Twilight of the Right

Alan Pell Crawford chronicles the decline of movement conservatism in The American Conservative.

“Every great cause,” Tyrrell quotes Eric Hoffer in After the Hangover, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” The conservative movement underwent this transmogrification with blazing speed. Maybe it had been something admirable when Buckley, Kirk, Willmoore Kendall, and others, informed by such minds as Friedrich Hayek and Richard Weaver, were formulating a much needed response to the Great Society liberalism of the 1960s. But by the late 1970s, the organizations formed to translate this critique into politics were being hijacked by a posse of faux populists with only the most passing interest in the more humane, attractive, and civilizing features of conservatism.

Whether conservatism can or should ever be a “movement” is open to question. But there was no doubt in my mind that political operatives whose abiding concerns were personal advancement and financial gain were taking the controls. These were not their only attributes, of course. They also had a taste, or at least high tolerance, for political infighting, which they would put to effective use. Someone needed to say something, and no one else would.

Long years in official Washington render careerists complacent and therefore vulnerable. This explains why they were so caught off-guard by the only really interesting political developments to take place in the Republican Party since Reagan himself joshed his way onto the scene. One was the rise of the Tea Party, which resembles in many ways the New Right of the 1970s, except it seems a more genuinely bottom-up rebellion.
The strong resemblance—the ginned-up sense of resentment and grievance, coupled with a lack of any examined program—explains why the GOP’s accommodation with it seems to have been accomplished with relative ease.

Because both sides operate on the assumption that the most extreme statement represents the most principled position and there can be no enemy to the right, the accommodation is simple, if ultimately suicidal for the GOP. The Republican Party simply escalates its rhetoric to match that of the Tea Party and absorbs its politicians into its leadership. It might not be smart politics in the long term or prudent public policy, but it’s great for fundraising.

The second challenge is more difficult. That is the strong support, mostly from young voters, for Ron Paul and now Rand Paul in their dissent from conservative orthodoxy on foreign interventionism and civil liberties. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1990, there was talk that the fragile “Reagan coalition” could collapse as well. This might have happened were it not for 9/11, which provided in “Islamofascism” a convenient stand-in for the Soviet Union. No matter how much lip service movement conservatives pay to the defense of individual liberties, they put “national security” first. “American exceptionalism,” to them, boils down to not much more than the notion that there is no problem outside of our own borders that the heavy hand of our federal government cannot fix. There is always another enemy to fight, which means an ever-larger military budget, no matter the condition of our economy.

As different as they might be, Pat Robertson, Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh, Mitt Romney, Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, Newt Gingrich, and even our old friend Bob Tyrrell agree: America’s “survival” always hangs by a thread, and our “interests” are forever threatened. There is no war these chicken hawks are not eager to fight, as long as somebody else’s sons and daughters do the dying.

It’s of historic importance that the most thoughtful observers among American conservatives—those whose essays do not read like Viguerie’s fundraising letters—have little or no truck with the movement. They don’t even write for its publications. Their work is more likely to appear elsewhere, even in the dread “liberal media,” and they are deeply distrusted by the movement that claims a right to define what is conservative and what is not. Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan, Conor Friedersdorf, and Bill Kauffman are mostly ignored. They raise concerns that movement types don’t want to think about. People who say interesting things, as Bruce Bartlett can tell you, get drummed out of the ranks, which is why people likely to have anything of much value to offer don’t enlist. That still strikes me as a peculiar atmosphere for a movement that claims to stand for individual freedom, but decade after decade that is the air they breathe.