It’s at times like this that I am most diligent about separating my Conservatism – which is what I believe, politically speaking – with the Republican Party, which is the group I associate with to try to forward conservatism.

Because it’s going to be a bad year for the GOP. I predict that while Barack Obama is potentially very vulnerable, it’s going to be another bloodbath in Congress; if the Dems end up with less than 80-85 seats in the Senate and 350 in the House, they should hang it up.

The GOP – the party, not the conservative movement for which it is wrongly considered synonymous by the too many in the media and the sorosphere – squandered a stupendous amount of intellectual and politlcal capital in the past eight years. On behalf of all of us Forbes/Kemp 2000 supporters – we told you so.

Watch closely for the media – especially the paid-off media of the left – to start declaring conservatism dead, after a gunfight to which conservatism wasn’t invited.

Oh, yeah – and conservatism’s been “dead”, according to one pundit or another, a few times in my lifetime. Goldwater’s loss killed it. Richard “I’m a Keynesian!” Nixon supposedly stuck it in a hospice. Stagflation robbed its grave. Bush I gave it a docile, neoliberal veneer. George Will has declared it dead every couple of years, if I remember right. Bill Clinton and his Democratic Leadership Council ideas showed it obsolete (at least until the ’93 Inauguration).

Dane Smith is one of the good ones – but in this piece over at Growth and Justice, he comments on the inevitable tide of “Conservatism Is Dead” articles by wondering if conservatism is actually dead:

There’s a temptation in the punditry business to attach too much meaning to the present, to excitedly say “never before,” and to declare the “fall of” and “death of” this or that. And in my time I’ve seen too many premature pronouncements _ of the death of God, of the decline and fall of liberalism, and even the end of history _ to get too excited.

Smith then excitedly says “never before” and declares the fall, end and death of conservatism.

But George Packer in the latest New Yorker has written an eminently readable treatise about “The Fall of Conservatism.’’ It was referenced in a Star Tribune editorial Saturday about the Minnesota Republican Party’s state convention, and the Packer piece promises to be prime grist for the mill this summer.

Packer quotes conservatives themselves who fear that the movement is out of ideas and intellectually fatigued and he draws some amazing admissions out of Patrick Buchanan about how Republicans consciously and aggressively exploited southern white fury over the civil rights movements to build their counter-attack in the late 1960s. Packer also does a good job sketching out broader and more defensible non-economic motivations for the rise of conservatism: concerns about “the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young and the insults to national pride.’’ I’ve always maintained that “liberalism” got to be a dirty word because of “free love” and drugs and flag-burning and goofy dalliances with Marxism, not because of its efforts to alleviate poverty and social problems and gross inequalities in wealth and income.

Which means that a generation of drug-snarfing, free-loving, flag-burning, post-marxist libertines has grown to majority and is now in control of the wheels of corporate, academic and political power. Their children are now middle-class parents. People can still be outraged – but the threshold has zoomed upward. What once were vices are now habits.

Smith’s Minnesota roots start showing below:

And Packer gets closest to explaining the conservatives’ strategic mistake when he cites David Brooks’ analysis about how conservatives overreached with their hostility to government. “An anti-government philosophy turned out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American…People want something melioristic, they want government to do things.’’

There are two ways to answer that; the cynical way (“people want government to do things for them, and to give them stuff), and the idealistic way (my favorite cliche-in-the-making; government is a tug of war between the “state is my mother” crowd and the “abolish everything but the military and the courts” crowd; it’s for damn sure the far-left’s fringe won’t stop pulling until we have mandatory abortion and are living in eco-friendly yurts arranged along rail lines, so we pull the other way for all we’re worth).

This notion that there is some negotiated settlement to this pull – that the leaders of the left will meet the leaders of the right (whoever they are) and reach a gentlemans’ agreement that provides just the right amount of services, and leave us with just the right amount of government intervention, so we can all move forward is…

…a conceit of the group of which Smith is president. Growth and Justice is built around the wonky notion that

I, for one, will pull.

And in the end, because of a very contradictory conservative view of government as limitless when it comes to security and national defense, conservatives after almost 30 years of dominance “hadn’t made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality.’’

I’m surprised that someone like Smith would write that first sentence.  If your nation is not secure – and by “Secure” we mean “enemies afraid to try to kill us”, not “teachers paid so well they don’t go into insurance sales” – then what, indeed, is the point of having a nation; why have a government at all?

Packer goes on to quote conservative David Frum as saying that “smaller government is no longer a basis for conservative dominance.’’

True.

It never was.

Government does so much to mess up this country besides just “being big”.  Taxes sap our economic vitality; entitlements drain our prosperity and our drive; appeasement of those who’d kill us gets more of us killed; campaign finance reform and “Fairness Doctrines” and excessive taxation and banning smoking in bars and cars and homes and gun control gut our liberties; government policies that foster illegal immigration sap our culture; a shoddy, PC-based education system based more on punching political tickets and perpetuating its budget than on teaching our kids to be literate, capable citizens capable of thinking about issues like this one is worse than useless.

Every one of those issues are byproducts of big, unresponsive government-for-it’s-own-sake.

I don’t want conservatism to fall or die, anymore than I want yin to wipe out yang or night to eclipse day. And it doesn’t matter what I think because conservatism and the great ideas it stands for _ individual and market freedoms, personal responsibility, family values, respect for the past, and religious convictions _ will and should always be with us as we try to build a better world. I just think conservatism needs to return to the healthy accommodation its adherents used to have for other principles _ equality of opportunity, social justice, and a respectful faith that community and the “we” are at least as important as the individual and the “I”.

True conservatism is always about “we” – including putting those all-important limits on “we”.

And so we keep pulling.  I have a hunch that one Obama term with a Pelosi Congress will make George Packer wish he could eat his article.

UPDATE:  Oh, yeah – gotta reach a conclusion, don’t I?  Conservatism isn’t dead.  It’s just looking for better spokespeople.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Thursday, June 5th, 2008 at 6:34 am and is filed under Conservatism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.