By Kyle (of Vogue Republic)

In the grand discussion of where should Conservative leaders lead and where do they go, it’s important to get a good lay of the land, a solid bearing of where Republicans and Conservatives are, and an accurate reading of where the competition is. Building off of Mark’s exploration of the relationship between the base and wonks and E.D. taking that ball and running with it, I hope to add another piece to the puzzle.

In talks about conservative dissidents, conservative wonks, what we really need to talk about are conservative elites, of which some of the former are included. Elites are, leaders, columnists, idea-mongers, and purveyors of vision.

In that sense, Rush Limbaugh, reviled though he may be, is certainly an elite but not a dissident nor wonk. What he does do, is project an image of what conservatism is and just as importantly what is not. Some elites are dissidents, quite a few are wonks but they are – for better and for worse- leaders of conservatism.

The conservative base and its elite leaders are fractured unlike their competition, Democrats, progressives, and/aka liberals. The very strong alignment between the liberal base and liberal elites forms an iron binary, a group whose fundamental agreement on issues joins them inviolably. Their broad agreement on social and economic issues allows them to work – more or less – in harmony. By contrast, the right has a fairly sizeable disconnect between both. For example with the bank bailout and gay marriage there are sizeable chunks of the conservative elite who either support them or simply don’t care at the same time that the huge chunks of the base have been positively apoplectic over them. There’s a reason you see one of the most prominent conservative lawyers in America working for marriage equality but zero liberal lawyers seeking to overturn Roe.

Another contrast between the two, effective signaling between elites and the base allows liberal elites to organize for health care and channel the energy of a strong base into focused issues of consensus whereas tea parties and town halls reflected a base only enough organized enough to be a disorganized mess.

We saw this contrast as early the 2008 presidential primary. The Democratic candidates came in all regions, genders, and colors but basically agreed on 90%-95% on their policy. The Democratic contest was a contest of packaging not direction or political identity.

The Republicans were the exact opposite. They were all wealthy, white, men but their ideas couldn’t have been more heterodox. Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Romney all presented very different visions of the future of the Republican Party and consequently conservatism’s role within the party. The only candidate whose selection and platform amounted to tinkering around the edges rather than changing directions was also the one least offensive to the most number of people, John McCain. This is also why he suffered from an enthusiasm gap until he picked Palin.

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by Jaybird

There is a scene in C.S. Lewis’s _The Great Divorce that has been sticking in my craw in the last month or so. It’s the scene where they talk about Napoleon. If you haven’t read it (you should, it’s good) it’s a discussion of Hell. Hell, Lewis explains, is a place where one’s wishes are immediately granted. The problem is that people wish for things that make them feel better without actually helping them. The narrator talks to a couple of folks who say they looked up Napoleon. They spent a year spying on him and they said that all he did was pace back and forth saying “It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault.” That’s all he did. For an eternity.

I’m enough of an optimist to say that the wilderness is not for *THAT*… but, goodness, measuring some of the responses to the election, one might think that it was. People explaining that it was the fault of the media, or the fault of insufficiently rigorous investigation into the whereabouts of Barack (HUSSEIN!!!) Obama’s mother at the moment of his birth, or even the fault of the faithless American People. It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault.

To be sure, much of the complaining has taken the form of something like “if only you had been more like me, you would have succeeded. Since you were more like you, of course you failed.” While this argument feels good when you say it (go on, say it), it loses much of its oomph when one realizes that social conservatives are saying it at the same time as fiscal conservatives and yet again at the same time as defense hawks at the same time as paleocons at the same time as neocons at the same time as libertarians at the same time as Lincoln Chafee is saying it. Sure, one or two of these groups may be right (I’m pretty sure that at least one is) but the argument itself is just as likely to be the letting off of steam as it is an accurate measurement of the state of affairs.

Best to take a step back and think about what really happened and what it means. What happened in 2004? The Republicans won. Big Time. They picked up seats in their majority-controlled Senate, they picked up seats in their majority-controlled House. They re-won the White House with a majority vote and that is something that people hadn’t seen since 1988. Four years later, the Democrats have a nigh-unfillibusterable lead in the Senate. The Democrats have the House. Obama won the White House with a percentage of the electoral college so large that you have to go back to Lyndon Johnson in 1964 to see a democrat exceed it.

