The theme of an article and possibly a book (providing that I
can find a suitable commercial press) is “The End of Triangulation and the
American Conservative Movement.” My examination of this theme will draw on
previous material that I’ve published on the transformations of American
conservatism and will focus on the escalating divisions within the conservative
movement and their implications. Since the 1980s, and arguably since the 1950s,
conservative movement elites have built relations and, when possible,
friendships with the Center Left, while marginalizing any hard or pesky Right
that stands in its way professionally or programmatically. Thus from the time
William F. Buckley founded National Review in 1955, he began
expelling isolationists, mostly libertarian ones, from his movement. For the
next thirty years Buckley established close personal ties with well-placed
liberal politicians and journalists and frequently wrote for liberal
publications. The value of this strategy can be seen in how easily onetime
“conservative” journalists have been able to move into prestigious
left-of-center newspapers and TV news channels. Bill Kristol, Bret Stephens,
David Frum, David Brock, George Wills, Ross Doutat, and David Brookes are only
a few names out of a very long list of illustrations.
As the neoconservatives in the 1980s rose to prominence in the
conservative movement, they continued the triangulation pursued by Buckley, but
did so with somewhat less finesse. Anyone who disagreed too noisily with
well-connected neoconservative publicists could expect to be denounced as a
racist and/or anti-Semite. It made no difference what the disagreement was
over, whether foreign policy questions or suitable appointments to government
posts favored by the neoconservatives. The accusation that came from the
conservative establishment never varied, in large part because its most
prominent figures were attacking their opponents on the Right in a manner that
would be acceptable to those in the Left Center whom they were trying to
persuade or impress. Not incidentally, the neoconservatives had come from the
Left Center before they began their journey to the top of the establishment
Right.
That said,
the relationship of the elite groups in the conservative movement to what was
on their left and right was more complicated than this initial sketch would
suggest. A balancing act took place in which movement conservative elites would
draw positions and rhetoric from the Right, including from those on the Right
whom they expelled and marginalized, while trying to hold on to the favor of
the moderate Left. This strategy made perfectly good sense to those who
pursued it. The Left Center could provide them with entrée into a world of
sophisticated people and publications like the New York Times, Atlantic,
New York Review of Books, New Yorker, and the Washington
Post. A harder Right than the centrist one to which they were linked
could only bring those associated with it obloquy and ostracism. Of
course marginalizing those who were on their Right did not keep
neoconservatives and others on the respectable Right from plundering the
phrases and ideas of those whom they deemed unworthy of mention.Fascism: The Career of...Paul
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One might
notice the frequency with which movement conservative editors refer to the
Republicans as the “stupid party” and to the Democrats as the “evil party,” a
phrase that they borrowed from the late Sam Francis, albeit never with
acknowledgment. A columnposted by Lowry on July 19 may have
taken its description of the Republicans as “the Stupid Party” from this now
scorned paleoconservative author. Lowry then went on to state that while the
GOP just drifts along and temporizes, the Democrats can be effective because
“they are thoroughly committed to a vision.” A commentaryfeaturing the same point of view
had appeared on TAC website a few days earlier, by me.
Sometimes a member of the unacceptable Right whom an authorized conservative
intends to use has been so marginalized that he has to be “rediscovered” before
being returned to the memory hole. For example, Rush Limbaugh, who is at most a
peripheral member of Beltway conservatism, dragged up Sam Francis (after a number of
leftist journalists did) when Donald Trump began to surge politically as a
populist figure. Rush proclaimed Francis to be a forerunner of “populist
conservatism,” but seemed genuinely surprised that his fellow-conservatives
hardly ever referred to this stellar thinker. In fact they do quote Francis but
don’t dare mention their controversial source.
