Conservatism's Hollow Defeat

The intellectual right, now in the wilderness, keeps deluding itself about supposed past glories.

Brian Doherty from the March 2009 issue

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And the free market? Under both Democrats and Republicans, the generaldirection of the U.S. government has been toward more spending, more taxing, and more federal control, even if Reagan did succeed in dramatically lowering the highest marginal tax rates. Otherwise smart observers such as Schneider and Phillips-Fein miss these facts, conflating the success of the Republican Party, as it comes and goes, with the success of conservative ideas.

Phillips-Fein expresses this confusion about right-wing success most baldly, declaring out of nowhere, to buttress the significance of her topic, that “the New Deal has been turned back.” Except for court packing and the National Recovery Administration, every significant practice, and certainly every big idea, behind the New Deal has only gotten stronger in the last 60 years. Talk in liberal and journalistic circles abounds with hopeful references to a “new New Deal,” and President Obama would probably get some Republican votes if he tried pushing through a modern-day Works Progress Administration.

Garet Garrett, the Old Right stalwart with whom Schneider begins his book, once wrote that the New Deal “entered the old form” of the U.S. Constitution “and devoured its meaning from within.” Today, postwar conservatism has also seen its substance devoured from within. Conservative standard-bearers such as Palin and McCain are as devoted to bailouts and industrial policy and war as any New Dealers, and the right-wing intellectual tradition has withered into the narrow calculus of political gamesmanship within an ever-growing government.

Senior Editor Brian Doherty ([e-mail]) is the author of Radicals for Capitalism (PublicAffairs) and Gun Control on Trial (Cato).