A Political Merry-Go-Round With Wheels

Reading Andrew’s take down of the inimitable Michael Goldfarb today (apparently Fridays are Michael Goldfarb Day for me), I was struck with an insight about why I find myself so much more drawn to closely analyzing the goings on of American conservatism than American liberalism.

Andrew writes,

When you are a propagandist, these caveats – and the whole idea of thinking out loud in order to understand a foreign culture better – are anathema. And that’s why you end up shutling between “journalism” and being a spokesman for party campaigns.

There is a complete and utter lack of fear present in Andrew’s analysis about calling out the hypocrisies that he perceives as active within a movement and a party in which he was once fairly heavily invested.  I believe completely that such such ruthlessness, so long as it is carried out with an spirit of constructivism, is badly needed in America’s current political discourse.

Of course, Andrew isn’t the only one engaging this mission by any stretch of the imagination, and while he remains one of my favourite bloggers and thinkers, he isn’t even necessarily the most effective at it, either. What Andrew and other dissident conservatives are, though — at least to my mind — are honest brokers in the process who stand to unleash a certain kind of fire power on a sinking ship that by many accounts refuses to acknowledge the rising water line of its situation (that ship, I should add, is as much the conservative movement as it is the GOP, if not more so).

In our discussion on American liberalism yesterday, Freddie noted that part of the recent history of liberals is a certain kowtowing to the success of conservative ideas and ideals since the Reagan resurgence, present and influential even throughout the much rose-coloured Clinton years. If I’m reading him correctly, I think Freddie is saying that liberals are basically afraid to really wrestle their conservative counterparts and that this is part of their current weakness.

I would agree with that assessment, but I would add that I don’t think that liberals are, frankly, in a very good position to do this right now. Personally, if I see Pelosi, Reid, Dean, Schumer, or any of the other various Democratic spokespeople start in about the failings of American conservatism, invariably my eyes glaze over with that ubiquitous sheen of partisan disinterest. I just don’t take American liberals to be at all honest brokers in this discussion because there is so much more than principle at play when it comes to winning hearts and minds in that discussion.

And yet, it seems to a fairly roundly agreed upon assessment that something has gone terribly awry with the GOP and the larger conservative movement over the past decade or thereabouts. So there is a desperate need for a viciously honest discussion about what the nature of that wrong turn entails, how it happened, how things have changed as a result, and what is to be done about all of it. If I have a hard time seeing liberals as the appropriate interlocutors for such a dialogue, then it only stands to reason that my eyes are going to turn to dissident conservatives who are willing to argue vociferously on principle about the state of their movement (for it remains their movement, too) and what the necessary tonic for its future might be.

Of course, those who are being criticized are inevitably going to see those barbs as the wielding of culturally persuasive, yet ideologically disingenuous flip-flopping, that is the nature of being criticized on things like first principles. And nor am I suggesting that conservatives who see nothing wrong with the movement as it currently stands should meekly sit on their hands and nod their heads, this is a serious discussion and those involved ought to be willing to speak their minds freely and forcefully.

But, at the end of the day, I increasingly see this whole trage-comedy playing out against a cyclical background of wax and wane. So as much as liberals, who have amassed a not insubstantial amount of power, need a critical eye placed on their movements, I can’t help but be utterly transfixed with the battle over the heart and soul of conservatism. My obsession is born of the belief that if dissident conservatives can find a way of massaging the core changes they see as necessary (and there is still a pretty solid debate about what properly constitutes those changes because this group of dissidents is hardly a homogeneous mush), that the reborn conservatism to which they give rise, will be the only antidote to topple the liberal juggernaut that America has currently enthroned.

At that point, my eyes will turn, with equal fascination, towards what I suspect will be the same process for liberals some years (decades?) down the road. Being as that I find the idea of people moving beyond party affiliation towards abandoning even ideological affiliation in the way that I remain committed to be a pretty far off and unstable possibility, this dialectic evolutionary take on the political process strikes me as the best way of analyzing and understanding our predicament and discourse for the foreseeable future.

The focus, when everything else drops, is not really one side winning out over the other, but the maintained momentum of the process itself.

Tagged as: Andrew Sullivan, dialectic evolution, dissident conservatives, liberals, Michael Golfarb, movement conservatives, the political process