This unacknowledged borrowing from the Right is part of the
triangulating game that has been played by the conservative establishment for
decades. The most successful members of this establishment seek to appeal to a
right-of-center public, and therefore feed them Republican party-lines and
occasionally more daring right-wing positions. But they also take every
precaution to distance themselves from what they steadily denounce as the “far
Right.” Political analyst George Hawley sees such publicists and media
personalities as being engaged in a juggling act. They have to appear to be
centrist, in order to maintain a professional relationship with the Left
center, but they also feed raw meat to their aficionados on the Right in order
to justify their claim to being true-blue conservatives. These “conservatives”
also typically have to deal with sponsors and donors, most especially Rupert
Murdoch and the Koch brothers, who bring their own set of positions. These
donors are typically not interested in “traditionalist” social politics but are
ardent Zionists and/or advocates of cheap labor from Third World
countries. Whether or not one respects these establishment
conservatives, one has to admit that their juggling of interests has been truly
remarkable.
Unfortunately for its practitioners their strategy for success
may be exhausting its usefulness. The divisiveness of the Trump phenomenon, and
the unexpected appearance of “Never Trump” conservatives and Republicans, has
been an outward symptom of internal disintegration. Factionalism is now
bedeviling the conservative establishment; and were it not for a semblance of
solidarity provided by the Murdoch media, this establishment by now would look
even more disunited. One obvious reason for the disintegration is that
identifiable neoconservatives have been in high places for too long; and their
messages have worn thin. Whereas the first generation of this group displayed
certain disturbing eccentricities such as obsessive Germanophobia and
Russophobia, incessant Zionist partisanship and an unwillingness to treat
opposition on the Right civilly, the neoconservatives of the 1980s also brought
certain strengths to the conservative movement. They were relentlessly
anti-Soviet, when anti-Communism was the end-all and be-all of the American
Right; and their publications defended traditional family morality and never
held back from criticizing “alternative” lifestyles.
The second
generation, characterized by Bill Kristol, Max Boot, John Podhoretz and the
editorial boards of most conservative movement publications have slid
dramatically to the left on just about every social question, while going after
mainstream conservatives who have not followed their leftward course. The
recent attacks by Bill Kristol on his erstwhile employee Tucker Carlson, for
opposing the dismantling of Confederate memorial statues and for treating the
antifascist Left as co-responsible for the riot in Charlottesville, exemplifies
the war that has broken out between second-generation neoconservatives and
others in the Center Right. Second-generation neoconservatives show the same
obsession with Israel that marked the first generation of their group. How this
mixes with leftist politics is illustrated in an essay posted by Commentary–
editor Seth Mandel on October 29, 2015. In this commentary Mandel praises Black Lives
Matter and condemns the racism of the police force, but then complains that BLM
has embraced the Palestinian cause. Although Mandel’s position on BLM has
not been characteristic of every neoconservative, he is not the only member of
his persuasion who has Encounters: My Life wi...Paul
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of 12:36 EDT - Details)moved in that direction. But even
more interesting is his inflexible Zionist position, which may by itself
qualify him as a conservative in a conservative media culture that has been
dominated by neoconservatives and Rupert Murdoch’s funding.
moved in that direction. But even
more interesting is his inflexible Zionist position, which may by itself
qualify him as a conservative in a conservative media culture that has been
dominated by neoconservatives and Rupert Murdoch’s funding.
The war
between Trump’s supporters and the Never-Trumpers within the conservative
movement has generated other battle-lines; and no matter what Never-Trumpers
originally intended, the present polarity reveals clear ideological
differences. Establishment Republicans, corporate interests favoring increased
immigration, and a recognizable neoconservative foreign policy are on one side
of the divide, while their more rightist sounding opponents are on the other.
The two sides go at each other hammer and tongs; and the Never-Trumpers happily
run to CNN, the Washington Post and other left-of-center media
outlets in quest of allies. Entirely typical of the language that the Trump
conservatives unleash on Never-Trumpers is this diatribe by Kurt
Schlichter posted on townhall:
But the thing is, now we’re woke, and we’ve realized that our
establishment sucks, and that we’re tired of being the suckers. They didn’t
listen to us when we gave them the Tea Party, so now we gave them Trump. And
they’re very, very upset with us. That’s a key reason they want to undercut
Trump. Some people are just always going to want to trash the guy getting the
attention and wielding the influence they think rightfully belongs to them.
