Only last September, Sam Tanenhaus – editor of The New York Times Book Review – published a book entitled The Death of Conservatism. I didn’t read it. Having heard the author briefly on talk radio, it sounded tendentious and, worse, boring. His thesis, I take it, is that today’s conservatives (Limbaugh, etc.) define themselves by what they are against, rather than “conserving” the best of society in the traditional sense as conservatives once did. The true value of “conserving” he ascribes to, wait for it, Barack Obama.
Well, that’s the danger of topical political books. I feel sorry for Tanenhaus, in a way. How could he have known (well, maybe he should have) when writing his book nine or ten months ago that Barack Obama would now be manufacturing conservatives at a clip unparalleled in history? Our President is a veritable conservative mass production factory. And those conservatives, despite what Tanenhaus wrote, are Hell bent on conserving the traditional values of our society, including taxation with representation (thanks!), a common sense health care system, some modicum of transparency, and, now most clearly, honesty in national defense. (Treating Islamic radicalism as if it were house breaking is moronic behavior verging on national and cultural suicide. You don’t need to be “conservative” to see that.).
Perhaps Tanenhaus should have written “The Death of Liberalism,” because that is what is going on all around us. And it is his own media that is creating its death, their own death, because it is they that created Barack Obama, bringing out of obscurity a man less qualified to be president than the proverbial “my dead grandmother.” Dick Cheney’s blast at Obama yesterday definitely rang true, just as the response from an unnamed (for sure!) “senior Democrat,”quoted in the same Politico article rang especially hollow: “It’s telling that in attacking the president and the administration, that Vice President Cheney did not condemn the attack against our nation on Christmas Day.”
Yeah, right. I wouldn’t put my name to that drivel either. I don’t know if the terms conservative and liberal in general are useful anymore, but Obama is certainly simplifying that conundrum but destroying the latter.
Roger, I don’t think one of the traditional values of our society is taxation without representation-even though that appears to be the current state of affairs. I know you meant WITH instead of without.
The taxation thing was one of the colonist’s pet peeves.
Obama deserves credit for energizing the tea parties and helping folks discover the unsuspected conservative in their normally silent core This is probably not what he had in mind, but he is performing a public service after all.
The president is learning a thing or two about America, on our dime unfortunately. This bumbling of historic proportions is also revealing the emptiness of a Harvard education in disciplines other than physics and chemistry, where one can still get his tuition’s worth in productive learning.
Is Obama destroying liberalism? Well, at the very least, he is making it damned unpopular. Let’s review what Obama has done well this year.
1. Gun Salesman of the Year. There’s a reason his picture is featured in more gun stores than schools. Even before HotpantsGate, there were doubts about whether Obama wanted to keep us regular folks safe. And thankfully there are ordinary citizens who object to someone trying to set themselves on fire on an airplane. We are the system that is working.
2. Meet the Press, Meet the Press, Meet the Press. Obama logged a lot of time with his fan club and tried to make us all watch. I prefer college football pep rallies, thank you. There’s less bullsh!t and most of the people leading the cheers are not looking side to side like they’re at a tennis match. Why SNL has yet to do the Obama head thing I don’t know, maybe they are saving that for ratings sweep.
3. Spend, spend, and spend some more. Drunken sailors the world over are giving thanks to the great Obama, from now on the phrase will be “spend money like President Obama”.
4. A massive power grab described as health care reform. Yeah right, wink, wink, nod, nod, drunkblogging with Greene and I still don’t see it as anything other than a ginormous disaster waiting to happen–to me and mine. It’s SO GOOD in fact, the President and Congress are exempting themselves.
5. Obama helped Palin get her MOJO back. After 8 months of this administration, we all sounded like the teacher from Ferris Bueller and starting looking around for “…anyone, anyone”. While Sarah may not have charmed Katie Couric, at least she’d keep our country safe. Sign her up.
6. He solved global warming. It has been so freakin’ cold where I live since he took office, I’ll give him full credit for this one.
7. And one more for today, Obama makes both Clintons look great by comparison. As we get closer to 2012, will the Democratic party trust their future to Obama? The Republicans sure hope so!
Last year’s election of Obama (and so many Democrats, but surely Obama) showed, among other things, that the leftist narrative has now gained so much traction in the national consciousness that it must now be played out. We are all familiar with the Left’s dominance of most opinion-forming American institutions. The result has been that the Left’s myths, its defining of the ideological battlefield, its control of the national narrative, have gained primacy. Therefore, the Left MUST have its day. It MUST play itself out in realms ranging from multiculturalism, to eco religion, to vast, unsustainable entitlements and government growth. Obama is only the blank screen upon which the leftist narrative has now projected itself.
