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Sunday, November 05, 2006

Dusk Falls on "the Conservative Era"

Elections aren't until Tuesday, but we're already hearing "pre-mortems" on the vaunted Republican Revolution that led to GOP takeover of Congress in 1994. The reflexively cautious CNN has been running hour-long segments on "Broken Government" and "What Went Wrong with the Right," where rightist luminaries such as Grover Norquist and Bruce Bartlet explain why the GOP deserves its imminent and ignominious implosion. Even reliably-red cable news hosts such as Joe Scar have gotten into the feeding frenzy. And, in a sign of GOPocalypse, George Will has actually written cogent columns this week, suggesting--without a trace of that unhinged quality he's cultivated ever since the political earthquake of 1992--that George Allen is running a disastrous and demagogic campaign against the vastly superior Jim Webb in Virginia. If that weren't enough, Vanity Fair has just released a story on the "neoconservatives" where Richard Perle, Ken "Cakewalk" Adelman, and David Frum complain that the Bush administartion is filled with morons and milquetoasts, confused incompetents who just didn't know how to listen. Amen, my brothers. Too bad you weren't "in the room" back in the day. You were? G-Oops!

I don't know how these elections are going to turn out. My guess would be a Dem House (+25 pickup for D's) and a GOP Senate (+4 D's), both by small margins. Your guess is as good (and probably better) than mine. Frances knows the exact answer, but she's apparently not telling.

Horserace aside, I've been trying to think about the larger meaning of the GOPocalypse in light of modern American history. Someday, I expect that historians will refer to our time period as "the conservative era," much as the 1820s and 30s were "the Jacksonian era," the 1870s-90s were "the Gilded Age," and the 1890s-1910s were "the progressive era." Indeed, the era through which we have been living is a convenient bookend for the twentieth century, beginning as it did with the Progressives, a movement to which conservatism provides a mirror, as its inverted reflection. Both movements developed, at least in part, as middle-class idealists and populist radicals jockeyed to mold inchoate forces of public restlessness and discontent with the prevailing establishment. In each era, the reigning movement drove politics in both parties simultaneously (if not equally), and you could make a case that the most practically successful president of each era came from the less-naturally hospitable party: TR the progressive Republican, Clinton the conservative Democrat.

In the MSM, the most common Prog-Con comparison we get comes in the frequent--if confused--claim (made, for example, in the CNN shows mentioned above) that George W. Bush is pursuing a "Wilsonian" foreign policy. The heart of the claim comes from the Bush administration rhetoric about "promoting democracy" abroad, although this is the least plausible connection between the movements. Unlike Wilson, who promoted election reform and industrial democritization at home, Bush has never believed in "democracy" per se, as both the 2000 election and his consistent scorn for democratic norms demonstrates (reasoned discourse, government transparency, etc.). His use of that rhetorical ploy to defend the Iraq War was a post hoc marketing change, never an underlying rationale, a point that Frum, Perle, et al. have been trying in futility to make--for their own absolution. Unlike Wilson, who was an internationalist, a multilateralist, and a reluctant warrior, Bush is a warmongering jingoist who has consistently scorned the global community. The idea that Bush, who made John Bolton his UN ambassador, could be the proper heir to Wilson, who spent all his remaining capital fighting for a League of Nations, is frankly obscene.

Nonetheless, there are other (better) parallels. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Age of Reform (1955), Richard Hofstadter writes that,

The Progressive mind, I have said, was preeminently a Protestant mind; and even though much of its strength was in the cities, it inherited the moral traditions of rural evangelical Protestantism. The Progressives were still freshly horrified by phenomena we now resignedly consider indigenous to urban existence. However prosperous they were, they lived in the midst of all the iniquities that the agrarian myth had taught them to expect of urban life, and they refused to accept them calmly. Here it was that a most important aspect of the Protestant personality came into play: its ethos of personal responsibility (204).

I'm struck by how much of this description (e.g., its moral anti-urbanism) could apply to the conservative movement, at least as it came to understand itself in the 1970s and 1980s, a time when liberals routinely seemed to reject personal responsibility in the name of social guilt and nannyish government. We might also note that the evangelical strain in the "Protestant conscience" gave both Progs and Cons a deontological orientation, the kind of moralism that expresses itself in self-righteousness and categorical imperatives. Of course, the differences here are also profound. When the Progs championed "personal responsibility" they meant for the problems of society, not simply for your own personal material and spiritual well-being. Whereas progressivism made its individualism altruistic, conservatism made its individualism narcissistic.

