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Strength Through Diversity! (Not)

The fact that the right often debates within its ranks helps us come up with better policies and find better ways to get them enacted. That’s why we win so much more than the other side. ~David Hogberg Liberals have a favourite sport of “discovering” conservative disagreements (“Look, they have these energetic debates about policies […]

The fact that the right often debates within its ranks helps us come up with better policies and find better ways to get them enacted. That’s why we win so much more than the other side. ~David Hogberg

Liberals have a favourite sport of “discovering” conservative disagreements (“Look, they have these energetic debates about policies and principles!  How shocking!  All this time we thought they were sitting in their thatched huts and beating their women!”), but conservatives seem to outdo them in their enjoyment of waving the flag of diversity (admittedly more of the interesting, intellectual kind of diversity) and talking up how normal it is that conservatives disagree with each other.  These responses have two parts: chiding the silly liberals for thinking that they have found a chink in the armour of the movement (“Oh, Gray Lady, when will you ever learn?” [exaggerated comical laugh follows]), and then doing a quick run-down of the intellectual history of conservatism with allusions to or mentions of the great purges of the Randians and Birchers, a salute to fusionism, references to the Meyer-Kirk arguments, a rehash of the fight between paleos and neos, and the latest theories on the clash of Southerners and Westerners, and so on and so forth.  “Look at our boisterous bunch,” someone will say, “our big tent runneth over!”  In the same breath, if we are lucky, we will be told that internal disagreements among liberals and Democrats about trade, military interventions and fiscal discipline are signs of their basic incoherence and almost certain doom.  “Why can’t the liberals get their act together?” the neocon says to his friends after he has just finished purging another group of undesirables from the inner sanctum.

This is a fun way to bat away observations of real fissures and tensions in the movement and the GOP, and depending on how broad your definition of conservative is you can say that disagreement is frequent and the conversation is lively.    Looking more closely, however, especially over the last ten years, one does not see much in the way of a vibrant back-and-forth between a multitude of conflicting voices.  There is instead the slow stagnation of what was once a source of living water, and there was for a time a strict enforcement of giving the appearance of external agreement that began more and more to homogenise different parts of the movement.  It is only as the Bush Era has ushered in disaster after embarrassment after catastrophe that dissident voices have again reclaimed center stage and have regained momentum against forces of conformity.  In this sense the revival of a more combative diversity within conservative ranks is a healthy sign and a sign of a return to the old ways, but it is newsworthy precisely because it has been so lacking for at least six and probably ten years all together. 

So it is probably a healthy development, but it is hardly a source of strength in the present moment.  The irony of writing this post on the eve of an electoral debacle that follows several years of legislative failures and bad policies cannot have escaped Mr. Hogberg.  Maybe, maybe, over the long term having people on the same general “side” tearing each other down (recently we have had this exchange–Armey: Dobson is a big, fat jerk! Dobson: Armey is a buffoon! Pence: We have room enough for both jerks and buffoons!) is advantageous because of the increased creativity and exchange of ideas, such as they are, involved, but in in the short and middle term having at each other is usually a pretty good sign that you are harming your political fortunes.  Mutinies and episodes of cannibalism are not typically regarded as great success stories for the groups involved, and the current conservative-on-conservative bloodsport (which is a perfectly real phenomenon, even if it is not exactly a new thing under the sun) has elements of both of these things.  In the marketplace of ideas, the conservative suq has become a place of sectarian gang warfare. 

The movement is designed to dictate and enforce conformity, as Austin Bramwell very smartly observed in an American Conservative article, and allows a certain degree of policy debate combat provided that everyone accepts basic goals and doesn’t stray too far off of the message.  This message would be that the GOP favours small government, reduced government spending, lower taxes, free markets, free trade, curtailing abortion and controlling the borders, while invading various countries as and when the President deems it necessary.  This is the official story of what the GOP promotes.  Half of this message is not true and some of the rest of it should make conservatives nervous, but so long as the small-government, deficit hawk, “protectionist” and realist folks don’t point these things out too loudly everything will be fine.  But now that there is a sense that the ship is sinking anyway, these repressed disagreements are coming out with increasing ferocity and it has become much more like “every man for himself.”  To talk about how normal this situation supposedly is (with some variant of “and the sun rises in the east” remarks) is to be like Kevin Bacon’s ROTC character in Animal House declaring that all is well as chaos explodes around him. 

It is worth noting that the people who have led the way in dissenting from the party line on Iraq, spending and immigration have tended to be those with the least stake in the movement’s institutions and the administration (or they are people who worked for the administration but then left in disgust and/or frustration).  It is hardly impressive for a movement supposedly so defined by vibrant internal debate that the only dissonance one hears comes from the people who have gone out (or been cast out) to the margins.  Using this as proof of the vitality of conservative debate would be like bragging on the flourishing of freedom of expression and representative government in a given country by pointing to the great number of artists, intellectuals and professionals who have fled the country on political grounds.

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