Sure, many Americans seem to be scared and angered by runaway spending, or this or that. But have they even grasped, let alone rejected, how comprehensively they have been duped by the entire leftist narrative? i very much doubt that. As the psychotherapists say when a patient refuses to confront his own problems, more suffering necessary. More terror attacks, more utter failure in the foreign policy arena, more loss of individual choice and freedom, and, I fear, far worse economic pain, and possibly even economic collapse, are but a few of the things that must manifest before the big lie of leftism is even seen, let alone dropped.
The question will be whether the nation can ever really recover from the catastrophe of the perfect leftist storm we are now only beginning to endure. New York City politics have gone through similar cycles for decades: years of liberal dysfunction, corruption and failure, followed by a conservative to clean up the mess (and who is soon vilified thereafter as a “fascist.”) But the mess the Democrats are now making of the nation and the world is so profound, a conservative backlash may be too late. And who, pray tell, is the great and wise conservative champion to lead us back to sanity? None has appeared.
security theater….
I always wondered who these independents were that could ping pong between very different ideologies election to election, ultimately choosing our Presidents. I now realize that these befuddled people actually believed campaign promises and the MSM. They now know they have been conned, hence Obama’s precipitous fall in all polls. In 2010 and 2012, will they be fooled again?
He’s not destroying liberalism, he’s using it to it’s utmost power to destroy our America !
How about reviving the 1994 Contract With Amaerica (without the accompanying proposed legislation). The key part of the contract is below with my amendments in the parens. Obviously, open to additions. This time the GOP has to do it — if, as appears entirely possible, they get majorities in both houses.
FIRST, require all laws that apply to the rest of the country also apply equally to the Congress;
SECOND, select a major, independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud or abuse; (also, no earmarks):
THIRD, cut the number of House committees, and cut committee staff by one-third;
FOURTH, limit the terms of all committee chairs; (plus congressional term-limits);
FIFTH, ban the casting of proxy votes in committee;
SIXTH, require committee meetings to be open to the public; (plus, Obama & Co’s broken promise of internet posting of bills for 72 hours prior to voting);
SEVENTH, require a three-fifths majority vote to pass a tax increase;
EIGHTH, guarantee an honest accounting of our Federal Budget by implementing zero base-line budgeting.
The number one suckers of the Obama phenomenon might be the purple state voters. These are your secular yuppie, suburban residents who fairly are left wing regarding the divisive cultural war issues. They desperately wanted to believe that Barack Obama was a middle-of-the-road politician. The fact that he possessed dark skin was an added bonus. Voting for him would provide them with an opportunity to prove they were not racists.
The Purple state voters also voted for some other questionable Democratic Party candidates. They wrongly concluded that seemingly macho guys like Jon Tester and Jim Webb should be fairly sensible when it came to economic matters. The Democrats are increasingly able to attract only die-hard blue state voters. George McGovern’s radical domestic agenda of the 1972 presidential election now represents the moderate position of today’s Democratic Party. That’s a recipe for a national disaster for at least the next two election cycles.
“It’s telling that in attacking the president and the administration, that Vice President Cheney did not condemn the attack against our nation on Christmas Day.”
Meaning what exactly? That Cheney condones the attack? No one believes that. The propagandists are grasping at straws already. 3 more years of excuses should lead to some fairly humorous statements.
I love making snarky blogs, and I was going to create one called “Silver Linings” after Obama’s election. One of the biggest SLs would have been the destruction of liberalism. But it is getting to be sort of a Baby/Bathwater thing.
It occurs to me that much of modern liberal policy can be compared to a newly-licensed young driver taking his hands off the steering wheel. Everyone knows what happens when you take your hands off the wheel–if the tires are well-balanced, and the car is moving slowly, there may not be an immediate consequence evident–the car will continue moving in about the same direction at the same speed as before. But if there’s no one to make course corrections, or if the wheels aren’t perfectly balanced, or if there’s a bend in the road, eventually the car will go off course–perhaps disastrously so.
Likewise, some of the infantile policy changes being implemented by the Dems–the asinine health care bill, the “cash for clunkers” program, the unwillingness to admit that we are currently embroiled in a war in the Middle East (let alone to fight it properly)–are all akin to taking their hands off the wheel. The trouble is, we’re not perfectly aligned to begin with–and from my vantage point I can see many, many bends in the road ahead.
Pray they lose their majority, and soon, to someone who’s willing to steer carefully and watch the road.
I read The Death of Conservatism right after re-reading Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.
Goldberg’s book is thoroughly footnoted and well supplied with sources and references.
