Contra Jamie, I don’t think the conservative grassroots necessarily is revolting against elites generally. I think they’re revolting against the present cadre of elites parading under the conservative label.
Honestly, our present elites suck. They really do condescend, and their ideas are awful. Whose job should it be to persuade non-conservative intellectuals that conservative ideas are correct? That job falls to conservative elites, not the Sarah Palins and Joes the Plumber of this world. Reagan was able to do what he did because Friedman and Buckley had done what they did; politicians have a role in the system, and it ain’t as great thinkers. If educated types are trending liberal, then educated conservatives need to get on their horses and save the day, not whine that Sarah Palin can’t discuss Niebuhr.
And to the extent that some “intellectuals” voted for Obama because of their dislike of Sarah Palin, if these elites are so offended by the style of one side that they’ll vote for a substance with which they disagree, I question their intellectual bona fides. Who’s being an over-emotional identity voter at that point?
Who are the genuine intellectuals expounding genuinely conservative ideas? Newt. Sowell. That’s about all I can think of. Our newspaper columnists are either too low brow to have a conversation with David Brooks, or too heterodox to be real leaders for conservatism. I love Krauthammer, but outside of foreign affairs he’s a quirky sort of conservative, at best. George Will has been overtaken with bizarre notions of the Constitution lately and is one of the people driven so batty by Sarah Palin that he’s not making much sense.
Brooks, Kristol, and a whole swath of others are enamored with big government. If you had to pin down one thing that has broken the conservative coalition, it’s not the embrace of the religious right, it’s the abandoment of small government principles. The libertoids could put up with the fundies so long as both were voting for smaller government.
There’s no party out there preaching Reaganite freedom, which is how conservatism needs to be explained. Why shouldn’t we bail out Detroit? Because I should have the freedom not to have my money taken away and used to prop up failures. Because entrepreneurs should have the freedom to enter the market and crush crappy old companies. The free market is freedom, the freedom to succeed and the freedom to fail, without which the freedom to succeed is meaningless. Where are our “elites” here? Who’s making the heady case for freedom? No one I can think of.
For all the talk of the “youth vote” this year, no one’s catering to it. We Millennials are fundamentally a libertarian generation, and to the extent Democrats are winning the Millenial vote, it’s because Republicans have been impressively lax in letting the Democrats somehow portray their big-government never-saw-a-problem-that-didn’t-need-more-regulation “solutions” as somehow not offensive to liberty. A big part of this, of course, is that our nominee, selected by non-Republicans, was himself offensive to liberty. This year Republicans were an echo of big government nannyism, not a voice for freedom.
And the part of this campaign that our “elites” felt compelled to gripe about was Sarah Palin? The Republican nominee supported a no strings attached $700 billion bailout to companies that desperately needed to fail, and Sarah Palin was the problem? The Republican nominee said that “greed” was the source of our economic problems, and Sarah Palin was the one whose intelligence needed to be questioned? The Republican nominee tried to pass himself off as a stronger regulator than the Democrat, and the only thing that could stir our “elites” to put pen to paper in complaint was Sarah Palin? The Republican nominee had absolutely no intellectual coherence to his positions, but it’s Sarah Palin who’s the thoughtless anti-intellectual?
Sarah Palin moved most of the Republican electorate to the poll. McCain failed to pull through those independents and Democrats he was supposed to get, and moved a portion of the Republican electorate to stay home.
And the elites? If they’re so damned smart, why couldn’t they get their Niebuhr-reading pals to vote Republican this year? Who among them made a strong case for conservatism this year? And who among them made a strong case against Sarah Palin? Why is the latter list longer than the former?
Sure, we need elites. But we need better elites, who will defend freedom in a way that will win over the American public. We don’t have that right now. And if the only options are bad elites or no elites, then I say it’s time to start up the guillotine.
Apollo posted this at 4:26 PM EST on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 as Conservatism
This piece puts into words what I have been struggling to articulate since last Tuesday:
Back in the ’70s, conservative intellectuals loved to talk about “radical chic,” the well-known tendency of educated, often wealthy liberals to project their political fantasies onto brutal revolutionaries and street thugs, and romanticize their “struggles.” But “populist chic” is just the inversion of “radical chic,” and is no less absurd, comical or ominous. Traditional conservatives were always suspicious of populism, and they were right to be. They saw elites as a fact of political life, even of democratic life. What matters in democracy is that those elites acquire their positions through talent and experience, and that they be educated to serve the public good. But it also matters that they own up to their elite status and defend the need for elites. They must be friends of democracy while protecting it, and themselves, from the leveling and vulgarization all democracy tends toward.
