Who Closed the Conservative Mind?
Julian Sanchez and Matt Yglesias are only the latest to wonder about a topic that ought to matter to folks who follow this blog: assuming one agrees (as I do) that the American right-wing is, these days, substantially more closed-minded than the American left-wing (as represented not so much by ordinary people as the intellectual, political and media leadership), why should we have come to this pass?
I find Yglesias’ answer both partly persuasive and generally unsatisfying. Partly persuasive because it’s true that the demographic base of the GOP is relatively narrower (as you would expect of any minority party, and particularly a minority party that draws its support overwhelmingly from the demographic majority), and if you have a more homogeneous group you’d expect it to be more “group-think” oriented. But generally unsatisfying because the Democrats have always been more of a hodge-podge coalition, yet the common perception of those who worry about the “closing of the conservative mind” is that something has changed – certainly since the right’s intellectual heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, it’s not clear to me why demographic diversity specifically should lead to openness; you can just as easily have a series of closed-minded groups and a leadership with no mind at all, just a talent for balancing the interests of the closed-minded. That seems to be what many people thought of the Mondale campaign, anyway.
Sanchez’ main point is that a substantial contingent on the right is actively seeking epistemic closure as a response to the end of geographic isolation: relatively homogeneous communities that used to be able to keep the world at bay fairly naturally now have to fight to keep it out because of new communications technology that puts the world at their doorstep every day. I find this answer partly persuasive as well, but inadequate on two levels. First, the politics of resentment are nothing new, and neither is their utility in forging a right-wing coalition. The modern GOP was born in the fires of George Wallace’s 1968 run for the Presidency, and Nixon’s entire persona was wrapped around the politics of resentment. But this period was a period of great intellectual ferment on the right, emphatically not a time when people think of the conservative mind as “closed.” Rather, this was the era of Pauline Kael’s famous astonishment at Nixon’s victory, since nobody she knew had voted for him. Second, it’s an explanation of why a certain segment of the right-wing followership might be especially energized these days, but it doesn’t really explain anything about the state of conservative leadership.
Here are some possible additional explanations that I think are worth considering:
- Blame the South. The argument, in a nutshell, is that a successful political coalition in America cannot be dominated by the South, as the GOP currently is. The South is a distinct region in America, significantly different in history and political culture from the rest of the country. Moreover, regional identity in the South is manifested substantially in opposition to the rest of the nation. A political movement dominated by the South will necessarily manifest a political culture that is more similar to that of the South than to that of the rest of the nation, and that political movement is also going to absorb this oppositional element of Southern identity, and will necessarily become overly invested in intellectual shibboleths. What looks like epistemic closure is really just identity politics.
I don’t think this explanation can be dismissed out of hand – in particular, dismissing it out of hand as “insulting” to the South would be in instance of precisely the dynamic I’m outlining. The South does have a distinct history and culture; that culture is substantially oppositional; and the American right is dominated by the South in a way that it has not been before. Dominance of a party by an atypical and oppositional region is just a structural problem. And, if this is a problem, it is going to be a hard one for the American right to solve, because the South is now large enough and strong enough, and remains cohesive enough, that its leaders should expect to lead any coalition of which they are a member.
Now, you might plausibly say that whether the GOP is dominated by the South is irrelevant to the intellectual state of the right in America. The GOP could be run by a bunch of ninnies and the right could be full of intellectual ferment. I think that’s a reasonable description of the state of things in much of the 1970s, for what it’s worth.
The problem is that, if you are an engaged intellectual, you want to be able to see a way forward. And right-leaning types today – contrary to historical type – are terribly engaged. If, for the foreseeable future, the GOP is going to be dominated by the South, and the Democrats are going to be dominated by the left, then where is a Northern conservative to find a natural political home?
You can see the dynamics playing out in a place like the Manhattan Institute. Properly, the focus of the Manhattan Institute should be topics relevant to urban America – that’s their beat. So why do they publish so much culture war fodder? Why do they publish on foreign policy at all? Is it really plausible that what’s good for Alabama is good for New York? If not, then why isn’t City Journal the forum in which New York’s right-wingers get to make the case for their priorities over the priorities of Alabamians? I think part of the answer relates to the fact that an oppositional section is now dominant within the conservative coalition.
- Blame the money. Is there a major patron of conservative intellectuals who is a patron primarily because he or she wants to generate new ideas, insights, works of the spirit that do not already exist in the world, as opposed to advancing arguments for ideas that are already well-established in defense of interests that are well-entrenched? If there is, please let me know that person’s name. Ron Unz is the only person who comes immediately to mind, and honestly I don’t think he’s quite in the wealth category one would ideally want.
Nobody, of course, is just going to hand out money willy-nilly. But there is an enormous difference between bankrolling a person or organization because you like what they think, and bankrolling a person or organization because you like the way they think. If a multi-millionaire says: I am interested in education, and I believe that vouchers are the answer, so I’m going to give $100,000 per year to a think-tank to produce pro-vouchers research and advocate for vouchers, well, that’s not really intellectual patronage. If, on the other hand, that same multi-millionaire says: I am interested in education, and I am skeptical of the way the system works now, how we train teachers to how our schools are financed, and impressed with some of what’s been achieved following new models. I’m going to find the smartest, most informed, most independent-minded people I can, who are also skeptical of established practice, and give them money to do whatever research they want. If they can impress me with their independence and intelligence, then I want to know what they can learn with a bit of money to work with – and I want other people to know as well. That second millionaire might wind up funding Diane Ravitch – and getting a very different report than he or she expected. And why would that be so bad? If Diane Ravitch has lost faith in a certain kind of school reform, that’s a hugely important fact – her arguments are ones that any advocate of school reform needs to know and grapple with. Even if she doesn’t change her patron’s mind, he or she should be glad to have funded her work.
Ultimately, you can only have an intelligentsia if you have patrons who are interested in learning things they don’t already know. And so, if you want a conservative intelligentsia, you need patrons of a conservative temperament who want to learn things they don’t already know – things that may unsettle them. If all the patron wants is advocacy for established views in defense of established interests, then you don’t actually have intellectual patronage at all, and pretty soon you won’t have an intellectual establishment.
I have never been a movement conservative, and I’ve never worked for a conservative institution, so any impressions I have are from a considerable distance – second-hand impressions at best, generally third-hand. Having declared that caveat, I will say that my general impression is that the money going to purportedly intellectual conservative organs is vastly more interested in advocacy than in developing intellectual talent or generating new insights. If I’m right, then that is something that has to change if you want an open conservative mind.
