| I am reminded, for example of a particularly odious installment of Bill Moyers Journal that I very much wanted to write about at the time, but alas did not.
It was back on July 11, and Moyers kicked things off thus:
BILL MOYERS: Thirty years ago, intrigued by the ascendancy of the new right in politics and of Ronald Reagan, I had many of the conservative leaders on this broadcast to argue and debate their philosophy of society and government. My hour with Ronald Reagan remains a favorite....
Now, controlling the party, the Presidency, and Congress, conservatives had what historian Rick Perlstein describes as their first chance in the modern era to govern on their own terms - to prove themselves. They were euphoric. And they blew it....
Unable to cope with stagnating wages, loss of jobs, gross inequality or the environmental crisis, 80 percent of the public says America is heading in the wrong direction. How did the right go so wrong?
This week, we're devoting the Journal to a conversation with two men a generation apart, but joined at the hip, so to speak, as conservatives deeply troubled that their movement has run aground.
Mickey Edwards signed up with the movement early on. He was part of the political forces that Barry Goldwater first mobilized in his campaign against President Lyndon Johnson in 1964. The conservative columnist, George Will, wrote that Goldwater lost 44 states but won the future with the movement he inspired.
Mickey Edwards became a leading figure in that movement. One of three founding trustees of the Heritage Foundation, he served 16 years in Congress and was elected National Chairman of the American Conservative Union. He's the author of this widely discussed book: Reclaiming Conservatism: How A Great American Political Movement Got Lost-And How It Can Find Its Way Back.
If Mickey Edwards belongs to the founding generation of conservatives, Ross Douthat came of age in its floundering generation. He was born in 1979, one year before Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980. He has written what many of his peers, including David Brooks, consider the political book of the year. This is it: Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win The Working Class And Save The American Dream. It's co-authored with his colleague at Atlantic Magazine.
Let Douthat's book title sink in a little: Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win The Working Class And Save The American Dream. Saving the American Dream? So that's what they're doing destroying the domestic auto industry. I had no idea!
Good to know.
One interesting point is that both admit there's a problem with conservatism's small governemtn philsoophy vs. the reality that Americans like big government. Edwards tries to deal with it by saying, "no, we're for limited government, not small government, they're not the same." I find this amusing, since I've raised this point repeatedly over the years, that "limited government" in the Constitutional sense is the opposite of absolutist government, not big government. I've never met a conservative who would agree with me. But Edwards here is all over it:
MICKEY EDWARDS: Well, first of all, you know, I don't think the rationale of the conservatism is small government. It's limited government, but that doesn't necessarily mean small. It means that there are areas that you cannot take government into. There are there are areas where the rights of the people are paramount. So, you know, in the old system, you know, before America, you had rulers and their subjects, right?
And the rulers told their subjects what to do. And our idea was, you know, we're going to be citizens, not subjects. And we're going to tell the government what to do. And there are areas where the government's not permitted to go. But within those areas the government can act. It - nothing that says it has to be a tiny government if the people themselves are willing to pay the taxes and to support certain activities for the government and it's within the Constitution, that's fine.
But, of course, this gives you Barry Goldwater, who absolutely destested the religious right. Can't have much of a conservative movement on that basis. The vast majority of folks who believe in limited government in its true meaning are card-carrying liberals, card-carrying members of the ACLU. There are a handful of Bruce Fein's around. There are legions of ACLU types.
And Douhout isn't down with Edwards at all. He takes the small government imperative seriously.
ROSS DOUTHAT: But the challenge for conservatism, though, as a governing philosophy, is that it's precisely that it's a theory of limited government that's operating in a society and in a framework that was built by liberals. We have the New Deal. We have at least parts of the Great Society have endured to the present day. And this has always been the challenge for conservatives - that is, how do you govern as a party that's critical to the welfare state when most Americans want you to run the welfare state?
And that's why the most successful conservative reforms for the last 30 years, look at welfare reform, haven't been about abolishing government. They've been taking about taking programs that liberals built and reforming them. The problem is when you run out of things to do on that front. And I think that's one of the deeper problems of the Bush Administration that you know, Bush came to power in the late 1990s as a reaction against a sort of overweening small government fervor on the right.
I think Bush had the right idea. I think that, you know, in the broadest sense, compassionate conservatism and the whole idea of a conservatism that wasn't just about cutting Medicare and cutting Social Security, that was where the Republican Party had to go. The problem is he didn't, as it turned out, actually have that many good specific ideas for reforms he wanted to enact.
