The conservative movement isn’t dangerous or “revanchist;” it’s just boring. Right-wing intellectuals should eschew the movement and reintegrate into the mainstream, not because the movement threatens the Republic, but because freedom of thought can only be found outside of it. ~Austin Bramwell

Via Rod

Bramwell has done a good job of critiquing Tanenhaus’ The Death of Conservatism, which he does again on the main blog here. In his earlier article, he makes the essential point that ideology and unscrupulous political opportunism are not opposites, but actually complement one another:

Tanenhaus misses that movements can become both unprincipled and tediously ideological at the same time. Nobody would accuse late Soviet commissars, for example, of a faithful commitment to socialist dogma. At the same time, the more their practices strayed from their principles, the more they clung to their creeds outworn. Similarly, the very emptiness of movement slogans is a sign not of fervent belief but the lack of it. Perhaps all movements end in some combination of hypocrisy and intellectual torpor. As Tanenhaus observes, creative and original writers are abandoning the movement. Those left behind are just going through the motions.

What is important for understanding ideology is recognizing that it is perfectly malleable depending on the needs of the movement and/or party. This means that if the immediate political needs of movement or party require incredible intellectual contortionism or flat-out contradictions of stated beliefs, political needs will win out and the “substance” of the ideology, such as it is, will be made to fit. One of the depressing things about movement conservatism is simply that it is a movement, and like other programmatic movements the perpetuation of its own existence and its access to power becomes the only enduring part of the program. Dissenters are purged in different waves, and those doing the purging in one wave may end up as the victims of the next. Today it is imperative to back the NEP, and tomorrow it is a death sentence. This is why it is probably wise not to try to outdo rival factions in ideological zeal, especially because this zeal is not an expression of deep devotion to enduring truths but an attachment to power and its trappings.

This is related to the troubled relationship of conservative elites and the grassroots and to the broader problem of nationalism on the American right. To some significant degree, the grassroots believe what they are told conservatism is, and it seems to me that the elites reconcile the definition of conservatism they hand down with how political conservatives actually govern by wrapping everything in the banner of Americanism. Government can expand enormously, so long as it is doing so in the name of spreading and/or defending freedom. This is tied to the mythology of American exceptionalism and mission that many conservatives believe that they alone accept, and any trampling of actual constitutional liberties can be justified so long as it is being done to “protect” America. Insofar as their nationalism tells them that country, people and government are bound up together opposition to any policies related to this can and must be defined as “un-American,” “anti-American” and “unpatriotic.”