culture war

 Conservatism Is Dead!  Long Live Conservatism!

             I am 23 years old.  I have been told that my ilk and I are the future.  To say the least that assertion frightens me.  Statistics, while reassuring, can only attenuate my anxiety slightly.  For while the sweep of history that Obama disciples say their savior rode into the White House on this past November might not have been as strong as they once thought – voters 18-29 resoundingly turned out to vote for Obama, yet overall the difference between the ostensibly crucial youth vote’s turnout in 2004 and 2008 was just 3% higher – the consensus among my peer’s is that centrist-liberalism – the form of liberalism Obama does not practice but I think successfully conveys – has become the accepted norm.  Why?  Because it feels pragmatic, tolerant, and, above all, it is imbued with a sense of competent realism.  Gone are the days of stereotypical bleeding heart liberal – at least that is the perception a lot of people my age have. 

            Conservatism as a movement has been vanquished in the eyes of many young politically minded people I speak with.   It has proven not only morally bankrupt –after starting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, advocating torture, and impinging on civil liberties – but also intellectually bankrupt.  Where before a liberal friend of mine had begrudgingly admitted that conservatism’s redeeming quality for him was its emphasis on practical solutions, reliance on hard data, and fiscal frugality, today, in the wake of the financial and economic chaos that engulfs us it is no surprise that that reputation has been sullied. 

            I am not going to argue the merits of those qualms with modern conservatism.  My concern is the perception-reality gap; that is, how people, especially younger Americans, perceive conservatism, and, by extension its partisan vessel, the Republican Party.  There is a worthwhile debate to be had over whether the Bush era was, in fact, a traditionally conservative one.  William F. Buckley himself once remarked that Bush was conservative, but not a conservative.  He was not a part of the movement in the sense that Ronald Reagan was or Newt Gingrich continues to be a torchbearer for. 

            Much has been written on the subject of movement conservatism since the Republican Party was handed a disastrous defeat in the last general election.  While the former President Bush is certainly culpable to a certain extent for the humiliating electoral referendum of what has passed for conservatism these last nine years I think that all conservatives, myself included, need to look at the changing demographics and national economy and render a verdict on whether or not the conservatism embodied by our current representatives is the sort of conservatism that can subsist and win in 21st Century America. 

            Clichés can ruin empires.  They can also ruin political movements.  Unfortunately, conservatism has fallen prey to rampant clichés that are promulgated by a myriad of comedians and entertainers.  To my fellow youthful Americans, Stephen Colbert and comedians of his kidney hold great sway over perception of conservatives (comedy does have a liberal bias, after all).  I am hesitant to bring Mr. Colbert into a serious discussion about the state of modern conservatism as an intellectual and political movement, but I would be remiss not to highlight how entertainment media has successfully reduced conservatism to a set of ugly cultural symbols:  the gun-crazed, the gay basher, and the God fearer.   Conservatives have long wrestled with images of backwardness, bigotry, and zealous piety.  In the 1940s, when the postwar conservative movement was still in its adolescence and sowing the fundamental intellectual seeds of its platform, liberals decried nascent conservatism in America as an attempt to reinstate medieval feudalism.   Meanwhile, the average college student is, I can safely confirm, denied any knowledge of the conservative intellectual history that could challenge these nasty generalizations.   The domination of the nation’s universities by a liberal professoriate is complete.   Men like William F. Buckley Jr., Friedrich Hayek, Frank Meyer, Russel Kirk, and Wilmoore Kendall are scarcely mentioned outside of being the butt of many bad jokes.    Instead, conservatism is treated as a reactionary force in American politics – the default position of obstinate country bumpkins and avaricious plutocrats. 

            But really, who can blame these critics?  Conservatives of late have made themselves easy targets for two reasons.  First, conservatism has become ideologically rigid and rhetorically trite.  In the 1980s and 1990s, the small-government, free market message resounded because it contravened liberalism’s decades long insistence on the power of federal programs to correct society’s ills – the results of which were Leviathan bureaucracy and stagflation.  So while the totalizing nostrums of liberal policymakers had been compounding inefficiencies since the New Deal, Reagan represented the culmination of a conservative movement that offered sound reasoning for why liberalism had failed and what it could be replaced with.  

