The Devolution of American Conservatism

Christopher Hitchens gets it right on post-election conservatism in America, which is increasingly a nightmare-child of the Religious Right and freaked-out anti-communist phantoms.

Conservatism in my lifetime has gone from the intellectually principled style of Bill Buckley to the pragmatically principled style of Reagan to the frenzied principled style of Limbaugh to the dogmatically principled style of George W. Bush to the downright nightmarish style of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.  And in this last and latest incarnation, there is neither intellect nor discernible intelligence.  These people do not really read, and their comprehension of history staggers on drunken legs.

One of the great strengths of Buckley's conservatism was that it did not suffer fools.  

The greatest weakness of Glenn Beck's and Sarah Palin's conservatism is that it suffers nobody but Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.  It takes from its Christian mistress a sense of orthodoxy and apocalypse and the belief that its enemies are evil minions in the service of a coming night.  It takes from Buckley the impressionistic conviction that government is bad and potentially totalitarian.  Unlike Buckley, it cannot be troubled to comprehend the complexity of life in America or the potential generosity of politics.

No, conservatism declared war on America sometime between Buckley and Palin, believing that it was defending it.  America as a place where people of good will could dispute about policy represents to conservatism a dangerous threat to the hegemony of a white middle class.   Hitchens' article damningly and rightly says about the Tea Party,  "I don’t remember ever seeing grown-ups behave less seriously, at least in an election season."

As my conservative friends continue to swell the ranks of Tea Parties and to continue to promulgate poisonous thinking, I hope they'll consider what has happened to them, and to consider too that there are some versions of America not worth living in or defending.  Some of those are the monster-children of conservatism.