Con-itive Dissonance

This jumped out at me from Daniel today.

One of the remarkable things about the Gallup poll I was commenting on in the initial post was the GOP’s remarkable ability to retain conservative identification with the party. Rather, I should say that this is conservatives’ remarkable ability to continue to identify with a party that they simultaneously claim represents them less and less. This continuing identification with the party has happened despite what most long-time conservative critics of the party would insist is its failure to practice the sort of principled conservatism that most conservatives say that they want. Populist and dissident conservatives have raised objections for years, indeed decades, that the party has never governed as they would wish it to, but over time the label conservative, emptied of meaning as it has become, has increasingly become a more common label for reliable Republican voters to apply to themselves. The two identities have become harder and harder to extricate from one another, and the insistence from mainstream conservatives that it was the GOP that failed them, and they were more or less blameless, has become ever more difficult for a skeptic to accept.

It jumped out because the words ‘GOP’ and ‘the party’ could just as well be replaced with the word ‘America’. Unenviably, conservatives are increasingly defining themselves as the Patriotic Movement in a country full of increasing numbers of people whom conservatives can only disparage as bad patriots. There are more than a few good or valid reasons for this, but the political problem for conservatives is simple: how to win elections with a party that champions America but criticizes Americans. The most recent strategy to square the circle required putting a national security-oriented brand of national greatness at the top of the party agenda. In fact, when renegade cons like Bill Kauffman (see Daniel’s post) complain that conservatism in theory has cashed out as hegemonic jingoism in practice, I think they underrate the innate pressure faced by coalition-building conservatives during a decade of massive and sustained cultural transformation. (They also downplay some important realities about the stakes involved in the unnatural and unfortunate but very real Cold War.) But at any rate, that recent strategy now seems rather defunct. I do think it can be renovated on terms somewhat — but only somewhat — more amenable to the Bills and Daniels of the world. And I suspect that the Dems have not really cemented the nat-sec credibility that Obama seems to be successfully accumulating. But this is another post.