In a well attended panel this morning in Washington entitled “Making Conservatism Credible Again” (audio here), the message was the same old song: preach market individualism and a nationalized social conservatism and the GOP will win again.  Panelists insisted that the conservative movement has never gone wrong with its political agenda; rather, it has failed to communicate with the American people, especially voters under 30, one-third of whom now support “socialism,” according to a poll quoted by AEI’s Arthur Brooks.

The conservative movement must be more inclusive of these young voters and minorities, Mitch Daniels and Rich Lowry insisted.  That didn’t stop them from taking shots at “mass transit” and “urban America,” never mind that most of the young people in their audience probably used mass transit that very morning and live in a part of urban America that is the ninth largest metropolitan area in the country.  The panelists demonstrated that despite advocating a big tent, the part of America that does not conform to a rigid post-war vision of the American dream — a suburban (and ultimately exurban) home with three cars in the garage and a WalMart nearby — might not be the best or most desired dream for all, especially young people, many of whom are embracing walkable urban communities.

Perhaps most alarming, in what was supposed be a frank discussion of the state of the movement, was an unwillingness to address the Iraq war and the failed neoconservative foreign policy agenda of the Bush years.  Rich Lowry insisted that America has always been “a crusading power,” a commercial republic concerned with economic progress.  Lowry might well be right on the history of American imperial impulses and rejection of the Jeffersonian agrarian vision.  It is appropriate to ask whether this trajectory, if left unaltered, will serve America well in the future, and whether it promotes conservative ends: ordered liberty tempered by prudence, local attachments, and acknowledgment of human imperfectibility.

In contrast, Governor Daniels thought it appropriate to invoke Emerson, who once contrasted the “party of memory” with the “party of hope.”  Daniels insisted that the GOP must become the latter, more hopeful party.  Emerson’s distinction was popularized more recently by none other than Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who wrote that

For Emerson the basic difference was between the party of the past and the party of the future, between the party of memory and the party of hope. It is still true that the American liberal believes that society can and should be improved, and that the way to improve it is to apply human intelligence to social and economic problems. The conservative, on the other hand, opposes efforts at purposeful change — especially when they threaten the existing distribution of power and wealth — because he believes that things are about as good as they can be reasonably expected to be, and that any change is more likely than not to be for the worse…he clings stubbornly to that which he knows and to which he is habituated. “The castle which conservatism is set to defend,” said Emerson, “is the actual state of things, good and bad.”

While Schlesinger undoubtedly mischaracterized and thus maligned traditional conservatism here, it is nonetheless astounding that this morning Daniels essentially aligned with Schlesinger in suggesting that conservatives must become the “party of hope” (he continued by rejecting Burke’s famous definition of society by calling it a “democracy including the dead,” a “reliably Democratic constituency,” to much laughter).  A political movement that discards custom and tradition to promote abstract, utopian visions is no longer conservative, at least in the Burkean sense of the word.  To throw the lessons of history to the wind in favor of a politics that places “hope” in the capacity of mankind on earth is exactly the kind of utopian dreaming Burke criticized in the French revolutionaries: a rejection of our human frailty and the limitations of what might be accomplished by the state—and even more frighteningly, by the sword.

But in Lowry’s bellicose rhetoric, the right faces “a war on American exceptionalism.”  What Lowry misses is that there is also an American exceptionalism of the left, and that its statist redistributionism is peddled as alternative to what is merely an opposing ideology: a hawkish right with an uncritical faith in the market.  Until conservatives embrace an older, anti-ideological tradition, we will be unable to make the moral argument that Lowry and Daniels both insisted is necessary to regaining the high ground.

See NRO’s take here.