“Hey, you’re a moderate”, remarks the friend who sends along this piece of Damon Linker’s, adding that it’s “one of the few Linker writings of more than twenty-five words that I’ve not disagreed with very much”. There’s certainly a lot in it to nod along with, and despite my professed disdain for self-styled moderation and “centrism”, I suppose the appellation fits me well enough. Meanwhile, the hopeful note that Linker’s essay ends on isn’t that dissimilar from the one I sounded exactly a year ago:

With power comes prestige, and with prestige come corruption and complacency. (As Pat Buchanan puts it to Packer in that same New Yorker essay, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”) If the record of the Bush Administration and its Congressional cheerleaders is any indication of its health, the American conservative movement in its present state is one that needs to grind to a halt, to take stock of what has gone so horribly wrong, to purge itself of the bad elements and seize upon what little is left of the good. Such transformation is, of course, not easy under any circumstances, but it is the sort of thing that is simply impossible for a party in power to undergo. [...] By any reasonable measure, the present catastrophe is only a symptom of a much more profound disease. And, as with most great battlefield injuries, the best route to healing will surely be by way of a long period of convalescence.

Trouble is, as Linker helpfully acknowledges, much of the real thinking among the factions he highlights is happening at or well beyond the margins of the American conservative movement, with the traditional journals and institutions of record functioning as little more than cheerleaders for the tired party line. It’s putting it mildly to say that those of us at TAS, TAC, and Front Porch Republic are “less politically consequential” than our counterparts at NR or the Weekly Standard, let alone the Limbaugh/Coulter/FOX News/RedState nexus that probably has the largest impact on the attitudes of the conservative base. (Those folks don’t really come up for discussion in Linker’s piece, but then again it’s meant to be an overview of the “intellectual right”.) Nor is this likely to change so long as folks like Rod and Conor keep picking fights with the likes of Mark Levin: a nasty purge, as I suggested in the quote above, seems to be the only appropriate response to a condition of the sort in question, but the problem is that so far it seems to be the disease, not the necessary cure, that’s been the most successful in driving the opposing forces out.

Ultimately the problem may lie, as I suggest in a forthcoming review of Paul Weyrich and William Lind’s new book (concerning which, see Kara Hopkins’s thoroughly enjoyable review – subscribers only! – in the May 4 issue), simply in the inherent logic of “movements” themselves. The remark that I quoted from Pat Buchanan seems to get things exactly right, though one might argue that it’s really the combination of a movement and a party that’s the most deadly: hence mainstream libertarianism, despite being every bit the movement that conservatism is, is able to remain consistently interesting precisely because it lacks real political influence. The agendas of most political movements are defined by those of the parties they represent, and the agendas of political parties are defined in turn by their associated interest groups; hence the capacity to “think[] for its own sake”, as Linker puts it, and to “follow[ one's] ideas wherever they lead”, is markedly curtailed when those thoughts and ideas are ultimately beholden to the political fortunes of others. With a complete lack of power, however, comes a remarkable degree of intellectual freedom. In any case, it’s certainly nice to know that at least some of you out there in blog-reading land get some kicks out of watching us spin our wheels.

P.S. What Daniel said, too.

     Filed under: conservatism, media/culture, politics