Whither the Conservative Movement?

When a Republican House leader says the GOP should model itself after the Taliban, when conservative activists are holding organizational seminars to teach Saul Alinsky's and Eurocommunist Antonio Gramsci's theories, something is dangerously amiss. The secret Christian fundamentalists group The Family eulogizes Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot and talk show hosts liken Fascism with Communism and claim Barack Obama is like Hitler. Somehow I am missing the democracy and the conservatism in all this.

To help understand what's going on, conservative Sam Tenenhaus, the biographer of Whittacker Chambers, has just published a book-long essay "The Death of Conservatism"(Random House, $17.00) where he claims the conservative movement has been hijacked by "revanchists"who distrust government and society and find themselves at war with America itself. These people, he claims, are "profoundly and defiantly unconservative" in their arguments and ideas, iin their tactics and strategies and above all in their vision. He calls how modern conservatism grew out of intellectuals such as James Burnham, Wittacker Chambers and Bill Buckley, Jr. and how at a critical juncture they had to set the boundaries where the extremists had to be neutralized.

Sam Tenenhaus recalls the days when Bill Buckley,Jr. published an entire issue of the National Review reading the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement. At that moment, the Republican Party was at its historic low-point of 25%--which is about where it is now. As I've written before, the John Birch Society called Ike a Communist sympathizer and ran campaigns against his cabinet. Some of us remember their view that fluoride treatment of water was a Communist plot. Buckley saw that their paranoid politics was destructive and would hinder any growth of a serious conservative movement. He solicited and received the support of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and John Tower from Texas. Tower read Buckley's writings about the Society into the Congressional Record as a clear signal to Republicans to step away from the Society. Some of us recall the photo of Sarah Palin reading the John Birch magazine during the campaign.

The problem is there are no adults today in the conservative movement, who will denounce the proliferation of the paranoid fringe of birthers,deathers, tenthers and vaxers (those opposing the swine flue vaccination). And there is even a more profound problem--the total absence of any belief in the common welfare or the public good. Old-fashioned conservatives debated liberals about the "politics of stability" and did not dream of destablizing the American government.

How did it get to this point? Tanenhaus takes a stab at it by locating the beginnings of the end when conservatives started attacking Ronald Reagan at the end of his second term. This was then followed by their defection from George Bush because of his raising taxes. Then Tenenhaus sees the radicalization of the conservative movement with the emergence of Newt Gingrich and his bid to take over the House. By then, conservatives simply abandoned any belief in the virtue of government and its power to adjust to changing conditions.

But conservatives may have let the situation get far beyond them. Max Blumenthal in Republican Gomorrah: Inside The Movement That Shattered The Party (Nation Books, $25.00) tells the sorry and seedy tale of how the evangelical movement took over the Republican Party. If anything the tales of Governor Sanford and Senator Ensign are rather mild compared to the depravity of the theocrats trying to run the party. Blumenthal outlines how Sarah Palin was the absolutely natural and logical choice for John McCain to pick since he had to appease this dominating element of the party. He warns that Palin's backers will be the major elements trying to undermine President Obama. His investigative reporting has some delicious bits on how Palin started running for President in 2012 at John McCain's expense and extensive material on the evangelicals difficult problems with their own gays and those in the general society. So if you hear people refer to "Real Americans"--run for cover. It's the guys in Blumenthal's reporting.