Writing recently in the New York Times, David Brooks noted correctly (if belatedly) that conservatives’ ”disdain for liberal intellectuals” had slipped into “disdain for the educated class as a whole,” and worried that the Republican Party was alienating educated voters. I couldn’t care less about the future of the Republican Party, but I do care about the quality of political thinking and judgment in the country as a whole. There was a time when conservative intellectuals raised the level of American public debate and helped to keep it sober. Those days are gone. As for political judgment, the promotion of Sarah Palin as a possible world leader speaks for itself. The Republican Party and the political right will survive, but the conservative intellectual tradition is already dead. And all of us, even liberals like myself, are poorer for it.
I have seen the rise of populism on the right in recent years as a deeply troubling mixed blessing. It has helped the right win elections, but at the cost of our soul. It has encourage the basest and most crass kind of conservatism, an intollerant Us vs. Them dynamic that in the end will doom a movement that is based so heavily in logical reasoning.
A friend of mine (a liberal one mind you) likes to say “Conservatives vote with their head, Liberals with their heart” - by encouraging this new wave of populism the GOP is alienating all of us who believe that conservatism is the logical path. Replacing it with a new kind of intellectual class warfare based solely in peoples desires not to feel inferior to elites - many of whom are elite by virtue of natural talent and hard work.
This is a strain of conservatism we would do well to stamp out.
In the Slate series, I’m sure Kmiec said some extremely insightful things, but I don’t particularly care what they are. Instead, I was much more interested in reading Ross Douthat give him the whatfor he deserves, calling him a “useful idiot” and concluding:
And I have no doubt that the Republican Party can profit from greater dialogue between its pro-life and pro-choice constituents—and do a better job, as well, of addressing itself to both pro-lifers and pro-choicers who aren’t already inside its tent. But I can’t begin to fathom why the GOP should consider taking any advice whatsoever from a “pro-lifer” who has spent the past year serving as an increasingly embarrassing shill for the opposition party’s objectively pro-abortion nominee.
Dang. Kmiec deserves it for the ridiculous arguments he’s made this year. Frankly, even if he came back into the fold I don’t think I could take seriously the words of a man who argued as he has.
Hey, Doug. Toughen up. Seriously. I’ve read suicide notes that were less passive-aggressive than this. . . . People often attack the religious right, sometimes with justification. But as you just reminded us, there is nothing in the world more annoying than the religious left.
Damned straight. Kmiec has become perhaps the one Obamacan I want back the least. Most of the others left over issues of petulance, but Kmiec spent the campaign making arguments that on the most serious moral question we face, Obama was somehow right despite the fact that he was wrong. I’m glad Douthat told him what he needed to hear.
Apollo posted this at 11:44 PM EST on Friday, November 7th, 2008 as Conservatism
Fascinating. This reflects abysmally on John McCain as a leader.
There’s a reason we don’t elect senators to be president, and it has to do with the fact that the average senator couldn’t lead his way out of a wet paper sack. I suspect we’re about to relearn that.
Apollo posted this at 11:26 AM EST on Thursday, November 6th, 2008 as Conservatism, Politics
In my first post about Sarah Palin, I gleefully recounted how the governor had “already caused one liberal pundit’s head to explode in violent mixtures of irrationality, peevishness, and bitterness.” Among other things, I was referring to liberal cries about her inexperience.
At the time, I thought McCain had made a brilliant tactical maneuver: he would bait the Democratic ticket into making Palin’s political inexperience an issue then turn this argument right back on them with devastating effect. Exchanges like this between Marc Ambinder and a republican delegate made think this was going to work.
Like Glen Loury, I must now admit that this didn’t work. Part of the problem was Palin’s poor performances in interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. Another part of it was that — putting aside matters of substance — Obama just sounded so damned calm, collected, and presidential that it’s easy to forget how little he’s governed. His eloquence seemed to diminish his inexperience; Palin’s folksiness amplified hers.
