What If Tanenhaus Is Right?
By now I think everyone has moved on from Sam Tanenhaus’s essay on the death of conservatism, but I’d like to add a few brief thoughts.
(1) I mostly agree with Yuval about the flaws in the Tanenhaus essay:
Tanenhaus describes a cycle over the past five decades in which the left and the right each suffers a defeat for being too rigid, retools and reconnects with the middle of the country while the other is in power, and then regains power when the other grows too rigid. But at the end he suggests, without much argument, that this time the cycle is over and the right has lost permanently.
As I’m sure Yuval would agree, much depends on the definition of conservatism. The “right” has not lost permanently — I don’t think Tanenhaus believes that. The political right taken many different forms over the last century, and post-1955 movement conservatism is only one of them. Is that movement dead? Because Tanenhaus is convinced that there is a Beaconsfieldian through-line that stretches back to Burke, I think he muddies the issue. Because I am in the camp of discontinuity — there are historical breaks and ruptures that are papered over by shared language; there is no such thing as an Athens-to-Albion West, though there are palimpsests and resonances — I think you can separate out this question in a constructive way.
(2) The main reason I can’t dismiss Tanenhaus out of hand is that others have made something like his argument more effectively. In 2006, before the Republican rout in the midterm elections, David Frum wrote a prescient, persuasive essay for Cato Unbound on the death of movement conservatism.
The state is growing again—and it is pre-programmed to carry on growing. Health spending will rise, pension spending will rise, and taxes will rise.
Now I still continue to hope that the Republican Party will lean against these trends. But there’s a big difference between being the party of less government and a party of small government. It’s one thing to try to slow down opponents as they try to enact their vision of society into law. It’s a very different thing to have a vision of one’s own.
And the day in which we could look to the GOP to have an affirmative small-government vision of its own has I think definitively passed.
For Frum, the author of Dead Right — itself a forceful attempt at an affirmative small-government vision — this was very much a lament. Though I quibbled with Frum’s assessment at the time, I now think it is pretty clear that he was right in a number of important respects.
(a) Will Republicans repudiate “Bushism”? Not “Bushism” as a matter of political affect, but “Bushism” as a turn towards mildly pro-government meliorism.
And as one surveys the available political talent, one sees that most of the governors and senators who look like plausible presidential material have already committed themselves to some form or another of Bush-style compromise with activist government.
(b) What does it mean for an ideological tendency to die? It could mean success:
Sometimes intellectual movements are called to life to save their countries at a time of challenge—and then gradually fade away as their work is done, as the Whigs faded away in the 1850s or the Progressives after the First World War. It may be that the future of conservatism is to recognize that it belongs to the past.
Or, more plausibly, it could mean that conservatism has become a more pervasive tendency.
Long after the Whigs went out of business as a party, their ideas and preferences exerted influence on American politics. A Republican President and Congress gave the country the nonpartisan civil service the Whigs had wanted; a Democratic President and Congress restored a central bank in 1913. Progressive ideals of government by experts, scientific management, and government responsibility for the health and welfare of the population have likewise become the common inheritance of both modern parties.
Might not the same be true of the small-government conservative beliefs championed by Goldwater, Reagan, and Gingrich?
This raises the question of whether movement conservatism will have a successor ideology, and of how strongly that successor ideology will resemble movement conservatism as we know it. That’s a question for another time, I guess. I tend to think that the next conservatism — and chances are the movement in question will be called “conservatism,” in no small part because conservative cultural politics, a moving target, will remain vital — will continue to emphasize the virtues of decentralization and competition, etc., but tax-cutting and deregulation will “evolve.” We’ll see.
The question of ideological succession is particularly interesting to me because I’ve been reading Sheri Berman’s excellent book on the history of social democracy. It also reminds me of David Ciepley’s take on the death or displacement of “virtue progressivism” in the wake of the totalitarian encounter — Berman doesn’t address the American political scene, but it was deeply shaped by the European experience, in that a moralistic, Whiggish disposition was essentially banished from the discourse. When I think about the next conservatism, I suspect that it will take on many aspects of late 19th/early 20th century “virtue progressivism.”
(3) One quick thing from the actual essay: T. compares the 1993 stimulus fight to the 2009 stimulus fight.
There is instead almost universal agreement—reinforced by the penitential testimony of Alan Greenspan and, more recently, by grudgingly conciliatory Republicans—that the most plausible economic rescue will involve massive government intervention, quite possibly on the scale of the New Deal/Fair Deal of the 1930s and ’40s and perhaps even the New Frontier/Great Society of the 1960s. All this suggests that movement doctrine has not only been defeated but discredited.
