A New Breed Of Conservativism In The Wings - Post-Bush Conservativism

Nighthawks by Peter Beinart

Peter Beinhart is an author, analyst and editor-at-large that occasionally posts on The New Republic (Online) and is recently known for his book, The Good Fight: Why Liberals---and Only Liberals---Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. He will be speaking at a Barnes & Noble in Georgetown (DC) on May 31st.

The New Republic is a magazine that criticizes both liberal and conservative thought, sometimes leans conservative and sometimes leans liberal (if we can rely on such labels), but does force the reader to think beyond well-established rhetoric.

In the following article, Beinhart offers a brief history of conservativism and some analysis--perhaps predictions--of where conservativism (especially ultra-conservativism) will be directed in the post-Bush era. It has some interesting ideas.

Do you detect a difference among conservatives these days? The talk about exporting American values to the Middle East is waning--eclipsed by worries about whether such values can survive unregulated immigration at home. One hears less about the wonders of tax cuts and more about the perils of government spending. Instead of attacking the left for denigrating American culture, the right is increasingly doing so itself. A switch has been flipped--one side of the right's brain is shutting down, and another is turning on. We are moving, once again, from the conservatism of day to the conservatism of night.

Night conservatism is the older creed. The men (yes, men) who created the modern conservative movement in the decade after World War II were generally pessimists. All around them, they saw statism--whether in its Stalinist or New Deal incarnations--on the march. Mass society seemed to be erasing the economic and cultural distinctions that conservatives considered essential to liberty. The American people, insisted conservative forefather Albert Jay Nock, were irredeemable; conservatism was the refuge of the beleaguered, superior few. In his 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk declared that American conservatives had been "routed" ever since 1789. Another key thinker, Richard Weaver, argued that civilization had been going downhill since the fourteenth century.

For day conservatism to be born, the right had to gain faith in America. The reconciliation began with Joseph McCarthy's crusade to exclude alleged communists from the institutions of American life. Most conservative intellectuals embraced McCarthy and, to their delight, found the American public on their side. By 1968, when Richard Nixon and George Wallace rallied the white working class against the pointy-headed left, conservatives had realized that populism could be their friend.

But day conservatism only truly emerged with the election of Ronald Reagan. The McCarthy and Nixon insurrections had been populist but dark--bitter insurgencies against a still-hegemonic liberal elite. Reagan's message, by contrast, was relentlessly optimistic. American culture--which conservatives had feared was irredeemable--would be rapidly remoralized. Communism--which conservatives had long considered ascendant--was destined for the "ash-heap of history." And tax cuts would unleash unimaginable prosperity.

The third element was particularly important. Earlier conservative leaders like Barry Goldwater had insisted that cutting government should precede cutting taxes, so as not to unleash the menace of budget deficits and inflation. But, under Reagan, conservatives switched from peddling broccoli to peddling ice cream. Reagan cut taxes without cutting government, on the theory that lower taxes would produce such epic economic growth that tax revenue would actually rise. The right--which had once prided itself on telling harsh truths--was suddenly telling Americans they could have it all.

In 1994, the conservative writer David Frum wrote a manifesto, Dead Right, which attacked the Reaganites for playing to the crowd and thus selling conservatism's soul. But, unbeknownst to him, night conservatism was on the verge of a comeback. The Republican revolutionaries who stormed Congress that fall represented the partial return of the pre-Reagan right. In contrast to Reagan's foreign policy adventurism, they were generally cynical about the world beyond America's shores--and they urged the United States to pull up its drawbridge, reducing immigration, retreating from international institutions, and slashing foreign aid. They demanded a balanced budget, even trying to cut the popular middle-class spending that Reagan had spared. And, by the late '90s, when the American people refused to impeach Bill Clinton, they had grown pessimistic again about American culture. In 1999, Paul Weyrich famously urged conservatives to do just what Nock had envisioned: retreat from American society and live as a beleaguered, superior counterculture.

When George W. Bush ran for president in 2000, he pointedly disassociated himself from the Republican Congress. Instead, he returned to Reagan's model--abandoning the assault on middle-class spending and promising tax cuts instead. He avoided harsh culture war rhetoric and advertised his comfort with blacks and immigrants. And, after September 11, he pushed Reagan's optimistic internationalism to its limits--declaring that the United States would not only defeat its terrorist enemies, but also extinguish tyranny from the earth.

Now, as the Bush era comes to a close, dusk is setting in again. Conservatives are in another frenzy over immigration, insisting that the United States is surrendering its sovereignty and its way of life. Day conservatives say America lifts immigrants up. But night conservatives are increasingly saying that immigrants bring America down.

After insisting, as Dick Cheney famously did in 2003, that deficits don't matter, conservatives are finding them intolerable again--and denouncing Bush as a heretic for expanding government. The movement toward gay equality is again turning conservatives sour on the culture, with fundamentalist leaders Jerry Falwell and Tim LaHaye recently predicting America's decline into paganism. Once-proud neoconservatives like Francis Fukuyama are calling the Bush administration's faith that military conquest will organically breed democracy a perversion of their creed.