The End of the Conservatives?

[Doug]

The End Of the Right?
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, August 4, 2006; The Washington Post

What might have seemed an absurd question less than two years ago is now one of the most important issues in American politics. The question is being asked -- mostly quietly but occasionally publicly -- by conservatives themselves as they survey the wreckage of their hopes, and as their champions in the Republican Party use any means necessary to survive this fall's elections.

Conservatism was always a delicate balancing act between small-government economic libertarians and social traditionalists who revered family, faith and old values. The two wings were often held together by a common enemy, modern liberalism certainly, but even more so by communism until the early 1990s, and now by what some conservatives call "Islamofascism."

...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.

Read the rest here.

[Hogeye]

According to McClave at NWApolitics.com, it was a clever ploy by Republicans:

It was a pretty good election year move: the dems will have to admit they voted against raising the minimum wage just because they wanted to continue the death tax. The average Joe doesn't give a shit about the death tax but they damn sure to care about the minimum wage. When the GOP starts pounding them over that, the people will listen.

Of course, IMO both factions suck, and all this is the usual meaningless political dog and pony show. Don't vote. Don't pay taxes. Build your own freedom.

Conservatism was always a delicate balancing act between small-government economic libertarians and social traditionalists who revered family, faith and old values. The two wings were often held together by a common enemy, modern liberalism certainly, but even more so by communism until the early 1990s, and now by what some conservatives call "Islamofascism."

Good! Many people seem to portray American "conservatism" as some kind of unified ideology. I would make the anti-communist/islamofascist another third faction, since it has little or no logical connection to economic libertarianism or social traditionalism. Up until the 1950s conservatives ("the Old Right") were ardently antiwar and anti-imperialist. Buckley's "fusion conservatism" unfortunately won out; conservatives have been dominated by the paranoid imperialist faction ever since. Not like liberals, who are warmongers for humanitarian reasons.