Last week, Josh Marshall had a post over at TPM where he examined what he sees as the coming death of conservatism:
With all the efforts now to disassociate President Bush from conservatism, I am starting to believe that conservatism itself — not the political machine, mind you, but the ideology — is heading toward that misty land-over-the-ocean where ideologies go after they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil. Sort of like the way post-Stalinist lefties used to say, “You can’t say Communism’s failed. It’s just never really been tried.”
But as it was with Communism, so with conservatism. When all the people who call themselves conservatives get together and run the government, they’re on the line for it. Conservative president. Conservative House. Conservative Senate.
What we appear to be in for now is the emergence of this phantom conservatism existing out in the ether, wholly cut loose from any connection to the actual people who are universally identified as the conservatives and who claim the label for themselves.
New polling released today seems to confirm this…
The last six years have been a grand experiment for the conservative movement, with their complete control of the government giving them every opportunity to bring their ideals to bear on the rest of the country.
Unfortunately, things have not gone well.
As I stated in my earlier piece, Why Conservatives Will Never Love a Free Iraq, the realization of the conservative policies in Iraq has highlighted problems that exist at home as well:
The problems that conservatives have with a free Iraq are numerous and complex, but at the crux of the matter are the three areas in the political realm that they had hoped to craft and thereby control inside of the new Iraq. The domestic policy, foreign policy, and economic policy inside of this nation were to be set back at “Year Zero”, in a movement more reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge than the American Dream. But as these rapid-action plans have gone into place, the difficulties in realization have put the conservatives in the place of defending their policies, and taking any small step of progress as a major victory that even they know isn’t true.
They understand they are losing direct control over the Iraqi plan, their great experiment, and they aren’t happy. This wasn’t supposed to happen this way, and the evidence all points to a failure in ideology, rather than on a personal level.
But what evidence do we have to support that these failures are translating into a change of heart at home?
The Evidence
In 1989, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. released a book entitled, The Cycles of American History, wherein he meditated on various topics related to history and politics in the United States. One theory contained within its pages, promulgated by his father in the 1930s, speaks to the ‘cycle’ of American politics, and the inevitable rise and fall of political parties:
The realignment model was first launched by Samuel Lubell in 1952 with a famous astronomical metaphor. The American political solar system, Lubell suggested, had been marked “not by two equally competing suns, but by a sun and a moon. It is within the majority party that the issues of any particular period are fought out; while the minority party shines in reflected radiance of the heat thus generated…Each time one majority sun sets and a new sun arises, the drama of American politics is transformed. Figuratively and literally the new political era begins. For each new majority party brings its own orbit of conflict, its own peculiar rhythm of ethnic antagonisms, its own economic equilibrium, its own sectional balance.”
Both Schlesinger Jr. and his father believed that these cycles existed on something of a decade and a half scale, whereby the liberal and conservative movements in the country would fight for dominance and then fade after their rise to power. Whether or not you agree with the infallible nature of this argument, one must admit that American political history, at least in the modern era Executive branch, has been characterized by these swings of power.
What interests me is the idea that the conservative movement’s meteoric rise in the mid-1990s, coupled with the apparent mandate they were given in their post-9/11 response, has accelerated and intensified this process. Bush and the conservative movers and shakers have had six years of nearly complete control over the direction of our government, and our nation, and the results are quickly eroding the foundation of the conservative movement. This has not been a slow process, but rather one that has come quickly, as the American people have been faced with a near daily deluge of radical actions they were not prepared for. Unfortunately for the conservative movement, this accelerated political cycle may spell disaster for their movement for many, many years.
Want proof? Look at this new Gallup Poll:
The May 8-11, 2006, Gallup Poll on Values and Beliefs finds most Americans (59%) agreeing that government policies have a “significant effect on the moral values of people in this country;” only 38% dispute this. Gallup asked the same question in 1996, and found similar results (58% versus 39%).
The public is divided, however, on whether the federal government should be involved in promoting moral values, with 48% saying it should and 48% saying it should not. In 1996, Americans took a very different view on this matter, with 60% saying the government should be involved and 38% saying it should not.
That change appears to be a fairly recent phenomenon. Gallup regularly asks a similar question — whether the government should promote traditional values or not favor any set of values. Last September, 50% of Americans said the government should promote traditional values and 47% said it should not favor any values. That was the closest the gap has been in the 13-year trend on this question. Prior to that, there had been roughly a 10 percentage point margin in favor of promoting traditional values.
The key here is that under a Republican controlled government, the belief that the government should be involved in promoting ‘traditional values’ has decreased. Please read that again, just so you can be certain it processed properly: The conservative school of thought is killing itself.
This is completely earth-shattering for the conservative movement, because it reflects that their actions over the last six years have actually turned people away from them, rather than rallied the American people around their value system. They have failed, and the American people are tired of it. These are the first signs of a real public opinion change on the issue of social conservatism as a movement, and it reflects what I see as a growing trend against the conservative ideology.
What Next?
The post-9/11 leadership we have seen will stay with us forever, as a reminder of these failures. It is as if we have stared at the sun too long, and no matter where we look we are followed by an indescribable stain of color and emotion. Rather than serving as a reminder of strength and courage however, this blemish on the American psyche is indicative of a political sea change in the works.
I agree with Josh Marshall that we will not see a complete ‘death’ of conservatism, in that it will completely disappear from the political landscape. Rather, I think the Bush administration’s legacy will be the fact that it put the ideals of the conservative movement into the hearts and minds of every American. Unfortunately, the failures of nearly every policy undertaken by this administration, and the ineffectiveness of the Republican-controlled Congress, means that this indelible mark may be their downfall, rather than their salvation.
(Originally posted at Deny My Freedom and cross posted at Daily Kos)