            Today, however, the twin pillars of the conservative economic policy – low taxation and deregulation – are held in disrepute.   Cut taxes and deregulate it repeated ad nauseum will not do.  As much as I agree with these mantras (in most instances) it must be acknowledged that as rhetorical tools they have become useless pabulum.   Conservatives must articulate a more nuanced economic policy that stresses long-term fiscal solvency, debt reduction, free trade, measured and responsible deregulation, and sensible arguments for why tax cuts – not spending programs – are the stuff of real economic growth.   A government-phobic stance only reinforces the perception of doctrinaire intransigence.  If conservatives can admit the necessity of limited economic regulation they will win not only more respect from non-ideological voters who are skeptical of dogmatism in any form, but they will be returning to a pragmatism that is the very essence of conservatism.

            I would also like to stress the supreme importance of shedding the image conservatives have garnered for being socially parochial.  I have been contemplating this article for some time now, and in the way of research I made it a point to start conversations with young people of different political stripes and with varying degrees of interest in politics.  To someone with only a fleeting interest in electoral politics social issues are what matter, and often function as a first foray into politics (more than likely because social issues elicit emotional responses and do not require one to be well-versed on an issue).  To win young voters, or at least not alienate them, conservatives should apply the “Don’t Tread on Me” ethos they champion in the economic sphere in the social one, as well.  This does not mean we shirk the greater task of reintroducing meaning, civic duty, religion, and something beyond shallow materialism and licentiousness into American society.  On the contrary, conservatives should fully embrace their rhetoric of individual responsibility by purging the movement of its puritanical authoritarianism so as to eliminate the inherent contradictions in their positions.  For how can we praise the right to individual choice and responsibility and still support the interminably futile “war on drugs,” which not only wastes millions of the taxpayer’s dollars but exacerbates racial tensions?  How can we continue to speak of justice and liberty when homosexuals are not allowed to marry their loved ones and when the majority of Republicans in congress opposed the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act?  

            To accomplish all of the above and remain relevant conservatives must follow point two of my thesis, as well:  they must govern effectively and remain principled.   My generation’s formative experiences occurred during the Bush administration and under the auspices of a Republican-dominated congress.  Two wars, a rash of scandals (Mark Foley, the Delay-Abramoff connection, the Valerie Plame leak, the Terri Schiavo episode, Black Water, etc.), and the financial crisis have severely damaged the Republican Party and conservatism’s image.  The recovery will be slow going.  But if conservative politicians can begin to shed their reactionary mien, offer alternative policy ideas that bypass hackneyed platitudes, and live out their lofty rhetoric and lead by example we may yet see the movement regain its strength and political clout. 

            It goes without saying that the party out of power naturally seems adrift and leaderless.  And already the steady stream of articles proclaiming conservatism in America “dead” seems conspicuously outdated.  A recent Gallup Poll finds that more Americans in all fifty states identify themselves as conservatives rather than liberal or very liberal.  The Democrats health care reform salvo is on precarious footing thanks to a grassroots conservative revival across the country and a smile-worthy Rasmussen Poll concludes that fifty-seven percent of Americans would vote out the entire congress – including those ossified Republican relics.  This has to mean something, right?  America has tried “change” in the Obama vein and is disappointed, yes?  Well, in a word, no.  First it is too early to predict how Obama will recover from these setbacks and second I’m afraid the president, despite his sinking poll numbers of late, represents a new breed of liberalism that has successfully adopted superficial conservative hues; in particular, conservatisms mild-mannered pragmatism.  Essentially, Obama has won the vital center by shrewd deception and still enjoys the support of those who might not agree with him on certain controversial issues, such as health care, Afghanistan-Pakistan, or bank bailouts, but who trust his judgment, nonetheless.  Like Reagan, he’s Teflon (for now.)

            The backlash Obama and the Democrats have faced this summer is, most likely, ephemeral.  The town hall meetings will eventually cease and the endless news cycle will make it all seem like a dream, as the angry voices of protest that once commanded front-page attention are lost to the archives.  I hope I’m wrong, but this is more than often the case; sustained popular outrage has a relatively short life expectancy.  If conservatives want to win in the future it will require a new language, a more tolerant and less rigid ideological platform, and exciting and articulate figures like William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan to lend action to ideas.  If you’ll notice, those three aforementioned heroes of the conservative cannon are no more.  Conservatism, though, can live on.  One, because it is the movement of the individual and his quest for self-improvement, not only for himself but his country and mankind, and two, because that quest is the ongoing story of the United States.

But, then again, I'm only 23 -- what do I know?

NOTE:  Cross Posted At Political Capital

Ah, moderates.  I've been hearing that term thrown around a lot lately, but unfortunately I haven't seen a great deal of exploration of the concept - instead it seems like the "go to" word when describing a faction of the party which is not of the socially conservative ilk. 

