George Packer's article in The New Yorker, "The Fall of Conservatism," in reviewing Rick Perlstein’s new history Nixonland, offers insights into the directions that political conservatism may next go.
Packer sees modern American conservatism as rooted in divisiveness, in the effort to peel away layer by layer the New Deal coalition of voters that had endured through the early 1960's. He writes that Nixon's administration adopted a strategy of "working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few."
As an example, he cites first-hand evidence from Pat Buchanan:
Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum—“A little raw for today,” he warned—that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote.
The goal was nothing less than a great conservative movement that would take its place as the most recent in a string of grand political movements in US history, "Jacksonian Democracy, Republican industrialism, and New Deal liberalism."
Interestingly, George W. Bush while running for President in 2000, suggested this kind of politics of polarization was past. Instead, his administration wallowed in it.
Within hours of the Supreme Court decision that ended the disputed Florida recount [in George W. Bush's favor,] Dick Cheney met with a group of moderate Republican senators, including Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island. According to Chafee’s new book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President,... the Vice-President-elect gave the new order of battle: “We would seek confrontation on every front.... The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us....” Its conduct of the war on terror broke with sixty years of relatively bipartisan and multilateralist foreign policy.
Packer's summary of conservatism's trajectory is that it is a movement that
Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.
.....
Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
Packer interviews several prominent political conservatives who clearly see evidence that the majority of American voters are sick of such politics of division as the Republican Party has practiced for decades. Given President Bush's low approval rating and Democratic Party successes in the 2006 midterm elections and recent special elections, they might be correct.
But that doesn't mean conservatism is doomed. It needs to acknowledge "wage stagnation, inequality, health care, [and] global warming" as central issues and not simply cede them to the Democrats. There are signs that more thoughtful conservative politicians and commentators are doing just that.
What is more, there are weaknesses in the new Democratic coalition that Senator Barack Obama symbolizes. According to Packer, a principle weakness is Democrats' inability to recognize that for many Americans "the economic condition of the country as inextricable from its moral condition." Packer suggests Obama address the question of perceived liberal elitism "as frontally as he spoke about race," to do as FDR did when he--as an East Coast patrician--drew Midwestern farmers and Appalachian miners to himself: don't pander; instead, admit that he is not like white swing voters are, but then explain how that doesn't matter.
(Photo: Barry Goldwater accepting the Republican Party's nomination for President in 1964.)