As a result, the conservative movement can claim few if any of the accomplishments of the progressives. Its idealism was almost immediately captured and corrupted by the imperatives of American business. Appropriately, given its self-obsessions, the corruptions its ascendency has revealed--Enron, Abramoff, Ney, Cunningham, DeLay, Foley, even Clinton--have almost always been it own. Similiarly, whereas the progressives were able to create systematic institutional reform (income tax, direct election of Senate, etc.) since they saw the individual conscience as working within an interconnected society, conservativism has exposed only the endless personal failings of its practitioners, as Ted Haggard's humiliating fall from grace this week richly illustrates.

Hofstadter reports that the progressive movement collapsed from public exhaustion over WWI, and that, "by pinning America's role in the war so exclusively on high moral considerations. . . and by linking the foreign crusade as intimately as possible to the Progressive values and the Progressive language, [Wilson] was unintentionally insuring that the reaction against Progressivism and moral idealism would be as intense as it could be" (278). Hard not to hear echoes of Bush's war in these lines, especially when, on the eve of the election, it's Iraq that threatens to kill the conservative majority. The movement too?, we might ask.

Just as the Prog-Con mirror reflects unflatteringly on the latter's domestic achievements, so will be the case in foreign policy. As unpopular as it became after just two years, WWI was a stunning victory for the US, both in terms of immediate result and its long-term power implications. Not so Iraq, a narcissistic misadventure if there ever was one. Wilson's diplomacy, if overly triumphalist, was also scrupulously self-sacrificing. Bush's relentless quest to use the Iraq War for partisan and special interest advantage has resulted in a very undiplomatic defeat. The Dems lost everything in 1920, as Progressivism gave way to "the Dollar Decade." Even the New Deal, at least as Hofstadter describes it--practical, experimental, anti-ideological--was as much repudiation of Progressivism as culmination. Where, we are left to wonder, will the pending collapse of our era's reigning orthodoxy leave us?

4 Comments:

At 4:52 PM, Blogger Number Three said...

How was the First World War a stunning victory for the United States?

(1) The war ended before the U.S. fully deployed to the continent, with a German surrender precipitated by a failed offensive spurred on by the threat of U.S. full deployment. So no major U.S. victories on the battlefield.

(2) Wilson was unable to achieve most of his important goals ar Versailles, where the Allies went in for vengence and reparations, as opposed to resolving the problems that had caused the war in the first place. The failure of the Allies at Versailles to address those underlying issues, and their punitive measures against Germany, created the conditions in Germany that made possible someone like Hitler's ascent to power. So no major diplomatic success.

(3) Let us not forget that the Soviet Union, our former Cold War rival, emerged out of the chaos of the war. Limited U.S. and Allied intervention in the Civil War there didn't produce any net positives for the U.S.

I think that if history has shown us anything, it's that no one won the First World War. It's arguable that several European nations have never recovered, demographically, from the waste of human life that it entailed. All those dead and maimed soldiers (and civilians) certainly didn't win. The war, and its aftermath, led to the rise of the Soviet Union, one of the most evil regimes in human history, and laid the groundwork for Nazi Germany, another of the most evil regimes in human history.

 
At 5:50 PM, Blogger Frances said...

I'm not ready to proclaim the dusk of the conservative movement yet. I wish I could. The tiredness of the GOP's campaign this midterm, rehashing the same old themes (taxes, terrorism) from their successful campaigns of years past, makes the whole thing seem moribund, entirely separate from the polling numbers we've seen over the past months.

But the GOP has shown significant gains in the most recent polls, both in the generic ballot and in key races (Montana, Rhode Island, Maryland).

Considering the assumptions about Democratic victories that our media overlords have been making of late--e.g., the past-tenses used in the CNN special TMcD references--Wednesday morning we may all talking about how the Republicans, yet again, exceeded expectations.

 
At 10:04 AM, Blogger tenaciousmcd said...

