The Choices We Face...

"No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are his accomplices." - Edward R. Murrow

* At last... the mass desertion by true conservatives appears to have begun. See this by Paul Craig Roberts, of all people, who was Ronal Reagan's Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and contributing editor of National Review.

He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Like Paul O'Niel, Ben Nighthorse Campbell and a few others, these are not traitors to conservatism; they are angry over an ongoing betrayal of genuine conservatism by a cabal of extremists who have taken over the movement for their own purposes.

* Even more telling and devastating is the conversion of Kevin Phillips, whose book "The Emerging Republican Majority" (published as he began work for Nixon in 1969) first coined terms like the "sunbelt," forecasting the southern and rural GOP strategy that we now think of as "red state culture war." (That deserves a high score, whatever predictions "registry" you happen to be using.)

Like Newt Gingrich, Phillips foresaw the developing neoconservative movement not only as a march back to power, after catastrophic political defeat in 1964. During the subsequent long process of reappraisal and renewal, those who were reinventing conservatism envisioned a values-oriented return to decent American norms... sort of an immune reaction to - and correction of - purported anti-individualism excess by a fetishistically paternalistic Left.

According to this expectation, a broadly populist political uprising on the right would lead to fiscal responsibility, reduced debt, cautious restraint in foreign policy, efficient and limited government, elevated social discourse, electoral and legislative transparency, emphasis on professionalism and readiness, rising personal wealth for most Americans, a renaissance of entrepreneurial small business and the fostering of healthy civil society through a Tocquevillian process that devolves power from elites to the people.

Read that list of expectations over and over again, as many times as it may take for the irony to sink in. Did this fantastically successful American political revolution, seizing nearly all of a great nation's significant institutions of power, accomplish any of its worthy surface aspirations? Any at all?

That is, aspirations other than raw power? For those special few who in effect own the GOP, the active and profound reversal of all stated goals may not matter very much. (After all, power is power.) And other parts of the ruling neocon coalition - Straussian Platonist Mystics and religious fundamentalists - are easily satisfied with symbolic gestures, rather than tangible outcomes.

But for old-fashioned Goldwater Conservatives, who still make up a high fraction of grassroots Republican voters, the betrayal of every principle and desideratum must tear, grind and fester. Logically, this kind of cognitive dissonance should lead to agonized-but honest reevaluation, starting from the ground up. Well, it should. But, alas.

A deep flaw - perhaps the most tragic in human nature - makes delusional hallucinators of us all, blinding our eyes to any evidence that runs counter to our favorite dogmas. (This applies in all directions, to all dogmas, left as well as right.) Even more urgent is the need to find excuses for our side, our team, our tribe. In the face of this core human trait, it takes an awfully big person to admit that cherished, idealistic plans went awry... even diametrically opposite to every fervent hope.

IS CITIZENSHIP TOO MUCH TO ASK FOR?

And yet, aren't we praying, right now, for just such a grim admission to emerge out of the festering pain of decent American conservatism? The honest and sincere conservatism of Barry Goldwater, that was based upon a straightforward dedication to rectitude and accountability, arising out of some combination of market forces, law, and a vibrantly empowered, democratically enlightened citizenry? The kind that proudly faced the best of liberalism, ready to negotiate how problems should be solved, not whether they should be ignored?

That notion of conservatism remains valid and continues to deserve a place at-table, even now, after the movement's tiller has been hijacked by monsters. Is there even a slim chance that it can be rescued, before its reputation is permanently ruined by association with monsters?

Imagine how it might help save conservatism - and the republic itself - if a critical mass of decent, conservative paragons were to see their public-spirited duty in time. A clear duty to emulate the Miracle of 1947.

That was when several thousand moderate American liberals - having learned the truth about Stalin's Soviet horror - gathered their courage and resolve, stood up, and admitted that "the radicals of our side can be mad." In a combination of patriotism, pragmatism and idealism, they resolved to separate themselves, from any association with Communism, even at the level of nostalgic sympathy!

Nothing less would have sufficed. A schism of the left was necessary, in order to save the American left as a dynamic force in our national life.