This is more than can be pinned on Josephine. [Read more →]

It’s clear to me that Conor and to a lesser extent Rod don’t understand what Jamelle, Freddie, E.D., and myself have been driving at in our various critiques of reform-minded conservatism.  Conor’s misunderstanding is made apparent in this statement from his interview with Scott:

Perhaps we’re getting at what puzzles and galls me so much about recent posts at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen about how dissident conservative writers ought to conduct themselves. The notion is that these writers should assess an ideological subset of the American public, discern their sensibilities, and craft all subsequent writing so as not to offend them. What a fool’s errand. There are times when people react badly to hearing the truth plainly stated. It is a journalist’s job to tell them that truth anyway, as forthrightly and accurately as one can put it.

Although I don’t wish to speak for Freddie, Jamelle, or E.D., this seems to miss the point of our critiques entirely.

Our point has nothing to do with insisting that Conor or anyone else soft-pedal their critiques of Limbaugh, et al, although those attacks may well have the effect of making matters worse.  It certainly does not suggest that reform-minded conservatives should refrain from objecting to torture or the conduct of the War on Terror or civil liberties violations by the Bush Administration – quite the contrary, Ron Paul’s growing influence on conservatism shows that it is possible to passionately dissent without forfeiting the ability to move conservatism in your direction.  Nor do I think we are suggesting that Conor or any other specific reform-minded conservative is to blame for the current state of the Republican Party.

No, the point is that reform conservatives need to recognize that there is an ideological problem with conservatism as currently constituted as an amalgam of libertarianism, hawkishness, and religious fundamentalism that leaves modern conservatism incapable of governing well or ethically.  It is all well and good to criticize the Bush Administration or to take issue with talk radio, but until reform conservatives recognize what caused the Bush Administration’s faults and the hyper-vitriol of talk radio, they will be unable to do anything about it.

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Kyle’s post yesterday the other day about the need for the GOP to stop focusing on “how” it was going to come back from the wilderness if it ever wants to get back to relevance made a lot of sense to me.  The political reality is that the GOP, despite its recent defeats, continues to consist of tens of millions of faithful voters, including moderates, party fundamentalists, social conservatives, libertarians, etc.  And exactly none of those voters are going to change their worldview overnight just because some pundit says that it would be more electorally sound if they did so.  So whatever direction one thinks the GOP should go as a matter of policy, the political reality is that it is incapable of consciously choosing any new direction. 

Does this mean that the party is permanently doomed?  No – we live in a two-party federalist system, and that’s not about to change soon. 

Today, I think I finally have a picture of exactly how that road back to relevance is going to look (which is different from the normative picture of how I think it should look), thanks in part to this Politico interview with Gov. Huntsman of Utah.  In the interview, Huntsman spells out a worldview that some would call “moderate,” but is instead quite along the lines of the various reformist conservatives – it’s a distincly different type of worldview from that of Arlen Specter & Co. 

Matt Yglesias thinks the growth of reformism amongst elected officials like Huntsman and Gov. Crist of Florida means a coming civil war for the GOP.  But he argues that these voices seem confined to the state level, and that the GOP won’t actually start to reform on a national level until similar voices start getting elected to Congress. 

I disagree.  The reality is that change in political party policy doesn’t happen overnight; instead, it happens subtly and gradually over the course of years.  What we see in the reformist governors is the beginning of that change – it’s just not a change that is being consciously directed. 

Patrick Ruffini’s much-ballyhooed and criticized post on de-Plumberizing the Right gives a pretty good idea of where the Right is likely to go over the next few years on the federal level.  Specifically, Ruffini argues that what is need is not a change in policy, but a change in focus onto issues where 80% of Americans agree with Republicans, per Newt Gingrich’s strategy.  This actually makes quite a bit of sense as political strategy because it doesn’t involve alienating any of the base, which a political party cannot do without putting itself in an even worse position in the short-run.  Meanwhile, Robert Stacy McCain is probably right that it is politically more sound for Republicans to simply oppose anything the Dems try to do, and make them own it if (and some would say when) the Dem policies fail.  Besides, there’s rarely an electoral penalty for opposing something that succeeds; there’s frequently an electoral reward for opposing something that fails.  And this, of course, is precisely what Congressional Republicans seem to be doing.

The trouble with this approach, while it probably will work in the short-term, is that it is superficial, and only gets part of the GOP’s problems right, as Ross Douthat and Daniel Larison argue.  It allows Republicans to stop the bleeding, but those 80% issues aren’t going to be big picture enough to make the GOP relevant again in the minds of a lot of those who have abandoned it (“Drill, Baby, Drill” may be popular with a lot of people, but it’s not something that’s going to suddenly make many people Republicans). 

