The fall of conservatism

evince

evince

Truthmatters
http://www.truthout.org/article/the-fall-conservatism

Great article for everyone espcially the young people on here who have never heard the inside story of how Nixon created a new colalition to win his election.

Pat Buchanon is the source for a good part of this info folks so no whining about the perceptions.



The Fall of Conservatism
Monday 26 May 2008

»
by: George Packer, The New Yorker


From Nixon until now, conservatism has served to dominate US political discourse. (Photo: ABC News)
Have the Republicans run out of ideas?
The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.

"From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority," Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.'s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives - what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South." Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group - men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, "burned the paint off the walls." As they left the hotel, Nixon said, "This is the future of this Party, right here in the South."
 
Desh said:
http://www.truthout.org/article/the-fall-conservatism

Great article for everyone espcially the young people on here who have never heard the inside story of how Nixon created a new colalition to win his election.

Pat Buchanon is the source for a good part of this info folks so no whining about the perceptions.



The Fall of Conservatism
Monday 26 May 2008

»
by: George Packer, The New Yorker


From Nixon until now, conservatism has served to dominate US political discourse. (Photo: ABC News)
Have the Republicans run out of ideas?
The era of American politics that has been dying before our eyes was born in 1966. That January, a twenty-seven-year-old editorial writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat named Patrick Buchanan went to work for Richard Nixon, who was just beginning the most improbable political comeback in American history. Having served as Vice-President in the Eisenhower Administration, Nixon had lost the Presidency by a whisker to John F. Kennedy, in 1960, and had been humiliated in a 1962 bid for the California governorship. But he saw that he could propel himself back to power on the strength of a new feeling among Americans who, appalled by the chaos of the cities, the moral heedlessness of the young, and the insults to national pride in Vietnam, were ready to blame it all on the liberalism of President Lyndon B. Johnson. Right-wing populism was bubbling up from below; it needed to be guided by a leader who understood its resentments because he felt them, too.

"From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority," Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.'s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives - what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South." Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group - men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, "burned the paint off the walls." As they left the hotel, Nixon said, "This is the future of this Party, right here in the South."
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It's just mindboggling that the Left has turned to Buchanan as the epitome of the 'Right', he isn't and never was. As you suggested to Meme, had to google and low and behold it's the NY Times and two of your favorite authors to the rescue, pre-2000 election:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpa...15753C1A96F958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print

October 25, 1999
Reject the Global Buddy System
By WILLIAM KRISTOL AND ROBERT KAGAN

The Clinton Administration has been trying to frame the foreign policy debate for the 2000 election in the simplest possible terms: It's Clintonian internationalism versus Republican isolationism. Samuel Berger, the national security adviser, offered the fullest version of this thesis last Thursday, arguing that the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty means we have returned once again to the ''old debate'' of the 1930's.

It is true that some Republicans want the United States to pull back from its overseas commitments and stay out of messy conflicts in the Balkans, East Timor and elsewhere.

But the leading Republican Presidential candidates -- George W. Bush and John McCain -- are both internationalists and free-traders. Both believe in American leadership and global responsibilities. Both supported intervention in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of this decade and in Kosovo at the end. No matter who wins next November, American foreign policy after 2001 is going to be characterized by some version of internationalism.

The real debate in the coming year will be: What brand of internationalism? This is the debate between the internationalism of Theodore Roosevelt and that of Woodrow Wilson, between the internationalism of Ronald Reagan and that of Jimmy Carter.

The Clinton Administration has placed itself squarely in the tradition of Presidents Wilson and Carter, and never more so than in Mr. Berger's speech, entitled ''American Power: Hegemony, Isolationism or Engagement.'' Mr. Berger is opposed to American hegemony and decries Republican calls for increased defense spending. The true test of leadership, he argues, is not whether the United States remains militarily powerful, but whether it signs onto international conventions such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Climate Change Treaty, provides enough money to global poverty programs and supports the United Nations....
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I dont think he is the paragon of conservitism Kathy and I did not say he was.

He is not a tool of the left though is he?

He is providing his historical involvement in the past that created the modern republican party.

