Peter Berkowitz, a Hoover Institution senior fellow, has written for the Wall Street Journal an ambitious and largely thoughtful lament on the sorry state of conservatism. "The American right," he says, with both regret and praise, is in a "cauldron of debate," whereas "the left," with its "ranks increasingly untroubled by debate or dissent," is not.
Putting aside the misguided tendency of both camps to see each other as monolithic in thought and unified in deed, and putting aside as well the left's very real and considerable infighting, Mr. Berkowitz has a point: The right is unraveling -- ideologically, organizationally and emotionally.
He states the right's current troubles with accuracy: "The divisions within contemporary American conservatism -- social conservatives, libertarians, and neoconservatives -- arise from differences over which goods most urgently need to be preserved, to what extent, and with what role for government."
What he doesn't say, however -- not explicitly, anyway -- is that the modern right is an elaborate, dizzying concoction pasted together as late as the 1950s and early 60s. It was an uneasy alliance then -- the social traditionalists, economic libertarians and hyperglandular anticommunists (yesterday's neoconservatives) -- and it's a mess of conflict now.
The unraveling was bound to happen. So what surprises is not that it's happening; what surprises is that it took so long.
These differing schools of conservative thought always knew their separateness would keep them in the minority, electorally speaking. They stewed and pondered and argued amongst themselves throughout the 1950s. What to do, what to do.
Then, in 1960, a conservative strategist who regularly wrote for and philosophized in the National Review had an idea. Frank Meyer, a former Marxist still enchanted by the possibilities of the dialectic, envisioned an ideological synthesis. He saw that traditionalists and libertarians, both having sizable anticommunist contingencies as a kind of unifying glue, could, if they really tried, forsake their eccentric differences for the sake of electoral gain.
After all, he wrote, "on neither side is there a purposeful, philosophically founded rejection of the ends the other side proclaims." Both schools were in fundamental agreement, as Meyer saw it, yet "each emphasizes so strongly" its own pet bugaboos, "distortion sets in" -- not to mention guaranteed political failure.
Meyer's solution: Cool it, all of ya. Quit your bickering about the edges and learn to love each other by hating your "common enemy" -- those menacing, "collectivist" liberals.
And that's precisely what Barry Goldwater did four years later. The good libertarian-anticommunist senator had always disdained the injection of social "moralism" into secular politics, but he swallowed his hidebound convictions nevertheless and set out to chastise and Puritanize America. He damn near gagged on it, and ultimately he regretted having done it and despised the movement conservatism -- the New Right -- that mushroomed from it. But in '64 it was his only presidential hope.
Goldwater failed, of course, but others, in time, succeeded.
The conservatism that stemmed from Meyer's synthesis was, indeed, a smashing success. It split conservative Democrats from their political home, sucked in theretofore unworldly evangelicals and nurtured yesterday's now-discredited neoconservatives.
But that hodgepodge conservatism was also precarious, artificial and ultimately unworkable. There really are irreconcilable divisions between religious conservatives, economic libertarians and socially indifferent neoconservatives -- and they can all thank George W. Bush for having brought those stark differences once again to the fore.
If there is, as Mr. Berkowitz overstates it, unity on the left now, its political lure comes chiefly not from that unity, but from the opposition's returning disunity. But that's no way to win and keep winning.
Hence there is wisdom in his parting words: "Conservatives, facing uncertainty about George W. Bush's legacy, and the reality of their own errors and excesses, have good reason just now to read and ponder" their ideological heritage. ""Progressives, too prone these days to perceive difficult moral and political questions as one-sided and too keen to characterize their allies at home in the defense of liberty as enemies, have good reason to do so themselves."
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