North Star Writers Group - Syndicated Commentary: Opinion, Humor and Features

October 20, 2008

Death of the Conservative Dream

That muffled roar you’re hearing? It’s the sound of the most immense and longest-lasting political juggernaut in American history crashing onto the rocks and collapsing into rubble.

Reagan conservatism, the most pernicious and narcissistic political philosophy America has yet produced in the 232 years of its existence, has destroyed itself, and not a moment too soon. The once-immutable force that delivered five of the last seven presidential elections to the Republican Party has been ground into virtual nonexistence, thanks almost exclusively to its failure to adapt in a rapidly-changing world in which its vision-free, single-note philosophy of venality uber alles is ill-equipped to simply function, let alone thrive.

Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama for the presidency stands as the coda to what has been a steady eight-year decline. George W. Bush, John McCain, the party they lead and the right-wing pundit class who serve as their messengers and acolytes long ago staked their fortunes upon one significant false promise to the populace at large that they never stood a chance of being able to fulfill. They promised that, in being allowed stewardship of the ship of state, they would “return” America to its presumably rightful position as “a shining city on the hill,” to use Ronald Reagan’s eloquent but hollow words.

Externally, the U.S. would be viewed as unquestionably dominant in military, economic and philosophical terms, the single nation on the world stage for others to emulate. Internally, we would magically become once again a nation of well-maintained suburban tract houses with beautifully manicured lawns, occupied by the flag-waving, church-going faithful. The New Old America sold to the SUV-driving, gated-community-dwelling masses was to be one in which neither diversity nor dissent was in evidence, one in which each individual could be readily amalgamated into one nice, bland, safe, comfortable, economically secure homogenized whole.

American conservatism has spent the last third of a century in the myth-selling business, proffering a vision of the country comprised of equal parts John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart, a country of clear-cut black/white distinctions between good vs. evil and us vs. them. Reagan cannily seized upon a collective longing for a much mythologized simpler time, gaining power on the strength of the unspoken promise of this vision, and his successors have followed the same formula. Elect us, they have said, and we will Restore America.

Reality, of course, is seldom obliging to fantasists, and Reaganism has been no exception. The vision of the shining city has dimmed sufficiently that few even remember what it allegedly was. The complexities of life in a world filled with institutional corruption, multiple foreign adversaries, a paucity of shared values and ideals, a collapsing economy, a restive lower-middle class and a host of other complicating factors unknown in Mayberry RFD have effectively erased the shining city from the memory banks of most Americans.

Left in its stead: A sense of loss, as well as resentment of those whose malign leadership created a society whose core seems to consist of little more than anxiety and struggle. That Colin Powell, one of the last of the loyalist rats aboard the listing Republican ship, has seen fit to swiftly scurry to the other side tells you all you need to know about Republicans’ prospects for the intermediate future.

Democrats will want to congratulate themselves and their admittedly exceptional candidate, Barack Obama, as the engineers of conservatism’s collapse, but this isn’t in accord with the facts. The party’s and the candidate’s excellent performances over the past couple of years have certainly been laudable in their own right, but conservatism’s decay is attributable almost solely to the weaknesses in the philosophy itself. Predicated upon a lie, conservatism died because it sold off the America it promised to conserve, and sold out even its most earnest adherents.

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