usmbguest5318
Gold Member
On matters of racially motivated hatred, some Republicans "get it" and some don't. The remarks coming and not coming from various quarters of the GOP make that clear.
Surprisingly, the divide doesn't appear to be politically founded. It's, quite simply, a matter of intellect and rationally derived ethics.
It's been well documented and understood that the GOP long ago lost its intellectual way.
I shared the video of that debate not for the policy stances either individual took, but rather because cast in high relief the differences between Buckley and the so-called New Right. Since founding National Review in 1955, Buckley and his colleagues had been the spokesmen of an intellectual and philosophical critique of democratic mass society as well as the domestic and foreign policies of American liberalism. Beginning with the Republican nomination of Barry Goldwater (whom Buckley supported) in 1964, however, and accelerating in the tumultuous 1970s, the National Review crowd found itself challenged by a group of activists, journalists, and politicians whose criticism of the elite was populist, vehement, bipartisan, and anti-corporate. The question of how these anti-Establishment newcomers from the South and West fit into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, the question of where to strike the balance between populism and conservatism, has bedeviled conservative intellectuals and pro-business GOP officials ever since. [1]
This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual. After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes, and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home. He finds the détente between conservatism and populism abrogated. His models-- Buckley, Burnham, Will, Charles Murray, Yuval Levin -- are forgotten, attacked, or ignored by a large part of the conservative infrastructure they helped to build. He finds the prospect of a reform conservatism that adds to the GOP's strengths while also, with partisan fealty, obligingly exacerbating its weaknesses to be remarkably dim.
From the Panama Canal to the Tea Party, from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin, the conservative intellectual has viewed the New Right as a sometimes annoying but ultimately worthy friend. New Right activists supplied the institutions, dollars and votes that helped the conservative intellectual reform tax, crime, welfare, and legal policy. But that is no longer the case. Donald Trump is the vehicle by which the New Right went from one part of the conservative coalition to the dominant ideological plurality of the Grand Old Party.
With the New Right's newfound primacy in the GOP, the dilemma of conservative intellectuals, and their liberal opponents, is how to reform the party into one that that understands "conservative" and "contemptible" need not, as Trump has made them, be synonymous. Failing to do so augurs doom for conservative legislation and policies.
Note:
Surprisingly, the divide doesn't appear to be politically founded. It's, quite simply, a matter of intellect and rationally derived ethics.
It's been well documented and understood that the GOP long ago lost its intellectual way.
- Conservative intellectual Yuval Levin on how the Republican Party lost its way
- The Decline of The Conservative Intellectual
- 1978 Debate between Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, Jr.
I shared the video of that debate not for the policy stances either individual took, but rather because cast in high relief the differences between Buckley and the so-called New Right. Since founding National Review in 1955, Buckley and his colleagues had been the spokesmen of an intellectual and philosophical critique of democratic mass society as well as the domestic and foreign policies of American liberalism. Beginning with the Republican nomination of Barry Goldwater (whom Buckley supported) in 1964, however, and accelerating in the tumultuous 1970s, the National Review crowd found itself challenged by a group of activists, journalists, and politicians whose criticism of the elite was populist, vehement, bipartisan, and anti-corporate. The question of how these anti-Establishment newcomers from the South and West fit into the conservative movement and the Republican Party, the question of where to strike the balance between populism and conservatism, has bedeviled conservative intellectuals and pro-business GOP officials ever since. [1]
This is the crisis of the conservative intellectual. After years of aligning with, trying to explain, sympathizing with the causes, and occasionally ignoring the worst aspects of populism, he finds that populism has exiled him from his political home. He finds the détente between conservatism and populism abrogated. His models-- Buckley, Burnham, Will, Charles Murray, Yuval Levin -- are forgotten, attacked, or ignored by a large part of the conservative infrastructure they helped to build. He finds the prospect of a reform conservatism that adds to the GOP's strengths while also, with partisan fealty, obligingly exacerbating its weaknesses to be remarkably dim.
From the Panama Canal to the Tea Party, from Phyllis Schlafly to Sarah Palin, the conservative intellectual has viewed the New Right as a sometimes annoying but ultimately worthy friend. New Right activists supplied the institutions, dollars and votes that helped the conservative intellectual reform tax, crime, welfare, and legal policy. But that is no longer the case. Donald Trump is the vehicle by which the New Right went from one part of the conservative coalition to the dominant ideological plurality of the Grand Old Party.
With the New Right's newfound primacy in the GOP, the dilemma of conservative intellectuals, and their liberal opponents, is how to reform the party into one that that understands "conservative" and "contemptible" need not, as Trump has made them, be synonymous. Failing to do so augurs doom for conservative legislation and policies.
Note:
- It is noteworthy, for example, that Reagan sided with Buchanan and the populists in the debate over the Panama Canal. If he hadn't done so he would have alienated an increasingly important Republican constituency. "I think, ironically, that Reagan would not have been nominated [in 1980] if he had favored the Panama Canal Treaty, and that he wouldn't have been elected if it hadn't passed. He'd have lost the conservatives if he had backed the treaty, and lost the election if we'd subsequently faced, in Panama, insurrection, as in my opinion we would have."
