Josh Marshall puts up some thought about a long New Yorker piece by George Packer on the Fall of Conservatism.
The piece analyses the rise and fall of the conservative movement that started with the Nixon presidential campaign in 1966. Two years later:
[Nixon’s] Administration adopted an undercover strategy for building a Republican majority, working to create the impression that there were two Americas: the quiet, ordinary, patriotic, religious, law-abiding Many, and the noisy, élitist, amoral, disorderly, condescending Few.
That tactic of polarization carried the Republicans on for nearly 40 years. But now it seems to work no more. Today:
Among Republicans, there is no energy, no fresh thinking, no ability to capture the concerns and feelings of millions of people.
…
On May 6th, Newt Gingrich posted a message, “My Plea to Republicans: It’s Time for Real Change to Avoid Real Disaster,”
…
Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
The conservatives have run out of aims that incite the electorate. People love tax cuts, but they also love good government service. The Republican party has no energy left to deliver either and no ideas for new themes.
Still Packer sees the presidential race between McCain and Obama as open. This because McCain does not run as much on polarization as Bush/Rove did and because of a hidden racist swell in the electorate that works against Obama.
Packer does not analyse the Democratic state of affairs. I am not sure that it is in a better than the Republican one. When I read through the Democratic sites and programs, I find no new
inspiring ideas either. I also do not the see the groundswell in the
electorate that would allow for new ideas to get real weight and
traction (though that may be for my lack of travelling in the U.S. in
recent years.)
To me the Democrats look just as corporatist as the Republicans. Both feed at the same trough.
The view that both, Packer and Marshall, seem to subscribe to is that of a zero-sum game. One party rises when the other falls.
While Packer and Marshall see their attempts of interpretation as "taking a step back" and "the big view," their analysis is restricted to U.S. domestic policy. But it is the international big picture that is really important.
My long term theory is that today there is a lack of successful, established alternative examples in the world that look good enough to incite real demand for change in the ‘West’.
The independency of the U.S. was related to the French revolution movement. FDR’s programs were an answer to then established communism. The late 60’s conservative movement was an answer to social democrats. All are gone. There is nothing for the conservatives to fight against and nothing for the ‘progressives’ to copy from.
David Frum, quoted by Packer, confirms this view:
I asked
Frum if the movement still existed. “We’ll have people formed by the
conservative movement making decisions for the next thirty to forty
years,” he said. “But will they belong to a self-conscious and cohesive
conservative movement? I don’t think so. Because their movement did its
work. The core task was to stop and reverse, to some degree, the
drift of democratic countries after the Second World War toward social
democracy. And that was done.”
(Side-thought: Think that through and consider the U.S. motives to fight ‘Islamists’.)
Without any real ‘enemy’ to corporatism left, the right wing base has lost its enemy and falls apart.
Without any real ‘enemy’ to corporatism left, the left wing base has lost examples to follow and cheases to exist.
What is left are two parties in a two party system who are both without a real base movement and both supporting corporatism. They each may win this or that election and the paths they follow are slightly different.
But without some outer example that will ignite a real base movement to ‘force’ a real change of direction, they will both end up in a town named Fascism.