But if I’m right, the question that must next be asked is: has this changed? Were things different in 1975, and if so – why? I think it would be highly instructive to see a study done on the sources of funding for conservative organs and see how these sources have changed over time – is the money coming more or less from individuals over time, from more or fewer sources, from the same or different industries, is the age of donors changing, has the place in American life of donors changed over time, etc. I don’t know much of this information is in the public domain, but if it is, it would be interesting to see if anything can be gleaned from this kind of aggregate data. But, you know, I’m an elitist. My own inclination is to think that single individuals who are determined to shape history can make an enormous impact if they have the wherewithal. You don’t need a whole generation of intellectually-minded plutocrats to sponsor a renaissance. If he’s rich enough, and clear-eyed and determined enough, you may only need one.
- Blame David Frum. Just prior to the Iraq War, David Frum published a now-infamous essay expelling “unpatriotic conservatives” – that is to say, people who vociferously opposed the war – from . . . well, it’s not exactly clear from what, since he had no power to expel anybody from anything – let’s say from “conservative respectability.” And this endeavor on his part was, generally, applauded by the outlets of the organized American right. I don’t know that this was literally unprecedented, but it felt to me at the time – and more so since – like a crucial Rubicon had been crossed.
In previous defenestrations – Eisenhower’s turn against McCarthy, Buckley’s expulsion of the Birchers, the removal of Trent Lott from his leadership position – the organizations or individuals being expelled were extremists of the dominant tendency. If Republicans were generally anti-Communist, McCarthy took this to an unacceptable extreme; if Republicans were generally more friendly to a white Southern perspective on American history, Lott, in his remarks, took this to an unacceptable extreme. Frum was not expelling extremists, however; he was expelling dissenters.
The expulsion of dissenters is not something we generally associate with mainstream political movements; it is most memorable as a tic of the radical left, Stalinists expelling Trotskyites and so forth. Certainly, right-wing groups – anti-tax groups, anti-abortion groups, etc. – have tried to impose orthodoxy before, demanding pledges of allegiance in exchange for electoral support. But this is just interest-group politics; civil-rights groups, unions, and other left-wing organizations do that sort of thing all the time, with more or less effectiveness depending on the political circumstances. Expelling dissenters is something else again, and once the precedent has been set, it is very difficult to see how one may justify not applying it in more and more circumstances.
While I don’t think it’s fair to blame David Frum as an individual for very much (and poetic justice has already been served on him specifically anyhow), I do think it’s important for those who are concerned with the openness or closedness of the conservative mind to grapple with this particular event, and consider whether a formal repudiation might not do rather a bit of good, even at this late date.
- Blame Iraq. The Iraq War was the cause for which Frum expelled the so-called “unpatriotic conservatives” and the Iraq War is the cause for which the conservative mind closed. It won’t open again until this fact is faced.
Of course, conservatives weren’t alone in supporting the Iraq War, or in blinding themselves to contrary arguments. But it is instructive to examine the difference between the way conservatives who changed their mind about the war have behaved and the way liberals who changed their mind have behaved.
In my experience, conservatives who have changed their mind fall into three broad camps: minimizers, avoiders, and abandoners. Minimizers admit the war didn’t work out as planned, but spend their energies on damage control – arguing that intentions were good, or that knowledge was limited, or that some aspects did work out, or whatever. Avoiders show signs that they know the whole enterprise was rotten to the core – so they avoid the topic and avoid drawing any broader conclusions about, well, anything from the fiasco of Iraq. And abandoners, well, they feel obliged, when they face the depth of their mistake, to abandon their political home altogether, either for the other side or for a relatively un-engaged posture.
In other words, there’s a general sense among conservative thinkers that the die was cast long ago: within the context of the conservative political world, it is not an option to seriously rethink the decision for war. Doing so is tantamount to abandoning their political identity. Why that is, I’m not sure, though I suspect guilt has more to do with it than anything.
It’s instructive to compare conservatives with liberals in this regard. Liberal hawks – people whose political identity was very bound up with the Iraq War project – have had much the same problem as conservatives coming to grips with the war. But liberals who supported the war but didn’t consider that integral to their identity have had a pretty easy time chucking off their history and forging a new identity around what they learned from that mistake. These liberals frequently learned a great deal from dissenting conservative opponents of the war – people like Andrew Bacevich – and have thereby brought essentially conservative arguments against ventures like Iraq into the tent of liberal thinking – to the benefit of the nation, if to the impoverishment of the conservative tent.
I don’t know what the solution to this is. I do know that when Ross Douthat writes a column for the New York Times about why the Iraq War was fundamentally a mistake, and how his outlook on the world changed when he fully absorbed that, we’ll know that the conservative mind has opened a bit again.
- Blame the times. No analysis of where conservatism has gone wrong would be complete without an utterly fatalistic analysis, so here it is. Political movements have their life cycles like anything else: they are born; they grow; they mature; they decay. The conservative movement was born in the 1950s, grew in the late 1960s and 1970s, matured in the 1980s and early 1990s, and decayed from the mid-1990s through today. You can lament being born at the wrong time, but you can’t do anything about it.
To a considerable extent, the life cycle of movements derives from the life cycle of the people who grow up within those movements. Young conservatives in the late 1980s and early 1990s saw their movement go from strength to strength – and learned that conservatism was always right and that people who didn’t see that were fools. These same folks in the Bush years tutored their successors in appalling intellectual tactics: bullying and sophistry and identity politics. By contrast, the generation of liberals who came of age in the Bush years had to weather that bullying, had to cut through that sophistry – and were vindicated by events. I am continually impressed by the intelligence and sophistication of liberals ten years younger than I am. They are the leaders of tomorrow’s left even more than today’s, and the right is just not in the same league. It was, once, in 1960s and 1970s, when left-wing ideas were dominant and left-wingers intellectually complacent – even as their intellectual roof was falling in. The bright young things who saw that the roof was falling in, and who debated what their new home should look like, became the rising generation of conservative leaders.
I have a lot of sympathy for this kind of explanation, simply because I’m temperamentally conservative. I think it’s very hard for people to change once they are set, and so the formative experiences of a generation have a lasting political and intellectual impact. Intellectually, the children of the Bush Administration on the right are a lost generation. They may grow in wisdom, chastened by experience, but this will come at a price of lost confidence; or they may retain their confidence, but this will come at the greater price of never attaining wisdom.
An open mind seeks wisdom, first and last.
this is a marvelous post.
a major part of the rot that you didn’t quite explicate fully here is the embrace of relativism as a tactical response to liberal dominance of mainstream intellectual institutions. [i know you’re sensitive to this in general as you’ve talked about the “unified-theory-of-nonsense” in the past]
you see this most clearly with climate change denialism and creationism. i was talking to some undergraduates the other day who were complaining about “bias” in their classes. in all but one of the cases, it struck me that the class material they objected to was both accurate and pedagogically appropriate. this conversation was pretty dispiriting to me as i put a pretty high stock in the idea that there is objective knowledge out there even as i am quite sympathetic to the idea that we can dispute what moral or policy implications we ought to infer from that knowledge.
my only sunny thought is the general problem of golden age nostalgia, in that we tend to only remember the best of the past (eg, Russell Kirk not John Birch society) whereas in the present the full portfolio, including loudmouth jackasses, is quite salient and so our estimation of the present inevitably looks dour in comparison.
