This is the last CPAC post, and it has been the longest in coming 1) because it required the most amount of digestion/reflection, and 2) because I've been really busy. A good amount of this post was spurred on by
Mark Henrie's
ISI-sposnored talk on Saturday morning of CPAC entitled "Conservatism 101."
He used as a branching off point George Nash's three divisions of the conservative movement and the books that define them (from Nash's excellent
History of the Conservative Movement in America Since 1945). Those three divisions are libertarians, spurred on by F.A. Hayek's
The Road to Serfdom, anti-communists, pointing at Whittaker Chambers'
Witness, and the traditionalists, who found inspiration in Russell Kirk's
The Conservative Mind, and Richard M. Weaver's
Ideas Have Consequences.
Now obviously, there can be great conflict between all of these three groups, though they have natural points of convergence. For example, the libertarians and the traditionalists would have both prefer to have a non-interventionist foreign policy, and the anti-communists wanted to fight communism at home and abroad. However, all three parts came together, getting Barry Goldwater the nomination in 1968 and Reagan the presidency in 1980.
The reason for this uniting was that they all believed that the West was in crisis. The anti-communists feared the growing power of the USSR, and its further expansion into Europe and Asia. The libertarians feared the expansion of the state in Western Europe, which they believed would lead to totalitarianism. The motivating events for traditionalists, according to Weaver where William of Ockham, the French Revolution, and the rise of Nazism in Germany. The traditionalists found it appalling that Nazism had come rise in Germany, one of the most politically advanced countries in the West.
Conservatives genuinely believed that they were on the "losing side of history." They firmly believed, as common wisdom both inside and outside academia, that the inevitable victory of the USSR was, well inevitable. Henrie said in his talk that if someone had asked him 5 minutes before the Berlin Wall fell if the Soviet Union would collapse, he would have laughed at such a ludicrous idea. (More on this thinking in John O'Sullivan's new book
The President, the Pope and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World; and
a great review of the book over at Albion's Seedlings)
In fact, the fundamental event that places the conservative movement at a crossroads is the fall of the USSR. This allowed the rise of Neoonservatism and the New Right (mainly the Evangelical Protestants). Henrie described Neocons as "hard Wilsonians," who rediscovered the market in the 1970s, and wished to use market-based government-led solutions to domestic problems. It also caused conservatives to re-think this tragic sense of history.
The most successful way to govern the conservative movement, a task most successfully accomplished by Reagan, was to effectively partition these groups into separate spheres of influence. The libertarians were given domestic economic policy, the traditionalists domestic social policy, and the anti-communists foreign policy. In this way, Reagan seems to be the climactic figure for the conservative movement. After all, he defeated the Soviets and is mentioned about once every half minute at CPAC.
The election of Reagan and the eventual defeat of the USSR does not mean the conservative movement was successful, nor does it mean that they even set out on these goals. In fact, the movement has been challenged by defeat after defeat, and if the actions of the 2000-2006 Republican Congress and the first Bush Administration is any indication, conservatives generally deal better with defeat than with success.
Well, what about the 1990s? According to Henrie, conservatives who were in college during the 1990s saw Pat Buchanan as the savior of the movement, and the logical successor to Reagan. Buchanan was wildly popular within the movement, but it seems that now his diehard followers are seen as black sheep to a point.
It seems that now, this having been my third CPAC, Newt Gingrich is trying to position himself as the Reagan/Buchanan for this decade, and perhaps the next as well. He wants to be the godfather for this generation of collegiate conservatives, and seems to turn out some of the largest crowds at CPAC on a regular basis. I'm not sure if this is a good thing. Gingrich has a lot of ideas (the man is almost his own think tank) but they're not always
good ideas. Especially given that he seems to speak mostly in rhetoric.
This is where conservatives face one of the two big crises of today. One, there is no charismatic leader to coalesce around, and conservatives on the whole seem less educated about their intellectual roots than the used to be, buying into sets of ideas that at one point were much more systemic than they are today.
Many conservatives on campuses today can point to what they are opposed to more readily than what they are
for. This presents a challenge in finding that leader. It should be someone who is well rooted in the intellectual tradition, someone who makes policy decisions based on that tradition rather than from an abstracted set of ideas. This is what has happened with President Bush. He is "conservative" in that he employs conservatives and seems to be a neocon, but is not rooted in the tradition of Robert Taft or Ronald Reagan.
The second crisis is the challenge that Islamic terror poses to the country. Many of us see this as a "clash of civilizations," but Henrie more aptly defines it has a clash of civilization and barbarism. Henrie suggests that conservatives have lost the tragic sense of the future, but some, like
Mark Steyn, certainly retain it about this conflict.
Islam is not a product of the left, like communism, socialism, and fascism. They are progressive in that they appear after democratic and republican forms of government. Henrie asserts that Islam is of the right, though really not an ideology at all, because of its inherit mysticism.
The Cold War and World War II were conflicts that spanned the world, but were fundamentally still of the West. Russia is one of the great western nations, which had gone astray in 1917. Because of this, neocons have come to believe that liberal democracy is inevitable in the Middle East just as it has established itself in the West. This is flawed because Islam is not of the West.
In it's mild forms, Islam has the grounds to be a well reasoned religion like Judaism or Christianity, but has deeply cut off it's philosophical interpretations of the Qur'an. Thus the radical elements, like
Wahabbism, are able to assert itself at the forefront and radicalize many Muslims. And really it isn't the Muslims in the Middle East that are poised to bring the West to its knees, but Muslims now of Europe, where radical mosques are able to attract disaffected second generation Muslims.
I don't have a solution to either of these crises, as I am looking for someone to lead us forward, especially in 2008. This is the state of conservatism as I see it: looking for direction. Hopefully we will find one traveling from the right place.
Labels: Conservaism, CPAC