In fairness, the recession was essentially over by the time Clinton took office — this was a mild recession that had an outsized cultural impact in large part because it was the first postwar recession to hit college-educated workers and its impact on New York city. So even if you hold the exact same ideological stance you did in 1993, you might sincerely believe that a different set of solutions is in order. Pro-market reformers at the Booth School, like Luigi Zingales, have offered smart critiques of the bailout and the stimulus that emphasize bright-line low-cost regulatory interventions and targeted tax cuts. I’d submit that this program is founded on a particular ideological sensibility that is not tangential to movement doctrine. Moreover, Tanenhaus clearly wrote this essay before the debate over the stimulus reached its present pitch — we’re seeing Republicans relearning the virtues of sober center-right neoliberalism and budget discipline, thanks in no small part to the interventions of Democrats like Alice Rivlin.
There is obviously a tactical, narrowly political component to this. There is also a rediscovery of conservative bearings.
First of all, I think this is really a very sharp post.
I have never personally seen Bush’s betrayal as an actual betrayal. I don’t think that he actually ever intended to grow government; I think he got into government and learned something conservatives often resist, that when you are in charge of the government there are certain things that you simply have to do, and they grow government. When conservatives are out of power, I think they underestimate the fact that when you get into office, there are just a huge number of fires to put out. What if it’s not possible to shrink government when you’re in government? This is especially the case if we point out, correctly, that defense expenditure is not somehow exempt from being government spending.
Look, Reagan and Bush I grew government too. So the question I think needs to be asked isn’t whether Bush is a traitor but whether Bush’s expansion of the size of government is an inevitable consequence of actually being in power, rather than sniping from the outside.
— Freddie · Feb 9, 05:11 PM · #
I think perhaps the question too often focuses on the size of government rather than the efficacy of governance itself. As Freddie mentioned, when in power it becomes increasingly difficult to hold on to those small-government bonifides which in theory sound so reasonable. This gets to the question of what limited government as opposed to small government might mean.
In any case, I think Tanenhaus’s larger point was that perhaps too much has been made of turning back the clock in this country—of a conservatism that seeks basically to repeal the 20th century—and not enough on working with what we have got—or, essentially, focusing on governance rather than anti-government. Which to me makes a great deal of sense, because the Republicans will never be able to hold on to a lasting majority (or even regain one) without proving that they can govern with some tiny bit of competence….
— E.D.Kain · Feb 9, 06:17 PM · #
Conservatism simply cannot sustain itself in a movement, unlike Progressivism, which can claim certain policy goals and champion said goals over multiple generations of voters without risk of redundancy. Left-of-center politics conform to a standard philosophical conviction of collectivism, whereas right-of-center politics fragments in the face of changing demographics and cultural norms.
In fact, I have never understood how a right-of-center political party can sustain a political philosohpy (or platform) in part derived from individualism. A culture of individualism should hedge against political orthodoxy in favor of empiricism and realism. How does a political party culture a generation of individualists to essentially all think – or practice, or believe – the same thing? It can’t, and in a perfect world, it wouldn’t want to.
The neo-Reaganite conservatism that Bush II wanted so badly to establish was, in reality, a direct contradiction to the conservative philosophy. It was his complete adherence to Republican political orthodoxy that did him in. The notion that Reagan established a platform by which all other conservatives should be measured is the biggest failure of the “movement.” Until conservatives reject the calls for conformity and seek to establish themselves as the party of independence and liberty they will continue to bleed representation all over the country.
— mattc · Feb 9, 07:59 PM · #
But what about the shadow horror that we peer at while holding our hands over our eyes like frightened children?
The implacable truth that will break our hearts and break our minds?
Correlate this with this and glimpse my thesis. Hint-hint…..its the odious bellcurve of IQ again.
— matoko_chan · Feb 9, 11:36 PM · #
Further to Freddie’s comment, I would note that Reagan and Bush 43 both came from state government. In state government, there really is waste to cut: there are agencies with overlapping jurisdiction that can be consolidated, there are budgets with line items to keep legislators’ cousins employed, there are grants to do-nothing groups, etc., etc. For the most part, that is not the case in federal government. That doesn’t mean that every dollar spent by the federal government is well spent, but it does mean that pretty much every dollar has a real constituency. If you cut Social Security, you can’t just fire a bunch of bureaucrats to make up the difference; you have to cut payments to Social Security recipients. That difference between state and federal government sometimes goes unappreciated on the right.
— alkali · Feb 10, 12:02 AM · #
Here are some “home” truths that you still seem able to ignore, homeslice.
GW failed because he was a well meaning evangelical bumbler that couldn’t rise above his impossible dream of the Manifest Destiny of Judeoxian democracy and because he was able to collude with the venal/stupid/and/or/incompetant Alan Geenspan in artificially depressing interest rates so ‘Mericans could raise their debt burden over the event horizon.
Palin got where she is primarily by virtue of her looks.
Admit those two things and perhaps you can move forward.
I’m doubtful, however.
— matoko_chan · Feb 10, 06:01 PM · #