Timothy Burke makes a very good point:
It’s schadenfreudey fun to read the ongoing psychotic meltdowns at various far-right sites like the Corner, I agree. But there’s little need to take the really bad-faith conservatives seriously now. For the last eight years, we’ve had to take them somewhat seriously because they had access to political power. You had to listen to the hack complaints about academia from endlessly manipulative writers because it was perfectly plausible that whatever axe they were grinding was going to end up as a priority agenda item coming out of Margaret Spelling’s office or get incorporated into legislation by right-wing state legislators. You had to listen to and reply to even the most laughably incoherent, goalpost-moving, anti-reality-based neoconservative writer talking about Iraq or terrorism because there was an even-money chance that you were hearing actual sentiments going back and forth between Dick Cheney’s office and the Pentagon. You had to answer back to Jonah Goldberg not just because making that answer was arguably our responsibility as academics, but also because left alone, some of the aggressively bad-faith caricatures he and others served up had a reasonable chance to gain even further strength through incorporation into federal policy.
(emphasis original)
I would disagree on two points:
- Schadenfreudey is an offence to the English and German language. I believe, based on my limited German, and some Google, it should be Schadenfreudes.
- The are no seriously good faith conservatives out there. This is simply misplaced optimism. Modern conservatism is, as John Kenneth Galbraith said, “The search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
Quite honestly, movement conservatism, which I admit is not all of conservatism, has always been so. When looks at William F. Buckley and his spawn, it is all about preserving hereditary privilege, and the feeling of superiority that comes from justifying the unjustifiable.
That’s why you see so much in the way of Racist screeds in the 1950s and 1960s in the National Review, many from Buckley’s own poison pen.
There are also the haters, Delay and Musgrove come to mind, who are simply motivated by hate, and find conservationism the easiest way to find an outlet for their hate.
There are, of course, the inevitable hangers on: people who find personal affirmation on being part of “the movement”, particularly when it is in the ascendancy, but this is largely a social, and not an ideological phenomenon but a social one.
At its core, movement conservatism in the United States believes that nothing can be done to improve anything, and thus, there is no more point in dialog with them than there would be with a turnip.
As to “non-movement” conservatives….I’ve never met any, except for senior Catholic clergy, Bishops and higher, who appear to pine for the days of feudalism, and al Qaeda, who pine for the days of feudalism, but feudalism a few miles further east.