— gabriel · Apr 8, 06:57 PM · #
Sorry to nit-pick, but the Pauline Kael reference is a bit off – it appeared in an article in which Kael quotes a woman who can’t believe Nixon won. It’s a logical leap from “a quotation from an article by Pauline Kael” to “a Pauline Kael” quotation. But Kael was far too prickly and cynical to say anything that naive – she’s obviously making fun of the woman she’s quoting.
— David M. · Apr 8, 07:04 PM · #
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauline_Kael#Nixon_.22quote.22
— Bryan · Apr 8, 07:06 PM · #
“The modern GOP was born in the fires of George Wallace’s 1968 run for the Presidency”
Um, what?
— Phil · Apr 8, 07:12 PM · #
A great post, but you missed one obvious factor – the rise of conservative-dominated mass media as the main source of news and analysis in right wing public conversation. When no conservative intellectual can be smarter than Sean Hannity or more emotionally mature than Rush Limbaugh, it’s kind of hard to maintain a lively internal debate on any issue.
Mike
— MBunge · Apr 8, 07:54 PM · #
Excellent post, Noah,
I wonder what the impact is of so many young people being able to make long, well-compensated careers for themselves inside the conservative movement. Surely the lucrative market for conservative orthodoxy changes the incentives of those who produce political rhetoric and ideas.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Apr 8, 08:25 PM · #
Great post. You know why this was a great post? Because I wanted to read more. Hopefully you have more for a sequel.
I agree, it would be a fascinating to see the donation record for think tanks from say, 1975 through 2005. I suspect most of the money does not come from individual patrons or family foundations like those in the past (Joseph Coors for example, although the Koch brothers and Bradley are still around) but corporations, especially those like defense contractors for example, who want to control the parameters of discussions that affect their bottom lines and will pay good money to pay for court intellectuals to make sure of it. Plus, it’s a tax write-off.
But what they’re buying is basically polemics, not thinking. It’s basically work to support a supposition, not to bring about a greater understanding of the truth of things. It just goes to show when the conservatives abandon academia (meaning careers in academia not College Republican escapades to strip clubs with money donated by blue hairs)it leaves an enormous vacummn those who are already bored into in establishment think tanks (AEI Heritage) and sit around living off of corporate money, or those within the “conservative” media who main concern is not the truth but ratings and entertainment value. Ergo, not just a closed mind, but no mind at all, like all those at Big Brother rallies in 1984. The Conservative Movement, or as it exists right now, is basically no different, as Austin Bramwell said, than Orwell’s “inner party.”
— Sean Scallon · Apr 8, 08:50 PM · #
Fantastic post. David Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” article was the point when I realized that something had gone seriously wrong with the conservative movement. I was actually on the fence about Iraq, but that article made me realize that whatever your position the conservative movement was getting sick.
Still, that sort in-out mentality was present earlier. I came to DC in 2000, prior to the election, and worked at a think tank that later became fairly notorious. A senior scholar who had been around since 1960s told me “We can’t say that, because that gives the liberals too much ground.” Hearing that sort of thing wasn’t unusual, but the excommunications in 2003 were another level.
I agree with MBunge. Something changed in the early 1990s—as the conservative movement and Republican party looked for a way forward after the loss to Clinton. The movement and party had to come to terms with its first real defeat and the loss of its traditional enemy (the USSR). All the “death of conservatism” articles we see now were written back then as well. The stodgy, competent Republicans (Bush I’s people) and the Buchananites were marginalized and a new group centered around the younger Kristol (who gained a lot of credibility with his role in the defeat of Clinton’s health care bill). After the 1994 victories, the Republican party really began to try to become the party of government (Continetti chronicles this fairly convincingly in K Street Gang).
The counterpart to this development in high politics was (for lack of a better term) a culture war strategy—stoke rage at various elites (Bill Clinton, etc.) and then adopt Karl Rove’s 50+1 election strategy. Rush Limbaugh was another key and, at least in my mind, marked the beginning of the construction of the conservative alternate universe.
Unfortunately, I am even more fatalistic than Noah. I think the conservative movement has become a sort of self-perpetuating machine—bad leaders stoke populist rage; younger thinkers grow up inside the bubble; younger thinkers become leaders; younger thinkers stoke populist rage; repeat. I think this explains why there has been so little obvious learning among conservatives over the past 7 years.
— Boz · Apr 8, 09:01 PM · #
Regarding the donor question, I’ve often wondered how the Cato Institute funds Cato Unbound, which is one of the most consistently interesting publications on the web. I suppose there’s a definite editorial slant in favor of highlighting libertarian ideas, but the site generally does a great job of publishing interesting people from across the political spectrum. How does Cato get funding for such an off-the-wall web presence?
— Will · Apr 8, 09:24 PM · #
Great post, Noah. I think it’s the obsession with bias. I really do.
— Freddie · Apr 8, 10:10 PM · #
Well, Mr. Millman must respond to his readings differently than I do. I don’t find Balkinization so much more epistemically open than the Volokh Conspiracy, for example. I don’t find Crooked Timber so much more broad-minded than Instapundit. I don’t find Paul Krugman so much more intellectually vigorous than Greg Mankiw. Apparently Mr. Millman disagrees, and, like the apocryphal Pauline Kael, finds that everyone he knows agrees with him.
— y81 · Apr 8, 10:20 PM · #
“the focus of the Manhattan Institute should be topics relevant to urban America – that’s their beat. So why do they publish so much culture war fodder? Why do they publish on foreign policy at all? Is it really plausible that what’s good for Alabama is good for New York?”
I don’t read City Journal cover to cover, but what do you mean by “culture war fodder”? Don’t they often write about how the “culture wars” wiped out family culture among the poorer classes? And isn’t that quite relevant to their locale?
— Kevin J Jones · Apr 8, 10:21 PM · #
I personally think evangelism closed the conservative mind….the idea that your w/e….religion, culture, government…..is so superior to any other system that it becomes your duty to proselytize/missionary/mil force impose that system on others.
That is what happened in Iraq.
Of course, there is hubris, and the second law of thermodynamics also operating on the GOP….but the main flaw is evangelism.
The democrats, forced into a coalition of multiple ethnicities and systems and religions….have to be openminded and pragmatic….borrowers that incorporate parts of many systems.
How do you improve a system that ALREADY maintains it the “best”?
Also, you don’t mention race or IQ/education, Noah.
