The New York Times / September 29, 2009 Books of The Times The Waxing and Waning of America’s Political Right By JACKSON LEARS Skip to next paragraph
THE DEATH OF CONSERVATISM By Sam Tanenhaus 123 pages. Random House. $17. One puzzling feature of American politics is that the people who call themselves conservatives seldom want to conserve anything. The modern conservative movement promotes radical transformation while ignoring classical conservative ideas — for example, Edmund Burke’s respect for established institutions and customs, for continuity with tradition and for incremental change. The recent history of the American right, writes Sam Tanenhaus, involves the triumph of “movement conservatism” over the Burkean version. In his view “the paradox of the modern Right” is that “its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative,” and that has finally led to electoral disaster, political irrelevance and “rigor mortis.” <clip> “The Death of Conservatism” is a persuasive intellectual history of the right, but it omits a lot of institutional history and ignores money and power altogether. A fuller history would have paid attention to Lewis F. Powell Jr.’s 1971 memorandum to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.” Powell, soon to be a Supreme Court justice, urged friends of capitalism to retake command of public discourse by financing think tanks, reshaping mass media and seeking influence in universities and the judiciary. This did happen in the decades to follow. What had once been far-right fantasies — abolishing welfare, privatizing Social Security, deregulating banking, embracing preventive war — became legitimate policy positions, emanating from institutions that cost a lot of money to maintain: the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Fox News Network, as well as numerous corporate lobbying organizations and university professorships. Money talked. None of this ideological infrastructure has disappeared. Whether the Obama administration can stand up to its power remains to be seen. Despite popular support for a robust public option in health care coverage and even a single-payer system, the airwaves are pervaded by the buzzwords of the market — competition, incentives, consumer choice. Foreign policy, too, remains dominated by right-wing assumptions. Whatever President Obama’s intentions (and it would be a mistake to underestimate him), he will find the imperial presidency difficult to repudiate. The bureaucratic labyrinths of the national security state will be dismantled no more easily than the hundreds of American military bases around the world, many of them shrouded in secrecy. Nor will it be easy to challenge the assumptions that underlie empire: the humanitarian dreams of interventionists in Mr. Obama’s own party and the relentless Republican demands for toughness. Here as elsewhere, the right wields far more power than its weak popular support warrants. Reports of its death have been exaggerated. Jackson Lears is editor in chief of Raritan: A Quarterly Review and the author, most recently, of “Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.” Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
