The Conservative Mind

Via Kevin Drum's blog, I saw this review and commentary in the Washington Monthly of Jeffrey Hart's new book The Making of the American Conservative Mind. Hart is a professor of English at Dartmouth College and former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. He has been a regular contributor to National Review since the 1960s. And he doesn't like what he sees of today's conservative movement. He doesn't like the heavy influence of the Christian Right or the right-wing slime-throwers like Rush Limbaugh. He doesn't like what George Bush has done to the Republican Party. But as reviewer Jacob Heilbrunn says:

Hart has a vision of a benign, aristocratic conservatism, but America was never a plausible candidate for this ideal. The truth is that, whatever feats of intellectual prestidigitation conservative thinkers like Kirk may have performed, they bore little relation to the realities of a country with a booming free-market economy. Conservatives have never been able to reconcile their worship of the almighty free market with its attendant social upheaval. They want unfettered free enterprise, but not all the freedoms that free enterprise brings, such as pornography and other vices. Hart may not be a severe moralist, but he does deplore vulgar taste in the arts, which is another inevitable byproduct of a capitalist economy.

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In reality, though, conservatism hasn't really changed all that much. The Christian right has certainly infused it with moralism and anti-Darwin mumbo-jumbo, but what's more striking about the GOP over the past 100 years or so is its continuity. The party's main, almost sole, purpose has been to ensure that as much money as possible goes to those who need it least and that as little as possible goes to those who need it most. (Emphasis added) In a party of moneybags, Theodore Roosevelt was the exception, not the rule. Whether Bush manages to extricate the United States from Iraq or not, his avalanche of tax cuts has already justified the main reason that Republican pooh-bahs selected him to become their candidate for president.

Hart indulges in wistful notions of what might have been, but Bush is not the betrayer of Reagan and the conservative movement. He is its purest expression. To its credit, National Review's older generation is recognizing what happens when utopia is in power. Buckley, gracious and inquisitive, has mellowed over the years and has little in common with the toadies serving Bush. This is all the more ironic since liberals have for several years been bemoaning their own lack of ideas and looking to the conservative movement's rise for inspiration. Who would have thought that, at the peak of the conservative movement's political success, its founding fathers would recoil from the Frankenstein's monster they created and end up as troubled heretics?