Disarray in Conservative Ranks

The article below discusses the disarray in conservative ranks and points out the disaffection within the ranks over the GOP ticket, pointing out some some of the conservatives who have admitted that Palin is a mistake, including George Will, Kathleen Parker, and David Brooks.



By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: October 18, 2008
In recent weeks some prominent conservative intellectuals seem to have discovered they have two hands after all. In column after column, these writers have alternately praised the virtues of John McCain and Sarah Palin and lamented their shortcomings.

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Free to Be His Own Buckley (October 19, 2008)
Straying From the Fold?
Articles by conservative commentators criticizing John McCain and Sarah Palin:
Kathleen Parker: 'Palin Problem' (nationalreview.com)
Charles Krauthammer: 'Hail Mary vs. Cool Barry' (washingtonpost.com)
George F. Will: 'McCain's Closing Argument' (washingtonpost.com)
Christopher Buckley: 'Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama' (thedailybeast.com)
David Brooks: 'The Class War Before Palin' (nytimes.com)
The syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker, for example, wrote in National Review on Sept. 26 that Governor Palin is “clearly out of her league” and should bow out of the campaign. (The conservative biweekly chose not to run a subsequent column in which Ms. Parker offered advice to Senator Barack Obama on how to win votes in Appalachia.)

On Oct. 4, one of the most influential conservative pundits, the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, rapped Senator McCain for his “frenetic improvisation” and, in what some interpreted as an endorsement of Senator Obama, praised his “first-class intellect and a first-class temperament,” adding that these strengths “will likely be enough to make him president.”

This came after another conservative beacon, George F. Will, compared the “Palin bubble” to the irrational exuberance of the deflated high- tech and housing bubbles and said Senator McCain was “behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high” in the way he responded to the financial crisis. He all but pronounced the Republican ticket finished after the final presidential debate last Wednesday night.

And then, to top it off, the novelist and humorist Christopher Buckley endorsed Mr. Obama. This decision, coming from the son of William F. Buckley Jr., one of the intellectual founders of the modern conservative movement, climaxed what seemed to be a mood of growing discomfort on the right.

No doubt these are all significant voices. But it seems fair to ask whether — in an election in which many millions will vote — the assertions of the opinion and chattering class really matter.
One answer is that for more than half a century the conservative movement has insisted that “ideas have consequences,” which implies that writers and thinkers have played a major part in shaping the fortunes of the right.

William Buckley created National Review in 1955 largely because he believed that liberal magazines like The Nation, The New Republic and similar journals had achieved a “monopoly on sophisticated information” and so had been able to set the political agenda.

For this reason, contributors to National Review and other conservative publications have long been careful about reaching agreement on fundamental principles. Of course, total unanimity was an impossibility. But the strength of the movement, as it gained power, rested on discipline. Conservative writers and thinkers might disagree, but usually within limits — and they were
careful to emphasize their points of agreement and also to modulate their differences. Hashing them out in public would only weaken the movement and give ammunition to the other side.

This mindset may be at least partly responsible for the more than 12,000 e-mail messages Ms. Parker said she received after her column appeared, many of them insulting and even threatening. Mr. Buckley also said he had heard from angry readers after he declared his apostasy in The Daily Beast, the Web site edited by Tina Brown, the former editor of The New Yorker and a certified member of the “liberal media elite.”

Of course, it is hardly in the nature of political commentators, whatever their affinities, to keep their views to themselves.

In 1964, for example, well-established conservative publications, including all 10 Hearst newspapers and The Saturday Evening Post, broke with longstanding practice by endorsing Lyndon Johnson over Barry Goldwater.

A decade later Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and Richard John Neuhaus, all onetime liberals or leftists, led the charge against the Democratic Party, which they accused of being soft on the Soviet Union and a partner in cultural and moral decline at home.

These neoconservatives — and others like Jeane Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak and Ben Wattenberg — did not just express opinions. They also helped lay the intellectual groundwork, from supply-side economics to foreign policy, for Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.

This was a classic case of ideas having consequences. While the actual number of neocons was small, they were “intellectually significant,” said Allen Matusow, a professor of American history at Rice University and the author of “The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s.” This was a case of intellectuals being in step with the broader culture. “The neoconservatives were merely a symptom of a widespread feeling that America had lost its edge in the Cold War,” Mr. Matusow said.

The next generation of neoconservatives — including Mr. Krauthammer, writing in The Post, and William Kristol (Irving’s son) and Robert Kagan, writing in the pages of The Weekly Standard — helped lead the campaign for the war in Iraq and championed the idea that America should use its might to press its vision of democracy around the world, an idea that has split both liberals and conservatives.

Today, President Bush’s policies and the collapse of Wall Street have led longtime conservatives to conflicting conclusions about where the Republican Party should be headed. And the disillusioned commentary of credentialed conservatives like Mr. Will, Mr. Buckley and Mr. Krauthammer may be the sound of a movement splintering at its foundation — a movement whose intellectuals have long been uneasy with, for example, the rising power, in the Bush years, of evangelicals, with their categorical faith in creationism and distrust of scientific reason.
The Times’s Op-Ed columnist David Brooks, who recently described Governor Palin as a “cancer on the Republican Party,” explained in an interview that the movement is now embroiled in a debate: “Should it go back to the core principles of Ronald Reagan or should it go on to something else? That’s the core issue.”

Resolving such fundamental questions can take years, Mr. Brooks said, noting that in Britain, the Conservative Party spent a decade and a half reinventing itself after Margaret Thatcher left office. Following Goldwater’s rout in 1964, American conservatives struggled for 16 years before Ronald Reagan finally was elected president.

With the election only two weeks away, it is impossible to say whether the disillusionment of the conservative intelligentsia is evidence of a similarly widespread disaffection on the right or is merely the rumblings of a handful of high-profile critics.

“In every election you’re going to find some people who are opposed to their party’s candidate,” Mr. Matusow said. “The question is, when is it significant?”

Even as some within the Republican camp — including those who support Mr. McCain — have warned of substantial disaffection among party members and seem girded for a disappointing loss on Nov. 4, others insist that the despair is premature. This, in turn, may point to yet another emerging schism on the right — between rank-and-file conservatives and the movement’s own “media elite.”

“The migration or desertion of the intellectuals does not reflect the base,” said Mr. Matusow.
Pundits, after all, tend to travel in packs and form their own constituency. They may be wringing their hands. But, Mr. Matusow said, “The average Republican will turn out” on Election Day.