It is unfortunate that this article is necessary, but alas in many recent readings (such as here) I have come across descriptions of the friction within the Republican Party, and what has struck me has been the remarkable lack of understanding of basic political philosophy in not only the media, but in the right as well, including honestly grasping what a moderate is, and who exactly is about to "go to war" inside the right.

The upcoming “war for the soul of the GOP” as its being called lately is being described almost universally as “Moderates vs. social conservatives”.

::sigh::

First of all, lets get something straight - there are a lot more than just two factions within the Republican Party, and it is certainly a hell of a lot more in-depth than “moderates vs. conservatives”. Such descriptions hearken to the notion that politics is bi-polar, which is born of a two party system I suppose. You are apparently either left or right, or somewhere in the middle.

Sorry folks, but there is no "right" and "left" and "center".  Those concepts are artificial creations.  We keep hearing, "does the republican party need to go further right?" - but what are they asking?  Should the party go more right economically, socially or both?  If you go left on one and right on another, does that make you a "moderate"?  (no it doesn't)

Such descriptions, as I’ve noted before, are completely divorced from reality or critical thought. There are at lest four main “groups” of political thought across the landscape of political philosophy, popularized by the libertarian party’s two dimensional model of political thought. For the sake of reference, I’ll be referring to them as such:

• Authoritarians - Economic statism, Social statism
• Libertarians - Economic liberalism, Social liberalism
• Progressives - Economic statism, Social liberalism
• Conservatives - Economic liberalism, Social statism

This isn’t just a theory, this is more or less the general makeup of everyone’s political brain. Yes, there are variations on all of these things - I’ve met libertarians for example that range from isolationists to broad internationalists on foreign policy - but lets not use those fractures distract from the fact that most people fall in these general categories. We can deal with the dozen or so verifiable “strains” of Republicanism at another time, but for now, lets deal with the three main factions that we see competing - conservatives, libertarians, and true moderates. I say true moderates for a reason that I will outline below.

When somebody says the war within the Republican Party is “moderates vs. conservatives” - what in the living hell are they talking about?

The only thing they can be talking about is social policy and the culture wars.

Why? Because primarily the grassroots of the Republican Party is made up of a collection of conservatives and libertarians, both of whom agree on economic liberalism. Yes, I know the leaders of the party have acted like authoritarians - who cares? We know they don’t represent the actual grassroots of the party, so lets just set that aside and agree that nearly everyone in this country who would be predisposed to vote for a Republican would be either a libertarian or a conservative. But then again, there are the “moderates”.

So what is a moderate? A true moderate is somebody who can’t make up their damned mind and just blows with the wind on any and all issues. These are the real cancer within the party - the folks who conspire with Democrats to increase spending, expand entitlements, raise taxes, support earmarks, and the entire litany of state loving activities of the left. They do so because they see compromise on those government issues as “the center” and don’t want to be extreme. They do the same thing with social policy as well for the exactly same reason.

These are the people that need to be excommunicated from the party. These state loving, compromising, wishy washy, sail where the wind blows you lawmakers are the ones who don’t belong with us, and aren’t helping us anyway.

But it isn’t where the war within the party is going to be fought. True moderates as I just described are widely hated by everyone within our party - libertarians hate them because they compromise all freedom oriented principles, both economic and social, as they run to the politically safe road. Conservatives hate them because they tax and spend like Democrats, and they are much more liberal on social issues. I think we’re all on board with not liking these people.

But the coming war isn’t with this definition of moderates, which is the essence of my problem with the description I keep seeing in the media about the Republican schism.

No, the real war is between the culture warriors and the libertarians, about what role, and how much of a role, social issues will play in the Republican Party’s new strategy. Since both libertarians and conservatives are agreed on economic liberalism, this is the only place they can fight - but since the media needs to label something they don’t understand, they do the intellectually lazy thing and say it is “moderates” vs. “conservatives”.

I’m sorry, but moderates aren’t going to war with anyone. They’re out of the equasion, and to even bring up that label when discussing the future of the party is a dis-service to the conversation. If for no other reason that it irritates the living hell out of libertarians to be labeled as moderates, because they are moderate about nothing.

In any event, social issues is where the friction really is within the party - but the continual, inaccurate description of the conflict that is coming as “moderates vs. conservatives” feeds into the insanity that Soren Dayton talked about the other day - the idea being propagated by Rush Limbaugh and others that the problem with the party is that “true conservatives” have been betrayed, and that “moderates” have corrupted our core principles.

This gets us into people within the party labeling other people RINOs, when some of those “RINOs” are anti-government crusaders that would just as soon eliminate 10 executive departments, cut taxes by 20% across the board, and institute market reforms on every entitlement we have, but simply have a disagreement about the role of social warfare within our politics.