Actually, this is utter hogwash. "Compassionate conservatism" was never about anything more than using big government to steer big wads of money to conservative power bases--white evangelic churches, primarily--and prospective power bases--black evangelic (and even, perhaps prosperity gospel) churches. This was directly parallel to the privatization of everything else in sight, with Halliburton, Blackwater and all the rest. This is how actually existing conservatives marry their "small government" philosophy with the fact that Americans don't want small government: they turn big government into a cash cow for their power bases, and use the kickbacks to keep fooling the rubes with "guns, God and gays" ad campaigns come election time.
It's a cheap carney, game, nothing more. There is no conservative intellectual tradition to reform, defend or theorize about. It's like trying to join Star Fleet in 2008: Nice idea, but it doesn't freakin' exist!
What does exist is destroying the US auto industry, the UAW and the regional economy of the Midwest, in a valiant attempt to reduce it to the income level of the Deep South.
Elsewhere, Douthat says:
I think of American conservatism as the attitude and habit in politics that's dedicated towards defending American exceptionalism in all its forms.... Against well, against the idea that we need to change America in pursuit of some abstract form of justice.
Such as, oh, say, the idea that all men (sic) are created equal?
That's the divide in a nutshell. Liberals believe in the abstract ideals that they find repeatedly in the words of the Founding Fathers. Conservatives believe in holding on tenaciously to the most backwards of social institutions for as long as humanly possible. Or longer.
And, finally, there's this prolonged exchange, in which Moyers brings up the sub-title of Douthat's book--"How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream"--and Douthat basically says, "I got nothin'," though, of course, he could never actually come out and admit it:
BILL MOYERS: But here's let's get to the big issue in your book. The subtitle of your book is "How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" because my great concern is that ordinary working people in this country are having a real trouble making a living wage.
The paucity of jobs that pay living wages is, I think, the great moral as well as economic crisis in America today. And neither party has fully addressed that. Conservatives won under Nixon with the silent majority. Reagan won with the-
ROSS DOUTHAT: Reagan Democrats.
BILL MOYERS: -the working class that came over to the Republican Party. And George Bush won with the angry white man. But I don't see what any of those people have gotten from the conservative revolution because they're worse off today in real wages, adjusted for inflation, than they were 30 years ago when you came to power.
ROSS DOUTHAT: I'll push back on that argument a little bit. I think there are a lot of ways in which the working class is better off than they were in that era. I think if just looking at wages is misleading because one of the things that's happened thanks to free trade, thanks to policies that Republicans have championed, is prices, the cost of living, has fallen dramatically across the board for Americans.
If you look at the goods the poor and the working class buy versus the goods the rich buy, the goods that the poor and working class buy today are vastly cheaper than they used to be.
BILL MOYERS: You're not saying that workers face wage stagnation?
ROSS DOUTHAT: No, workers do face wage stagnation. But those wages do, in fact, buy more goods than they used to buy. There are ways in which the working class is better off. But, yes, on the big picture, I agree with you.
But Republicans need a tax policy that helps people investing in America's future in another way: People struggling to raise families. So we talk a lot about making the tax code more family friendly, making it easier for people to have two kids, to have three kids, to put those kids through school.
All that might have been remotely plausible (not believable, but plausible, in a high school speech & debate type of way) two and a half months before the financial meltdown hit with gale force winds. But now? Now it's just laughable! American workers only kept their heads above water by having their wives go to work, turnging from savers into borrowers, first on credit cards, then by finally raiding the equity in their houses.
Now all of that is gone, tapped out as a source of new income to replace what's being lost. The whole house of cards is tumbling down, and the conservative response is to set the whole deck on fire.
I don't know how realistic Valkyrie is, how far back into the origins of the plotting it goes. But the real history here shows what a real conservative oppositon to authoritarian excess looked like. It was still, historically, a failure. But there was a moral seriousness to it that Russ Douthat could not dream of approaching, not in a thousand year Reich.
Here's a bit of that background from Wikipedia's account:
Since 1938, conspiratorial groups planning a coup of some kind had existed in the German Army (Wehrmacht Heer) and in the German Military Intelligence Organization (Abwehr). Early leaders of these plots included Brigadier-General Hans Oster, General Ludwig Beck, and Field Marshal Erwin von Witzleben. Oster was the head of the Military Intelligence Office. Beck was a former Chief-of-Staff of the German Army High Command (Oberkommando des Heeres, OKH). Von Witzleben was the former commander of the German 1st Army and the former Commander-in-Chief of the German Army Command in the West (Oberbefehlshaber West, or OB West). Military conspiratioral groups exchanged thoughts with civilian, political and intellectual resistance groups in the famous Kreisauer Kreis (which met at the von Moltke estate in Kreisau) and in other secret circles.
