Triumph and Tragedy
As I write this Liz Cheney, the scion of Reagan
Republicanism and what used to be the heartbeat of American conservatism, lost
her primary battle to a Trump acolyte in Wyoming. Simply out, the Republican
Party is no longer a conservative party, but rather a cult of personality
populist party. This is the end point of Matthew Continetti’s hundred-year
history of American conservatism. Continetti, now a fellow at the American
Enterprise Institute, has been a writer/activist on the conservative scene for
two decades and is the son-in-law of William Kristol, a leading neoconservative
and one of the foremost anti-Trumpers on the Right.
Continetti begins his history in the 1920’s when the
conservative Republican Party stood for protectionism, anti-immigration and
more or less and isolationist foreign policy. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it.
However, there is a major difference from today that Continetti doesn’t
mention. That is in the 1920’s conservatives were an optimistic bunch believing
in the new technologies of automobiles, electrification, radio, aircraft, and talking
pictures that was underpinning an economic boom. Thus, when the Great
Depression came, it was truly a shock turning optimism into pessimism about the
future of the country under the New Deal.
As a result, conservatives stayed in the political
wilderness for years as the Democratic Party and liberal Republicans dominated
the scene. However, beneath the surface a disparate group of conservatives
rallied around anticommunism and the leadership of William Buckley and his
National Review. Elitist to the core Buckley and crew became the backbone of
conservative revival, but beneath the surface their remained vestiges of
racism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism. Those would resurface many years
later.
When liberalism cracked up under the strains of the
Vietnam War and the stagflation of the 1970’s, conservatives were ready to
seize the mantle of power. Instead of the dour conservatism of say, 1940’s Bob
Taft, conservatives were led by the sunny optimism of Ronald Reagan who offered
economic growth at home and the defeat of communism abroad. Reagan united
social, economic, and foreign policy conservatives under one banner. However,
the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and with that the unity of the conservative
movement fell.
In fact, one year later, in a forerunner to Trump, Pat
Buchanan mounted a populist challenge to President George H.W. Bush and soon
Ruch Limbaugh would dominate the airwaves of talk radio. For a time, the conservative establishment
held these forces in check, but failures in the Iraq War and the Great
Financial Crisis destroyed its legitimacy. All the while a populist revolt was
brewing against trade, immigration, and foreign wars that Continetti and his
intellectual buddies in the think tanks and K-Street were oblivious to. They
were too busy talking to each other rather than going out into the country to
visit the dive bars and fast-food joints of the Midwest and the South. They
soon would have discovered that there was a revolt brewing against the
know-it-all coastal elites of both parties who in the words of Hillary Clinton,
called them “deplorables.” I hate to
break it to Continetti, but all too many conservatives felt the same way.
Continetti’s goal is to blend historical conservatism
to the new populism. My guess is that train has passed the station, at least
for now. When CPAC features Hungarian autocrat Victor Orban as a speaker, you
know the world has changed. Thus, it looks like that conservatives will once
again be spending long years in the wilderness. If it is to recover it will
have to come with an optimistic vision similar to what happened in the 1920’s
and the 1980’s.
For the full Amazon URL see: Triumph and Tragedy (amazon.com)
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