ANOTHER pseudo theoretical flight of fancy...



One very unique aspect of modern conservative thought in the USA is that it gestated outside the corridors of power for nigh on thirty-six years prior to Ronald Reagan’s apotheosis in 1980.
That is, If we date the arrival of modern conservatism to the publication of Friedrich Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom” in 1944.
It seems like a good solid date to from my perspective, since the aforementioned book is an economic treatise uncontaminated with musty conservative social engineering bugaboos.
So for thirty-six years in this country, an ongoing conservative intellectual counter reformation was going on sans any impact on democratic politics.
Theory became doctrine became dogma without ever passing through the test of policy prior to 1981.
Now as of June 2004, movement conservatism has controlled either the White House or the Congress for twenty-two of the last twenty-four years. We can even make a case that conservative judges have controlled the Supreme Court since the elevation of Nixon appointee William Rehnquist to the Chief Justice ship.
There are certain contradictions and ironies inherent in modern conservative regime of George Bush Jr. He being the first US President to have known nothing else but the fabled U.S. conservative counter establishment.
The US Government is bigger and more intrusive than ever. If the tax burden has been taken off the upper class then certainly the universal burden of massive public debt remains to imperil us all and to tax sans representation our progeny.
These are the “inherent contradictions” evidenced by modern conservatism to borrow a phrase from Karl Marx.
And they are a strong signifier of the ideology’s eventual downfall in the USA.
And yet conservatism persists and even thrives despite going back on it’s every promise and violating it’s every shibboleth.
Now having said that, I don’t contend we are on the cusp of a liberal revival-I’ll believe that when I see it.
The debased conservatism of the future will still wallow in its favorite rhetorical catch phrases. What it will represent though is nothing conservative by way of either Hayek or Goldwater.
What keeps the conservatism “aloft” even as the ideology rots from within are three factors left over from the thirty-six years in the wilderness. For the doctrine to survive so long sans pay off an emphasis had to be placed on orthodoxy, consistency and zeal. It is these three factors that keep the movement going strong these days. Think of modern conservatism as a corpse being fired out of a howitzer.

Increasingly then, the loyal opposition could become an internally consistent conservative style movement if we define conservatism as the mere defense of prior economic gains.
Today’s conservatives may well then devolve into a bumptious radical corporate-populist type axis…xenophobic and larded up with all of today’s unctuous slogans.

Activist and anarchist Grover Norquist (aka “The Terror of K Street”) would have us believe that the destruction of the democratic party will bring about a new conservative utopia in the USA. The above described sheer momentum of his movement may well bring this about I don’t rule it out. But by the time it happens his ideology will be dead an buried and he have to find something else to rule in the name of.
I wish him well with that.