Race and IQ/education are significant markers for political affiliation.
“The GOP is an inferiority complex masquerading as political philosophy”— props Julian Sanchez.
The reason you don’t have intellectuals with open minds left is you gulagged them.
Same for scientists….6% of scientists are republicans…..does that worry you a’tall?
:)
— matoko_chan · Apr 8, 11:17 PM · #
“I don’t find Crooked Timber so much more broad-minded than Instapundit.”
Heh.
— sidereal · Apr 8, 11:28 PM · #
Freddie – The bias fetish makes me cringe, too, but I view it as symptomatic of the oppositional reflex Noah seizes on, in which it is reminiscent of some other sorts of identity politics (also driven by a logic and psychology of opposition)…the conviction that one is immersed in a hostile culture that is constantly and perhaps unconsciously producing invidious representations of you and yours.
— Matt Feeney · Apr 9, 01:46 AM · #
“If. . . the Democrats are going to be dominated by the left. . .”
Seems like a big if. Currently— certainly since the somewhat chastening experiences of LBJ and Carter— I don’t detect a budding ascension of the left. Not, anyway, in the good old-fashioned mid-twentieth century sense of the left. Rhetoric about Big Brother from the noisy fringes notwithstanding, Democrats continue to operate with trepidation, much more than your phrase suggests. Or if your phrase does not suggest that, I’d like to know more about it.
Beyond that, isn’t the stake the conservative base has planted in rural America— tired observation though it is— more distinctive than its connection to the South? The agrarian/plantation/secession-pining history of the South makes it unique, yes, but doesn’t this also make it more susceptible as a region to flowing through its backwaters rather than its cities? I suspect that the disconnection suffered by your engaged northern intellectual has less to do with his Southern discomfort than with the indifference/disdain he experiences in the urban environment.
— turnbuckle · Apr 9, 03:17 AM · #
I think everything mentioned above contributes to the retardedness, but the roots are in the southern strategy. Remember when that begain: the Nixon campaign at end of the sixties. The southern strategy was essentially to organize and ride the backlash of “real americans” against civil rights and hippies and psychedelic music, and free love. And the definition of real american was rural, religious, white, anti-intellectual. Intellectuals were the ones that thought up all the changes, they lived in cities, were atheists, friends of the negros. This demographic is who the republicans hitched thier wagon to and everything that is wrong today with conservativisim is based on the charateristics of this demographic: zenophobic, christian fundamentalist and evangalistic, anti-intellectual, conservative in the sense that they are closed to any change or new ideas, nationalistic, militaristic, authoritarian, have preacher hair.
Of all of these characteristis (and these are just the bad ones, this demographic has plenty of good characteristics) preacher hair is the worst. Have you noticed that you can tell how retarded a senator is by his hair? This is the internet. I could post quotes beneath photos.
ps. Does anyone find it interesting that intellectualls were often the people targeted for purges in communist countries? A couple easy examples are in china during cultural revoloution and Cambodia in the Khmer Rouge era (where earing glasses was enough to get you killed). I think this is a basic human tendecy under certain circumstances and has great relevance to the current emnity towards the “elite” in this country. If anyone out there is looking for a master’s thesis topic, I could talk you through it.
— cw · Apr 9, 03:47 AM · #
The other point that you missed here is that the the conservative mind won. The closing of the conservative mind has happened in the context of the modern “left” appropriating ideas that were formerly found firmly on the right and applying them to the problems the left wants to solve.
Look at all the major policy fights we are seeing today. In healthcare we have seen the democratic party adopt wholesale the solution advocated by Bob Dole and the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s. Yes, it is in place a bit more liberal than anything Dole or Heritage proposed, but the basic framework is an idea advocated by the right. Or take climate change. The goal of the left is to limit carbon emissions. But the means they are advocating would be utterly unrecognizable to any Kennedy-Johnson liberal. Their goal of putting a price on carbon has internalized the core conservative insights of the 70s and 80s.
This same pattern holds for just about every issue you look at. In education, the forefront of liberal reformers are ideas like charter schools and merit pay. On traffic congestion you see smart young liberals advocating congestion pricing. On issue after issue what in the Reagan era were considered conservative ideas are now being advocated by Democrats.
This willingness of Democrats since Clinton to appropriate conservative ideas, combined with the unwillingness of the conservative establishment to give an inch politically to the Democrats has in part led to conservatives having fewer and fewer ideas that it is OK to advocate.
— Remy · Apr 9, 05:18 AM · #
Mr. Millman,
Regarding your point about “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” what Frum actually did was a bit sneakier than that, I think.
His rhetorical slight of hand was to conflate all anti-war conservatives (ignoring, e.g., William Odom and Andrew Bacevich) with paleoconservatives and to conflate all paleos with their most extreme representatives, like Thomas Fleming and Justin Raimondo.
My question to you is what you mean by calling attention to that event. Do you think that the act of repudiating it would itself be salutary for the intellectual health of the conservative movement, or that some sort of rapprochement would ideally follow?
If the latter, I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about how that might proceed.
— David Polansky · Apr 9, 05:46 AM · #
I personally think evangelism closed the conservative mind….the idea that your w/e….religion, culture, government…..is so superior to any other system that it becomes your duty to proselytize/missionary/mil force impose that system on others.
Yes, matoko_chan. This I can agree with. This gets it exactly right.
— Keid A · Apr 9, 12:59 PM · #
One might as well ask why water is wet. Conservatism is by nature less open than liberalism, and what makes it an invaluable force in representative democracy. Conservatism functions best to reign in the forces of change and the excesses of unrestrained liberalism. Unfortunately, the predisposition of conservatism to conserve (in all but the fiscal sense) is ill-suited to the pace of change that marks the modern era. New ideas aren’t in conservatism’s DNA.
— beep52 · Apr 9, 01:57 PM · #
The key notion in opening your mind is throwing out ideas that didn’t work, or won’t work very soon.
Once the bad ideas a cleared away, you have room for new ideas. When conservatives give up the Laffer Curve fixation, they will be able to talk tax policy with sanity again.
— MobiusKlein · Apr 9, 03:35 PM · #
Noah:
Huh? From the Founding to 1860, then from 1876 to the mid-1980s or so, the South either dominated governing coalitions OR at the very least held outsized sway on the polity by virtue of their systematic disenfranchisement of a large segment of their population.
Shit. The The Three-Fifths compromise allowed the South many many extra members of of the House. Jim Crow continued that decided advantage.
The South wakes up and starts making growling noises like it is now every time they DON’T dominate.
— jfxgillis · Apr 9, 03:44 PM · #
Came over here from Sullivan – and was very impressed with your essay.