#3, please note the phrase "German surrender." The reason the Allies overreached at Versailles was directly related to the fact (and hence public perception) that they had WON. The US was seen as having broken with its history of isolationism, far more dramatically than it had in the Spanish-American War, and to decisive effect in a massive European conflict. And I don't see how the Russian withdrawal from the war into its own revolution reflects somehow as OUR defeat, since it wasn't directly related to American war aims or actions (not to mention that that USSR later became our indispensible ALLIES in WWII). Blaming Hitler on Wilson is bizarre, as if a statesman is automatically responsible for the radicals who pop up on the OPPOSITE side of the political spectrum in OPPOSING countries years later, as if, for example, Jim Crow was all Lincoln's fault.

In retrospect, the post-WWI settlement merely pushed back and even exacerbated many of the problems that had been at its roots. But I don't see how you can deny that (a) the US and its allies won the war, and (b) the internat. power and prestige of the US greatly rose as a result, kicking off "the American century."

Frances, I'm not ready to write off conservatism either, but that collapse will occur whether or not the 2006 elections tighten up. Do you really expect Iraq and the economy and the debt and the political atmosphere to IMPROVE over the next two years if the GOP holds Congress? (Not to mention the parade of scandals!) For me, the more difficult questions are, first, what a "return to normalcy" would look like, since political obliviousness and business-mania are the usual default positions once a movement dies in the US (as in the 1880s or 1920s). So what happens when the reform "movement" was, paradoxically enough, an ideological drive for exactly those conditions? Second, as the NDeal/Prog link shows, even if a movement dies, it may soon reemerge in a very different form while heading in a similar ideological direction. The Progs set the tone for much of the 20th C., even as they crashed and burned. Will historians one day say the same thing about the cons and the 21st?

 
At 9:44 PM, Blogger Number Three said...

So you can't blame Lincoln for Jim Crow, but the existence of Jim Crow, for more than fifty years, means that the Civil War cannot be described as some kind of rousing success for freedom, justice, and the American way of life. You can win the war and lose the peace, as I've heard said once or twice. Even, it appears, after a "stunning" military victory.

The use of the term "victory" implies, or, actually, more than implies, the achievement of objectives. My (deeper) point is that militarist triumphalism tends to obscure the negative inherent in resorting to violence, on a mass scale.

I'm not sure I blamed Wilson for Hitler. In fact, this is what I wrote: "The failure of the Allies at Versailles to address those underlying issues, and their punitive measures against Germany, created the conditions in Germany that made possible someone like Hitler's ascent to power. So no major diplomatic success." I would argue that this isn't bizarre. It's pretty much the conventional wisdom.

Again, the point about the Soviet Union is that, in calculating whether the First World War was a net plus or net negative for the United States, one has to consider the Soviet Union. It's hard to argue that things would have turned out the way they did, in Russia, had the First World War not happened. We just don't know. But the fact that we were left with totalitarian Soviets as superpower rivals for about forty years . . . I'd just say, remember that.

Here's the problem. I object to something you actually said: The First World War was a stunning victory for the United States. Indeed, here are your words: "WWI was a stunning victory for the US, both in terms of immediate result and its long-term power implications." Then you argue with things that I didn't say, like saying that I am "bizarrely" blaming Wilson for Hitler. Wilson's failure at Versailles has to be taken into consideration in figuring whether that failure, and the failure of the Allies, in general, to take a long-term view, negatively affected the United States. That is true. But I don't say, Wilson did X, and X led inexorably to Y, and Y = Hitler.

Or, as if I object to the historically accurate statement that the U.S. and its allies won the First World War. (I'm not so sure about international prestige, given what followed Wilson.)

My problem with the "stunning victory" line of argument is that it is too militaristic and, even worse, too easy. Organized, systematic violence on the part of the State is something to be avoided, whenever possible, not something to be celebrated, even when it is necessary--and it is necessary, sometimes. I'm not a pacifist. Still. Let's not forget the maimed, mutilated, and destroyed human lives that underpin that "stunning" victory. That includes the poor grunts on the other side, the guys who have to bear the brunt of "shock and awe" because they are made to, often against their own will.

If you want to object to that, be my guest.

 

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