Richard Posner on the Decline of Conservatism
by Jonathan Singer, Tue May 12, 2009 at 03:02:09 PM EDT
Over the weekend, conservative jurist Richard Posner, one of Ronald Reagan's first appointees to an appellate court position, blogged on the decline of conservatism. The post is well worth reading in full, but here are a few choice grafs:
By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of "originalism," the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. [...]
By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.
And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally.
What's interesting about this isn't that it's an example of a conservative chiding the Republican Party for abandoning its conservative roots, because we have seen quite a bit of that in recent weeks and months (indeed, that seems to be the common wisdom among many in the upper echelons of the party). No, what makes this stand out is that one of the leading progenitors of modern conservatism is in effect saying that the ideology itself has gone haywire, that its failings are a direct result of misdirected focus. Some conservatives might think that George W. Bush led the GOP astray by not devoting enough attention to repealing the estate tax (and it's worth noting that Posner stays away from demagoguing on the issue by calling it by another poll-tested name) or by resisting the rights of homosexuals -- but Posner clearly isn't one of them.
Where the movement goes from here is unclear, though Posner sees hopes in "portents of liberal excess in the policies and plans of the new administration." Maybe, maybe not. The "liberal excess[es]" of the 1960s certainly led to a backlash -- but what some might have considered the liberal excesses of the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s led to a further embrace of liberalism, not a retrenchment towards conservatism. So it just might be that conservatism will need some ideas outside of unending growth in the U.S. military and unending cuts to the marginal income tax rate for the wealthy to come back into the fore, rather than just waiting for the current administration to fail.
Tags: conservatism, Richard Posner (all tags)
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