I’d like to add an observation: the Right’s obsession with bias in the media was at one time absolutely merited – stories like Civil Rights, Vietnam, and Watergate were broadcast through a liberal prism. Since then, the Right has understandably developed alternative media through AM radio and now through News Corp. This has had an effect on the traditional media, which has become more open to the Right (look at the guest lists on the Sunday talk shows, for example). To all conservatives of my acquaintance, however, there is far more anti-Right bias than ever (reinforced by Fox, of course – an excellent branding strategy, no?). This is a solid example of a calcified movement that will have increasing difficulties in the non-Fox Loop.
— clyons · Apr 9, 03:49 PM · #
I find it interesting that no one has mentioned the rise of talk radio and Fox News as key factors in the closing of the conservative mind. In my opinion, the echo chamber created by these two entities has done more than anything else to convince conservatives, or at least what passes for such today, that their ideas are incontrovertibly, unquestionably correct and that anyone who disagrees with right-wing orthodoxy is a “liberal” and must be shunned.
— orogeny · Apr 9, 04:37 PM · #
Not sure whether to classify this as cause or symptom, but I would add cultural scapegoating to the list. The “real America” of the conservative movement suffers higher rates of teenage pregnancy, divorce, drug and alcohol abuse, and government subsidy than the Eastern and SF/Hollywood elites they rail against. Nothing new there—demagogues have always exploited people’s troubles by pointing the finger of blame elsewhere. If you take one of Limbaugh’s or Levin’s standard rant and substitute ‘bourgeoisie’ or ‘intellectuals’ or ‘Jews’ for ‘liberals’, the result is practically indistinguishable from a speech by Dzerzhinsky or Mao or Goebbels: a sick, perverse group of people secretly working in the shadows to corrupt and undermine the good folks of the nation.
— Bob Gordon · Apr 9, 05:18 PM · #
“This willingness of Democrats since Clinton to appropriate conservative ideas, combined with the unwillingness of the conservative establishment to give an inch politically to the Democrats has in part led to conservatives having fewer and fewer ideas that it is OK to advocate.”
I think this comment provides a more powerful explanation than that of the blog piece. At some point, the distinction between Conservativism and Republicanism all but collapsed. By this I mean that the Conservative movement reduced itself to a political movement—a movement about gaining and holding political power. There is no other way to explain its contemporary equation of conservative ideas (expanding health care via an individual mandate and private insurers; the marketization of pollution as a mechanism of dealing with its negative externalities) with socialism. But at the moment when a movement ceases to care about governing for any other reason beyond the perquisites that come from power, it will lose its intellectual vitality. And things for the mainstream Conservative movement are only likely to get worse, as all signs point toward a conflation of an unemployment-driven midterm triumph with an affirmation of the increasingly vacuous principles it espouses.
— LS · Apr 9, 05:27 PM · #
“This willingness of Democrats since Clinton to appropriate conservative ideas
i agree that is a brilliant insight….in my research group we always appropriated better models and incorporated them into our designs.
giving proper credit of course.
;)
republicans are stuck in universal rejection mode…..even if Obama stole their best stuff and plugged it into his meta-model, they have to reject the whole package because he made it his.
the other main problem is the leadership vacuum.
Sarahpalin is a shrill, mean carny barker executing a head-fake run on the presidency to scam the marks for cash….she knows the only way she could possibly be president now is in a putsch.
She cant even hold an open presser let alone perform in a Presidential debate with follow on questions.
Heres a little fable for you, dear bourgie conservatives.
Ross and Reihan (along with others, sure) invited the vampire into the House.
Do you understand what happens when you invite a vampire into the House?
They begin to think they own the House.
And people get bit….so soon pretty much everyone in the house becomes a vampire.
Then there are only two options to get the vampires out of the House.
Stake the Head Vampire (that would be Palin) through the heart…….or burn the House down.
What passes for intellectual conservatives here never had the nads for the stake…..gutless.
So….the House is already on fire.
Its only a question of how long it takes to burn to the ground.
— matoko_chan · Apr 9, 06:02 PM · #
http://lsrebellion.blogspot.com/2010/04/southern-problem.html
— Snaggle-Tooth Jones · Apr 9, 06:17 PM · #
Since the end of WW II, there has been no serious consticuency (with any success) on the left for actual socialism/communism. The Democratic party accepts the fundamentally capitalist nature of our society, and, as noted above, really has adopted many ideas from the right in order to serve a classical economic goal:
Pricing externalities.
In health care, one reason the system was broken is that people couldn’t (or wouldn’t) purchase health insurance, and would clog up emergency rooms when sick. Those emergency room costs would be passed on to others with insurance. Now everyone must buy insurance. The Republicans argued we should do nothing to price externalities.
For carbon emissions, either taxing emissions or cap and trade is an attempt to force the polluters of the commons to pay the cost of that pollution.
The Repbulican/“conservative” position is to argue that no externalities even exist.
It is a total rejection of basic and fundamental free-market principles. Almost one of the most important things government can do in a well run capitalist system is the accurate pricing of externalities. It’s become clear that there are massive externalities at play in Wall Street (they get all the profits, the public eats all the risk, and their profits can never be clawed back to pay for the damage done). But no apparent willingness to tax/regulate these costs on the right.
The wholesale rejection of empericisim is the root cause of the problems.
— agorabum · Apr 9, 06:31 PM · #
I think a rethink of conservative verities needs to go beyond recognizing that Iraq was a mistake. The celebrated intellectual ferment of the right during the Reagan era, for example, doesn’t look so productive when one considers how fundamentally wrong-headed it has turned out to be. Our huge fiscal deficits began with Reagan’s tax and spending policies. Admittedly, the marked growth in income and wealth inequality these policies predictably produced is a feature, not a bug for many conservatives; but living with the social and economic consequences of plutocracy is proving to be less fun than one might have expected. Right wingers did produce some good ideas during the 70s and 80s, but they were isolated points of light in the midst of an enormous error. Meanwhile, the fact that the left of the Reagan era was intellectually bankrupt or at least out of gas is simply irrelevant.
The more oligarchic party always has an intellectual problem in a polity with some democratic features since it promotes the interest of a minority over the majority but can’t do so openly. Hence the inevitability of appeals to race or nation or God or the Laffer curve or some other irrationality that can square the circle. Incipit Sarah.
— Jim Harrison · Apr 9, 06:51 PM · #
The larger lesson that can be derived from David Frum’s “Unpatriotic Conservatives” purge is that the influx of Jewish neoconservatives into the GOP in, say, 1969-1980 increased the intellectual diversity of the movement, but the subsequent neocon monopolization of the intellectual side of the conservative movement through money and purges lessened intellectual diversity.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 9, 10:52 PM · #
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Name any three major, unequivocal major conservative triumphs during Bush’s reign. Or go back to Clinton’s post Gingrich.