Im not really sure why you posted the other article , I think I missed your point?
 
Desh said:
I dont think he is the paragon of conservitism Kathy and I did not say he was.

He is not a tool of the left though is he?

He is providing his historical involvement in the past that created the modern republican party.

Im not really sure why you posted the other article , I think I missed your point?
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The idea of 'defining' the positions of the two parties. Buchanan is an isolationist, xenophobic, and a protectionist. That is not, nor ever been the Republican Party, with some exceptions during the 20's and 30's post WWI and Depression Era. The reason for the Kristol article in the NY Times was it makes clear the nuances on foreign policy between the two. Note indeed, that the idea of 'simple' international decisions, such as bombing aspirin factories, was not going to cut it in the future, even before 9/11.
 
You must not have read the whole article.


Once the principled levity had died down and it came time for questions, I asked whether the conservative movement was dead. "It would be a sign of maturity if conservatives would stop using the phrase 'conservative movement,' " Will said. "This is now a center-right country, and conservatism is the default position for, I think, a stable Presidential majority." Jay Nordlinger, an editor at National Review, added, "If it's no longer a movement, and really is mainstream, we owe a lot to Bill Buckley and Reagan." But Buckley himself had been more realistic than his eulogists. Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Times Book Review and the Week in Review section, who is working on a biography of Buckley, said that in his final years Buckley understood that his movement was cracking up. "He told me, 'The conservative movement lost its raison d'être with the end of Communism and never got it back.' "

Between the Mass and the forum, I had lunch with David Frum. His mood was elegiac and chastened. He now realized that, in 2001, Bush had been right and he had been wrong at their first meeting: the Party did need to change, but not in the way Bush went on to change it. "It wasn't a successful Presidency, and that's a painful thing," Frum said. "And I was a very small, unimportant part of it, but I was a part of it, and that implies responsibility." Frum has made his peace with the fact that smaller government is no longer a basis for conservative dominance. The thesis of his new book, "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again" (Doubleday), whose message Frum has been taking to Republican groups around the country, is that the Party has lost the middle class by ignoring its sense of economic insecurity and continuing to wage campaigns as if the year were 1980, or 1968.

"If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon," Frum writes. "Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well." He adds, "How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale? Voters want solutions to the problems of today." Polls reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment. The all-purpose Republican solution of cutting taxes has run its course. Frum writes, "There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well."
 
Kathianne said:
The idea of 'defining' the positions of the two parties. Buchanan is an isolationist, xenophobic, and a protectionist. That is not, nor ever been the Republican Party, with some exceptions during the 20's and 30's post WWI and Depression Era. The reason for the Kristol article in the NY Times was it makes clear the nuances on foreign policy between the two. Note indeed, that the idea of 'simple' international decisions, such as bombing aspirin factories, was not going to cut it in the future, even before 9/11.
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Well actually they were isolationist, xenophobic, and protectionist about since their founding, although the failure of those philosophies in the 20's is probably the most famous account of them. The free-trading of modern Republicans is actually a bit startling, given their roots.
 
You people seem to be missing the point of the article.

Its the fall of the Republican party.

This article is more than Just Pat B.

Its David Brooks
David Frum
William Buckley
Rich Lowry
George Will
Ed rollins

and more of the Young republican up and comers who of all of them are the most pessimestic on the future of power held in the Government by Rs.
 
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Desh said:
You people seem to be missing the point of the article.

Its the fall of the Republican party.

This article is more than Just Pat B.

Its David Brooks
David Frum
William Buckley
Rich Lowry
George Will
Ed rollins

and more of the Young republican up and comers who of all of them are the most pessimestic on the future of power held in the Government by Rs.
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The writers make good points about the changes the Republican Party needs to make but its not talking about the party falling.
 
cawacko said:
There is a difference between conservatism and the Republican Party.
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There sure is and the republicans are not real conservatives anymore.

Go read about the young conservitive leaders and writers near the end of the article and you will shit your pants at the direction they want to take the party in.
 