The primary reason, though, was that in leading the Obama/Biden ticket into the Experience Trap, McCain/Palin fell head first into the Covered Pit of Superstardom. McCain’s choice of Palin electrified the Republican base by appealing to their silliest instincts: anti-intellectualism, Christian identity politics, pulling the patriotism card, and regional victimhood.
McCain’s decision to embrace Palin’s new-found rockstar status completely undermined his ability to lampoon his opponent’s arrogance and self-adulation. The timing could hardly have been worse; McCain had spent weeks trying to focus attention on the sheer weirdness of the Messianismthe Obama Campaign had generated. As soon as his running mate began attracting equally adoring crowds for equally vapid reasons, McCain lost all focus and looked – rightfully – like a hypocrite.
What was even more depressing was how thoroughly the Conservative establishment bought in to this and how entirely unaware of its own folly it was. That partisan hacks – whether facile like Kathryn Lopez or clever like Hugh Hewitt – became enthralled by Palin should have come as no shock. That pundits as thoughtful and usually-level-headed as Victor Davis Hanson and Dennis Prager – who improbably declared Palin “The American Margaret Thatcher” the day McCain tapped her (here at the 23:00′ mark) – did is quite another story.
Conservatives have a lot of lessons to learn from this election and the last eight years. That we are susceptible to a lot of the same foolishness as liberals is one of them; that we might have squandered the national career of a promising young governor in the process should be deeply upsetting.
Both Jamie and Hubbard have expressed some frustration with Alaskans for reelecting Ted Stevens. Allow me now to defend Stevens voters.
Back in 2000, when I received my Missouri absentee ballot, I filled out most of it but left the senate race blank for a few days as thought about whether to vote for Mel Carnahan or John Ashcroft. A couple of days later, just as I was convincing myself that he was the right guy to support, Carnahan died in a plane crash. The Democrat governor announced that he would appoint Carnahan’s wife if Carnahan won, which convinced me to vote for Ashcroft. More people, however, switched over to Carnahan, who won posthumously, and his wife was appointed.
Of course no one voted in that election expecting Mel Carnahan to serve in the senate. But if you voted for his name, you knew what you were going to get. Whatever their reasons for voting for Jean Carnahan (I can’t fathom them - the whole attraction of Mel was was a great guy he was personally), the point is that people knew what they were going to get, and they voted for that, not for Mel Carnahan.
Picture Ted Stevens now as the dead guy. Sure, he’s not literally dead, but he has roughly the same chance of sitting in the next Congress as Mel Carnahan does.* A vote for Stevens brings along the distaste of voting for a convicted felon, but the reality is that he won’t be going to the senate next year. The reality is that he will be replaced by someone appointed by Sarah Palin, who is a reform-minded conservative. If you like Palin, and if you think you’ll like the person she’ll appoint, and if you think you’d prefer that guy to having another vote in Harry Reid’s pocket, then a vote for “Ted Stevens” is perfectly acceptable.
Moreover, let me say this: to the degree that a vote for Ted Stevens this year has a 0% chance of putting Ted Stevens back in the senate, I think it’s a more defensible conservative vote than voting for Ted Stevens in previous elections. There’s something distasteful about voting for a felon (You say!–ed.), but the reality is that you’re not voting to send a felon to Washington, you’re just voting to send not-a-Democrat to Washington. It is a near certainty that Palin’s appointee will be an improvement on Stevens for conservatives, and a near certainty that the Democrat would be less conservative than Palin’s appointee. Given the alternatives - Democrat #57 in the senate, or someone Palin likes - I think a vote for “Ted Stevens” is the more conservative choice. We must take this bizarre world as it is, not as it should be.
*As a note, I apologize to the memory of Mel Carnahan for comparing him to Ted Stevens.
Apollo posted this at 2:53 PM EST on Wednesday, November 5th, 2008 as Conservatism
Last night at about 9:30pm I switched off my TV, fired up the computer, and got back to my incredibly more interesting game of Spore (fyi - best game ever). The inevitable Obama victory had been declared and I had no real interest in seeing pundits preen for the cameras.
Still, after an hour or so of fierce interspecies warfare (damn those neighboring predators!) I was sucked back in to the world of politics via my obsession with blogs. Just when I thought I was out, I go looking for more punishment. In reading the various reactions the following thoughts swam through my head:
1) Shit.
2) There are two types of Obamacons. One that I think has a place in the conservative movement going forward and the other I think has so abandoned conservative principles as to make their return to the conservative fold almost impossible.