Not only was this move courageous, it proved spectacularly successful. What ensued was not a defeat of American liberalism, but rather its greatest era - that of Martin Luther King and Betty Friedan - when citizens were inspired to redouble every progressive effort, to pass bills, revise laws, change their communities, and above-all to repair deep character flaws of racism, sexism and the shortsighted abuse of our grandchildren's planet. These problems were not completely solved, of course. But few of us regret those strenuous exertions, or call them wasted. Nor could any of it have happened, if honest American reformers had not decisively separated liberalism from a far-left that was deeply sick.

CAN SUCH A MIRACLE HAPPEN AGAIN?

Can anyone doubt that matters are just as serious today, on the American right, as they were for the left in 1947? In much the same way that liberals felt torment over disowning the monsters on "their side," so we now see decent conservatives writhing and twisting, like pretzels, in order to make excuses for rapacious kleptocrats, incompetent thugs, moronic armchair warriors, cynical spin doctors, conniving feudalists and screeching fanatics.

Are they truly loyal to such monsters? Are they kept in rigid lockstep out of some misplaced fealty to a ridiculous "political axis" that was insipid even when the French invented it, in 1789? A left-right axis that offers no relevance or insight or utility for an agile and sophisticated Third Millennium? (Gather a dozen people and no two will even define it the same way!)

In frantic denial, these classic conservatives tell themselves that "at least Clinton was worse..." without ever explicitly showing how he was worse, by even a single rationally explicit metric of human governance!

Such is our human genius for self-delusion. The same deep character flaw that toppled every other great nation, even at its height of power. The character flaw that our pragmatic enlightenment was supposedly designed to overcome.

Will decent American conservatives see their duty in time, the same way that members of the ADA and AFL-CIO and NAACP saw theirs, way back in 1947? Or will we finally see how decisively different these two movements really are, when the chips are down? One with a record of openminded heroism and the other... displaying craven cowardice till the bitter end?

Alas, Newt Gingrich hasn't stepped forward yet. (An in-depth essay 'Should Democrats Issue a New Contract with America'? re-appraises Gingrich's 1994 Contract with America, considering how this masterful piece of 20th Century political polemic might be used by the other side, in the 21st. Indeed, Gingrich might even approve... if his goal remained sincere.)

Nor have many other "decent conservatives" who should rise up and put true patriotism over dogma, declaring greater loyalty to our system than to a side in this contrived culture war. Alas, for the most part, top conservatives have either bought into the madness, or else grit their teeth and excuse it, by pointing to a strawman carricature of liberalism - a version that bears no resemblance to mainstream Democrats. It may be satisfying to yammer about terror-coddling, pornography-pandering, overspending, UN -surrendering, effete naifs, but the difference between the Democrats and the GOP is that the liberals' loony carricatures never had any chance of real power, and never will.

(And yet, George F. Will, like Cato, continues shrieking hysterically at anemic Carthage, while making wincing excuses for a homegrown tyranny.)

CAUSE FOR HOPE?

But let's look at the bright side. Look around for signs of hope. Glimmers like Kevin Phillips who recently came out with American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. A book that every one of us should go out and buy, for two reasons:

(1) in order to make it a best-seller, and

(2) in order to shove each copy into the hands of at least one honest, sincere and mentally-competent American conservative. (Well, perhaps as a test of mental competence.)

I won't go into the author's arguments here. Not in detail, although it certainly is refreshing to see a "conservative" concede the obvious - for example, that an ingrown, secretive, and historically selfish petro plutocracy is hardly the most credible cabal to trust with a great nation's energy policy, or its foreign policy, for that matter.

Phillips admits that he was shocked by the course that his revolution took, veering in directions that left all of the old goals of empowered citizenship and public rectitude abandoned, in the dust. He never expected the mass-populist neoconservative movement could be so easily -- almost trivially -- hijacked by elements that are anti-freedom, anti-future and anti-enlightenment, taking this route not only out of venial self-interest but also as a matter of fundamental personality.

According to Phillips, those elements include not only the petrocracy, but also religious fanatics, contemptuous media moguls and foreign elements that seek world power in the most efficient and straightforward way possible - by directly influencing American elites.

While focusing especially upon two of these elements - the new theocrats and the petrocracy - Phillips comes closer than anybody else to actually recognizing what's going on... a return to the consistent pattern that dominated nearly every other urban culture in human history. A power-sharing arrangement between resource controlling aristocrats and mystical clerics, who chant justifications for aristocratic rule.

