Yesterday Jordan flagged this George Packer retrospective on the conservative movement, and I thought this George Will observation stood out:
Once the principled levity had died down and it came time for questions, I asked whether the conservative movement was dead. “It would be a sign of maturity if conservatives would stop using the phrase ‘conservative movement,' ” Will said. “This is now a center-right country, and conservatism is the default position for, I think, a stable Presidential majority.” Jay Nordlinger, an editor at National Review, added, “If it’s no longer a movement, and really is mainstream, we owe a lot to Bill Buckley and Reagan.” But Buckley himself had been more realistic than his eulogists. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Times Book Review and the Week in Review section, who is working on a biography of Buckley, said that in his final years Buckley understood that his movement was cracking up. “He told me, ‘The conservative movement lost its raison d’être with the end of Communism and never got it back.’ ”
Will's consideration of the conservative movement -- that it resulted in a permanent electoral realignment in presidential politics -- is precisely why he was such a poor choice to review Rick Perlstein's Nixonland last week. Will believes a conservative movement came in with superior ideas about governance and those ideas realigned voters to conservatism, the "default position." Now it may be true that a majority of the public considers itself "conservative," but how many of those people actually understand conservative ideas and public policy outside of the context of conservative politics? Perlstein's book isn't about conservative ideas, it's about one politician's mastery of the cultural landscape (one assumes a forthcoming "Reaganland" would argue a similar point) for political advantage. Nixon wasn't a movement conservative; he just knew how to push their buttons.
The conservative movement began to die, as Packer notes, as soon as its major goals were accomplished, and without the Soviet Union or Reagan to rally around, the movement degenerated: "Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces." If there is a new conservative intelligentsia on the rise, it will first need to get around the anti-intellectual right-wing xenophobia of Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin if it is to have any sort of serious electoral impact in the future.
--Mori Dinauer