Like many conservative writers, my good opinion of Barack Obama diminished somewhat over the course of the campaign. Part of this was the inevitable hardening of the partisan arteries that takes place during a Presidential year, but part of it was that Obama’s particular gifts - his combination of charisma and thoughtfulness, and his ability to project sympathy for positions he does not himself hold - created unreasonable initial expectations for the kind of actual compromises he might make with conservatives. You start with the fact that he seems to understand your side of the argument, and the next thing you know you’re imagining scenarios in which he moves the Democratic Party to the center on abortion, or comes out against race-based affirmative action, or offers some other grand, conciliatory gesture that you’d like to see American liberalism make.
None of this was ever terribly plausible, of course, given Obama’s actual record - and it was especially implausible in a year when running as a “generic Democrat” has such obvious upsides. Obama moved to the center on issues where Democrats more or less have to be move to the center - making hawkish gestures on foreign policy, promising middle-class tax cuts, etc. - but there was never any way that he was going to live up to the hopes of the various conservatives who said favorable things about him in the early going (unless they engaged in outright self-deception, as some did). Unlike previous Democratic nominees, Obama was operating in an environment where his side had the upper hand on almost every issue, and there was actually more risk than reward involved in straying too far off the liberal reservation. And the campaign he ran reflected that reality, rather than living up to its initial promise to transcend the left-right divide.
Then there are those who post videos like this (unfortunately we no longer link to his site):
The sheer joy certain “conservative” pundits took in abandoning deep rooted conservative principles to support Obama betrayed, I believe, their utter unconservative nature. I am willing to believe that after the disastrous incompetence of the last eight years of Republican government that a principled conservative could, reluctantly, come to support Obama. I cannot believe that someone who claims to want conservative government would throw their support to Obama with such emotional ferocity so as to overlook the very liberal policies that will be enacted by an Obama administration.
3) This election has highlighted the lie that is Andrew Sullivan’s “Conservatism of Doubt.” Andrew abandoned all “doubt” and any pretence of conservatism in his emotional support of Obama and his disgraceful attacks on Sarah Palin. Andrew is perhaps the worst kind of intellectual - the preening pundit ruled almost entirely by his emotions. His commentary was insightful when it was confined to longform journalism but blogging has destroyed his perspective.
4) We will hear in the coming weeks that this election represents a Reaganesque shift towards the left. A watershed moment in liberal politics that will usher in a generation of liberal policies. I disagree. I think more than anything this election shows that what the majority of Americans want in their government is competence. The governing Republicans managed to tarnish the reputation of conservatism as a competent steward of our nation. Americans want a government that will keeps things steady, and in a choice between the calm, even keeled campaign run by Obama and the frenetic, often times lost, campaign of McCain the choice was easy.
5) California voted against Prop 4: Parental Notification for Abortions and for Prop 8: Banning Gay Marriage. The end result is the exact opposite of what I would want the law to be. Still I’m glad that federalism is still alive in this country and that states can still decide certain issues for themselves. The fact that Californians were able to overturn a law imposed on them by judicial fiat gives me hope for my home state. The fact that they can’t seem to grasp that young women need more support in life changing decisions than an underpaid doctor and Planned Parenthood saddens me.
6) Thank GOD Franken looks to be losing.
7) Thank GOD Dole lost – that ad was shameful and represented everything I despise about the modern Republican Party.
8) What the hell is wrong with Alaska? Stevens? Are you kidding me?
9) Its looking like we won’t have to face a filibuster proof majority in the Senate. Hopefully this will curb some of the more excessively liberal policies an Obama/Pelosi/Reed triumvirate will try to enact.
10) Politics aside, it truly is wonderful to see a black man be elected President. Although I am not naive enough to think that this one event will heal all racial divides or that race hucksters like Jesse Jackson will disapear, it is still an example of the greatness of American society that race is no longer an impediment to the most powerful position in the world.
Here’s George Will, who writes a column devoted entirely to how John McCain and Sarah Palin don’t understand the Constitution. In doing so, he peddles such nonsense about the thing that I’m left curious where, exactly, he got his copy. From his strange desire to make himself look smarter than Sarah Palin, he winds up making her look like the second coming of John Marshall in comparison. I hope Will one day regains his senses and is embarrassed about this.