Clinton “rescued” Elian Gonzalez. Bush signed a Pontius Pilate paper while we were watching a woman being starved and dehydrated to death in the same state. He who was not afraid of Saddam hid behind papers when confronted with a county judge.
Gingrich was on this morning saying a GOP house majority would defund Obama. I do remember the government shutdown under Clinton and Gingrich caving. That was the last time I gave any blanket support to the GOP.
This is not ancient history. Ronald Reagan may have compromised and practiced Realpolitik, but I really believe Terri would still be alive, and Osama would be dead or in a federal prison and GITMO would not be our shame. What was the longest conflict he was involved in? He signed the treaty against torture, and now we just ignore it.
I think it was originally said of Clinton, “There’s no there there”. Now of the GOP. TARP and bailouts? No-win, pulled punches wars? Immigration?
Inaction on principle and on important matters, Listening to Lobbyists on daily business, Mushy moderation and poisonous pragmatism.
Circling the wagons, calling forth loyalty, team spirit, do it for the FatherParty, is the normal and standard reaction.
Frummy and Rummy and company knew they were doing evil, so started early. And had terrorism and fear as a real excuse for their McCarthyism. There were Communists. And terrorists. But one day there wren’t.
Sorry for the length, but here is where it returns to the topic.
They will not or cannot be real conservatives, at least if that means acting on principle and doing difficult things (like shutting down “their” government while the talking heads show starving school lunch recipients). They can only deliver on irrelevant things which all the Pols agree on – TARP, perpetual occupations, etc.
So those latter things become the litmus test. Iraq might be somewhere debated if Roe v. Wade was already overturned, or a few of those those many “unitary” executive orders effectively negated it, Terri was rescued, the budget was cut or reduced, an entitlement was eliminated instead of created, etc.
They are a collection of Judas Iscariots hunting down heretics who question the trivial parts of the Gospel that they actually believed. The unimportant parts. They know their guilt and evil, but instead of repenting, seek to justify it.
They require an oath of fealty to the facade BECAUSE they have denied in word and deed the core. Yet that is the nature of hubris. They are empty shells and know it in their hearts enough to require affirmation of the illusion.
— tz · Apr 10, 12:49 AM · #
> Moreover, it’s not clear to me why demographic diversity specifically should lead to openness;
Its the other way around. Open-mindedness values and attracts demographic diversity and closed-mindedness rejects it.
— Marc · Apr 10, 04:08 AM · #
This is a fraud post. An example of a weird internet phenomenon of someone flying a false intellectual flag as part of an rhetorical posture to try to discredit their opponent. The giveaway is the assertion that the modern conservative movement has anything to do with George Wallace, which is the type of bad faith political refuge that only a Liberal would resort to. F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman birthed modern conservatism and this person will not be singing the same tune after the 2010 elections.
— Rodrigo Plantaganet · Apr 10, 05:11 AM · #
Sanchez’s claim operates on a premise that assumes something is different.
What if the real answer is that perceptions of the closed mind are a product of the technological phenomena Sanchez identifies as responsible for revealing his epistemic closure?
Communication technology reveals and accentuates what previously would have been visible merely as elements of the historical arc of a political movement. However, instead of the history of the movement being written and circulated in book form five years hence, the historical analysis is being recorded and published concurrent with events. An example of this, is that the arguments made here actually appear to reveal a number of factors in the conservative movement that are not at all recent.
The South and the rural U.S. have always been insular and prone to a form of epistemic closure, replete with populist manifestations that are anti-government and anti-change.
Conservatives (as all political movements are prone to do) go through periods of turmoil where thinkers are purged and new thoughts are accomodated or adopted — Frum, Buckley, The Birch Society.
The waxing and waning of patrons is certainly predictable in a similar vein.
Basically, I suppose there is an argument that the conservative mind is currently in a more ‘closed’ state. It is also entirely possible that it is merely a perception. I don’t find myself particularly convinced that anything is all that different from the norm for conservatives.
— Van Carter · Apr 10, 05:25 AM · #
Missing is the end of the cold war, one of the central tenants of Reagan’s version of conservatives. Those commies were the cause of moral decay, the high price of oil, the defeat and humiliation of the US military and Reagan was going to restore America to greatness by defeating the commies.
But after the commies were defeated in 1990, there was no unconditional surrender, no victory parade, and thus no change in any Republican policy, all of which were in support of or directed at defeating the commies and ending the cold war.
Condi Rice was a student of the great cold war foreign service expert, the father of Ambassador Albright, and she advised Bush on the basis of what she had learned about the cold war polarity and leanings of the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Iran had ousted the Shah placing them in the Soviet sphere, and then Saddam entered a truce and threatened the Saudis in the US sphere, setting up the cold war proxy battle of the 90s. Osama must be an agent of the commies, or at least, he should be considered a Soviet puppet, along with Iran and Iraq, which meant they were allies, in spite of Osama seeking the overthrow of Iran and Iraq. Everything Chavez did was as a puppet of the Soviets, proven by his friendship with Castro. The war on drugs wasn’t the cause of the conflict in Colombia, but instead the efforts of the commies to take over the Americas, making the FARC allies of Chavez.
Both Republicans and Democrats saw the world in black/white cold war terms until 1970 when liberals discarded the cold war polar world view, validated by pulling out of Vietnam not resulting in the commies toppling the dominoes and turning Mexico commie.
But conservatives, are still defining every problem in cold war terms, seeing the commies as the ultimate threat, and the cause of every problem in society, and always seeking to root out those dirty commies hiding under our beds. Like that commie Obama who going to bring America down with Soviet style Romneycare for the nation.
— mulp · Apr 10, 08:29 AM · #
Van Carter, just above this, might be interested in this Mark Schmitt post. Maybe previous conservative/GOP/southern-strategy dynamics just had establishment figureheads that were arrogant enough to think that the crap bubbling daily and widespread from their “base” was something other than true and germaine. Maybe they were egotistical/dumb enough to think that they could lead that rabble without being that rabble. Now those charades get called-out a bit more, for better and for ill. Now all you get are leaders who, on more and more internal-levels, openly agree with that rabblecrap.
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=in_search_of_arrogance
— wiseguise · Apr 10, 12:45 PM · #
My perspective is Canadian – in other words, from a political context in which it is still true that the centre-left is more intellectually flabby than the right because more hegemonic. So I’d go with the cyclical explanation. Rethinking is painful, so political movements only do so when they really have to. The US right isn’t there yet, and it is almost certainly going to gain ground in 2010.
Sooner or later the GOP will have its British-Labour-Party-in-1983 moment, but that could be a decade or more in the future.
— Pithlord · Apr 10, 03:19 PM · #
“So I’d go with the cyclical explanation.”
sry, Pithlord but the cycle is broken.
Demographic and cultural evolution have rendered white christian conservatism obsolete.
