Not long ago, you might have
foreseen the Republican pilgrimage
to St. Paul, Minn., as having all
the brio of the Bataan Death March.
Surprise! For all the party's
problems, Republicans find
themselves with a fighting chance of
holding onto the presidency after
all. Impressive, that - as was John
McCain's gutsy choice of the
marvelous Sarah Palin. Maybe this
grand old party still has life in
it.
The Palin pick, vivifying though
it is, does not erase the
fundamental philosophical problems
besetting the GOP. Even if McCain
pulls off a November upset, last
week's GOP convention still marks
the end of something. It is, in
effect, the last hurrah of the
Republican Party as we've known it
for a generation.
The Republicans came to St. Paul
to praise John McCain, but whether
they know it or not, they also came
to bury the party of Ronald Reagan.
TRANSITION FROM REAGAN
During the GOP primaries, the
candidates' frequent invocation of
the sainted Reagan name telegraphed
how little thoughtful or fresh his
would-be heirs had to say. It has
been 20 years since Reagan left the
White House; imagine how pathetic it
would have been had Democrats
seeking the 1984 presidential
nomination invoked JFK's name at
every breath. The world that
produced Reagan, and Reaganism, has
passed into history (thanks in large
part to him and his successes).
To survey the intellectually
moribund Republican Party today is
to be eminded of Edmund Burke's
paradoxical dictum: "A state without
the means of some change is without
the means of its conservation."
It's also true of political
parties and movements. The classic
Reagan troika of anti-communism, low
taxes and less government had a good
run, but its day is done.
The Soviet Union is dead, the
People's Republic of China has gone
capitalist (if not democratic), and
an aggressively militarized and
moralistic foreign policy has mired
America in the sands of empire. Our
biggest economic problem now is not
high taxes, but high deficits - a
consequence of Reagan Republicans'
devotion to lowering taxes without
concomitant cuts in spending.
Neither Reagan nor his successors
truly sought smaller government,
hence the unintended honesty in GOP
Rep. Mike Pence's pathetic 2006
boast: "We may be the party of Big
Government, but they are the party
of Really Big Government." If it's
an epitaph for the Reagan GOP you
seek, that's as good as any.
For conservatism, a McCain
presidency would be at best
transitional, not transformational.
The question that should be on every
thoughtful conservative's mind now
is: What kind of Republican Party -
and what kind of conservatism - will
arise out of the right's crack-up?
The answer, of course, depends on
two related questions: What you
think conservatism's problem is
today, and more deeply, what you
think the conservative tradition has
to offer contemporary America.
Here's a heretical thought: What
if the most important work for
conservatives to engage in at this
moment has nothing to do with the
Republican Party, or with politics
at all? What if the Republicans are
struggling to answer questions that
aren't the most critical ones facing
our civilization? In fact, what if
the conservative political scientist
Claes Ryn is correct, and
conservatives' obsession with
politics in the postwar era has been
a massive distraction from the truly
important work before us? As Ryn
wrote in The American Conservative:
"The problem (for conservatives),
simply put, was lack of
sophistication - an inability to
understand what most deeply shapes
the outlook and conduct of human
beings. Persons move according to
their innermost beliefs, hopes and
fears. These are affected much less
by politicians than by philosophers,
novelists, religious visionaries,
moviemakers, playwrights, composers,
painters and the like, though truly
great works of this kind reach most
minds and imaginations only in
diminished, popular form."
TRADITIONS LOST
By disdaining to take culture
seriously, except to denounce it,
conservatives ceded the field of
imagination to liberals, who set the
terms of debate.
"Conservatives really don't
understand that culture trumps
politics," screenwriter and novelist
Andrew Klavan told me recently. "A
Ronald Reagan can change the
political culture for 20 years, but
that change can completely vanish,
and conservatives will not even know
how they got there. How does that
happen? Through the culture. But we
don't even see that over time."
Klavan, whose most recent novel
is the political thriller "Empire of
Lies," faults his fellow
conservatives for misunderstanding
and downplaying the importance of
culture. Culture puts the ideas in
people's heads. "And not just
popular culture, but high culture,"
he said. "The people who write TV,
they're not watching TV. They're
going to the ballet, they're reading
poetry and novels, they're partaking
of the high arts."
It may or may not be important to
elect Republicans to office, but
conservatives who believe politics
will lead to the renewal of a
debased culture are mistaken. In
fact, one measure of our decline is
how little understanding most people
who call themselves conservative
have of the root causes of our
civilizational crisis.
It is to be expected that the
liberal party would support the
casting off of traditional
restraints and adopt a cultural
politics built around the autonomy -
sexual and otherwise - of the
individual. The conservative party
offers only token resistance to
"progress," because if it were to
mount an effective countercharge, it
would find itself on the margins of
power. The culture is no longer
conservative - and there are and
have been few, if any, effective
sources of countercultural
resistance from the right.
That must change. That will
change. Conservatives who can read
the signs of the times sense that
America is headed for hard times.
The current order cannot stand for
long. We have been squandering the
cultural and
economic capital built up by
previous generations. We're about to
be foreclosed on.
RECOVER OUR HUMANITY
As former U.S. Comptroller David
Walker tirelessly points out, the
nation is headed over a fiscal cliff
in the near long term. We cannot
afford to make good on the promises
our government has made to retirees
and Medicare recipients, which will,
among other things, force radical
changes in the way extended families
live. We could also be facing deep
and lasting economic crisis
because of our individual and
governmental fiscal mismanagement.
The military that undergirds the
American empire is stretched thin.
The volatile cost and availability
of oil, the lifeblood of our
economy, puts our collective future
into serious question. The American
education system is badly troubled,
and what chiefly ails it defies the
ability of policymakers to fix. The
U.S. cannot or will not control its
southern border. And so on.
America has faced worse crises,
of course. But it is questionable
whether we have ever faced such
difficult challenges with so few
collective spiritual and moral
resources to draw on. For
traditionalists, the nature of our
crisis is not that modern people
don't live up to standards; it's
that they deny there are standards
to live up to.
Cultural liberalism and
individualism - both of the
Republican and Democratic kind - are
luxuries society can afford in times
of plenty. Self-discipline and
self-reliance are tough sells when
the good times roll endlessly on.
Realism doesn't sell; blind optimism
does. Future generations will wonder
why we were so reckless.
In that sense, the chief task
before conservatives is not to fight
the Democratic Party or prop up the
Republican Party. It's nothing less
than to recover what it means to be
fully human in a postmodern world
that denies human nature and the
transcendent order underlying our
affairs. We must lift our eyes
higher than the horizons of the next
election and build the institutions
and customs that will create an
enduring culture based on truth and
beauty and virtue, even as all that
is false and ugly and corrupt in
modernity passes, as it must.
LESSONS FROM ROME
History is cyclical, not linear.
America's is not the first advanced
civilization to have fallen under
the spell of its own power and given
itself over to pleasure. "Luxury,
more ruthless than war, broods over
Rome and exacts vengeance for a
conquered world," Juvenal wrote at
the beginning of Rome's descent.
Conservatives would do well to
hold this thought when pondering how
best to serve a country that has
lost touch with the truths and
traditions that made it the most
powerful nation on Earth. What
happened in St. Paul matters far
less to America's future than what's
happening in our families, churches,
schools and other institutions where
character and magination are
cultivated.
Does America need conservative
politicians? Absolutely. But more
than that, we need - and
conservatives must produce - poets,
pastors and professors of
wisdom, honor and creative vision.
Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning
News editorial columnist. Contact
him via e-mail at
rdreher@dallasnews.com
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Submitted and reprinted by
permission, Rod Dreher,