But GOP governors have the burden of actually governing rather than just criticizing, which is part of why several of them are solidly in the reformist camp.  They have no choice but to depart from dogma on core issues, which is precisely what Huntsman and Crist are doing.  Eventually, though, the national GOP’s change in focus will loosen the dogma on issues where the national GOP is no longer proposing serious policy alternatives.  At that point, you will see reformist thought actually start to infect Republicans in Congress and maybe even Presidential primary candidates because it will no longer require annoying part of the base. 

To sum up: continued populism on the national level, but with a focus on pushing different issues while reflexively opposing Obama on just about everything; renewed reformism on the state level that ultimately winds up providing an example for a new affirmative agenda on the national level.  And no one will have planned it this way, since really it’s not what anyone wants right now – the change is too slow from the perspective of the reformists, and too much from the perspective of the base.  But happen, I think it will.  I just don’t know what reforms will wind up carrying the day, nor whether I personally will find those reforms palatable in a way that brings me back to the GOP fold (no matter what happens, I’m pretty happy staying an independent).

Cross-posted.

K. Anthony Appiah writes:

Alan Wolfe is the sort of social theorist who would rather be plausible than provocative. Eschewing the lunacies of the left and the right—avoiding even their slighter sillinesses—he hews to a sensible, if unexciting, center.

Which is a nice thing to say.  It would be nicer still if it were correct.  Sensible is open to debate I suppose, but center (or centrist) not so much.  Exhibits A and B and C to that point.

Wolfe, whatever else he is, is a liberal not a centrist.  I would have thought Appiah would have figured out that rather central piece of information from the title of Wolfe’s book that Appiah reviews:  The Future of (wait for it) Liberalism.  Why can’t we call a spade a spade on this one?  Back at League Headquarters, I think I can hear Freddie’s about ready to throw down over this inability/unwillingness to use the dreaded “L” word–”progressive” “sensible center” (dear sweet JS Mill anything but liberal).

That aside, Appiah nicely lays out Wolfe’s thesis:

Wolfe’s distinctive claim, however, is that the key to liberalism is a set of dispositions, or habits of mind—seven of them, in fact, each of which gets its own chapter. Four of these dispositions will be quite familiar: “a sympathy for equality,” “an inclination to deliberate,” “a commitment to tolerance,” and “an appreciation of openness.”…But Wolfe’s sketch of the liberal adds three unfamiliar elements to the picture: “a disposition to grow,” “a preference for realism,” and “a taste for governance.”

Arguably the first four (and #6 “realism”) could be said of conservatives as well–or at least some kinds of conservatives (e.g. Beaconsfieldians).  Ditto, even more so, classical liberalism.

Now the fifth one “disposition to grow” acts as a transition:

What he means to resurrect is the faith that we can remake ourselves…The response of liberalism—epitomized, for Wolfe, in Kant—is that “we are not merely what God ordains us to be, but what we create through our own deliberate acts.” Far from being at our best when we follow a nature that is already given, we human beings are creatures destined to remake the world by shaping ourselves.

Classical liberalism would accept this point (classical liberalism in fact is nothing perhaps but that point), while a good many conservatives here begin to be worried if not outright in rejection.  Which is why Mark and Will Wilkinson are saying libertarianism lost its classical liberal side by aligning with movement conservatism.

But #7, here comes the juncture and the separation it seems to for liberaltarianism:

It is this conviction [ed: the view that humans can constantly remake themselves for the better] that explains the connection between liberalism and an optimistic commitment to politics.

Classical liberalism accepts the optimism of being able to change while seeing it more properly manifest through non-regulated, non-coereced action say in the market, in civil relations and the like. 20th century liberalism seeing that ability for positive change most powerfully through government as an agent of the democratic will.  Liberalism and libertarianism then are two various modifications of the same basic modern-era stance.**

Adopting Wolfe’s notion of liberalism as a series of habits/dispositions would I think go a long way to answering Freddie’s excellent challenge laid out here:

But I am left, reading John’s [Schwenkler] post, and many like it from what we might call the American Scene strata of contemporary conservatism, with a deep dissatisfaction and sense of injustice. Because I think that John and Will Wilkinson and many other reformist conservatives have the unfair habit of judging conservatism entirely from the lens of their notional ideals of what conservatism is, but judging liberalism, and the Democratic party, from the lens of vulgar politics.

And further this: [Read more →]