Impotent, old, rich white men shout at clouds

I can't wait until Wednesday when 80 prominent conservative "thinkers" will unveil "the Mount Vernon Statement" in homage of George Washington. The organizers of this historic event bill it as the next generation of the 1960 "Sharon Statement", which was produced at Bill Buckley's house in Connecticut by a group of young conservatives. The "Sharon Statement" served to define the conservative movement for years.

To appeal to the new generation,the headliners of the Mount Vernon Statement are well-known conservative foundation "welfare queens" Ed Feulner, who receives several times the salary of the President of the United States as the President of the non-profit Heritage Foundation, former Attorney General under Ronald Reagan and former head of the commission on pornography Ed Meese, Media Research Center leader Brent Bozell, leading American Wahhabist and President of Americans for Tax Reform Grover Norquist, Christian Right leader Tony Perkins of the Family Research Center and American Conservative Union head David Keene, who puts on CPAC every year. Almost all of them now qualify for Social Security and Medicare. All they are missing is David Horowitz, the 71-year old veteran of Ramparts magazine and a born-again conservative. This is a very exciting line-up, which would qualify as the Old Timers' Game.

One of the intriguing elements of the original "Sharon Statement" and Bill Buckley's role in building a conservative mvement was the exclusion of the John Birch Society. Bill Buckley, with the permission of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, wrote a long manifesto against the John Birch Society and had it read into the Congressional record with the approval of Senator Tower. The diatribe was then widely distributed to alert conservatives that the John Birch Society was beyond the pale.

That's what makes this crew's association with the Sharon Statement intriguing. David Keene's CPAC this year is being co-sponsored by the John Birch Society for the first time I remember. It's probably the promise of funding from the Koch Industries, whose family members always funded the John Birchers in the past. Buckley's original statement was also a salvo against the old conservatives like the Taft Republicans. It was a young man's challenge to the Old Guard. Here is the Old Guard, very old in fact. Are they just declaring their position as the leaders of American conservatism or are they in fact actually interested in drawing anyone new to their ranks? I guess you would have to pass a class, race and age test.

A coalition of tea party groups and right-wing activists will be using Keene's CPAC this year to support a guiding document of their own--The Contract from America. Semantically, I'm not sure whether this is a secessionist document, or a message from "real Americans". And the old ambulance chaser himself Newt Gingrich is following up his 1994 Contract with America , with another "New Contract with America" in the hopes that his student Eric Cantor can recapture the House, reliving Newt's glory days before he fell because of a sex scandal.

All this nonsense only underscores what I have said before that the conservative nomenklatura is too fossilized to change. Reminiscing about the Gipper is fine but two younger generations will have no clue what they are talking about. Intrestingly, all but Meese turned against Ronald Reagan in his last two years because of his changing stance to the Soviet Union and his desire for the reduction in nuclear arms. None of these men have produced an original idea in years and now they sure retire to their porches and shout at people on their lawns.

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.