Thread: The Attempted Murder Of Conservatism

The Attempted Murder Of Conservatism

By THOMAS MCARDLE
Posted 10/02/2009 07:29 PM ET

The editors of two of the country's most powerful publications, conducting a gloat-fest over the corpse of Reaganism last week, described their idea of true conservatives: Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham asked a remarkable question of Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, in New York's Greenwich Village Wednesday evening: "Isn't Barack Obama the most significant Burkean in American politics today?"

"Burkean" refers to Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British parliamentarian who sympathized with the freedom-loving revolution in America while vehemently opposing the anarchistic revolution in France.

Tanenhaus, author of an impressive biography of ex-Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, has just published "The Death of Conservatism," accusing today's conservatives of perverting Burke's vision.

Meacham and Tanenhaus provided a glimpse of the strange planet on which America's dominant journalists live.

According to Tanenhaus, "the engine of industrial capitalism" causes more upheaval than do leftist radicals.

Tanenhaus called ex-President Clinton "a classically conservative figure" and charged that the muscular conservatism of the predominant wing of the Republican Party is "in opposition to much of what America does."

While merciless toward the right, the two were nearly servile regarding Obama. Meacham praised the president's restraint in showing "no interest in gun control or universal health care."

He apparently hasn't seen the YouTube clips of then-Sen. Obama endorsing a single-payer health system and an incremental strategy toward arriving at it. Nor has he seemed to notice last year's Supreme Court ruling rendering federal gun control unconstitutional.

"I've never seen anything like Obama in Philadelphia," Tanenhaus gushed of Obama's March 2008 speech on race. Candidate Obama was trying to distance himself from his longtime pastor, the anti-Semitic, anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But Tanenhaus said it proved he could "penetrate the minds of those who would dislike him or disagree with him."

For all the supposedly deep analysis of the history of political thought on show last week, Tanenhaus revealed that he thinks Edmund Burke was Scottish. (He was born and educated in Dublin.)

And he did indeed agree with Meacham that the man who taught the leftist agitation methods of Saul Alinsky "seems like a Burkean figure today."

On the other hand, to Tanenhaus most influential modern conservative writers and thinkers, like Charles Krauthammer, Michael Barone and even the late William F. Buckley Jr., of whom Tanenhaus is writing a biography, are not true Burkean conservatives but extremist "revanchists."

The Burke argument fails because the latter half of the 20th century saw a governmental and social revolution take place.

The resulting Buckley-led counter-revolution brought Ronald Reagan to power, reduced and reformed taxes, revitalized the U.S. economy, won the Cold War and obstructed the Warren Era radicalism of the federal courts.

Why veer away from that successful program and instead follow the accommodationist "conservatism" of New York Times columnist David Brooks and former editor of the liberal New Republic Andrew Sullivan, with their "sophisticated, nuanced, complex arguments," as Tanenhaus advised last week?

As Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Piereson wrote in his New Criterion review, the Tanenhaus book demands a conservatism "that will accept its role as subordinate to the dominant liberal tradition in American life."

Dr. George H. Nash, author of "The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945" and the upcoming "Reappraising the Right: the Past and Future of American Conservatism," told Investor's Business Daily: "Tanenhaus is reminiscent of New Deal liberals like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the 1950s,who branded opponents of liberalism's recent triumphs as the 'radical right.'"

"Conservatism in America," Nash says, "has repeatedly been proactive, dynamic and not reclusive. It has rarely been reducible to passive, defeatist accommodation to an uncongenial status quo."

But there is little limit to the radical changes in society Tanenhaus expects "true conservatives" to swallow.

On his book's last page, he argues that "conservatives should savor the embrace of 'family values' by the nation's homosexual population, who seek the sanctuary — and responsibilities — of marriage and child-rearing."

Who can imagine an endorsement of that from Edmund Burke, who wrote "I love a manly, moral, regulated liberty" and who insisted that without "morality and religion ... liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long"?

For conservatives to serve as chauffeurs to liberals, tapping the brakes occasionally as the nation speeds towards socialism, would mean never recapturing the imagination of Americans — and never returning to real power.

• McArdle is an IBD senior

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Calling Clinton or Obama conservatives is like calling a duck anti-water.

Conservatives are people that believe in our Constitution, as is.