I started noticing the fracture sometime during the Bush II administration; \u00a0vast swathes of conservatives who could simply not tolerate other vast swathes of conservatives.<\/p>\n
It was unheard of during the Reagan era – and even under Newt Gingrich in 1994, conservatism was a fairly cohesive voting bloc as well as strategy.<\/p>\n
But somewhere during the Bush years – when our “conservative” governed more as a Democrat than his Gingrich-haunted predecessor did – the flaking started happening.<\/p>\n
By 2008, “conservatism” had split into three separate factions. \u00a0I identified them as:<\/p>\n
James Heaney in\u00a0Federalist,\u00a0<\/em>in a piece called “Conservatism is Dead; Long Live Conservatism” reaches a similar conclusion<\/a>.<\/p>\n He divides the movement…<\/p>\n …well, no. \u00a0The “movement” is dead. \u00a0He divides it also into three major centers of activity:<\/p>\n The problem is, the three largely detest each other – in some cases, more than the Democrats (indeed, the Populists drove a “former” Democrat who favors more Democrat-friendly policies than the other 18 contenders he beat to the nomination, all the way to victory).<\/p>\n Is there a way forward?<\/p>\n Not sure Heaney answers it. \u00a0But he notes that the way back – to a fundamental definition of what conservatism is supposed to be – is important:<\/p>\n When the modern conservative movement started out under the political leadership of Barry Goldwater and later Reagan, it was built on centuries-old principles handed down by men like Edmund Burke and Alexis de Toqueville. In 1953, the great intellectual, Russell Kirk,\u00a0summarized<\/a>\u00a0those central premises of conservatism.<\/p>\n In his \u201csix canons,\u201d Kirk articulated a conservativism that embraces \u201ca transcendant order, or body of natural law,\u201d because \u201c[p]olitical problems, at bottom, are religious and moral problems.\u201d Conservatives, Kirk said, reject \u201cuniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims,\u201d even as they recognize \u201cultimate equality in the judgement of God and\u2026 before courts of law.\u201d They maintain the importance of property rights against Leviathan government, and distrust \u201csophisters, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society on abstract designs.\u201d Finally, a Kirk conservative is prudent, recognizing \u201cthat change may not be salutary reform: hasty innovation may be a devouring conflagration, rather than a torch of progress.\u201d<\/p>\n The modern \u201cconservative movement\u201d\u00a0has lost touch with these essentials. The establishment\u00a0builds entire fiscal plans out of the \u201cabstract designs\u201d of \u201ccalculators and economists,\u201d and the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/em>\u00a0editorial board wouldn\u2019t recognize a \u201cbody of natural law\u201d if that body hauled back and punched L. Gordon Crovitz in\u00a0the nose. Even if they did take notice, the\u00a0Journal<\/em>\u00a0and its Acela Corridor buddies would find it\u00a0gauche<\/em>\u00a0in the extreme to actually speak\u00a0out loud<\/em>\u00a0about\u00a0political problems in fundamentally \u201creligious and moral\u201d terms.<\/p>\n The populists, for their part, often preach about problems in\u00a0highly charged moral language, but their only common theme is outrage, and their chosen avatar is Trump, the serial adulterer. Moreover, their desire to burn down all our political institutions is the very\u00a0definition<\/em>\u00a0of the \u201cdevouring conflagration\u201d Kirk warns of.<\/p>\n Conservatism has failed, then, partly because a large swath of the \u201cmovement\u201d\u00a0has lost touch with its central\u00a0ideas.\u00a0The very word \u201cconservative\u201d has been badly damaged. Corrupted and polarized, the label has become little more than a\u00a0tribal marker<\/a>, and alienates many\u00a0voters who would otherwise naturally align with Kirk\u2019s principles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I’m going to try to write more about this in the coming week or so.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I started noticing the fracture sometime during the Bush II administration; \u00a0vast swathes of conservatives who could simply not tolerate other vast swathes of conservatives. It was unheard of during the Reagan era – and even under Newt Gingrich in 1994, conservatism was a fairly cohesive voting bloc as well as strategy. But somewhere during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60993","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conservatism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60993","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=60993"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60993\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60996,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60993\/revisions\/60996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=60993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=60993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=60993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n