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Time to bury a defunct label?

Thursday, September 3, 2009

THE AMERICAN MEDIA can be very confusing for a Brit like me, even one who’s lived here 18 years, and long before that had been insatiably consuming US publications and broadcast material.

Take the ubiquitous media label “conservative”. Maybe my original British political grounding is responsible, but I have always thought that the term describes an outlook that is cautious, even resistant where necessary, about social and political change … that values social order above many other public necessities … and prefers hard-headed realism to wide-eyed idealism.

 

I seem to be wrong. More and more, certainly in American writing and electronic journalism, conservatism has come to mean often an uneasy melding of anti-elitism (however elites might be defined these days) along with “right-to-life” fervor, plus more than a dash of what could be called culture-wars vigilantism.

 

And now I’m being shown that - while American conservatism clearly is this very different kind of animal - the beast is now dead anyway.

 

In a provocative book published just two days ago, The Death of Conservatism, author Sam Tanenhaus (pictured above) argues that in 2009 this death can now be definitively pronounced. He assigns cause-of-death not to what we might have simplistically expected, a Barack Obama-led liberal upsurge. Rather, he blames a process of self-slaughter that has set in steadily over the past few generations inside that supposed repository of conservative thought and action, the Republican Party. It has led inexorably to what he calls “the rigor mortis of a defunct ideology”.

 

Those who pass for conservatives in modern America look a lot like the pitchfork-wielding mobs that conservatives have traditionally abhorred, They indulge emptily, says Tanenhaus, in the angry politics of “accusatory protest”, whether they are office-holders (for a while) like Sarah Palin, or so-called thinkers like Jonah Goldberg, whose recent rather ridiculous jeremiad between hard covers, Liberal Fascism, Tanenhaus politely scorns.

 

(I have to say I share that scorn, but I must also point out in full disclosure that it was Goldberg's syndicated writings that the troubled - and conservative - Tribune Newspaper Group would use to replace my columns back when I was writing in its AM New York daily - whenever, that is, I transgressed some Tribune line.)

 

The internal inconsistencies of today’s right-wing politics can be baffling. For instance, the ascendancy of what Tanenhaus calls “movement conservatism”, as opposed to what he sees as the reasoned and authentic brand, eventually meant that the George W Bush Administration put into government people who didn’t for one minute believe in government. (“Heckuva job, Brownie!” after Hurricane Katrina comes to mind, recalling federal agencies that were deliberately brought under the control of incompetent ideologues).

 

That towering father-figure of conservatism, Edmund Burke, would scarcely recognize his transatlantic descendants.

   

 

AFTER ALL, as Tanenhaus wisely emphasizes, Burke certainly believed in government. The 18th century Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher fully spelled out in his resounding Reflections on the Revolution in France all his horror at a populace overturning the established traditions and institutions of what (way ahead of late-20th century progressives) he called “civil society”. The task of a sensible government should, of course, be to head off such anarchy. In Tanenhaus' words, “Burke recognized that governments were obligated to meliorate intolerable conditions”.

 

Which brings us to another provocative thought. While Tanenhaus discussed his book with me recently (a work he self-effacingly called “simply a history book” and “a brief narrative”) we considered where Barack Obama might fit in the political spectrum the author was exploring. “Thoroughly steeped in the principles of Burkean conservatism” was what Tanenhaus had written about our current President, and in conversation he elaborated: 

 

“Politics are also about temperament and culture. Temperamentally and culturally Obama is pretty conservative. He believes in the strength of institutions. He’s a great believer in The Establishment - just look at who’s on his team".

 

Indeed if we scan the field, from veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke and ex-Senator George Mitchell in their respective overseas regions, through ex-Federal Reserve banker Timothy Geithner at Treasury, to ex-Congressman Rahm Emmanuel at the very center of the White House, it’s hard not to agree. And these establishment figures represent just the tip of the proverbial (and in this case decidely elitist) iceberg. 

 

No wonder that conservatives, even while reported dead, can still contrive to be apoplectic.

 

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