That’s true whether they are some donkey–looking senator from Arizona or
Nebraska pimping a book about his agonizing moral struggles, or some tiresome
op-ed scribbler serving as the domesticated house conservative on a failing
liberal rag, or the invasion-happy beneficiary of his parents’ success who
finds he can’t fill the cabins on his brochure’s cruises anymore.
Another
regular contributor to townhall, Jack Kerwick, unleashes this attack on the virtue-signaling of the
celebrities of the respectable Center Right:
In the America of 2017, it requires as much courage to issue
public condemnations of “white supremacy” (whatever exactly this means),
“racism” (again, not really sure what this means nowadays either), and
neo-Nazism as is required to publicly condemn slavery, murder, genocide, and
torturing little children solely for tricks.
Please note that both diatribes were posted on a website geared
for a general Republican readership.
Of course
there are equally nasty invectives launched against the pro-Trump Right
in National Review, Weekly Standard and Wall
Street Journal. And not at all surprisingly one finds Never-Trumper Jonah
Goldberg as a guest on Fox-news expressing sympathy for a presidential run
by Mark Zuckerberg or Mike Bloomberg against “the sclerotic party structure”
and presumably Trump. Clearly these feuds have not broken out
between a unified conservative movement and those “cranks” and “wingnuts” on
the Right, whom Jonah Goldberg thanked W.F. Buckley for “throwing off the bus”
in a famous tribute to his onetime boss (National Review Online, October
27, 2005). A war has erupted among the passengers on the bus; and it doesn’t
seem likely to end very soon.
This
brings us back to the growing ineffectiveness of the triangulation strategy
that served the conservative movement in the past. How can one triangulate when
the conservative movement is at war with itself? The Right that the
neoconservatives and establishment Republicans detest has moved into their
camp; and increasingly second generation neoconservatives are becoming
indistinguishable from the Left, from which they have to distinguish themselves
in order to remain credible conservatives. To make matters even worse, the conservative media attract a mostly older white crowd.
According to the British Daily Mail, the average age of a Fox-news viewer is
68; while the average age of a National Review reader is 66.
Seeing that less than l.5 % of Fox-news viewers are black, the network’s
outreach to minorities has had no success, any more than the efforts to reach
young viewers.
Although
some Fox-news viewers and some subscribers to magazines like National
Reviewhave deeply ingrained loyalty to theMulticulturalism and t...Paul
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of 08:07 EDT - Details) Republican Party and to
Republican talking points, one must ask whether these senior citizens agree
with the leftward drift shown by widely featured conservative celebrities on
salient social issues. How many Southern white senior citizens are pleased to
hear Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, and Max Boot come out
passionately in favor of dismantling Confederate memorial statues? How many
senior citizens identifying themselves with the Right really care to engage
Muslim countries in war because, as Sean Hannity and other Fox-news
contributors tell us incessantly, “they throw gays off buildings”? Would these
viewers see this as a call to arms, even if the accusation turns out to be
true?
Republican Party and to
Republican talking points, one must ask whether these senior citizens agree
with the leftward drift shown by widely featured conservative celebrities on
salient social issues. How many Southern white senior citizens are pleased to
hear Charles Krauthammer, Bill Kristol, Rich Lowry, and Max Boot come out
passionately in favor of dismantling Confederate memorial statues? How many
senior citizens identifying themselves with the Right really care to engage
Muslim countries in war because, as Sean Hannity and other Fox-news
contributors tell us incessantly, “they throw gays off buildings”? Would these
viewers see this as a call to arms, even if the accusation turns out to be
true?