Plans to stage a coup and prevent Hitler from launching a new world war were developed in 1938 and 1939, but were aborted because of the indecision of Army Generals Franz Halder and Walter von Brauchitsch, and the failure of the western powers to oppose Hitler's aggressions until 1939. This first military resistance group delayed their plans after Hitler's extreme popularity following the unexpectedly fast success in the battle for France.
"Liberal" vacillation! My, I never heard of that before! How curious!
Next, a whole lot of nothing while Nazi Germany was on a roll:
In 1941 a new conspiratorial group formed. It was led by Colonel Henning von Tresckow, a member of his uncle Field Marshal Fedor von Bock's staff, who commanded Army Group Centre in Operation Barbarossa. Tresckow systematically recruited oppositionists to the Group's staff, making it the nerve center of the Army resistance. Little could be done against Hitler while his armies advanced triumphantly into the western Soviet Union through 1941 and 1942, even after the setback before Moscow (in December 1941) that caused the dismissal of both Brauchitsch and Bock.
During 1942 Oster and Tresckow nevertheless succeeded in rebuilding an effective resistance network. Their most important recruit was General Friedrich Olbricht, head of the General Army Office headquarters at the Bendlerblock in central Berlin, who controlled an independent system of communications to reserve units all over Germany. Linking this asset to Tresckow's resistance group in Army Group Centre created a viable coup apparatus.
In late 1942 Tresckow and Olbricht formulated a plan to assassinate Hitler and stage a coup during Hitler's visit to the headquarters of Army Group Centre at Smolensk in March 1943, by placing a bomb on his plane. The bomb did not go off, and a second attempt days later with Hitler at an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry in Berlin also failed. These failures demoralized the conspirators. During 1943 they tried without success to recruit senior Army field commanders such as Field Marshal Erich von Manstein and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, to support a seizure of power.
Then it moves on to the point where the Tom Cruise character--Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg--enters the scene:
By mid-1943 the tide of war was turning decisively against Germany. The Army plotters and their civilian allies became convinced that Hitler must be assassinated so that a government acceptable to the western Allies could be formed and a separate peace negotiated in time to prevent a Soviet invasion of Germany and to avoid as much bloodshed as possible. In August 1943 Tresckow met a young staff officer, Colonel Count Claus von Stauffenberg, for the first time. Badly wounded in North Africa, Stauffenberg was a political conservative, a zealous German nationalist, and a Roman Catholic with a taste for philosophy. He had at first welcomed the Nazi regime but had become rapidly disillusioned by the systematic executions of Jewish civilians and the treatment of the Russian POWs. Then, since the beginning of 1942 he shared the widespread conviction among Army officers that Germany was being led to disaster and that Hitler for both reasons must be removed from power. For some time his religious scruples had prevented him from coming to the conclusion that assassination was the correct way to achieve this. After the Battle of Stalingrad in December 1942, however, he came to the conclusion that not assassinating Hitler would be a greater moral evil. He brought a new tone of decisive, revolutionary decision-making to the ranks of the resistance
As various attempts fail and time slips away, the long-time core conspirators undergo a change of heart--not about what they must do, but about why. They have, in short, transformed themselves from pragmatists, trying to save Germany from zealously destructive ideologues, into ideologues of another sort--for whom the ideology of German honor must be somehow preserved, there must be some high-ranking Germans willing to sacrifice themselves, no matter how imnpossible, in the hopes of bringing down the evil of Adolph Hitler:
By the summer of 1944 the Gestapo was closing in on the conspirators. There was a sense that time was running out, both on the battlefield, where the Eastern front was in full retreat and where the Allies had landed in France on 6 June, and in Germany, where the resistance's room for maneuver was rapidly contracting. The belief that this was the last chance for action seized the conspirators. By this time the core of the conspirators had begun to think of themselves as doomed men, whose actions were more symbolic than real. The purpose of the conspiracy came to be seen by some of them as saving the honor of themselves, their families, the Army and Germany through a grand, if futile gesture, rather than actually altering the course of history.
It is only conservatives like Bruce Fein, who has called for Bush's impeachment, who have the least possibility of preserving any honor or integrity for themselves. And there are nowhere near enough of them to preserve the honor or integrity of American conservatism as a movement or political philosophy.
They may have destroyed Iraq. They may have destroyed New Orleans. They may yet destroy Detroit and much of the rest of the Midwest. But they have also destroyed themselves, along with any semblance of honor or integrity they may have dreamed of in their wildest fever dreams.
Let us not allow the Democratic Party, too, to join them. |
