Movement conservatism is on its last legs; It always has been

Thers responds to some of the recent conservative wails that what the Bush administration has done is not "pure" ideological conservatism, and in so responding points to a basic truth about movement conservatism.

Movement conservatism started off as a racket. Movement conservatism has always been about exacerbating and then profiting from existing cultural, social, and economic resentments. There was never any fall from an original ideological Eden. The corruption was there from the start. Packer is quite right to emphasize how the political and popular success of movement conservatism owes everything to its legitimization of a politics of resentment that arose in the 1960s. Movement conservatism has nothing without Hatred of the Liberal, a point reinforced not least by the image with which Joyner chooses to adorn his post.

It's quite nice that Joyner deplores Coulter-level books and says their crudity is part of the reason the GOP is in trouble. However, this class of stuff is just a less sophisticated version of commonplace rhetoric you see emanating from everywhere else on the right these days. And if Joyner wants to dump it, fine, but the brute fact is that without accusations like, say, that Barack Obama is an un-American socialist, well, the GOP might as well just concede the election immediately. And everyone knows it. The right just cannot win if it renounces the politics of resentment, and that's all there is to it. You can't scrub ugly. You can't reboot Soviet Communism without perpetrating once more its rottenness, and you can't retool movement conservatism without it eventually fucking up royally.

Which is why I see no reason to believe that invocations of a "pure, timeless" conservatism are anything more than so much self-serving horseshit. If there were any substance or value to it as an intellectual concept, first of all, it would sound a lot less vapid. Sorry, "a belief in free markets, free people, and in the greatness of the American people and the American nation" is sonorous doxa, pure and simple. None of these terms means anything as far as policy goes and in the real world can be used to justify pretty much any absurdity, like, say, an immensely disastrous, ill-conceived invasion and occupation of a foreign nation justified by utterly disingenuous bullcrap.

I lack patience for invocations of ideological purity in the context of serious analysis. As I said at FDL, if "movement conservatism" were truly guided by lofty principles as opposed to nihilistic opportunism, history would have turned out differently. It sure would have been nice to see "movement conservatives" put their "principles" into action in say the fall of 2002.

"Intellectual movements" that end up unable to cope with empirical scientific data (global warming), that end up making excuses for torture, that depend upon self-flattering fantasies such as a belief in a partisan "liberal media," that delight in the sort of race-baiting nonsense we've already seen in this election season, have nowhere to go. It is eminently reasonable to draw the conclusion that there is just nothing to "movement conservatism" except a dead end. "Conservatism" as it is currently embodied just cannot handle the truth. It can't afford to.

Or, as Atrios points out:

Galbraith perhaps said it a bit shorter:

The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.

As I wrote earlier, 2008 will be the dirtiest Presidential campaign on record. Why?

Because movement conservatism has reached its inevitable end. The suckers are waking up and they are finding as they wake up that the bill has arrived and they are stuck with it. The alleged benefits of movement conservatism are nowhere to be seen, but the suckers will pay anyway.

All the pretty promises of benefits from movement conservatives have now been shown to be less accurate than the promises of the worst kind of lying crooked used car salesman. Instead of the promised wealth and security, they have given America economic crises and an unnecessary, unending war that we will be paying for the rest of our lives. But, the conservatives claim, it will all be alright if everyone just wears a flag lapel pin.

2008 will be the dirtiest Presidential campaign on record because the movement conservatives have failed, but they will still go down defending their tribe at all costs. They have nothing else except dirty politics, PR imagery and lies to run on.