It's probably not an accident that the most compelling account of the crisis was written by two conservatives who are still in their twenties and have made their careers outside movement institutions. Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, editors at the Atlantic Monthly, are eager to cut loose the dead weight of the Gingrich and Bush years. In their forthcoming book, "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday), Douthat and Salam are writing about, if not for, what they call "Sam's Club Republicans" - members of the white working class, who are the descendants of Nixon's "northern ethnics and southern Protestants" and the Reagan Democrats of the eighties. In their analysis, America is divided between the working class (defined as those without a college education) and a "mass upper class" of the college educated, who are culturally liberal and increasingly Democratic. The New Deal, the authors acknowledge, provided a sense of security to working-class families; the upheavals of the sixties and afterward broke it down. Their emphasis is on the disintegration of working-class cohesion, which they blame on "crime, contraception, and growing economic inequality." Douthat and Salam are cultural conservatives - Douthat became a Pentecostal and then a Catholic in his teens - but they readily acknowledge the economic forces that contribute to the breakdown of families lacking the "social capital" of a college degree. Their policy proposals are an unorthodox mixture of government interventions (wage subsidies for lower-income workers) and tax reforms (Ponnuru's increased child-credit idea, along with a revision of the tax code in favor of lower-income families). Their ultimate purpose is political: to turn as much of the working class into Sam's Club Republicans as possible. They don't acknowledge the corporate interests that are at least as Republican as Sam's Club shoppers, and that will put up a fight on many counts, potentially tearing the Party apart. Nor are they prepared to accept as large a role for government as required by the deep structural problems they identify. Douthat and Salam are as personally remote from working-class America as any élite liberal; Douthat described their work to me as "a data-driven attempt at political imagination." Still, any Republican politician worried about his party's eroding base and grim prospects should make a careful study of this book.
 
LMAO @ The Fall of Conservatism!

A recent Pugh research study indicates 61% of the country identifies with conservative values. Now, I don't know, maybe the argument is, 61% is lower than the 80% conservatism of the 70's? But if the patient is 61% alive, they are far from "dead."

I will take this opportunity to re-emphasise the earlier point made, conservative doesn't mean republican. Pat Buchanan is to Republicans as Ralph Nader is to Democrats... there are some shared values, but by-and-large, their political motivations are completely different.

This said, the Republican party has a problem. They have fractured the conservative base, and don't seem to understand how to put it all back together again. It's the simplest thing in the world, they must return to their core conservative roots and have a strong conservative voice, but because of people like Buchanan, there is this pawl of doubt and second-guessing, which has led to a watered down version of liberalism controlling the Republican party.

Conservatism is not dead, not by a long shot. And it will not die! Conservatives may have to endure the fire, we may have to wait another 4~8~12 years... but eventually, we will regain power and control of our government. I am hoping, America being the resilient lady she is, it will not be too late to reverse the damage done by decades of liberal policy.
 
I think Dix was correct once, but I forget what is was on.

Dix is handy to have around, take what he says will happen and expect the reverse of what he says to happen.
 
Dixie said:
LMAO @ The Fall of Conservatism!

A recent Pugh research study indicates 61% of the country identifies with conservative values. Now, I don't know, maybe the argument is, 61% is lower than the 80% conservatism of the 70's? But if the patient is 61% alive, they are far from "dead."

I will take this opportunity to re-emphasise the earlier point made, conservative doesn't mean republican. Pat Buchanan is to Republicans as Ralph Nader is to Democrats... there are some shared values, but by-and-large, their political motivations are completely different.

This said, the Republican party has a problem. They have fractured the conservative base, and don't seem to understand how to put it all back together again. It's the simplest thing in the world, they must return to their core conservative roots and have a strong conservative voice, but because of people like Buchanan, there is this pawl of doubt and second-guessing, which has led to a watered down version of liberalism controlling the Republican party.

Conservatism is not dead, not by a long shot. And it will not die! Conservatives may have to endure the fire, we may have to wait another 4~8~12 years... but eventually, we will regain power and control of our government. I am hoping, America being the resilient lady she is, it will not be too late to reverse the damage done by decades of liberal policy.
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Decades of liberal policy dolled out by the absolute rape and ream of America by the conservatives who have had complete and utter control over the lives of Americans for the past 30 years?
 
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