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The View From Movement-World

Continuing the “epistemic closure” debate, Jonah Goldberg writes: Lord knows the Democrats did not ride back to power on the backs of nimble and novel public policy prescriptions. This is quite right. There is no necessary connection between election results and the quality or vibrancy of the intellectual life of the activists, wonks and experts […]

Continuing the “epistemic closure” debate, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Lord knows the Democrats did not ride back to power on the backs of nimble and novel public policy prescriptions.

This is quite right. There is no necessary connection between election results and the quality or vibrancy of the intellectual life of the activists, wonks and experts aligned with one coalition or another. Between early 2002 and early 2005, Republicans and conservatives were politically in fairly good shape, but that same period was characterized by some of the sloppiest thinking and the most inflexible, ideological responses to events in at least thirty years. This is why references to the relative political strength or weakness of a party that Goldberg and Continetti have made are entirely irrelevant to the question. The conservative movement could be operating in a self-reinforcing cocoon and suffering from intellectual bankruptcy, and the electorate might nonetheless support their Republican political leaders in spite or even because of these things.

It is not difficult to demonstrate the reality of the “hermetically-sealed mental world in which only information provided by organs of the conservative movement is trusted.” In the last four years, Republicans and mainstream conservatives have largely learned nothing or learned the wrong things about why they lost power. It was not intellectual bankruptcy that directly caused Republican defeats, but we can see intellectual bankruptcy on display in the way movement conservatives have responded to political defeats.

The first, most predictable move was to declare the losses to be setbacks for Republicans, but not for conservatives. As a dissident conservative, I agree that there was nothing genuinely conservative in Republican policies between 2001 and 2009, but movement conservatives’ maneuvering to distance themselves from the failures of policies they either tolerated or embraced has just been an effort to flee from the scene of the crime. Since then, movement conservatives have invented comforting stories that reinforce their ideological commitments and avoid all responsibility for anything that happened while self-described conservatives were governing.

In movement-world, Iraq had little or nothing to do with what happened in the 2006 midterms–it was spending and earmarks! In movement-world, the financial crisis was caused pretty much entirely by the Community Reinvestment Act and the GSEs. You might have never known that the Federal Reserve, FASB 157, and Bush’s “ownership society” housing policy even existed if you relied on mainstream conservative media, because these things might implicate the “wrong side” in contributing to the disaster. Critical thinking, self-criticism and a willingness to revisit and abandon assumptions were all notably absent. As movement conservatives see things today, Obama either rejects American exceptionalism or simply loathes America (and in some circles the debate is simply over where he learned this loathing), and he is doing all he can to weaken America and hasten American decline. Their new political stars and leading pundits spout nonsense on foreign policy, and they make blustery proclamations of the uniqueness and superiority of American social mobility and economic dynamism that are flatly untrue. There is an impulse to self-congratulation and hubris in all of this that tends to hamper clear and critical thinking.

As Austin Bramwell wrote four years ago for TAC, this is simply the way the movement works:

Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

Third, and closely related to doublethinking, the conservative movement engages in selective editing of history. When events have a tendency to disconfirm ideology, down the memory hole they go. Thus, conservatives do not recall their dire warnings about the Soviet Union during the Cold War or about the economy after the Bush I or Clinton tax increases. On the Iraq invasion, they will not remind you of their claims that Iraqis would welcome us as liberators, that the world would soon be applauding the Iraq invasion, or that events in Lebanon and the Ukraine heralded global democratic revolution. Nor will conservatives remind you of their predictions that the insurgency’s demise was imminent, that Saddam Hussein and then Zarqawi were the Big Men of the insurgency, or that the insurgency consisted largely of foreign jihadis. As in 1984, the ability to forget that any of these events ever occurred signals one’s loyalty to the movement.

However, there has been an intensification in cocooning and forgetting as conservatives are now able to receive and exchange information in an almost parallel universe. In this universe, as Henninger’s column in The Wall Street Journal reminded me yet again this morning, Obama originally never intended to increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, when in the real world he had pledged to do this many times. When viewed from the parallel universe, Obama’s decision on Afghanistan is a surprise and a change, because it does not agree with the cartoon fantasy of Obama’s foreign policy that movement conservatives and their allies have constructed for themselves. This happens all the time, and not only are these mistakes never corrected, but the people who make them on a regular basis enjoy great success within the confines of the movement. This is not a “closing” of something that was once open, but the normal operation of an ideological movement.

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