Missing the point: George Packer’s “The Fall of Conservatism”

George Packer’s 8600-word opus on the Republican party’s purported failure of vision from last week’s New Yorker is probably the most widely read big-picture analysis of either party circa 2008 that anyone has produced so far. The piece veers off the beam pretty badly in the last half by assuming that the disasters abroad and at home in the GWB years reflect a failure that the author puts down to the conservatives’ fatal lack of interest in governing.

Packer neglects to consider the possibility that the Bush GOP’s radicalism was more than lip service, and that what afflicts them now is instead a function of their successes — in hamstringing the federal government at home and launching a semi-permanent occupation of the oil-producing state with the largest remaining easily accessible reserves.

On the first count, Reagan budget man David Stockman recognized as long ago as the 1980s that part of the political goal in cutting taxes and sending military spending through the roof was to create deficits that would hamper the capacity of future regimes to spend on pinko domestic social programs. And in this sense, the “failed” creed of the supply-siders was in fact a political victory for the right, a point the Clinton administration went on to underline emphatically with its deficit-hawking and domestic austerity. The Bush administration has created an infinitely deeper hole, and correspondingly stronger shackles, for those who follow it. It may have placed the party in an untenable position for the future, sure, but at another level entirely it’s Mission Accomplished for the Grover Norquists and Dick Cheneys of the world, is it not?

On the other hand, Packer’s piece is good on the Nixon-era coalescence of the factional alliances that would dominate the party and the country for the next 40 years, and it contains a revelatory passage about the mindset of the Cheney/Bush team at the start of its first term.

You’ll find both those passages below the jump.

Continued: Click “Read More”  George Packer, “The Fall of Conservatism:” excerpts

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum-”A little raw for today,” he warned-that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading “Dividing the Democrats.” Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in “the Old Roosevelt Coalition,” it recommended that the White House “exacerbate the ideological division” between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon’s policies; highlight “the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party”; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. “Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.” The Nixon White House didn’t enact all of these recommendations, but it would be hard to find a more succinct and unapologetic blueprint for Republican success in the conservative era.

The phrase that signalled Bush’s approach was “compassionate conservatism,” but it never amounted to a policy program. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision that ended the disputed Florida recount, Dick Cheney met with a group of moderate Republican senators, including Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island. According to Chafee’s new book, “Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President” (Thomas Dunne), the Vice-President-elect gave the new order of battle: “We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us.” Cheney’s combative instincts and belief in an unfettered and secretive executive proved far more influential at the White House than Bush’s campaign promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” Cheney behaved as if, notwithstanding the loss of the popular vote, conservative Republican domination could continue by sheer force of will. On domestic policy, the Administration made tax cuts and privatization its highest priority; and its conduct of the war on terror broke with sixty years of relatively bipartisan and multilateralist foreign policy.