Don't even try to deny that this was the freedom-suppressing formula in every culture, from Babylon to China to Rome... and all the way to the British Imperium that our founders finally rejected, in their daring gamble. A wager instead upon Periclean-Lockean notions of institutionalized reciprocal accountability. (Moreover, it is worth pointing out that the same formula dominated the old Confederate South, which Phillips now calls the ultimate winner of an ongoing Civil War.)

* Just to keep up my reputation of balance, let me point out that the Soviet Union followed this classic pattern in every detail, down to a mutually beneficial alliance where power-holders bent on ferociously enforced rule by an inherited nomenklatura, relied upon quasi-religious Marxian dogmatists to justify the elites' monopoly of power. Everything else - every bit of "egalitarian" Communist rhetoric - was hypocritical, Potemkin window-dressing. *

Far from being a matter of left versus right, what we are seeing today is a renewal of the same battle fought by Franklin, Washington, Lincoln, Marshall and every other great American hero. Every generation of American heroes. A battle pitting the new maturity of accountability, pragmatic self-improvement and rambunctious citizenship against the endlessly recycled power-rationalizations that served tyrants of every stripe. An age-old reflex that's the real enemy of freedom, still calling to us from Egypt and Ur. From the caves. From our genes.

WILL "DECENT CONSERVATIVES" BECOME AN OXYMORON?

Alas, though Phillips comes closer than anybody else, he still doesn't lay things out this clearly. Amid a somewhat murky morass of near-term details, he never crystallizes the Big Picture... that all ideologies tend to serve the interests of some freedom-stealing cabal. Especially if we let our favorite dogmas get hijacked by monsters.

Liberals (the smartest and best of them) were able to see this, when they performed a miracle in 1947, choosing to side with Franklin, Madison and Marshall. In a similar manner, decent conservatives may yet rescue us from a similarly dire crisis, in 2006, ending "culture war" by the simple expediency of saying "this is not conservatism. No, this is madness."

Will it happen, though?

Let's be clear about this. Patriots of all kinds will stand up and stop the monsters. As our parents and grandparents passed every test, we too will rise up and be counted, in defense of both our republic and civilization. America will be saved. That is not the real issue.

No, the issue is whether enough decent conservatives will rise up, joining this struggle, to save any hope for their movement during generations to come.

If Newt and his friends want a better version of conservatism to survive and thrive, with a reputation for anything other than spineless dogmatism, they will heed the call of history, and stand up. Now, when we need them most.

In doing so, they will make this not a matter of "culture war" between rural and urban America, but a much simpler matter, about ejecting a nasty gang of thieves, in order to let our nation get back to business. In doing so, they will save their own movement. But don't hold your breath.

So far, the pioneers in this conservative turnaround are so few that individual quirkiness dominates over any sense of momentum. From Kevin Phillips to David Brock to Paul O'Neil, the exceptions merely serve to attract Rovean spasms of character assassination, while raising false hopes, that this generation will be able to accomplish its historic mission - preserving the Great Experiment - with significant help from the right.

So far, despite those few exceptions, it seems unlikely.

If we can find any consolation, during this time of darkness, it is in a strange fact... or rather, a bit of inspiring truthiness... that the State of Arizona has started producing copious amounts of clean electricity from magnetic coils that surround the furious spinning in Barry Goldwater's grave.

===

See more: Politics for the 21st Century

The Political Battle over Modernity: Part V

I'm planning to post this series, plus the full list of a dozen slicedBread suggestions, at http://www.davidbrin.com/politics.html

I know this is a bad idea. Till now I have been able to claim I was at least somewhat neutral, taking sides because one side is awful, not because the other side is great. But in these series, I do seem to be very partisan, talking about what the Democratic Party must do in order to defeat these very BAD examples of conservatism.

Tell you what, in order to show balance, I think I may re-register as a... Republican.

You doubt me? Just wait.

Meanwhile...

The Political Battle over Modernity

Part V: WAS CLINTON DIFFERENT? THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE.

What can we expect in the next few political seasons?

Some things are more certain than sunrise. For starters, standard leftist mantras will dominate the primaries, while candidates vie for support from the passionately committed...

... followed by a frantic, post-convention scurry as candidates earnestly burnish their "moderate" credentials for the November face-off.

Alas, for the poor benighted Democrats, this dance will prove (as always) ineffective. The rightwing-controlled press will recall every vaguely lefty statement that each candidate ever made. Any subsequent explanations or equivocations will be labeled "wishy-washy" or indecisive, a character flaw that is routinely portrayed in the press as more heinous than dogmatic obstinacy.