Finally
one should note the persistence of baggage that the neoconservatives brought
with them in their ascent to power over the Center Right in the 1980s. Can one
still imagine a future conservative movement, particularly one that is becoming
fractured, held together by such Cold War concepts, as America as an
exceptional, creedal nation that is destined to transform the world? And what
use is there in dragging out other trademark views of the neoconservatives that
may have been shaped by their cultural and sociological situation: e.g., that
the Central Powers were alone responsible for the Great War and, as one learn
from reading New Criterion, were about to attack the US in 1917?
Readers might also wince at Rich Lowry’s cliché-ridden contrast
of Russia and the US published in National Review Online (September
17, 2013). According to this well-worn script, Russia and the US both show
“exceptionalism” but in glaringly different ways. “The danger of Russian
execeptionalism” lies in its “tradition of autocracy,” which “Putin
epitomizes.” By contrast, we are equally exceptional because we have set an
example of liberal democratic practice that everyone should want to emulate.
Lest anyone doubt this thesis bears the marks of high
scholarship, Lowry refers to a book by James Bennett and Michael Lotus that
“demonstrates” that “American exceptionalism is an age-old phenomenon.”
Needless to say, a polemicist can pull out genealogies whenever he wants to
prove the inevitability of a political conflict, between the predestined good
and predestined bad sides. Yes we know that neoconservatives
entertain historic grievances against certain countries and exalt the US as a
creedal nation, but there is nothing particularly novel or even conservative
about these platitudes. And there are other neoconservative practices that have
marked the conservative movement since the 1980s that look even more shop-worn.
For example, will self-identified conservatives go on believing that every
foreign policy crisis faced by this country is a repetition of Munich in 1938
and that every opponent we confront is a new incarnation of Hitler?
Political movements change; and so do their grand narratives.
The extent
to which things are changing for the conservative movement can be seen in the recent spat between Bill Kristol and
Fox-news star Tucker Carlson. Kristol went after his former employee at Weekly
Standard by accusing him of right-wing extremism. He scolded him for
“rationalizing slavery,” by not taking what Kristol believes is the acceptable
position on Confederate memorial statues. This resounding condemnation by a
scion of the leading neoconservative family, one that still has considerable
clout in the conservative movement, would have spelled doom for the accused
twenty years ago. Then Kristol and his vassals and associates would have likely
received the overwhelming support of the liberal media; and an intimidated
Fox-news manager might well have demoted the target of Kristol’s rage. But this
no longer is the case. The entire Right is united in its hatred of the “lying
media,” a revulsion that helped propel Trump into the presidency. The
Republican Congress and its “moderation,” which Kristol has praised, stands at
a 17% popularity rating among Republicans, according to the latest Quinnipiac
poll. Moreover, the attack on statues of Lee and Davis has very little
resonance outside the Democratic Party and the liberal media, with which
Kristol has already identified himself both ideologically and professionally.
Given such
altered circumstances, Carlson could treat Kristol and his twitter invective in
an unmistakably patronizing way. Carlson suggested that Bill’s capacity for
serious thought had diminished over the years. He should cut down on his
twittering before he starts behaving “like a slot-machine junkie.” In any case
Tucker’s former boss should play more often with his grandchildren rather than
hurl insults at him over the internet.
Nota bene: Although I’m associated with the Old Right, which
lost control of the conservative movement decades ago, the proposed text will
most certainly not try to demonstrate that my side will ever regain a
commanding position on the Right. Political movements come and go in response
to changing historical circumstances. Except for those bits and pieces that a
new independent Right might try to extract from the wreckage, the Right to
which I belonged is gone.
Paul
Gottfried [send
him mail] is Horace Raffensperger Professor Emeritus of Humanities
at Elizabethtown College and author of Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, The Strange Death of Marxism, and Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American
Right. His latest books are Fascism: The Career of a Concept and Encounters: My Life with Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends
and Teachers.
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