Partial Readings: The Future of American Conservatism
Partial Readings: The Future of American Conservatism
If there’s one thing that brings out the top ten–list impulse in progressive journalists, it’s the rantings of conservatives. By standing up for, say, rape and slavery in spite of the damage they risk to their public image, today’s Tea Partiers and their colleagues in the GOP can’t help handing their opponents fodder for ridicule on sites like Buzzfeed. And nowhere is conservatives’ penchant for the offensive and absurd more apparent than when a few dozen of their most influential leaders gather in a convention center with thousands of fans to goad them on, as was the case at last weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Threatened by Obama’s re-election and losses in the Senate last November, this year’s CPAC attendees had plenty to talk about. Indeed, with the relative decline of older, white voters, the GOP may well be facing an existential threat, if not a very immediate one, as Mike Davis ponders in the lead essay of the most recent New Left Review. His essay, entitled “The Last White Election?”, is a sweeping survey of electoral demographics, right-wing fanaticism, and shady campaign funding that arrives at the heartwarming conclusion that “Tea Party Republicanism is not the future, not the majority, not even the conservative past. It’s the gangrene of imperial decline.”
In an extensive report for the New Yorker, Ryan Lizza offers another perspective on the growing divide between the Tea Party ranks and the “establishment Republicans,” portraying tensions between House Speaker John Boehner and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor during budget negotiations as indicative of a broader rift in the GOP. The GOP House caucus, Lizza notes, is divided along geographical and generational as well as ideological lines; now, a further split is emerging between those who believe that Republicans should embrace different policies and those, like Eric Cantor, who think they just need to market their current policies better.
Last November’s defeat and the resulting strategic deliberations have only highlighted the divisions in an already unwieldy GOP. There are the belligerent social conservatives and the cunning fiscal ones; there are deficit hawks, gun nuts, and gay-bashers, Wall Streeters and Main Streeters; and then there are the ultra-libertarians, whose most vocal representative is now Rand Paul, the Senator who admirably challenged the Obama administration’s drone assassination program earlier this month but maintains egregious positions on women’s and civil rights and would like to dismantle the welfare state. For all their misgivings about one another, leaders from each of these groups had the good faith to come together last weekend to share their visions for the future of American conservatism.
Some highlights, as compiled by the Guardian, Alternet, and Mother Jones‘s Andy Kroll:
In his first speech since last November, humbled presidential candidate Mitt Romney styled himself as a lowly GOP “co-worker”.
After joking about her [gun] “rack” in a rousing defense of the Second Amendment, Sarah Palin pulled out a Big Gulp soda and sipped on it just long enough to let her punch line sink in—only to deliver another zinger, this time aimed at New York Mayor Bloomberg’s large soda ban.
Nor was Palin alone in her defense of the Big Gulp: joining her were four speakers at the panel, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love Plastic Water Bottles, Fracking, Genetically Modified Food, & Big Gulp Sodas,” sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Among the lessons of this anti–nanny state extravaganza: canvas bags kill.
Offsetting Palin’s folksy charm, Rick Santorum, mourning the loss of his nephew, went literary, citing Nietzsche, Victor Frankl, and G.K. Chesterton.
Donald Trump lamented that we didn’t get more oil out of Iraq.
Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal opened his speech by joking about torture.
An audience member’s defense of slavery at a breakout session entitled “Trump the Race Card” shocked even his fellow CPAC attendees.
In a more nuanced defense of slavery, Dinesh D’Souza expanded on his apparently popular theory that American liberalism has been shaped by anticolonialist resentment since the 1960s. He seeks to counter this liberal tendency with a moral and epistemological case for free enterprise, which involves challenging the notion that slavery meant stealing African labor.
NRA chief Wayne LaPierre defended the right of Americans to protect themselves, with guns, against a government that infringes on their rights. “If you aren’t free to protect yourself when the government puts its thumb on that freedom, then you’re not free at all,” he said. (More LaPierre highlights in the Guardian.)
For all the spectacle, it’s clear that the GOP still has its share of shrewd pragmatists—those who know how to win elections even when their arguments are winning over less than half the public. Though Republicans increasingly seem to agree on the need to attract minority votes, the shrewdest of conservative strategists, as Mike Davis notes, have all but dismissed the popular vote as a means of getting their way, preferring to use methods like congressional redistricting to override their electoral losses. In the wake of last November’s election, National Review pundit Ramesh Ponnuru wrote: “What the House success demonstrates, in part, is that Republicans can do well when they choose the voters rather than vice versa.”
Ponnuru’s statement underscores the notion that conservatives are most successful when they work behind the scenes, dismantling progressive legislation and public initiatives through lobbying and other such means, than when they trumpet their contempt for women and minorities on the national stage. The NRA’s victory over the latest round of proposed gun control legislation, for example, probably had more to do with the group’s outsized campaign contributions than with Wayne LaPierre’s speeches since the Newtown massacre last December.
And so the Republicans plod on, brash at times, quietly duplicitous at others, and sometimes —like when John Boehner and Paul Ryan both admitted on national television last weekend that “we do not have an immediate debt crisis”—a bit of both. By any means possible, the Grand Old Party is digging its heels in for the long haul.
Elsewhere online:
As Detroit’s new Emergency Manager takes office, “disaster capitalism” is the order of the day, from Michigan to Red Hook, Brooklyn.
A climate change–denying Utah representative is set to lead the congressional subcommittee on climate change. Schoolchildren in his state celebrate fossil fuels on Earth Day.
The New York Post releases a letter from Kimani Gray’s school testifying to his enthusiasm as a student, but the tabloid does not approve of a new push by prominent New York politicians to increase NYPD oversight.
Drones are being considered for use against jihadists in Syria and Maoists in northeastern India.
