Where is Britain’s Bill O’Reilly or its TownHall.com?

I’m slightly obsessive about the American model and have to guard against it. The US is not a perfect model. It depends on too many unhealthy connections with big money, for example. I also know that it couldn’t easily translate to Britain. The religiosity of America’s conservatives would never work here for a start. All of these reservations aside, however, I still think that there’s much for us to learn from the way that American conservatives haven’t allowed the conservative movement to be dependent upon who is in power in the White House. The conservative movement has many leaders and when Bush recently took it for granted – in his nomination of his close friend Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court – it rebelled and killed her nomination. ~Tim Montgomerie, The Spectator Blog

Mr. Montgomerie may be forgiven for mistaking the sheer numbers and constant chatter of the American “conservative movement” for vibrancy and health, since any alternative would look good to a Tory languishing in the shadows of Conservative irrelevance for the past eight years. For Tories these days, winning a general election, which the GOP does on the national level with relative ease, is one of the greatest goods imaginable, and anything that will bring them a bit closer to that goal is worth trying. Now granted that political parties exist to contest and win elections, and granted that political activists do not worry about political ideas for their own sake, it is worth keeping in mind that the “movement” has many members and has won several important elections, but only at the price of surrendering everything of value to the party and receiving next to nothing in return. Misreading the defeat of Miers’ nomination as proof of “conservative” strength in the GOP does not help Mr. Montgomerie’s case.

What Mr. Montgomerie misses is that FoxNews and the think tank regime have managed to have an enervating, stultifying, uniforming effect on conservative thought–indeed, they have taken the thought out all together. British Tory intellectuals during the last, pre-Thatcher exile did perfectly well in preparing the revived Conservative Party of nearly thirty years ago. If good policies had no connection with coherent and sound thinking, this might be all right, but the sheer ideological stupour of what remains of American conservatism today has managed to damage severely the very variety and vibrancy that once made the same network of think tanks, even as late at the mid-90s, potentially quite creative and productive places. But the movement that brought you the 1994 election victory and what it was supposed to represent died long ago, or rather acquiesced into irrelevance when its goals were thrown aside. It has since become the loudspeaker for the very limited interests of small sectors of the GOP and its leadership.

Men whom “conservatives” of this sort have elected now run the government, but it is the least conservative government of the last 40 years. At the risk of some exaggeration, the very same think tanks that paved the way for the (admittedly ephemeral and excessively hyped) Reagan Revolution are now factories that turn out the “conservative” equivalent of Soylent Green. The Tories do not need that kind of success, provided that they actually desire to stand for a certain philosophy of government distinct from New Labour and one that serves the best interests of their constituents. If that doesn’t much matter to them, by all means imitate the failed American conservative movement.