Meanwhile, there are already dark warnings from the left, that any drive for the center will be punished by the Democratic Party’s home-grown ideologues.

As happened to every Democratic candidate, other than the agile Bill Clinton, this quickstep of relentless explanation, clarification, and re-explanation will dominate campaign news. Too-left. Too-moderate. Too wishy-washy in between. These are the Scylla, Charybdis and Styx of every modern Democratic candidacy. And by dancing to this tune, the candidate inevitably wastes both time and resources, then winds up dashed against all three shoals, at the same time.

So, how did Bill Clinton escape this trap?

* First, he relentlessly avoided excluding people and groups, unless it was clearly necessary. He even found things to praise in Newt Gingrich’s "Contract With America!" (This is a hint to something the Democrats really ought to try next.)

These Clintonian behaviors weren’t just a matter of tactics, but of personality. In taking this approach, Clinton resembled the inclusive tendencies of Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. Moreover, conservatives were right to fear this. It was why the true believers had to be diverted from debates over policy to issues of "character."

* Second, Clinton never bought into the silly and insipid notion of a clearcut "left-right political axis." And when fanatics of left or right tried relentlessly to apply such labels, he simply shrugged it off.

* Third, Clinton only got into real trouble when he lied.

This final item would seem to be a tautology! After all, the self-hypnotic mantra of the far right is that Clinton always lied. And yet, the irony is that he won almost every battle that he ever fought, and most of them weren’t even close. The ONLY fight that was truly a squeaker happened to be the only time anybody was able to prove that he lied.

Now, there are two possible paths you can take from there. One is to say that he wasn’t caught in any other lies because he was so "slick." Too slick to be caught even by the entire apparatus of the GOP, after they had all of the filing cabinets and all the papers of the Executive Branch in their hands, for five long years, along with all of the resources of the Justice Department and the FBI. Right.

The other, far simpler explanation -- but one that neocons cannot conceive, or even parse -- is that, contrary to the mantra, Bill Clinton simply did not lie very much. Despite the howls of derision that this second hypothesis will reflexively provoke on the right, which view is supported by actual evidence?

A detailed rebuttal can come elsewhere. But three irrefutable facts are utterly inconsistent with the standard mantra.

. (a) Under Clinton the government’s use of secrecy went down to its lowest level since WWII (in contrast to overwhelming Bush-Cheney increases in secrecy, to levels never seen even during the Cold War).

. (b) During almost the whole span of the Clinton Administration, it was subjected to relentless supervision and scrutiny by subpoena-equipped staffers from Republican-controlled Congressional committees -- something that has not happened, even remotely, under the present regime.

. (c) We were promised that Slick Willy and his guys would all go to jail, just as soon as "honest Republicans" got those Executive Branch filing cabinets to pore through. "Any day now..." we were assured during the first six months of 2001. By autumn, people were starting to wonder. Now, five years later, after untold millions in resources spent looking for smoking guns, the total number of Clinton era officials indicted for abuse of their actual powers in office is... still… zero.

These facts are not ambiguous or politically biased. They are simply, blatantly, outrageously plain facts. They put severe test to standard articles of neoconservative faith posited by the right and inflicted upon Americans for thirteen years.

* Finally, Clinton was unashamed of reaching out to particular subsets of conservatism, taking advantage of inherent schisms, splitting the right-wing coalition and luring away support from the other side.

Alas, these efforts were nearly always of short duration. Clinton’s own notion of a Big Tent was always tactical, never strategic, a character flaw that historians may someday deem far worse than sexual pecadillos. As soon as the next political battle came along, the same obdurate "liberal-conservative" party lines re-asserted themselves.

Because classic liberals and conservatives wanted it that way.

Hence, even if the Democrats come up with another political genius like Clinton, and even supposing that he wins the Presidency, that will be no panacea for a revitalized liberalism, or even revitalized moderation. Not if the same self-defeating habits continue to prevail at all lower levels.

Unless something is done about the deeper problem… that of a deliberately induced "Culture War"… the grand strategy of neoconservatism will continue to achieve brilliant success, out of all proportion to the merit of their policies or agenda.

...next, detailed examples of liberal suicide....

Return to Part 1: Ideas for Rescuing Modernity