Conservatism, Dead by its Own Hand

The GOP claims to be conservative, but is it really? Sam Tanenhaus argues that classical conservatism has disappeared from modern politics, replaced by a radical movement of revenge. In a detailed narrative history, The Death of Conservatism, he outlines the Republican Party's political transformation. Tanenhaus, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Whittaker Chambers: A Biography before becoming editor of the New York Times book review, recently chatted with U.S. News about conservative politics, the role of intellectuals, and the possibility of a revival. Excerpts:

Why did you write this book now?

Amid all the cacophony, all the noise in our politics, particularly coming from the right, we've lost sight of an entirely different kind of conservatism that's historically been essential to our politics and that has actually contributed much more to governance and our civil society than what we're seeing and hearing now.

You say conservatism is dead. When was it last alive?

The last truly conservative president was Bill Clinton. [He] came into office as one kind of politician, as a kind of liberal Democrat, a Kennedy-Johnson-era Democrat, and saw that the country had moved in a different direction as a result of the Reagan years. Instead of trying to impose an ideology on the country, which a number of our recent presidents have done, he led by following. He listened to the public [and] saw the public was ready to continue the Reagan experiment in some modified form. That kind of realistic view of our politics is what conservatism is supposed to be.

Which other figures vitalized the party in the past?

Look at two sets: the political leaders on one hand and the thinkers on the other. We're behind today in both areas. We don't today have conservative thinkers like Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, James Burnham, Irving Kristol. These were very large figures who at their best tried to find a way of speaking to as much of the public as possible and to shape a conservatism that was really based on pragmatic reaction to the events on the ground. Among leaders, a president I also really admire is Dwight Eisenhower. [He] took office following a period of 20 years in which Democrats had dominated the White House. The assumption on the far right was that the Republican president elected in 1952, as Eisenhower was, should make it his business to roll back the New Deal. Eisenhower resisted all that. Rather than try to roll it back or dismantle it, he modified it. To me, that is classical conservatism.

Who turned conservatism for the worse?

It began, interestingly, with [Herbert] Hoover, who in the 1930s denounced Franklin Roosevelt in exactly the language that Barack Obama is being denounced today. He said FDR was leading America down the road to fascism, a long march to socialism. That gave us a strain of conservatism that's very much about revenge. Revanchism is a European term, but what it really means is taking back something that you think you've been illegally deprived of. So when we hear people talk about taking back the culture or taking back America—and we're hearing a lot of that now—that is revanchist conservatism.

You argue that "movement conservatism" is defiant. How so?

Someone like Congressman [Joseph] Wilson, I don't want to put too much on him, but many others on the right speak about how America has been taken away from them. Well, what America do they mean? And who exactly is taking it away from them? The 53 percent who voted for President Obama? What it's become is a party dominated—and this has been going on for a long time—by its ideologues. Moderate Republicans almost don't exist anymore. What hurts the Republican Party now—and conservatism—is that it thinks and acts like a movement. It's the mentality of the Crusades. So conservatives are very pleased by these marchers and demonstrations in Washington and all the cities—the tea baggers and all the rest—but what they overlook is that the modern conservative movement came to power not through public spectacles like that but by revitalizing our political process. They went to the polls. They chose the candidates they liked. They became tremendously energetic grass-roots organizers and activists.

Who needs to bring the party back?

I don't worry so much about the politicians. The politicians really, sort of, do their job. There is a handful of very strong, smart, interesting conservative thinkers. The problem is they've all left the movement. David Brooks, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Lind, Mark Lilla, Frank Fukuyama, Fareed Zakaria. What [conservatives] will need to do is find new intellectuals, younger people, writers and thinkers, journalists, who are watching the politics of this moment who are going to have to devise a new way to talk about these very big issues facing the country.

What do you think of the anti-intellectual movement within the Republican Party?

The anti-intellectualism, as you think of it, is really a battle between two different sets of intellectuals. So yes, they'll take up a figure like Sarah Palin, full well knowing how unversed she is in politics and government. They like that about her, because she angers or irks or somehow—what's the word—she provokes a Pavlovian response of disdain from what they see as the liberal elite. And that's what they like. She rings the bell for them. So they don't ask whether she's equipped to govern. They set all that aside and make it a purely cultural debate. She is someone who's an outsider, who represents populism.

What is the role of rhetoric in today's conservative politics?

Rhetoric is useful as a way to start the conversation and to get people to think a little differently, but the day-to-day requirements of governance can't be dictated by the rhetoric. Listen to the rhetoric, because that will tell you where your leader is eventually going. But don't hold him up to every statement he's ever made and call him a liar if he defies it. If that happens, no Republican could govern at all.