It is more and more fun to read the newspaper stories, articles, blog posts, and the rest about the demise of conservatism and/or the Republican Party.
It is no wonder there is so much speculation. Just watch John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or the nightly news or catch a clip of Rush Limbaugh ranting on Morning Joe. The leaders of the Republican Party and the ideologues of conservatism have no answers for any of the problems that our country and our people are trying to deal with.
Recently, I saw an opinion piece by Steven Hayward of the American Enterprise Institute in the Washington Post. His piece was headlined "Is Conservatism Dead?"
Hayward's point was that, of course, conservatism isn't dead, but that the ideology needed a balance between right wing populism and intellectual heft. He noted the success of William F. Buckley as a public intellectual.
Shockingly, Hayward lifted up Fox News' Glenn Beck as a thoughtful conservative who bridges the gap between right wing populism and intellectual heft. To hold Glenn Beck up as either the future or savior of conservatives is laughable on its face. Beck doesn't even take himself seriously. And Beck's open, ugly and visceral hatred for those he disagrees with will hardly draw thoughtful young people or independents to his ideology.
Hayward then criticizes progressives for the "belief in political solutions for everything..." This is one of the right's scariest notions, because politics is how free people in democracies solve social problems.
Conservatism's illness has other symptoms. For one thing, right wing ideologues now call themselves conservatives. Folks like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove are hardly conservatives. They want to continue to transfer power and wealth from the great majority of Americans to those who already have too much and who've brought on the greatest economic crisis in 80 years. Just the other night I was on Fox Business debating these right wing nutcases about health care reform and the public health care plan. One of them admitted that they thought of Canada as a socialist country. I said that is just how bizarre their thinking is.
That kind of bizarre right wing (conservative thinking) has brought us 30 years of declining wages, 15-18% unemployment, 50 million Americans without health care, CEOs making 400 times that of the average worker, increasing poverty, a shrinking and stressed middle class, a falling standard or living, a government that lied to take us into an unnecessary and disastrous war, the worst economic crisis in 80 years, a business-government ethos that produced obscene greed and gluttony at the highest levels, ballooning debt, a coarsening of our culture and political discourse, and a shredding of any notion of our Nation's common good.
Maybe conservatism is dead.
