Yes, I was there too last night. I must say I have mixed views on the whole thing (I’m working through the book as we speak and I have a piece related to, but not on, the Tanenhaus book in the next issue). On the one hand, Tanenhaus comes across as deeply thoughtful and sincere, as well as a terribly nice guy. On the other hand, I am completely unpersuaded by his whole argument. But that’s okay. What has me a bit flummoxed, however, was Tanenhaus’s confession that his argument is, indeed, “otherworldly” — a charge leveled by both Steve and me. Tanenhaus tried to take the word otherworldly and make it his own when he said he “pleads guilty to the charge of otherworldliness.” He wanted it to mean Olympian or Platonic or simply grand. But the way Steve and I meant it was “not of this world” or “not descriptive of this chunk of the space-time continuum.”
Tanenhaus describes a state of play where liberals are the engines of change and conservatives are dogmatists who refuse to work with liberals. We are see “secret cadres” at war with America and “revanchists.” He says Bush is the apotheosis of this lamentable transformation of the Right. Now, he is careful not to say that liberals are without their own flaws, many of them similar to the Right’s. But that’s a pretty weak defense when he’s written a book called The Death of Conservatism, not The Death of Discourse or The Death of Politics. His criticisms are all pointed rightward and when asked about that, he simply says, in effect: Well, the Left has it’s problems, too.
Even so, the world he describes is more than slightly at odds with the world as it is. Tanenhaus says that he’s a Nixonophile and a Buckleyphile, which is interesting. But Nixon of course was one of the most liberal presidents of the last half-century in terms of his domestic agenda and his idea of the role of the state. Tanenhaus is a great admirer of William F. Buckley’s, but Nixon feared and loathed the Buckleyites as a greater threat to the Republican party than the John Birch Society. But that’s all a distraction. Conservatives, says Tanenhaus, have turned their back on Buckley who is somehow cast in Tanenhaus’s mind as noble accommodationist to liberalism, albeit in a Burkean way. It is with sorrow that he observes conservatives and Republicans (he largely used the terms interchangeably) are no longer willing to work with liberals and Democrats because they’ve become too bunkered in their movement mentality.
But, wait a second, George W. Bush’s signature domestic policy (other than tax cuts during a time of great surplus) was the No Child Left Behind Act, co-authored and sponsored by Ted Kennedy. Bush bragged of his association with Teddy; Teddy spat all over Bush the moment it was signed. Bush pushed for and passed a huge expansion of entitlement spending in the prescription-drug benefit. Bush dropped any discussion of racial quotas. He bought the liberal orthodoxy on Title IX. Pushed for amnesty for illegal immigrants. Openly rejected Buckleyite small-government conservatism in favor of such treacle called “compassionate conservatism.” And so on.
Meanwhile, National Review, which one supposes is as good a hotbed of “revanchist” sentiments as any, supported Bill Clinton in the Balkans and even when he bombed the Sudan during the Lewinsky scandal. We opposed, to one extent or another, many of Bush’s most popular and important programs and initiatives. That all seems to me to be signs of more bipartisanship, less dogmatism, and more internal openmindedness than Tanenhaus’s description would allow. Meanwhile, at this very moment, a lot of liberals are working very, very hard to explain why Trutherism is a mainstream and legitimate point of view. If that’s not believing in “secret cadres,” I don’t know what is.
One last thing. Tanenhaus’s argument is a very old one, as he acknowledged and the panelists last night did a very fine job raising objections to it. But the idea that conservatives should accommodate liberalism, that we should content ourselves with being the janitorial crew for progressive messes (to borrow Steve’s phrasing) will always be around. So it’s worth addressing from time to time. And I guess this is one of those times.
In his talk, Tanenhaus claims Bill Clinton as one of the most conservative presidents of the 20th century, and in the perhaps tendentious way he describes conservatism, that’s not all that crazy. Clinton started off as a very ambitious liberal, but once reality slapped him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper he grabbed the political center and held on for dear life, keeping a weather eye on the stock market ticker. Many conservatives, including me, have made the argument that Clinton ratified the Reagan Revolution in the same way that Eisenhower ratified the New Deal and Tanenhaus seems to be endorsing that argument.
But here’s the problem with that. If conservatives listened to the Tanenhauses of the 1970s, there never would have been a Reagan Revolution. It would have been Nixons for as far as the eye could see. Indeed, without a Reagan, you don’t get a “conservative” Clinton.
At the end of the day, as Jim Piereson explores at some length in his excellent review in The New Criterion, the Tanenhausian argument boils down to asking conservatives to please stop being effective and go back to being interesting eccentrics like Albert Jay Nock. It’s not an appeal to reasonableness but a call for unilateral surrender.