I caught the Bob Taft Club's panel discussion on the question: "Is the Conservative Movement Dead?" Panelists Don Devine and Bruce Bartlett answered "yes" and then immediately sat down. Since those gathered expected something more substantive, both graciously proceeded to give short, but interesting, talks.

Devine, whose refusal to join in a sufficient number of standing ovations during a speech by President Bush resulted in ACU chairman David Keene renouncing their friendship, opined that "the conservative movement is in much more difficult shape today than back when it started in the '60s." Devine cited limited government, traditional values, and a national-interest based foreign policy as the pillars of the conservative movement. Bush, he noted, stands for none of these things, and at best, stands against two of three. Conservatives stand for Bush. Thus, the conservative movement is no more. "It's over," Devine conceded. The best option for conservatives is to "reconstitute."

"The whole conservative movement has been reduced to a subset of the Republican Party," Bruce Bartlett observed. What makes this even worse is that the Republican Party of today has "no substance." Bartlett, who lost a $172,000-a-year foundation job for the crime of writing a book (buy it here) calling George W. Bush an "Imposter" conservative, calls the conservative movement "brain dead." There's "absolutely no intellectual leadership whatsoever." After citing Russell Kirk, F.A. Hayek, and other leading lights of postwar conservatives, Bartlett rhetorically asked, "Who do we point to today?"

What struck me is that both speakers delivering post-mortems on the conservative movement, in contrast to past critics of that movement, defend the history of that movement. They don't attack William F. Buckley, Ronald Reagan, or much of anything attached to the postwar conservative movement. In other words, neither Devine nor Bartlett is a professional griper. They are cheerful, pleasant people who are movement insiders--or, perhaps more accurately, were movement insiders. They just think the movement is dead, not in name but in fact. Unlike past conservatives critical of the conservative movement, Devine and Bartlett aren't "lovers scorned." They loved the movement. They helped build it. But now it is gone. They are political widowers.

It's clear to see what happened. The forces that once governed the movement have, at their core, always been uncompromisingly loyal to the GOP. When the GOP decided that conservatism was a burden that needed to be removed in the name of "outreach" and "pragmatic politics", the leaders of the movement gleefully followed. Winning elections trumped the cause. Their shortsightedness will come home to roost this November, as abandonment of the cause will cause them to lose elections. Sweet irony indeed.

Didn't conservatives proclaim the movement dead after Reagan nominated Bennett for head of the NEH over Bradford?

Both are being disingenuous by proclaiming the conservative movement dead. The only things that may have died were the careers of these two within the conservative movement. The movement moved on. Put them in the pile with the rest of conservatives who are on the outside looking in. We can all rattle off more than a few names of people in the same boat.

Newsflash to Bartlett, Kirk has been dead for 12 years, Hayek gone for 14. And it’s not as if Kirk was some great leader of conservatism before he passed. Anyone remember how his stand against going to war with Iraq in 1991 rallied conservatives everywhere to abandon the call to war by Bush Sr.? Me neither.

There are still intellectual leaders around in the movement. Neocons have their own set of leaders. Paleocons have there own set. And then the mindless middle have their talk radio and pulp conservative authors.

I don't recall any conservative proclaiming the conservative movement dead in the aftermath of Reagan choosing Bill Bennett over Mel Bradford to head NEH. (It would have been better for Reagan to have chosen neither and just abolished it). I think this controversy is one that has taken added significance over the years because it marks the first of many nasty debates between "neocons" and "paleocons." If there were a bunch of people claiming the death of the conservative movement because of this, I'd like to see it.

Maybe it wasn't quite in the immediate aftermath, but it certainly came up. There is the Symposium on Conservatism that was featured in the Intercollegiate Review in 1986. Gregory Wolfe introduces the Sypomsium with, "In the Symposium that follows the reader who had become accustomed to the notion that conservatism in America is at its peak influence and intellectual rigor will be surprised to find several distinguished conservative scholars characterize the movement as 'adrift' and 'in trouble,' suffering from 'attenuation,' 'apostasy,' and a sense of 'malaise.'"
http://www.mmisi.org/ir/21_03/symposium.pdf

Dan, Paul Gottfried was also on the panel discussion correct? What did he say about the conservative movement?

