Death of Conservativism - Liberal wishful thinking?

The President's poll numbers are tanking faster than any previous president, the Democrats are likely to lose the governorships of New Jersey and Virgina in November, the latter an historic bellweather of what to expect in the next mid-term elections. Ordinary citizens for the first time are showing up at town hall meetings, going to tea parties, and marching in the 9/12 movement. Obama's key initiatives (health care and cap and trade) have stalled in Congress. The DNC has shown a significant downturn in fundraising from just over a year ago, and in August, Republican campaign committees outraised Democrats by $1.7 million, despite being the minority party in Congress. Jimmy Carter, Maureen Dowd and a multitude of others are frantically playing the race card from the bottom of the deck.


It's gotten so bad that the Democrats in Congress won't even let the American People read the health care bill before passage lest that complicate efforts to get it passed before the elections in new Jersey and Virginia.


But none of this seems to factor into the number of books, magazine and Internet articles and blog postings that boldly proclaim "The Death of Conservatism" (by Sam Tanenhaus), just to name one representative title.


Tanenhaus is hardly alone. Just peruse the blogs and the websites: "The GOP is Still Shell-shocked"; "Republicans Deaf Ear on Health Care"; "Is the GOP Overreaching on Health Care?"
"Which Political Party is Decadent and Sick"; "The Bankruptcy of Ideological Conservatism"; "GOP Disorder - Purge or Binge"; "Americans Trust Obama, Not the Republicans."

In a review of Tanenhaus' book for The New Republic, Damon Linker writes:

Surveying intellectual life on the right in the opening months of the Obama administration, Tanenhaus concludes that too many conservative intellectuals “recognize no distinction between analysis and advocacy, or between the competition of ideas and the naked struggle for power.”

WTF!! Do Tanenhaus and Linker inhabit the same planet that I do? Try an experiment, tonight watch any debate between a real conservative and liberal (preferably, but not necessarily on Fox News) and see who it is who can't recognize the distinction between analysis and advocacy. Or who doesn't understand the difference between competition of ideas or the naked struggle for power.

Feel like you're in the twilight zone, or in Alice in Wonderland? You're not alone. In responding to Linker, Jonah Goldberg writes:

Much has been written about Tanenhaus's book already. Indeed, it's hard to think of a book that unites more factions of conservatism than Tanenhaus's tome, about which the apparently universal consensus is that it is completely, totally, and in every way imaginable unpersuasive. Not bad or uninteresting, mind you; just unpersuasive, like a wild-eyed witch-doctor ooga-boogaing about why he should be allowed to remove your spleen.

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Don't be alarmed by that Twilight Zone vibe you're getting. It's perfectly normal. In fact, it's intended. At an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, I told Tanenhaus that his description of things had a decidedly "otherworldly" feel to it. He responded by pleading "Guilty as charged" and saying that otherworldly writing was a great tradition among intellectuals, or some such, and that he did not shirk from the accusation one bit. It almost sounds like he's saying his narrative is fake-but-accurate.

If you spend any time surfing the comments sections on conservative blogs and websites you'll notice the ubiquitous presence of what some call "trolls," moonbats" or "libtards" who engage conservatives not with ideas, but with profanities, insults, ad hominem attacks, and (often irrelevant) talking points. Some have theorized that these trolls are agents of George Soros paid to scour the internet to challenge conservatives with their "facts and superior analysis." [O.k., sarcasm off now].

To be fair, Linker also wrote in the same article:

Far from being dead, ideological conservatism will have proven its enduring capacity to express, provoke, and mobilize populist anger and resentments. That has been ideological conservatism’s great strength—and its path to political power—for over forty years now.

Liberals and temperamental conservatives like Sam Tanenhaus can and should be working to prevent the pattern from repeating itself. But before they can do that, they must resist the temptation to engage in wishful thinking.

And that's my point. Read any normal day's offerings from Real Clear Politics or Politco and you'll see numerous titles that amount to little more than "wishful thinking." (And I haven't even touched titles like "Al Franken will be a superlative Senator" (Like anyone could possibly know that!)).

The liberals will probably have to learn the hard way, like President Obama eventually will, that saying it doesn't make it so.