This election ought to once and for all teach conservatives thatRonald Reagan is dead, and he’s not coming back.
Who lost conservatism? The first instinct among shell-shocked andinfuriated partisans will be to blame anybody but their own faction forthis historical repudiation. Look to the talk-radio mob to set uponconservative elites who failed to stay loyally on side, especially inthe matter of Sarah Palin’s candidacy. This will do nobody any good andwill delay the necessary repentance, rethinking and rebuilding.The right has developed a vicious habit of tagging any dissentingconservative as a closet liberal. This folly has constructed anairtight bubble around the GOP and conservative leaders, not onlydepriving conservatism of constructive criticism from within its ranks,but also reinforcing the rank-and-file’s worst instincts. If theelection results didn’t convince Republicans that they couldn’t affordto throw people out — especially their intellectuals and people whorespect intellect — then their ignorance is invincible.
This election ought to once and for all teach conservatives thatRonald Reagan is dead, and he’s not coming back. The intellectualpoverty of the GOP primary debates showed itself by the candidates’ritualistic invocation of Reagan’s name, as if saying it often enoughwould compensate for the lack of new ideas among the sorry bunch.
Reagan and his popular brand of conservatism arose out of aparticular set of historical circumstances — specifically, thechallenge of Soviet communism abroad and welfare-statism at home. It’sa new day with new challenges, and the intellectually exhausted rightis not up to meeting them.
Conservatives must return to the philosophical sources of ourtradition and reinterpret its insights and truths for the world we livein now. Ideas really do have consequences as, obviously, does the lackof same. Yes, conservatives have to oppose the Obama Democrats whenthey overreach, but if the only response conservatives offer isdefensive and obstreperous, they will not soon recover.
Conservatives will go nowhere until the right owns up to thefailures of the Bush years. They were chiefly a failure of competenceand a corruption of professed ideals. They were also a failure ofideology. In particular:
–The idea that the American military is an omnipotent tool forspreading liberal democracy died in Iraq and Afghanistan. The right’sromanticization of militarism, and its crusading pieties about theuniversality of democratic values, are done.
–The dogmatic conviction that the globalized free market is capableof regulating itself for the greater good of society is a spectacularlycostly shibboleth, as even Alan Greenspan, the high priest of thisreligion, confessed recently.
–The GOP’s knee-jerk hostility to environmental concerns is notonly a betrayal of conservative tradition but also costs Republicanscredibility with young voters. Similarly, though it’s tough for socialconservatives like me to admit it, we’ve lost the gay marriage battle,especially among the young. We’re going to have to come to some sort ofaccommodation with it to protect religious liberty.
The good news is that Obama may be a liberal, but he did notcampaign as one and is too smart to govern as one. America remainslargely a center-right country, which means there are opportunities fornew iterations of conservatism. All eyes should be on Louisiana’sbrilliant young governor, Bobby Jindal,** as the one national Republicanleft standing who can shore up the fragments against conservatism’spresent ruin and possibly reverse the tide.
Out of loss, new victories can arise. Modern American conservatismbegan with the crushing defeat of Arizona’s Barry Goldwater in the 1964presidential race. That laid the groundwork for an emergingconservative movement, one that would not fully arrive until the Reaganpresidency set the political agenda for nearly 30 years.
It is poetic, even poignant, that conservatism ended its remarkablerun with the failed 2008 presidential effort of the Arizona senator whosucceeded Goldwater. It took 16 years to get from Mr. Goldwater toReagan.
The duration of conservatism’s exile from power depends on how long its civil war lasts — and who wins it.
• Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorialcolumnist. Readers may write to him at the Dallas Morning News,Communications Center, Dallas, Texas 75265; e-mail: rdreher@dallasnews.com.
** Ronald Reagan and Bobby Jindal is hardly what this nation needs to get on the right track, at least toward a semblance of national sanity. The remaining dominant population demographic needs identity and purpose more than faux patriotism to attain real nationhood. While it still has the resources, an awakened European American population asserting paleoconservative positions within a traditional framework in addition to far sighted practicality can easily overcome our current fiscal and social woes, not to mention decimate its potential enemies in fair elections. — Ed.