George Packer has a long article in the current New Yorker examining the coming conservative crack-up. The GOP's success over the last 40 years is attributed to various issues and strategies: law and order, race, moral relativism, high taxation, etc. But I think Packer ignores perhaps the most crucial one: resentment. The Republicans perfected the art of portraying prominent liberals as representatives and causes of economic and social upheaval. Conservatism was in large part not hatred of hatred of liberalism as an ideology, but hatred of prominent liberals as people.
David Brooks, for instance, tells Packer that the conservative movement had lost steam by the mid-1990s: "The only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to government." No, the only thing that held the coalition together was hostility to the Clintons. There's a difference. After all, the impeachment, Whitewater, troopergate etc. had nothing to do with hostility to government. The Clintons were not Great Society liberals in the 1990s, but they were still portrayed by conservatives as immoral, America-hating, class-warring frauds. Likewise, John Kerry was a liar, a traitor and a fraud for his recollections about Vietnam, Al Gore was an out-of-touch hypocritical intellectual. From Ted Kennedy to George Clooney, simple liberal-hatred has played a crucial role in contemporary conservatism.
--Jordan Michael Smith