Tannenhaus’s book has no footnotes and very few sources to back up his assertions about conservatism.
Perhaps its an unfair comparison. But I found The Death of Conservatism to be a very dreamlike experience.
Maybe I should read it again.
We are living the Goldberg book. Maybe it’s time to read it again.
Jonah Goldberg’s LIberal Fascism is a must-read. And would be a must-re-read except I have loaned my copy to a new convert to conservatism. Let’s make 2010 the year of Epic Fail for the Progressives.
“Our President is a veritable conservative mass production factory.” That’s a very good line [chuckle]. Nicely put, Roger, and Happy New Year.
Obama and the Democrats are certainly setting up a reaction against liberal rule but if the Duke 88 show anything, attitudes die hard. The left will stick with its outdated agenda. I doubt Republicans will have the courage to deal with entitlement reform. If Palin runs in 2012 and openly espouses tea party goals she may win in a landslide. That would be a real mandate for change.
Roger, I laughed out loud when I read these lines in your post:
I am one of the new conservatives Obama has created! My “Hell, no!” moment was the revelations about Rev. Wright and my “last straw” was the choice of Biden over Hillary for VP. Then I had to read up to be able to explain my choice to my liberal friends — stop laughing, yes, it WAS just like spitting into the wind — and poof! I saw the point of becoming a fiscal conservative.
But since reading was so fundamental in my transformation, and we are talking about books, the ones that I think provide the most insight into Leftism/liberalism are Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer and the new book that applies Hoffer’s insights to our current era, Jamie Glazov’s United in Hate. Glazov is particularly insightful about the Left’s rage against capitalism and once you understand what he’s saying, then you’ve got a lever, a fulcrum and a place to stand: you can move the world.
The books that best explain Obama are therapist Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door and Sandy Hotchkiss’s Why Is It Always About You?: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism.
For the bonus reading list, to understand Michelle Obama and Rahm Emanuel, I suspect the best book is Randi Kreger’s Stop Walking on Eggshells: Taking Your Life Back When Someone You Care About Has Borderline Personality Disorder. An excellent introduction to Kreger’s work is Dr. Helen’s recent interview with her on Pajamas TV.
I want to thank you and the commenters for my first belly laughs of 2010!
I have a daughter who gave me “Audacity of Hope” for Christmas last year. At least she could have made it “Dreams From My Father” as I would have read that. This year, I gave her “Vision of the Anointed” and I hope she reads it.
America at it roots and beginning was built on Exceptionalism , Individualism ,
Personal Responsibility , Work Ethics and Patriotism .
Our first 300 years there were no Entitlement , welfare , food stamps and over 390 other Govt. hand out programs and Obama is adding many his self in a down economy ?
We fix our own selves in the “Singular “or with help from others not Govt. then Fight those as a group that Challenge our vast Freedoms and Democracy .
We scoff at those that must tax the air we breath … tax us to death , regulate us to death and think for us the demands of Karl MARX for Marxism to Work ….. Hence Millions Murdered, imprisoned and starved and work to death and it has never worked .
******* HOW TERRIBLE MARXISM AND RADICAL SOCIALISM IS NOT TAUGHT IN OUR SCHOOLS TODAY ***** IN FACT QUITE THE OPPOSITE IS SADLY !
Socialist ”need ‘ to rule and Govern by total and complete control . Even thought they see Human Beings as the Collective it is the many Individuals that has made of the greatest Nation ever on earth .
When is the last time your heard off anyone “Risking ” their Lives to move to Socialist countries like Cuba , Venezuela , Nam , China , France , England , Germany ,Russia, Greece , Spain and Italy .
Obama is a blend of ACORN , Machiavelli , Lien , Mussolini , Saul Alinsky and Rev Wright .
All Demonic .
Clearly, all this talk about “jobs, jobs, jobs” refers to Apple CEO Steve Jobs who was side-lined for most of the year while he obtained a liver transplant, which I guess must have cost $787 billion dollars, which explains the need for ObamaCare.
welcome lesbian Cynthia! I’m a convert going way back, raised a lib hippie malcontent, I turned apostate decades ago.
You will find, in time, warm open hearts under the conservative tent. We don’t actually invite people in by class, sex, skin color or aggrieved status. We invite all citizens under the Constitution, as corny as that sounds to liberals. But it’s true, modern conservatives want only freedom to pursue happiness and prosperity within our nation’s laws. No we don’t bargain to attract gays, or blacks or libertarians or jews or… you get the idea. The tea party movement is only demanding the freedoms our ancestors fought and died for.
Cynthia, a conservative stranger would give his life for YOUR freedom. Can you say that about any liberal stranger you know?