Maggie's Farm

From the already-famous Packer piece, The Fall of Conservatism, in The New Yorker:

Political tactics have a way of outliving their ability to respond to the felt needs and aspirations of the electorate: Democrats continued to accuse Republicans of being like Herbert Hoover well into the nineteen-seventies; Republicans will no doubt accuse Democrats of being out of touch with real Americans long after George W. Bush retires to Crawford, Texas. But the 2006 and 2008 elections are the hinge on which America is entering a new political era.

This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, “both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics,” the Times columnist David Brooks told me. “McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he’s a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don’t resonate with the sixties at all.” The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing—despite being despised by significant voices on the right—shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces.

I happen to think that reports of Conservatism's death are highly exaggerated. The age-old message of free people and free markets is a winner in America, when delivered the right way - and when Conservatives have the right political "hooks" to hang it on. It's always harder to find those hooks when you live in the White House, and George Bush never figured out how to use his bully pulpit to inspire and to energize anybody except our wonderful soldiers. Bill Clinton, slippery as he is, knew how to give the impression that he was interested in folks' lives - and everybody, except for our most red-blooded and energetic citizens - wants his life to be easier with less worries (and seems quite willing to let somebody else pay for it).

So, if you want to be a Conservative politician, you have to do the same thing - demonstrate your interest, but by reminding people of their opportunities and their precious gift of freedom. Otherwise, the panderers and the lefties will just jump into the vacuum and try to buy their votes and their freedom with the half of your income that they take from you.

As shown in the recent European elections (and the next one, in the UK), whenever you give Leftists enough rope, they hang themselves with their statist, nannyist, anti-traditional and totalitarian excesses. 

James Joyner has a superb commentary on the Packer essay, And Rick Moran has an interesting and immensely well-informed What ails Conservatism?, which adds some history to Packer's somewhat ahistorical view. As Rick says:

I’ve got news for Mr. Packer; American politics has always been an “ugly, unredeemed business.” To actually believe that the politics of fear, of division, or deliberately appealing to racial differences and divisions is something invented by Nixon and the Republicans is absurd.

In fact, I could argue that politics today is cleaner, more uplifting, less personal than the battle royales of elections past. Examine some of the post Civil War elections during the Gilded Age and you will find not only outright lies being circulated in newspapers owned by both parties but rank appeals to racism, a nauseating, virulent strain of populism that threatened violence against the middle class, and a frank discussion of the inferiorities found in various immigrant groups. And always, lurking in the background of the anti-immigrant message was the eternal Jew and his “control” of banks and money lending.

I would just like to remind everybody that such essays were written about Socialism and Liberals just a few years ago. Plus sa change, plus c'est la meme chose. Politics is an ugly business. We citizens have to cling to the eternal verities - including God and our guns.