Following Barack Obama’s victory, political conservatives are suffering a crisis that could be called psychological but is better described as spiritual. The mood is one of depression, despair, panic.
Responding to calls for rebuilding the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh demands purging it instead: “We had some people abandon the conservative movement, and they need to be abandoned,” he said on the radio, referring to a handful of conservatives who went over to the Obama side, abandoning John McCain (who, in Limbaugh’s view, wasn’t a conservative anyway). The present moment is, Limbaugh explains, “an opportunity for cleansing.”
Others say it’s the end of conservatism as we’ve known it. “The modern conservative movement began with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential race,” writes Beliefnet blogger Rod Dreher. “The modern conservative movement ends with the crushing defeat of Arizona Sen. John McCain — who took Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement — in the 2008 presidential race.”
Still others look back longingly to the golden 1980s. The Web site Politico reports on a planned secret meeting of unidentified top conservative politicians, activists and intellectuals at an undisclosed location in Virginia, where the question to be considered is how to revive the magic of Reaganism.
Clearly, conservatives need a reformation of some kind. Otherwise it’s hard to see how the glaring enthusiasm differential between the Republican and Democratic candidates can be fixed next time. McCain won only 78% of conservative voters, while Obama won 89% of liberals.
Reformations come in two varieties. One seeks to recover an original, timeless purity, real or imagined, with the hope of energizing a present constituency. The other brokers a compromise between past and present for the sake of holding on to the same constituency. In religion, an example of the former, a truly conservative reformation, would be the Protestant Reformation, which revolted from the Catholic Church and claimed to recapture the simple, pure essence of the early Christian community. Another would be Hasidic Judaism, which sparked a revival in Jewish life by making available to the masses the deep-rooted, mystical tradition of Kabbalah, which had previously been the domain of isolated, expert scholars alone.
The other kind of reformation isn’t necessarily liberal in nature, but for convenience we’ll call it that. An example would be Reform or Conservative Judaism, neither of which at its founding claimed to recover a lost or hidden past but merely attempted to hold on to a constituency, Jews, by fashioning a compromise with modern values. They have a hard time inspiring much passion.
The cardinals of political conservatism are faced with a choice between these two alternatives. Some advocate remaking the ideology with a view to securing a particular audience. Appeals to the working class were fashionable a few months ago and had something to do with the choice of Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate. It didn’t work. Obama excited voters by not appearing to calculate in such a transparent way.
A really conservative reformation is the more promising path. Consider the parallel cases in religious history. Evangelical Protestantism remains vital and enthusiastically expansionist. So too, in the Jewish context, does the Hasidic reformation, still growing aggressively around the world with the encouragement and guidance of the emissaries of Chabad, Judaism’s most successful branch.
But what is the original pure conservatism that’s waiting, hidden like a pearl, to be rediscovered? The pearl is not about wonky “reforms” cynically and hopelessly crafted to win the favor of Joe Six-Pack. It won’t be found via a desperate attempt to recapture 1980s Reaganism either. Conservatism’s pearl is timeless. It’s metaphysical.
The philosopher Russell Kirk extracted the essence of conservatism in his book “The Conservative Mind,” tracing the conservative idea back not just to Edmund Burke in the 18th century, but still further, millennia in the past, to Mount Sinai.
The contrast with Barack Obama may help make this clear. He appealed to the future, offering the exhilarating prospect of rejecting our narrow, bigoted past. It’s indeed a beautiful thing to have elected our first black president. We can and should celebrate, but without adopting the prejudice that in all things we are better than our forebears.
Conservatism embraces past, present and future, a covenant linking the dead with the living and the still unborn. Faith in the wisdom we receive from our ancestors, necessarily a religious faith, is essential.
Burke wrote, “The reason first why we do admire those things which are greatest, and second those things which are ancientest, is because the one are the least distant from the infinite substance, the other from the infinite continuance, of God.” Kirk remarked: “Precisely [a] blindness to the effulgence of the burning bush, [a] deafness to the thunder above Sinai, is what Burke proclaims to be the principal error of the French ‘enlightenment.’” One may say that being “enlightened,” then as now, means being blind to the light that pulses like a distant star across the galaxy, from long ago.
The spirit that Kirk ably captured was the spirit of National Review founder William F. Buckley and other icons of the past. This doesn’t tell us immediately what conservative policies should be, but it does indicate that a secular conservatism can’t thrive. That truth got lost amid the practical distractions of Republican governance, in much the same way that Judaism’s true spirit often gets lost today amid the distractions of governing a secular Jewish state or maintaining an alphabet soup of Jewish organizational bureaucracies.
