Dionne, me, and the consensus school

I see that E.J. Dionne's embrace of what is known among American historiographers as the "consensus school" has become as fragile as mine:

[U]ntil recently conservatives operated within America’s long consensus that accepted a market economy as well as a robust role for a government that served the common good. American politics is now roiled because this consensus is under the fiercest attack it has faced in more than 100 years.

Such things cause shifts in historical perspective. The relatively peaceful and prosperous postwar era--that in which the consensus school thrived, and to which I have always been intellectually if not anachronistically wedded--helped to instill in the chroniclers of American history their view of American history. Think of it as classically Eisenhoweresque: we were, and always had been, one big family of millions, replete with every family's heated squabbles and bubbling discontents; but by and large we got along--we compromised, we cooperated, we all, in our own little ways, accepted the realization of the American Dream as a worthwhile hope to pursue. The consensus school was far from unimpeachable, but that was OK. Reconciling its flaws kept a lot of historians employed--and published.

At any rate, it is obvious that this is also the school out of which came Dionne. And he has a question:

So why has this consensus unraveled?

To which he answers:

Modern conservatism’s rejection of its communal roots [once grounded in the American consensus] is a relatively recent development. It can be traced to a simultaneous reaction against Bush’s failures and Barack Obama’s rise.

But (and historians, like lawyers, love to say "But") here we encounter the additionally tricky question of periodization. That is, can conservatism's wholesale philosophical collapse really be compartmented into such a narrowly recent slice of history?--that pre-Bush and even throughout Bush there was "conservatism," yet post-Bush, there wasn't?

I'm skeptical of Dionne's op-ed tidiness, which I won't pursue critically, since I'm also sure that in his book on the subject (Our Divided Political Heart--which I haven't yet read), he has taken advantage of greater explanatory room to run in. Which is my way of saying I'm confident that Dionne would not disagree: there's something about today's misnomered "conservatism" that is creepily similar to the far right of the New Deal era, the far right of the postwar era, the far right of the Goldwater era and the far right of the 1970s New Right, and beyond.

Conservatism today is, in brief, the far right of consensus-historian Richard Hofstadter's "paranoid style," a well-known political neologism that sprang from his still-circulating work but is tied thematically to another of his less-read works today--his New Deal chapter in The Age of Reform, in which Hofstadter brilliantly reduces conservatism's anti-New Dealism to a frothing, hysterical reaction rooted in an ideological shift to essential indifference to human tribulation and remedial, pragmatic experimentation.      

Conservatism's principal difference today from that of its anti-New Deal manifestation is that, as the cliche roughly goes, its paranoid psychotics are running the asylum. However there is continuity, which is elemental to the consensus school of historical thought. So take heart, E.J. Our old-school perspective isn't toast yet.

Comments

[mdblanche]

I mostly agree with you but I think Dionne has hit on something important. The end of the Bush administration and the beginning of he Obama administration really has been a turning point for the GOP and I think most people don't appreciate this yet. After the disaster that was Bush the GOP was going to have to reinvent themselves somehow and they did so by embracing the crazy closer than ever before, which they didn't have to do. In 2008 the Republicans were still acting like a traditional American political party in ways they don't today. We had divided government that wasn't dysfunctional. TARP was passed was passed with the bipartisan majorities traditional for unpopular but necessary legislation. No serious Republican dreamed of listening to the crazies who said to let it all blow up. By last summer those crazies were in charge of their party in practice if not in theory and got to manufacture a new crisis of their own. And given half a chance they'll do it again. Whatever historical continuity, they really are a different, crazier party than they were four years ago and should be treated as such.

[NickT]

171 House Democrats voted for TARP to only 91 Republicans. That's pretty thin bipartisan gruel, one way or the other.

For my money, the GOP has been this crazy at least since the Glory of Gnewt - they just didn't let it show quite so nakedly in public. Most of the time.

I suspect that what has changed over the last 15 years is that the GOP feel increasing confidence that they can let the crazy out for a gallop - and the media will hardly bother to notice half the time. Both sides do it, after all.

[Chris Andersen]

It's amazing how much they want to deny that the craziness of the GOP hasn't been around for some time. It's like they can't remember things like the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

[Robert Lipscomb]

It strikes me that the New Deal institutionalized the concept of community which gives the right something tangible to hate into perpetuity. The two Banks of the United Btates served the same purpose for the jeffersonians and the Jacksonians.

The Busines Plot Against FDR has a murky history to which I will defer to professionals, such as PM.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/Coup.htm

Even so, it is clear that crazy conservative thinking existed at the highest levels going back to at least 1932.

[You Don't Say]

I don't know my history so won't comment on that, but I do think there is a difference between the Rs of Clinton and the Rs today and that is the leadership has lost control of its party. And it can't all be blamed on Boehner's lack of competenceor anyone else's. The rank and file cannot be contained.