It would be interesting to contrast it with what he said in his article for the 1986 symposium.

Paul Gottfried couldn't make it, due, I believe, to a minor medical problem that had arisen in his family. Marcus Epstein tried to give a perspective in line with Gottfried's, and he generally found the movement's problems present at the creation. Marcus reads the site, so perhaps, if he's reading, he could expound here.

Obi,

That symposium in IR was interesting as the first public dissenting from traditional conservatives to the broadening of the tent by Buckley to include the neocons. The real disruption, however, came in the early 90s when Buckley saw fit to attack Sobran and Buchanan as anti-Semites, and then the break-up of the conservative coalition (such as it was) w/ Buchanan's attempt to get the G.O.P. nomination in 1992. That is when I think it would be better to speak of the movement as "dying."* The Gingrich "revolution" of 1994 was really a neoconservative one, not a triumph of the conservative movement. At the time, many neocons also started to write about the "end of neoconservatism," precisely b/c they declared (rightly) that "conservatism" now simply meant their views, so no more need for the prefix. By the way, I think that is part of the reason why in all the brouhaha over the War with Iraq many neoconservatives or fellow travelers like Coulter responded to the use of the term as a racist epithet that supposedly meant "Jewish conservative."

I am not sure why conservatives are just now, under the Bush regime, recognizing the death of their movement. On the right the demise seems to me to have taken place in the early 90's as a result of the neocon-Religious Right alliance aided by the MSM, Buckley, and the Rockefeller Republicans.

*By death of the movement I only have in mind the loss of effective power and influence over the policies and principles of the Republican Party. But maintaining such influence on a major party is a sisyphean task, the oligarchy we live under is simply too entrenched. I think the liberal triumphalists back in the day, like Schlesinger, were probably right . . . America is a liberal modern country, and to think that any sort of Burkean conservatism could be more than a fly in the ointment is a pipe dream.

But being a gadfly is a noble cause anyway, despite (or even because of) its inherent tragedy.

this is a test comment.

Thanks for hyping the club, dan. For those interested, we now have a website (not too interesting) in it. www.roberttaft.org

As Dan said, Gottfried couldn't make it because of some health issues, but nothing that anyone should be concerned about. He most likely will speak at the next club with Jim Bovard and one other speaker TBA on populism vs. elitism.

I'm pretty busy now, but I'll try to give some more thoughts tomorrow.

Sam Francis began to speak of the conservative movement as being dead in the late 1980s, and he wasn't really admonished by it untile the mid 1990s. You could just as easily call him a political widower as a widow scorned.

That Devine, Bartlett and many other loyal Reaganites are now fed up with the movement to me just says they have a higher threshhold for various crap within the movement than the paleos.

Devine and Bartlett have just as much been scorned from the movement as Francis had been, it's just that they have been scorned from an even more decrepit movement than Francis.

The point is that even from a reaganite/fusionist perspective the movement is a joke now, but from the states rights, anti-multiculturalists, nationalist perspective of francis, buchanan etc. it has been dead for a bit longer.

As for my own comments, I think Devine's praise of Reagan was telling. The two great things he could name was Reagan winning the cold war (a debatable point) and him having a -1.3% rate of growth in the size of government in non-discretionary domestic spending, while ballooning every other part of the budget. I admit, that's better than nothing, but is that really a smashing success that we should model ourselves after? I hope not, but maybe that is the best we can do.

Basically, What Barlett and Don Devine said is that Conservativism is decadent.

My observation is that since America is decadent, then why should anyone be surprised that that Conservativism has become decadent as well.

One of the problems, that no-one discussed---and I didn't get a chance to ask about--- is the moral fiber of America's elites whose sense of self was formed in the the "Do-Your-OWn-Thing" 60's., and "me" generation that followed. We just basically have a modern generation that is the most self-indulgent in history.

Doesn't matter what "principles" that Conservativism espouses, if the people supposed to be carrying out those principles don't really believe in them. As an example, we have George W., a drunken playboy til he was 40, the model behind "Animal House", and from a blue blood family who has made it's money in crony capitalism. We can hardly expect a guy like that to think that "principles" are any more then something to snicker at.