The Conservative Reformation: A Cauldron of Proposals
July 14th, 2008 by PETE ABEL, Assistant Editor
In my prior post on this subject, I promised to share a “modest proposal for the next Goldwater’s consideration.” By that, I meant this: Goldwater articulated a compelling vision for conservatives in 1960, which Ronald Reagan and his team subsequently studied and re-phrased in their own parlance and used (two decades later) to build a winning coalition. The “new Goldwater” — of 2008 or beyond — will need to do the same, anticipating the “new Reagan,” whomever he might be and whenever he might arrive, be it 20 years from now, or less, or more.
That’s where I left off nearly two months ago. I’ll now beg your forgiveness for another (albeit lesser) delay. I’m opting for this second delay because I think — before offering my unsolicited opinions to the heirs of Goldwater and Reagan — it would be worthwhile to first look at some recent proposals from other conservatives, two of which I briefly referenced in my last post.
(I’ll focus here on proposals from inside the conservative camp, but I’d be remiss not to remind readers of Damozel’s excellent thoughts on this subject. And if I’ve unfairly characterized Damozel as “not conservative,” I trust she’ll correct me in the comments.)
On May 9, in two separate essays, NYT columnist David Brooks and Reason Associate Editor Michael Moynihan suggested the new Goldwater look to today’s British conservatives as a model for the movement’s reformation. Moynihan concluded:
With a strong majority of Americans supporting Roe v. Wade, a clear majority supporting civil unions for gay couples, and the very real possibility of the country electing an African-American president, it’s time for the Republican Party to borrow from the Tories if they want to recapture the center ground.
That line of thinking seems a tad simplistic. If American conservatives, as represented in today’s Republican Party, are to enjoy a Tory-like resurgence, they will have to think much more broadly than a center-skewed migration on social/cultural issues. Such a migration might be a good start, but it can’t be the only (nor the predominant) step.
I think Tory captain David Cameron strikes closer to the crux of the matter – as does columnist David Brooks in his aforementioned column, where he wrote:
… The central political debate of the 20th century was over the role of government. The right stood for individual freedom while the left stood for extending the role of the state. But the central debate of the 21st century is over quality of life. In this new debate, it is necessary but insufficient to talk about individual freedom. Political leaders have to also talk about, as one Tory politician put it, “the whole way we live our lives.”
That “way we live our lives” meme is amplified in two new books by conservative authors, both of which George Packer references in his May 26 essay for The New Yorker, “The Fall of Conservatism.”
The first book is Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, by David Frum. Its thesis (according to Packer) is this: The GOP “has lost the middle class by ignoring its sense of economic insecurity and continuing to wage campaigns as if the year were 1980, or 1968.”
Expanding on that motif, the second book — Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam — concerns itself with:
… “Sam’s Club Republicans” — members of the white working class, who are the descendants of Nixon’s “northern ethnics and southern Protestants” and the Reagan Democrats of the eighties. In their analysis, America is divided between the working class (defined as those without a college education) and a “mass upper class” of the college educated, who are culturally liberal and increasingly Democratic. The New Deal, the authors acknowledge, provided a sense of security to working-class families; the upheavals of the sixties and afterward broke it down. Their emphasis is on the disintegration of working-class cohesion, which they blame on “crime, contraception, and growing economic inequality.”
Packer is skeptical of Douthat’s and Salam’s policy prescriptions, summarizing them as “an unorthodox mixture of government interventions … and tax reforms.” But despite his skepticism, Packer acknowledges that “any Republican politician worried about his party’s eroding base and grim prospects should make a careful study of this book.”
David Brooks is more kind than Packer in his assessment of Grand New Party — a postion that may, he acknowledges, have something to do with his “friendship with the authors.” Regardless, he reaches a conclusion similar to Packer’s, namely that Grand New Party is a must-read treatise for concerned Republicans.
I assume Packer’s sketch of the two books, and Brooks’ of the latter, are reasonably accurate. But to be fair to the books’ authors, a full reading of both is on my “to do” list.
In the meantime, I hope (finally) to present, later this week, my own set of suggestions for conservative reform — which you, in turn, can either throw into the same cauldron as the other proposals outlined above, or simply throw away.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 6:24 am and is filed under TCR, Conservatives, Politics. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
