What I miss most from my time in the United States is all the yelling. I lived in the U.S. from 1999 to 2006, a tumultuous period from any political perspective. And whether I found myself in a Midwestern college town or an East Coast city or a Texas suburb, I was always struck by the passion and vitality of the U.S. national conversation or, more precisely, by the shared understanding in the United States, across deep-cut ideological lines, that a truly thriving national conversation depends upon a wide array of political and cultural positions developing their ideas – not their slogans or their talking points, but their ideas – in constant close contact, combat even.
More than once in those years, I was at dinner parties where people were standing on chairs yelling at each other until it was time to go home, at which point they would shake hands and return to their corners until next time. The only reason I think you would see someone standing on a chair at a Toronto dinner party is to change a light bulb.
The Death of Conservatism, by Sam Tanenhaus, Random House, 133 pages, $21
The good of this unrelenting clash of convictions is twofold: First, it invests a political culture with a sense of transcendent unity; second, in its healthiest form, this clash can be the lively source of replenishment for national life itself. The problem in the United States at present, according to Sam Tanenhaus, an intellectual historian and editor of The New York Times Book Review and Week in Review, is that the right has fallen down on the job. His new book, The Death of Conservatism, is a slim but idea-packed volume that provides an intellectual genealogy-cum-autopsy for “movement conservatism, the orthodoxy that has been a vital force in [U.S.] political life for more than half a century and the dominant one during the past 30 years,” a movement that for decades has been engaged in a cycle of defeat and renewal that gradually “pushed it farther along the route to ultimate victory.”
Along the way, this conservative movement thrived, exerting greater influence via think tanks and opinion magazines and, most dramatically, via a succession of Republican presidential and congressional gains until 2008, when it endured a conclusive defeat.
But rather than breathlessly invoke the rise of Barack Obama, Tanenhaus coolly blames the right's current doldrums on its abandonment of a decades-long commitment to vigorous thinking “about the nature of government and society, and about the role of politics in binding the two,” for the easier and cheaper games of party infighting and “stockpiling ammunition for the next election.”
A nation's public life ... is at its best when hard argument and vital ideas and passionate engagement come from both the left and the right
In Tanenhaus's cogent reconstruction of U.S. intellectual and national politics, from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, he makes it clear that conservatives, often in reaction to liberal advances and broader cultural developments, have both been at their strongest and made their most important contributions to U.S. life when they have accepted the “obligation to rethink and re-evaluate, to undergo the serious work of self-examination and preparation,” all in support of advancing national interests according to their own core conservative principles.
These principles reach back to the thought of Edmund Burke, specifically Burke's vision of a politics that rejected all ideologies for “the continual adjustment and recalibration of the existing order.” One way of understanding this book is to regard it as a study of post-Second World War U.S. conservatives who have been motivated by Burkean principles and those who have subverted them in naked grabs for power.