Unless conservatism can become multi-ethnic and multi-hued, it is as Fail as the Whigs.
It simply doesnt reflect the electorate.
The pendulum wont swing back.
— matoko_chan · Apr 10, 04:28 PM · #
Great post and great comments. I hate to add another site to my burgeoning blogroll, but I may just have to.
Here’s what most conservatives do not understand, or pretend not to understand, that I’m pretty sure Noah does understand. I’m a moderate liberal and cruise through a number of left-of-center websites every day, and every single day I will come across and read some posts critical of Obama. Now, most aren’t apocalyptically critical or all that harsh – though if I went farther left into DailyKos or Firedoglake, a large number would be – but the people I read do not forgo critical reasoning skills when assessing Obama. Even the most starry-eyed among them views him skeptically, though maybe not as skeptically as they should. A cheerleader or “homer” would get laughed out of the club and dropped from my blogroll.
The folks I read treat political commentary the same way A.O. Scott reviews movies. Scott may think Scorcese is one of our greatest directors, but he can still give one of his movies a “bad” review, sometimes even the same day he’s giving a “good” review to a director who Scott would not think worthy of tying Marty’s shoes. The folks I read may think Obama is the best president they’re going to see in their lifetimes, yet they still hold him accountable to some objective standards. Hell, just read Paul Krugman. For that matter, read the editorials in the NYT or WaPo – over time you’ll see that there are at least as many critical of Obama as there are supportive ones.
This does not happen on the conservative side – more accurately, on the conservative movement side. Skepticism is what you use when you examine your opponent’s arguments, not those of your own side. Supporting your side means uniting against critics, not giving them ammunition. If you voted for W, then you’d better not criticize the way the war is going – that’s what the America-haters do. And how you can say that Rummy should resign? What other orders should we be taking from Moveon.org? Don’t like torture? That can only be because you’re a moral exhibitionist looking for validation from the pinkos at the New York Times. (One of Michael Gerson’s first columns for the WaPo began with just this sort of reasoning, but ultimately he managed to come around to sort of opposing torture, despite the fact moral exhibitionists also think it’s wrong.) Solidarity can be a good thing, and red meat is great for firing up the Base, but it’s also highly destructive if the propagandists begin to believe their own BS. Or even worse, begin to believe that there is no reality other than whatever fantasies you can scare people into believing in.
The paragraph above does not apply to Noah or to Conor Friedersdorf and I’m sure numerous others. The first time I read one of Conor’s posts, my head snapped back, not because I was surprised that a conservative could reach the same conclusion I’d reached on the issue, but rather because I immediately recognized that he was applying well-honed critical thinking skills and using them to criticize a conservative position. His reasoning was my reasoning, only better (which is why he has a blog and I don’t). If you read enough of the Wall Street Journal, or the Weekly Standard or National Review, you being to question whether up is indeed up or whether water can possibly be wet. Again, it’s not because of the conclusions they reach but the way they get there – by violating every principle of objectivity, using ad hominem and strawman arguments and ridiculous overgeneralizations as if they were the height of Aristotelian reasoning, and generally refusing to acknowledge even a scintilla of possibility that liberals may actually be operating in good faith, or might be capable of any insight worth responding to honestly.
An argument between Move.on and the Sons of the Confederacy, or between Firedoglake and the masthead of the National Review, is not worth listening to. I want to argue with Conor and Noah because nine times out of ten I’ll be smarter when it’s over, and if I hold up my end, they will be too. I don’t know exactly how we get there, but since movement conservatism is auguring into the ground, maybe it will happen sooner than I think.
— Geoff G · Apr 10, 05:38 PM · #
I’d like to see a piece from you touching on religion and its role in this.
— Katharine · Apr 10, 07:18 PM · #
It seems to me that what you are talking about is less “conservatism” and more about the liberal right. What you are asking for is a right wing liberalism. Conservatives fight to maintain the status quo, Liberalism looks to new ideas when the old ones are failing, and seeks validation of perpetually more ideas. The right leans toward laissez-faire and individual rights, the left toward broad social structures and group participation. If anything, the right you are talking about is in fact more represented by the Democrats than the Republicans, which is why the GOP is losing ground. Liberalism should be ultimately represented by both parties in order to have a functioning and continually improving government, whether large and involved, or trim and hands off. Either way, the idea that keeping things the way they are when there are obvious problems to engage seems to be something you are against, which actually makes you a liberal too, just perhaps a right wing liberal.
The Tea Party movement is a desire for just this kind of GOP, though poorly considered and very predictably full of lots of people with lots of different ideas about what they want. They are fundamentally middle-class anarchists who are upset that they are so subservient to any organization whether the US Gov’t or a large corporation, but they haven’t realized it until they lost their comfortable lifestyle. It seems to be the case that they are majorly constituted by the recently unemployed. The problem is that they don’t seem to see how heavily the corporations own their cause, and since they are anarchists trying to organize, run into the same problem as the blackshirts, and end up being unaware how to use the tactics they are naturally engaging in (which, look a lot like some of the radical tactics used by blackshirt left wing anarchists). I’m not sure what the solution to all this is, but I would also prefer a change in the balance. The Democratic Party as it is has its moment, and is pursuing many very moderate yet liberally aggressive progressive agendas. We will see a functioning government because people have decided they don’t actually want to waste their tax dollars. The current Republican agenda seems to be to produce so much waste that people will vote for small government, which is a deadly concept. While they are trying to represent small government, they are ultimately not gaining votes because they just disenfranchise overall instead of mobilizing the right toward active change, and small but effective government. We’ve also seen some of the failings of laissez-faire politics in the past few decades, and are currently coming to terms with that.
Thanks for a well considered article. Right/Left, I don’t care. You may be on the right, but you are at heart a liberal even if you have your terminology a bit wonked. :)
Good thoughts.
— Ryan Dunn · Apr 10, 10:55 PM · #
Re Noah’s point on funding: T. Boone Pickens has given something like $165 million to the Oklahoma State athletics department in the hopes of seeing OSU win the football national title while he’s still alive. Do you realize how many pundits he could rent for that amount?
This is just one example of how college football absorbs a ridiculous fraction of conservative energies and philanthropy.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 10, 11:08 PM · #
A fairly mindless article that desperately avoids the reality — never have so many intellectuals been writing so many books on so many conservative issues with more radical insight.
Consider Victor Davis Hanson, “Mexifornia,” a stunning indictment of the failure, culturally, socially, politically, and economically of widespread illegal (and otherwise) Mexican immigration. Plus a careful plan of action to fix the disaster that California has become.
Consider Victor Davis Hanson, again, in “Culture and Carnage” about how the West, fighting in a very different way, has generally won against non-Western nations and peoples, and the profound implications for today.
