Read Full Article: The Conscience of an (ex-)Conservative. By Philip Gold
Excerpt:
Civil liberties? Like limited government, this commitment now resides with the libertarians, a pert little faction composed mostly of people who, when told about something going on in the world, reply, “Yes, but how would it work in theory?” Blessings on the American Civil Liberties Union for its activism and its questioning, and on some right-libertarian single-issue groups. But that’s just another way of saying that, like downsizing Leviathan, upgrading freedom is no longer a significant conservative concern.

A foreign policy that does not presume the world is ours to remodel and redeem as we please, and that our resources of coercion and control are limitless? Conservatism once cherished a sense of modesty, disdaining attempts to root up societies and force people to be free. But now, according to the imperial conservatives, history begins again with us. The Beltway catchphrase du jour: “Hard Wilsonianism.” Perhaps they should study Mr. Wilson, and the mess he made, a bit more closely.

A cultural commitment to tolerance, appreciation of difference and an inviolable private realm? Why are we even asking this question?

Respect for the planet? Yeah, there’s a lot of junk science out there serving lefty environmental enthusiasms. But conservatism invented junk refutation. Rudy Vallee, a crooner of the 1920s, had a hit entitled, “You’re Going to Do It Someday, So Why Not Do It Now?” When I suggested to several conservatives active in the global economic policy realm that this might prove a wise conservative approach to environmental responsibility, they looked at me as though I’d proposed sodomy on the Capitol steps.

For all the blather about the “war of ideas,” 20th-century conservatism produced virtually nothing of lasting value. Most of the major conservative economists — Milton Friedman, especially — have eschewed the title, preferring to call themselves libertarians or classical liberals. Usual-suspect senior columnists such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Safire are always worth a read. But their stuff does not age well between covers. With one possible exception (Thomas Sowell), there are no Walter Lippmanns here, destined to be read for decades more. As for the great neoconservative efflorescence — well, as neocon godfather Irving Kristol loves to point out, it was a generational phenomenon: the public odyssey of some very bright but also very self-referent intellectuals. It passes now into the realm of historical curiosity.

As Lind summed the situation: “The conservative movement has had half a century to incubate a similar [to movements such as transcendentalism and progressivism] efflorescence; its leaders have had vast financial resources and public attention at their disposal. What is the result of the conservative intellectual renaissance of late twentieth-century America? A few position papers from think tanks subsidized by the aerospace and tobacco industries; a few public-policy potboilers slapped together by second-rate social scientists or former student journalists subsidized by pro-business foundations; a few collections of op-eds by right-wing syndicated columnists. Not one philosopher of world rank, not one great political or constitutional theorist, not one world-class novelist or poet has been enrolled in the ranks of late twentieth-century conservative intellectuals, or had anything more than a fleeting association with them.”

After a decade or two, it started to get old. And by the latter ’90s, I’d begun to sense something about conservatism that left me increasingly uneasy. I came to think of it as “The Sneer of Dismissal,” and once I became aware of it, I also became astonished at how often I encountered it.

A few of the milder examples:

I was talking with a prominent D.C. conservative about classical virtues as an alternative to Judeo-Christian ethics. He blew me off, noting en passant that people are stupid and need simple ideas in order “to be controlled.” I showed something I’d written on the subject to a local conservative, a good man and a good friend. “Philip,” he replied heatedly, “this is crap.”
heard a colleague muttering about some liberal who “dabbled in Buddhism.” I asked him if he would describe an American who went to church maybe four times a year as someone who “dabbled in Christianity.”

I tried to explain a new movement — civic feminism — to another colleague. A radical feminist friend back in D.C. was writing that women must participate in the defense of civilization. “Oh,” he replied, “Xena, Warrior Princess.”

Then there’s Rabbi Daniel Lapin, head of the Mercer Island–based conservative (very conservative) Toward Tradition — a man I’ve found to be charming, erudite, a brilliant teacher. I was listening to one of his audiotapes, on the deeper meanings of the Jewish holiday Hanukkah. At one point he mentioned the Greeks and “their ridiculous gods.” Why the gratuitous insult? Leave aside the immense importance of those deities to Western culture. Forget for a moment that there’s nothing inherently more ridiculous about Zeus and Aphrodite than the notion of a creator of the universe who cares which end of the cow you eat, or whether you kiss with your mouth open. Why The Sneer of Dismissal?

After 30 years, I realized why. Deep down, these people — these people who can be so gracious and so decent in their personal lives — believe that they’ve been deprived of their proper place at the center of the universe. Deep down, they know that, were the world right, everyone would be like them, or at least aspire, or pretend to aspire, to be like them.

After a decade or two, it started to get old. And by the latter ’90s, I’d begun to sense something about conservatism that left me increasingly uneasy. I came to think of it as “The Sneer of Dismissal,” and once I became aware of it, I also became astonished at how often I encountered it.

So what went wrong with conservatism? A complex question amenable to a simple answer. It went wrong because it failed and it succeeded. Culturally, it failed utterly to march the country back to an idealized past that never existed. Politically, it failed to implement its traditional agenda.

But it also succeeded. It became Important. Until Reagan, until Gingrich, until the big-money think tanks and media stars, conservatism saw itself as, and was, a minority movement. It still is. But that minority now disposes of a high-viz elite, serious cash and real power.

Power corrupts. It corrupts especially when you’ve got it, but can’t seem to accomplish what you set out to do, and you’ve jettisoned your ideals somewhere along the way, but can’t quite face the fact.

So what’s the future of conservatism? It’s still fractionated, of course, but this time into sects and subsects of increasingly ugly demeanor. The Birchers and the militias were peripheral. These are not.

Intellectually, there’s a two-tier star system. Call it the Senior Usuals and the Brat Pack, a mess of younger pundits and “public intellectuals” not nearly as profound or as clever as they like to think they are, but adept enough at telling the media and the funders what they want to hear the way they want to hear it.

So now what?


I’m hopeful. Very hopeful. Our numbers are growing. Who are we? We’re the disillusioned Righties who can’t bear to go left, and the disillusioned Lefties who can’t bear to go right. But we’re going somewhere. We’ll be carrying our principles and values. We’ll also be traveling light.


Where exactly shall we meet? Not in some split-the-difference middle, one hopes, nor in some phony “radical center.” Maybe somewhere else entirely. We’ll find it. We must.