late-great Culture11, James Poulos makes an excellent contribution to a roundtable discussing Sam Tanenhaus’ piece declaring the death of movement conservativism.  Tanenhaus’ original article is here.  The roundtable discussion is here–Br. James’ contribution is fittingly the final one.

What I like in some ways most about James’ response is that in my mind he is the only one who you can’t basically guess what his response will be to the question by looking at his biographical/affiliation blurp.  Some of the other responses I find interesting and on point, others maybe less so, but the rest all strike me as quite easily if not predictable at least guessable based on the individual’s place within conservo-world.

A (very) cheap and dirty version of Tanehaus’ argument is that movement conservatism is dead and should be replaced by a form of Burkean conservatism (so-called Beaconsfield conservatism).

Here’s Poulos:

When Tanenhaus cuts deeper, however, he complicates this easy narrative. Foreign and market policy concern little of the internecine warfare between ideological movement conservatives and their classical Beaconsfield foes. For both factions admit or champion the necessity of internationalism abroad and the free market at home—unlike a third, less popular or publicized strain of conservatism. More importantly, conservatives of this third strain most stridently reject the idea that cultural change is necessarily open-ended, progressive, and inevitable. Classical and movement conservatives alike, by contrast, concede—at a minimum—that we live in “a culture of continual novelty.” Yet they hesitate to consider that cultural change itself may have been commodified as a shared psychological and economic imperative.

This point is a further elucidation of James’ distinction between what he calls cultural (or what ED calls civilizational) conservatism and social conservatism.

For Poulos then, the difference between the Beaconsfieldians and the movement conservatives is really more just two various articulations of a common core assumption. (Ed: Does this apply as well to Grand New Party Conservatism? I’m guessing it does).  The Beaconsfieldians (that’s a pleasant word to say, just rolls off the tongue btw) argue for a more so-called organic, skeptical, open-ended, flexible, adaptable kind of conservatism.  The movement conservatives by attaching themselves so closely to (among others) social conservatives (as well as neocons I would add) embrace ideology described by Poulos as:

[an ideology] purports to comprehensively standardize and synthesize non-political convictions and commitments with political objectives…

This criticism I think lands quite successfully in many regards.  I hear a whole mess of MacIntyrean echoes in this graf.  Which leads me then to the ending to this piece:

Tanenhaus admirably invites conservatives to explode ideology—with its central myth that religious convictions, cultural commitments, and political objectives can be purified into a programmatic and comprehensive creedal unity. But he cannot explain how post-movement conservatives can successfully oppose movement liberalism, which effectively instrumentalizes economic and political policies that advance our cultural pathologies in such a way as to celebrate them.

Having made what I think is this crucial distinction between these various strands of conservatism (even adroitly applying that insight to the liberaltarian discussion), I want to nudge JP to begin answering his own hanging question: how would post-movement conservatives respond to movement liberalism?  Especially given the (in my mind) rather sound critiques of the alternate Beaconsfieldian types.

It seems to me that James has not gone in for the Benedict Option–at least not totally, though I doubt he’s opposed and potentially somewhat sympathetic to that route. James while I sense some MacIntyrean influence is more influenced by Philip Rieff (I feel like there is something wrong with wiki-ing Philip Rieff. Oh well).  If not Benedict, then what for cultural conservatism?

–

Bonus Coverage: In the previous link on the Benedict Option, Rod Dreher also talks about a Cincinnatus option.  Now being a native Cincinnatian, the child of multiple generations of born, raised, dyed in the wool Cincinnatians–of the proper or West Side Variety (people from The ‘Nati will know of what I speak)–I have to say a word or two on this.

Re: Cincinnatus option according to Rod:

I conclude that if we are Rome, we can either take the Cincinnatus Option, and work to rebuild our flagging institutions and restore our republican (small-r, nota bene) vigor …

Depending on one’s point of view fortuntaely or unfortunately, the Cincinnatus Option (as I recall my local civic history) would entail a partial period of dictatorship.  The Cincinnatus Option (at least historically and mythically) like The Benedict Option has a strong agricultural ethos to it.  [i.e. Emphasis on the crunchy in crunchy conservative.].  Cincinnatus post-dictatorship and military victory, returned to plowing his field rather than being life long dictator.  [Sidefact: My hometown is therefore named after George Washington considered the American Cincinnatus].   This agrarian imagination is generally what I don’t see in James’ work.  So when I’m asking JP to tease out the implications of his own theory, I partially mean that given an urban context.

* Also check out Larison’s piece in much the same vein.