Mark Steyn, “America Alone,” and the disaster of the demographic crash of modern Western nations and population replacement by non-Western immigrants.
Theodore Dalyrmple, “Life at the Bottom,” “Our Culture What’s Left of It,” “The New Vichy Syndrome” covering the collapse of culture and morality in public life, particularly as it pertains to the inability of the White British lower classes to advance out of hereditary poverty.
Andrew McCarthy, “Willful Blindness” about the failure of America’s legal system to handle the challenges of Jihad, sacrificing intelligence sources and methods to convict terrorists. With the Blind Sheik as Exhibit A for the need to treat Jihadis as other than POWs or common criminals, and the danger to the legal system itself for handling jihad within it.
These are all serious books, by serious writers, covering serious issues, from a radically conservative perspective, that challenges orthodox wisdom, both Libertarian and Liberal.
Moreover, these books, being aimed directly at conservative leaning folks, are far more successful than a bunch of pundit hacks (such as Bob Beckel, or Kirsten Powers) because they aim to persuade a broad spectrum of the White middle and working class on specific areas. City Journal covers cultural issues because as Dalyrmple notes, it is critical part of politics and life. No less than Charles Murray is writing a book on the rate of illegitimacy in the White middle and working classes.
The reality is that cultural and economic wars waged by the combination of hereditary White elites and non-White groups against the White middle and working class, has produced an extraordinary series of books on everything from Immigration, to War, to Demographics, to Culture, to the legal system and Jihad. Milman and others may not like what these writers have to say, but their extraordinary influence on conservative thinking has been stunning.
Steyn, and Dalrymple, for example, have profoundly influenced Murray’s choice of book.
— Whiskey · Apr 11, 12:20 AM · #
Whiskey:
“These are all serious books, by serious writers”
[wipes tears from eyes] Thanks for the laugh, I needed one at the end of a pretty crappy day!
— binz · Apr 11, 03:14 AM · #
Whiskey those are dated first culture intellectuals….talking about talking about stuff in complete denial of empirical data. Those are all perfectly horrible books. I’m surprised you didnt cite Palin’s clumsy rewrite of her sorry campaign history.
The rise of the Third Culture is also contributing to the death of white christian conservatism.
Brockman—
In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.
All the books you cite Whiskey, come from dated first culture philosophy.
The past.
— matoko_chan · Apr 11, 04:23 AM · #
Yes, the conservatives have a closed mind. no breakthru there. That the other side of the aisle stands in sharp contrast was not discussed in the post. Let’s take some issues: abortion, gun control, marriage for gays, and Iraq just to name some. I would like to see evidence of real debate on either conservatives or liberals…these issue strike me more as litmus tests of loyalty than topics to be vetted. I submit you can’t be a member of either party and bring an open mind…you’ll be unincluded. This ugly dynamic can only have two outcomes: people who want honest debate over the polical economy will have to become independents or honest debate on issues within either party will be drowned by yelling from both extremes.
— Ed Anderson · Apr 11, 04:18 PM · #
Levin, in particular, is a retard.
Goldstein on Levin.
“To interject here, let me first say that “culture,” the way Levin seems to be using it, is tied to a kind of civic history, and is accorded a permanence — or, at least, a precedence — that, ontologically, may not exist in the way he seems to believe. That is to say, if culture is but a set of beliefs and practices, then once the beliefs and practices change, the culture has changed.
What Levin wants is to change the culture once again — to model US culture on a previous incarnation of that culture, one that he (rightly) notes is more in keeping with the originalist intent of those who founded the country. The distinction may seem a minor one, but it is worth pointing out: “culture” is fluid; and it is therefore best addressed by correctives in law designed to influence the direction of “culture.” Here, what Levin is going for is an appeal to a past culture as a model for a future culture he hopes to see embraced.”
Again, this a deep denial of how cultural evolution works.
There is no culture war….there is only an evolution of culture event, like glaciation or the extinction event at the K-T boundary. Levin and what passes for “intellectual conservatives” these days deny scientific empiricism in favor of some ridikkulous tribal magical thinking…..proof by volume we usta call it in undergrad. If you shout loud enough it makes it so.
Until conservatism recovers empiricism, it is simply doomed.
— matoko_chan · Apr 11, 05:10 PM · #
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— The Tight Pants · Apr 12, 07:57 PM · #
It seems strange that no one has brought up talk radio and fox news. The conservative movement is dominated not ideologues or the rich or politicians but by entertainers.
— jimmy · Apr 13, 05:07 AM · #
Crickets?
this all I have to say.
Reihan, this one’s for you.
review that Suderman you poseur.
— matoko_chan · Apr 13, 07:01 PM · #
“It seems strange that no one has brought up talk radio and fox news.”
No, what seems strange is that about three or four of you have now bumbled into this thread and said, “It seems strange that no one has mentioned talk radio and Fox,” yet none of you have noticed the others.
— Thomas · Apr 14, 04:59 AM · #
Decent post. But I have a few issues with it (albeit small ones):
- Blame Frum? Really? What Frum did isn’t without precedent at all. Non-interventionist Conservatives (primarily pre-WW1 with some still retaining major influence until post-WW2) have always had an uneasy (and sometimes outright hostile) relationship with Conservative Hawks, and once anticommunism became a cause celebre for the Conservative movement, non-interventionist Paleo-Conservatives were almost always marginalized and chastised by the Hawks (Who saw that sort of non-interventionism as dangerous). This is nothing new essentially.
- Blame Iraq? Yet again, not a very convincing example. Conservative hawks have been on the front lines challenging the “patriotism” and “loyalty” of their fellow Americans since at least the Korean War (If not before with regards to their insistence that ones anticommunist credentials were a gauge with which we could judge ones loyalty to the “American way of life”). To act as if this knee jerk reaction (and the ramifications of such thought, which, almost always lead to one shouting “stay the course” for fear that they may have been wrong about the threat said enemy posed) is something altogether new is, well, odd.
- The Conservative Movement was not born in the 50’s. I’m going to have side with the likes of Lichtman on this one and say the Conservative Movement assumed it’s MODERN variation in the 20’s (Notice I didn’t say it was “born” then, because Conservatism… and even modern Conservatism… isn’t an outlier. It, like liberalism, is part of a larger tradition that weaves together many different threads to create a semi-coherent world view).
— Blaine · Apr 16, 05:16 AM · #
As several other commenters have noted, I think the big explanation that you missed is the rise of the Religious Right in the Republican party. And it’s not even so much because of the religion per se. There are lots of varieties of religion that are tolerant and open to rational debate. But the type of fundamentalist religion that dominates a large section of the Republican Party is positively anti-Enlightenment in it’s outlook. It’s not just anti-liberal, at times it verges on being anti-modern.
— Jamey · Apr 17, 11:49 PM · #