Dionne Pronounces Conservatism Dead
In what has got to be the silliest column I've read lately, EJ Dionne of the Washington Post asks is the right dead? Why? Because of the vote over the minimum wage. (Hard to type. Laughing too hard.)
A rather deft political move signals the end of the right to Dionne? Really? Oh yeah, it does:
The most obvious, outrageous and unprincipled spasm occurred last night when the Senate voted on a bill that would have simultaneously raised the minimum wage and slashed taxes on inherited wealth.
Rarely has our system produced a more naked exercise in opportunism than this measure. Most conservatives oppose the minimum wage on principle as a form of government meddling in the marketplace. But moderate Republicans in jeopardy this fall desperately wanted an increase in the minimum wage.
So the seemingly ingenious Republican leadership, which dearly wants deep cuts in the estate tax, proposed offering nickels and dimes to the working class to secure billions for the rich. Fortunately, though not surprisingly, the bill failed.
The episode was significant because it meant Republicans were acknowledging that they would not hold congressional power without the help of moderates. That is because there is nothing close to a conservative majority in the United States.
Yet their way of admitting this was to put on display the central goal of the currently dominant forces of politics: to give away as much as possible to the truly wealthy. You wonder what those blue-collar conservatives once known as Reagan Democrats made of this spectacle.
Last night's shenanigans were merely a symptom. Consider other profound fissures within the right. There is an increasingly bitter debate over whether it made any sense to wage war in Iraq in the hopes of transforming that country into a democracy. Conservatives with excellent philosophical credentials, including my colleague George F. Will, and Bill Buckley himself, see the enterprise as profoundly unconservative.
Oh, those silly shenanigans. How long has Dionne been a columnist, one wonders? An obviously political move, done for two good reasons in politics, providing cover for one's own while putting the opposition in an ugly position, is suddenly unheard of in Dionne's world? Deft becomes daft in the Dionne universe. The "right" has no more been a monolith than the left has been (although they think they are.) I've frankly never been a fan of Buckley or Will – though I agree more often with the latter more than the former.
On immigration, the big-business right and culturally optimistic conservatives square off against cultural pessimists and conservatives who see porous borders as a major security threat. On stem cell research, libertarians battle conservatives who have serious moral and religious doubts about the practice — and even some staunch opponents of abortion break with the right-to-life movement on the issue.
On spending . . . well, on spending, incoherence and big deficits are the order of the day. Writing in National Review in May, conservatives Kate O'Beirne and Rich Lowry had one word to describe the Republican Congress's approach to the matter: "Incontinence."
Funny, I see a lot of criticism for Bush over the border issue. I see a lot of people being very, very unhappy with spending. That does not mean that any of the unhappy people will abandon the Republicans and vote Democrat. No matter how much Dionne wishes it.
Between now and November, conservative leaders will dutifully try to rally the troops to stave off a Democratic victory. But their hearts won't be in the fight. The decline of conservatism leaves a vacuum in American politics. An unhappy electorate is waiting to see who will fill it.
I suspect EJ Dionne will be unhappy with the outcome of the elections. Because it will not be the end of the right. The left, is not the same as the liberals Dionne decries losing. For they are anything but liberal over there on that side.
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FreePA.org — August 4, 2006 @ 5:12 am
By Erkely, August 4, 2006 @ 12:03 am
I think neoconservatism is dead (”big government conservatism,” as Dionne calls it in the piece, or “national greatness conservatism,” as its proponents Orwellianly label it).
But real, small-government, libertarian-tinged conservatism is an eternal truth. With our national debt growing, it’s due for a resurgence.