This is an ideological contest between people who want to almost exclusively fight the Republican political war on the culture battlefield vs. people who want to downplay the culture wars, and focus on what unifies the two camps, economic liberalism and good government reform.

Count me squarely with the libertarians in this fight - and not just because I am one. I, nor anyone in this camp is a “moderate” about anything - indeed I would argue it is likely I am more hawkish on economic liberalism and government reform than 95% of the Republican Party.

We simply see that stressing a message of economic freedom, low taxes, spending restraint, balanced budgets, government reform and a strong national defense are much more effective in uniting people across multiple regions than the culture wars are. Hell, I’m a religious person (Catholic), militantly pro-life, and I’m not exactly the biggest fan of the homosexual lobby, but that doesn’t mean I want that to be my sales pitch to the American people.

Many social conservatives that I know are in this line of thinking as well, because they recognize that no matter how “right” the Republican social agenda is, it remains divisive and will shrink the base of support of the party if it is the focus and lead argument for the party. Such fights may be appropriate to make - but by defining your movement by them, you give the impression that you aren’t really interested in serious governing, you simply want to use the government as a tool of social control.

For better or worse, my friends, people want to elect people they believe will be good stewards of government. They want it to be as efficient and minimalistic as it can be, they don’t want it to waste resources or profit on its existence, they want common sense, good solutions, they want their money protected, and they want to feel safe living in this country. They don’t like power being more important than protecting the people, and they want to trust.

That appeals to our common agreements between libertarians and conservatives. Moderates do in fact have a place, and I would not dream of throwing them out with the bathwater (no political party in a two party system competing with such an unbreakable wall in entertainment and education as the Democrats have, could ever hope to be viable without at least a few moderates) - but the real division in the party has nothing to do with moderates.

Ronald Reagan built an electoral model on unifying the splintered, broken and seemingly defeated Republican Party, and he didn’t do it by campaigning on a gay-marriage ban in the constitution. He did it by asking us to believe in ourselves, take individual responsibility, fight the growth and power of the Federal Government, and reform our most basic institutions so they serve the people.

Unifying narratives work.  If you think that somehow not fighting the social wars as a central theme of campaigning will somehow mean we cede those issues, or "give up" on them, you are a political novice.  Messages to voters that unify and inspire are what work - things that inherently divide us (like culture) do not work.  This is why Barack Obama has thrived on quite literally nothing.  He got people to buy into a message - and for better or worse, he portrayed it as a message of pragmatic unity. 

Well, the right has its own unifying message of common sense and pragmatism, and its about time we stopped sniping each other over social and cultural issues, and set out to push forward with a unifying message - such as what was done during the Reagan Revolution and the 1994 overthrow of Congress.  Those movements were about common sense, good government ideas, and a positive inspiring vision of America.

We've lacked "that vision thing" for quite some time now, and become little more than economic statists increasingly fighting one battle - culture.  Lets hit the reset buttom and understand not only what our common causes are, but what any random generic American - yes independents and democrats - can see about our agenda that they like.  Small government, reform, efficiency, and intelligence.

That is a message we can all come together on (hell, even the moderates can probably hop on board that train), and if the Republican Party had any sense left in it, this would be the focus of our party as we pick up the pieces from 2008. But more than that, we can’t just sell ourselves that way, we must behave that way once we regain power.

I for one am hoping that this is the consensus the party arrives at after the election. But for the love of all that is holy, lets stop speaking about ourselves as though there are “true conservatives” and “moderates”, because politics is not bi-polar, and the people being labeled as moderates are not moderate by any definition of the word.

The addition of Andrew Breitbart to the stable of columnists at the Washington Times is, to my mind, a great development.  It seems to signal an emerging consciousness within the editorial board that there is a need for conservatism to renew its efforts to take part in the creation of cultural fare rather than ceding it to the left without so much as a peep, unless it happens to be the tired, old puling that conservatives have come to use as a crutch to explain the movement's misfortunes.

Breitbart tackles this issue in his column today, and it's well worth the read if only to serve as a reminder that if the rebuilding of the movement is to have any hope of success, it will have to take place on all fronts.  The cultural front is perhaps the most crucial one, since potential voters who aren't otherwise engaged most often develop their opinions based on what they're exposed to through the arts.

Andrew puts it aptly in the following passage:

If we encouraged our young to consider careers in the arts, we would begin to reap the benefits in short order. Instead, we waste valuable time complaining and now are knee-deep in our enemy's dogma and have the indignity of paying for their products. Too much time has been lost navel-gazing about why things haven't fallen our way.

Read the full article here.