Of course, I really didn’t have time to read it either. So naturally I want to waste more time to redeem the time I have wasted.
But at least the writer does slip to reveal his big fear. Long quotation to follow with punch line emphasized at the end:
In its final year, the Bush Administration is seen by many conservatives (along with seventy per cent of Americans) to be a failure. Among true believers, there are two explanations of why this happened and what it portends. One is the purist version: Bush expanded the size of government and created huge deficits; allowed Republicans in Congress to fatten lobbyists and stuff budgets full of earmarks; tried to foist democracy on a Muslim country; failed to secure the border; and thus won the justified wrath of the American people. This account—shared by Pat Buchanan, the columnist George F. Will, and many Republicans in Congress—has the appeal of asking relatively little of conservatives [yeah, except the scorn of sophisticates everywhere and resistance to the lure of expanding political power]. They need only to repent of their sins, rid themselves of the neoconservatives who had agitated for the Iraq invasion, and return to first principles. Buchanan said, “The conservatives need to, in Maoist terms, go back to Yenan.”
The second version—call it reformist—is more painful, because it’s based on the recognition that, though Bush’s fatal incompetence and Rove’s shortsighted tactics hastened the conservative movement’s demise, they didn’t cause it. In this view, conservatism has a more serious problem than self-betrayal: a doctrinaire failure to adapt to new circumstances, new problems. Instead of heading back to Yenan to regroup, conservatives will have to spend some years or even decades wandering across a bleak political landscape of losing campaigns and rebranding efforts and earnest policy retreats, much as liberals did after 1968, before they can hope to reëstablish dominance.
Recently, I spoke with a number of conservatives about their movement. The younger ones—say, those under fifty—uniformly subscribe to the reformist version. They are in a state of glowing revulsion at the condition of their political party. Most of them predicted that Republicans will lose the Presidency this year and suffer a rout in Congress.
So there still are conservatives hidden away from Fox news and other sell-out points. And the others are dying off. Good news.
The most hardcore conservatives I know are mere liberals compared to my views. But a word of warning, political
liberalism tends to lead toward moral and spiritual liberalism (in the modern meaning of the word).
Just because one despises both major political parties (and I do), one should be careful not to then unwittingly become a tool of the enemy.
For example, I read National Review, and I must say that even at the intellectual level, the NeoCon takeover is disheartening. I wrote a letter to the editor pointing out the obvious short-comings of the views of some of the writers of this magazine and naturally it was never published. So, it seems that NeoCons and ilk are now developing the same mental block against truth that the Democrats have long had.
Anyway cheers.