For such complacency, Judaism teaches that God finds exile to be an excellent tonic. If concerns on the right about Obama are correct, then his election is a reason to worry, in the short run. But in the long run, a dose of exile will be good for the conservative movement, spiritually and politically, a chance to recover its hidden pearl.
David Klinghoffer is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author, most recently, of “How Would God Vote?: Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative” (Doubleday).
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Conservatives lost because they backed the wrong candidate. They were told to go for luckluster McCain when they had an authentic conservative in the way of Chuck Baldwin on the Constitution Party line. Baldwin ran on hope and values not the fear mongering McCain offered.
George W. Bush got 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. John McCain only got 33% of the Hispanic vote. 90% of the people who voted for McCain are white. The Republicans can not win elections like this. Most Hispanics are Catholic, with increasing numbers becoming evangelical Protestants. Prop 8 passed in California, thanks largely to socially conservative black and Hispanic voters. The future of the Republican party, in my view, is to appeal to religiously conservative Hispanic voters, in addition to conservative whites.
As usual an incredible quantity of high-flown gush and wa-wa is being spilled by professional wordsmiths to "explain" the "historic" and "symbolic" victory of a so-called black. I just look at the record of the past eight years and remember the old American slogan: vote the rascals out. A solid but not overwhelming majority just did just that. End of.
Chuck Baldwin is only a good choice if one was a social conservative (McCain's weakness), Bob Barr and the Libertarians would have been a better pick for the Right. Just as Ralph Nader and Cynthia McKinney were better choices as true liberals then Barack Obama.
The Klinghoffers were leaders in the struggle against Communism's global revolution when it was not "in" to be against it, and that's when I first met them. But I was part of Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) during the Goldwater 1964 campaign. It's base was many young idealists-- many were university students-- who spoke up courageously though they faced the draft and Vietnam. However, Conservatism was taken over and led by self-serving "victory is everything" mediocrities who knew they were so mediocre that they could only win by "thinking outside the [rules]box," taking pride in being outlaws and low-ballers. They lived in a rigid bureaucracy where each member had a fat ass sitting on his face, making it hard to breathe. To get ahead, one had to dislocate his jaws like a python and swallow his superior in that bureaucratic order whole. That system gave us bureaucratic cannibals like Gingrich, DeLay etc. When these types got power they proved to be petty thieves, not only cannibals. They lived convinced that they winning was in violation of the laws of nature; and so, they coming to power, seemed so unnatural that they deemed themselves not bound by normal ethics. They invented self-serving "morals"-- a phony culture they applied to everyone else but themselves-- little wonder that so many went from power to petty theft and finally to prison or disgrace? To "conservatives"-- so convinced that they were unnatural in power, responsibility became a means, not an end. And so it seemed totally acceptable to tie in with Christian yahoo freaks, John Berchers, racists, skinheads and whatever would bring in votes-- even cemeteries! Opportunistically joining these "dumb goyim," ex-Leninist neocons plied the red tactic of "polarization" on their behalf to make many, many people feel dis-enfranchised and to be motivated by hate. As one time "Reds," then CIA payed propagandists and finally weapons industry mouthpieces in the Democrat Party, these "polarizing" tacticians moved right and played the Right's every psychotic bend. In the end, they had a neurotic need to of their own: to be seen as "mensch." And so, the elan of their youth as "Reds" now manifested in a geriatric pseudo-manliness, advocating that someone-else's son go to fight their "World War IV." With the Red World gone they had only one think to hit: Islam, the force that more than any other brought down the Red World. It's not that they ever really cared about Zionism, but in Leninist fashion (as with the New Left), they needed a good "vehicle" and that was it, especially after 9/11. Their personal Zionism was never there until 1967 when they thought that by rubbing against the IDF's Wunder mensch they too might be seen as "mensch." So they gathered what was left of their once CIA funded operations into "think-tanks" and waged war on the one fortress they had never conquered: academia. Giving themselves parallel titles in their Leninist-type "hierarchie parallel," they could now pretend they could be professors only by professing. Real conservatives, they derided as "paleocons," sure that in a Stalin-Hitler-like pact with the opportunist rightists like the Rovians and Christian Right wing nuts. Conservatism is a cultural and philosophical persuasion, not the ravings of some pear-shaped loudmouth addicted to uppers. Conservatives are not