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?