By Daniel
Greenfield, 2/3/16, Politichicks
No, conservatism isn’t dead. It just
isn’t nearly as influential as some conservatives thought it was.
This shouldn’t have come as a
surprise after two Obama victories, the failures of the Tea Party and the
warping of conservative institutions and politicians to serve entirely
different agendas. Ideas only have power when they’re vested in organizations
that have power. Conservative organizations have very little institutional
power. Those that do are not particularly conservative, but serve the agendas
of an establishment that has self-interested goals.
Conservative organizations lean
heavily on messaging, but their messaging is really about influencing those who
do have power. Their most effective messaging is filtered through populist and
viral mediums that have the conservative brand, but are not really
ideologically conservative.
Conservatives interface with FOX
News or the Chamber of Commerce, which have institutional power and which
provide a forum for conservative views, but which are not really conservative.
The perception that they are waters down the brand and undermines the idea of
conservatism.
Conservative overconfidence grew
under Obama, but opposition to Obama was far more popular than any set of
conservative ideas. Opposition to Obama became its own movement, but it didn’t
stand for anything. It was a populist movement that was against things and
looking for someone to lead.
Meanwhile conservatism became the
victim of its own successes. The establishment crippled and then cannibalized
the Tea Party. Conservatives finally emerged triumphant in a pitched battle
with the establishment over amnesty. But the battle mainly served to discredit
both sides in the eyes of a base that had seen a parade of former conservative
heroes being exposed as villains.
And conservatism came in for a tug
of war between established interests, intellectuals and the grass roots. There
were and still are debates over what conservative principles really are. This
election has shown that social conservatism and nationalism should be strong
parts of a conservative platform.
The libertarian conservatism popular
in some circles that packages together immigration, pro-crime policies and
cutting social security is vastly unpopular and has no political base of
support. This election has completely discredited it and it should be abandoned
as soon as possible.
If conservatives want to win
elections, their platform is going to have to be populist and realistic. That
means small government, but the cuts have to start with the left’s sacred cows,
rather than expecting the bulk of the Republican electorate to suck it up for
the greater good. I would love to see a conservative candidate announce a plan
to stop plowing more money into failed Democratic cities instead of announcing
yet another bright scheme to slash the military or Medicare.
Likewise the “exporting Democracy” school
of conservatives were thoroughly discredited by the Arab Spring. Their agenda
is mainstream among the establishment, but conservatives need a sensible
realistic foreign policy approach that avoids the extremes of nation building
and isolationism, that puts national interests first while at the same time
recognizing that we are a world power.
Americans have no interest in
fighting wars for futile missions to build democracy. But neither are they
willing to sit around and watch a group like ISIS take off. What is needed is
an approach that emphasizes decisive military intervention against enemies
without regard for collateral damage while minimizing American casualties. We
should sharply slash much of our foreign aid budget and look at what actually builds
influence and what doesn’t. Foreign aid should be closely interlinked with our
economic interests, the way that it is in China, and our international
interests. We are not a charity.
A small government, hard power,
anti-crime, nationalist and traditionalist conservatism can succeed. It has
succeeded in this election insofar as the leading candidates have adopted it,
with varying degrees of sincerity. If conservatism is to be relevant, it is
going to have to shed a lot of its liberal skin, dispense with the globalism
that has seeped into it, and actually be conservative. And then it might be
ready to win elections.
Without close ties to a grass roots,
conservatism becomes an echo chamber. That’s what the National Review really
showed. Building ties to a grass roots based around negative oppositionism is
easy. Anyone can do it. The hard work will be to build ties to the grass roots
based on a positive agenda.
This is where conservatives failed.
Trump just exposed their failure. Someone can always be more against X than you
are. The specific things that you are against matter less than the act of
opposing. Being against something is its own truth and competing in that arena
is more a matter of attitude than policy. And yet Trump has, in his own way,
also laid out a coherent and easy to understand positive agenda. One of the
reasons he’s winning is that his rivals have failed to do it. Trump distills
his agenda into soundbites. The Republican field has positions that are too
complex to boil down.
To the average voter, it’s easy to
understand what Trump stands for. It’s hard to understand what his rivals stand
for. All the endless articles about “How to Defeat Trump” completely miss the
point. What his opponents had to do was attack him in a simple and crude way
over and over again while making the contrast with their own agenda. They
failed to do this. That’s why they’re losing.
The Republican Party in general
suffers from an inability to communicate its agenda in ways that people can
understand. Conservatives are not immune from this problem. During the Obama
years, they compensated by doubling down on opposition. But they haven’t
produced a positive, coherent agenda that appeals to people. And they haven’t
bridged the gap with ordinary people.
The weak point has always been
organization. The left won based on its organizations. These organizations have
become more integrated than ever. Meanwhile the right’s organizations are vague
and detached, pursuing ambitious goals without a realistic agenda. The
organizations of the right occasionally suffice to win elections, but they do
not suffice when it comes to making policy. And they do not suffice at all when
it comes to organizing a populist conservative movement.
Conservative organizations suffer
from too much ‘insiderism’ making it easy for accusations about an
establishment to stick. This insiderism leaves them at the mercy of the real
establishment while preventing them from fully leveraging the grass roots to
push back at the GOP establishment.
Conservatism needs its
intellectuals, but it also needs its community organizers. We have quite a few
of the former and not nearly enough of the latter. Conservatives will never
achieve any lasting victories until that changes.
Conservatism isn’t dead. It’s
underdeveloped. It’s in the midst of a pitched internal battle which has yet to
be settled.
And it has a huge head and a small
body. That’s changing. It’s been changing for decades. But the country doesn’t
have decades. So neither do conservatives.
Conservatives did achieve key goals.
They pushed Congress to the right. They hurt the establishment.
Conservatives had managed to rally
an opposition, while vastly overestimating their ability to set the larger
agenda. This is a setback, not a curtain call for the movement. And setbacks
are a learning opportunity.
A conservatism disconnected from
actual people is never going to mean anything. Unpopular policies are a
self-evident dead end. And organizing an opposition is not the same thing as
proving you have the right to replace the thing you’re opposing. Among other
things, that means cleaning house and having less tolerance for scandals and
corruption. It also means becoming less dependent on non-conservative populist
acts that blow with the wind to convey conservative messages.
Conservatives have revolutionary
ideas. But they let the opportunity at building a revolution slip away leaving
behind a dissatisfied base. That mistake cannot and should not be made a second
time.
http://politichicks.com/2016/02/daniel-greenfield-conservatism-isnt-dead/
Comments
The
American people have been subjected to decades of brainwashing by a highly
organized group of Marxist subversives.
The American Communist Party goals published in 1920 and restated in
1963 outline the plan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDpGJ1vo_14
Obama has
been spending an additional $1 trillion per year to further these goals through
UN Agenda 21 implementation in the US.
Norb
Leahy, Dunwoody GA Tea Party Leader
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