pear shaped "military experts" who never held a gun but need recognition as "mensch" so much that they hire broken down old generals no one pays attention to as their puppets. Conservatives do not think of an all volunteer-army as roughnecks better kept in far off imperial wars than beating up these "mensch-wanna-bes" in dark alleys. There are REAL conservative think-tanks and thinkers. Many ARE in academia and many are in the real world. But they are not the "wrecking crew" in Wash DC that are stealing tax dollars hand over hoof. The real conservatives will do fine, for power was never their issue; their game was always philosophical dialogue, instead. The Klinghoffers were both academics-- whom I respect for their works-- so I think they know what I mean. Lastly, REAL conservatives are also part empiricists who are not vulnerable to ideological ignorance and Bible-babble but judge by reason and facts. Sooooo, now as ever, CONSERVATISM is doing fine, not as fatso shock-jocks, but as thinkers and moral beings. They will go on working and writing no matter how little or how much we hear from Hagard, Limbaugh and other soulless for sale big mouths or Republican bureaucratic cannibals fighting the join the celebration of ignorance on the Palin for 2012 campaign. By the way, no matter what the neocons that haven't moved back left into Obama's camp out of convenience say, there are many great Jewish conservatives but very few Jewish bureaucratic cannibals like the neocons. That is a tribute to Judaism's cultural leadership in America, the very leadership that made President-elect Obama possible.
Typical Klinghoffer: long on style but short on substance. It is also interesting that he manages to sneak his loathings and contempt for non-Orthodox Jews even into an essay on American politics. There is a difference between "conservative" and "reactionary." A true conservative conserves the good that the past and tradition has to offer but is not afraid to abandon the bad. Just our "liberalism" here in America is more properly deemed "centrism" in other parts of the world, what passes for "conservatism" in this country has too much been associated with reactionary elements seeking to impose a medieval social agenda on the rest of the population -- the obsession with homosexuality is symptomatic of the "conservative" movement's malaise. If, in their exile, American conservatives were to repent and return to their original ideals of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and the sanctity of privacy and individual rights then perhaps they might once again have a valuable contribution to make in our national discourse.
Dave is right: relax. Conservatives have not gone quietly into the night, nor will they. And can we please stop kidding ourselves about why Obama's fraudulent and corrupt campaign prevailed? Just ask those who watched him steal the nomination from Hillary. Want to try some real, ground-breaking analysis? Start with the game-changing effects of the far-to-port-listing media, which openly handed this election to Obama using the same mendacious, subtle-to-rabid demonization of McCain and, especially, Palin that they have relentlessly directed at Bush, Republicans and conservatives for over 8 years now (with virtually no response whatsoever). Remember, the same majority that elected Obama is the one that essentially re-elected the Democrat-controlled Congress to whom they'd given the lowest rating of any U.S. institution in history just a few months ago. So this election obviously had nothing to do with the electorate demanding accountability. It was a function of cult idol worship, an impeccably well-timed credit crisis scare, and media demoralization of the Republican base which simply resulted in them staying home. Conservatives don't need anything so much as new leaders. America doesn't need anything so much as a few well-placed libel suits aimed at the entrenched media establishment's utter abandonment of ethics, standards and obeisance to FEC regulations.
Relax. With a huge increase in African-American turnout and a horrible economy B.O. could only get a whopping 52% with a margin of victory smaller than Bush the first got over Dukakis.
Atta boy Dave, you keep right on telling yourself how peachy-keen everything is as America keeps squatting over your face and crapping down your throat, along with goy and the rest of the racist, half-human redneck trailer trash. You’re absolutely right: losing the overall popular vote 52% to 46% is a real squeaker; just like losing the electoral vote 365-173, and losing the largest proportion of Congressional seats in subsequent elections in 75 years. You’ll get ‘em next time, buddy. Just relax!!! Keep demanding those Conservative leaders insist on an “enforcement only” immigration policy, and tell those wet-backs to get the hell out of America, because the reduction of the Latino vote from 40% to 31% is no big deal. And keep insisting that Big Pig Palin announce – by golly, you betcha – that “real Americans” (wink-wink; get it? get it?) will never accept some “arrogant” (wink-wink; get it? get it?), “elitist” (wink-wink; get it? get it?), “cosmopolitan” (wink-wink; get it? get it?) “community organizer” (wink-wink; get it? get it?) as their president. It worked so well this time, it’ll probably play great in 2012, you Republican genius, you!