A Defeat for Conservatism

A number of wingnuts have been desperately trying to spin the election as not a defeat for conservatism. And after thinking about it a bit, I decided they sort of right...but not in the way they think they mean.

The election wasn't a defeat for conservatism. The last twelve years were a defeat for conservatism.

I saw this coming back in 1994. After the '94 elections, I argued to anyone who would listen (and quite a few who wouldn't) that the new Republican majority would be marked by massive and widespread corruption. I argued that their anti-government ideology mandated this; that when people who have only contempt for the capabilities of government are given control of government, they will use it primarily for the gain of themselves and their contributors¹.

This is the difference between Republicans and Democrats: where Democrats tend to be incidentally corrupt (that is, corruption is the price of getting things done), Republicans are ideologically corrupt. Corruption is their party platform.

The point of this is not that I was prescient 12 years ago. The point of this is that I didn't need to be. The nature of Republican ideology, the logical endpoint of its application--these things were obvious to anyone willing to see them. And now they have come to pass.

The point is that when Malkin claims conservatism won, or Republicans try to spin corruption as a kind of asterisk on the election results, they are unequivocally full of shit. Corruption wasn't some external circumstance that brought down the Republican majority; corruption was their modus operandi. Corruption isn't a recent development; it has been written into the DNA of the party since at least 1980, and was arguably pre-ordained as long ago as 1964. The only thing different is the absence of any restraint--a Democratic president or a Democratic congressional majority. What we have seen the last few years is not some aberrant strain but conservatism ('pseudo-conservatism' Hofstadter called it 50 years ago, but it's been the dominant version for a long time) in its purest form.

We have a tremendous opportunity now: the people who were suckered by Republican promises of fiscal probity aren't buying it anymore. Our challenge now is to make sure they understand, make sure everyone understands, that if they are ever put in a position of comparable power they will do exactly the same. Because Malkin is partly right: a lot of voters in a lot of states still buy into the fantasies at the heart of conservative ideology. We have to make clear, now and for all time, that the ideology and the corruption are inseparable.


¹Some Republicans argued that national defense was an exception. I was prepared to grant that at the time; now, in light of everything that's happened in the last five years, it's clear that they regard defense with the same cynical contempt as everything else government does.

[That's all, folks]