Conservative Crack-Up Watch
by digby
So we know that king neocon Norman Podhoretz is sticking with Bush to the bitter end, which is kind of sweet when you think about it. But the movement conservatives are bailing. Here’s a blurb from Richard Viguerie’s new book:
This is the first book that deals with the disappointment and even anger that most conservatives have with President Bush and the GOP-led Congress on major public policy issues. In this conservative manifesto, Viguerie applies conservative principles to 21st Century problems and issues. He also presents a detailed strategy for conservatives to take back control of the Republican Party and govern America.
With President Bush’s low approval numbers, the unrest among grassroots conservatives, and the potential for GOP losses in the 2006 and 2008 elections, this book is a roadmap for conservatives as they begin to rebuild the conservative movement, recapture the Republican Party, and move even the Democrats to the right. In Conservatives Betrayed, Mr. Viguerie proposes bold action for conservatives to take back the Republican Party from Big Government Republicans, including:
Withhold financial support from Republican committees and most Republican incumbents.
Withhold support from all 2008 presidential candidates.
No longer call yourself a “Republican” but rather a Reagan conservative or Reagan Republican.
Work for wholesale change in Republican leadership at all levels of government.
And think and act as a third force (not third party) independent of the Republican Party. While not advocating GOP defeat, Mr. Viguerie says conservatives should not fear the loss of Congress in 2006, since our best gains usually come after a defeat:
— 1976: Gerald Ford’s loss made possible Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980.
— 1992: George H.W. Bush’s loss made possible the Republican congressional victories in 1994.
Losing is always a good tonic for the New Right, who always get a little disoriented when they hold power for too long. It messes with their sense of victimization. And, of course, they have to do this to save conservatism from the taint of Bushism.
But there’s more to it than that and it has to do with old Norman. Even before the last election, Viguerie was seeing the writing on the wall:
… for Viguerie and other conservative leaders, maintaining that discipline this year is harder than usual. The Republicans’ united front masks a growing struggle sparked by the president’s hawkish and ambitious foreign policy–one that may burst into the open soon after the polls close, whoever wins. “Most conservatives are not comfortable with the neocons,” Viguerie says. He decries the neocons as “overbearing” and “immensely influential. . . . They want to be the world’s policeman. We don’t feel our role is to be Don Quixote, righting all the wrongs in the world.”
Viguerie’s disquiet is widely shared by veteran conservative activists, who are increasingly blaming neoconservatives for placing Iraq at the center of the war on terrorism.
Viguerie is one of the great old men of the modern conservative movement. He’s a keeper of the flame. The GOP is just the political arm, not the center of the movement itself. Bush and his friends the neocons have failed conservatism, big time:
…the neocons now find themselves in a fight for their place in the Republican Party–and in a second term, should Bush win. Former Reagan administration official Stefan Halper and former British diplomat Jonathan Clarke, in a widely discussed book called America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, charge that Bush’s foreign policy was hijacked after 9/11, leading to a “betrayal of both Republican and conservative principles.” Francis Fukuyama, a former State Department official in the administration of Bush’s father, assailed some fellow neocons and Bush’s Iraq policy in a National Interest article. He argued that Bush overlooked the need for international support to build a sense of “legitimacy” for the Iraq invasion, antagonized many by announcing a pre-emption strategy, and “went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the postwar situation would be.” Conservative columnists like George Will, Robert Novak, and William F. Buckley Jr. are stoking the fire. Will recently complained that ideology is crowding out facts in Bush’s Iraq nation building. “This administration needs a dose of conservatism without the [neo] prefix,” he wrote.
Behind the scenes, movement conservatives are disputing neocon ideas as well. Says Alfred Regnery, publisher of the American Spectator and numerous conservative books, “The administration got sold a little bit by the neocons. . . . We should return to a traditional, strong Republican foreign policy: We go to war only as a last resort, and we’re not in the business of building nations.” Phyllis Schlafly, president of the Eagle Forum, says the administration needs to “finish up the job in Iraq.” However, Schlafly says, “we don’t think we can be the policeman of the world.” She describes herself as “not a fan” of Wilsonian policies: “All this talk of democracy in Iraq is kind of ridiculous,” she argues. “What’s really important is that they have governments that are friendly to the United States.”
Meanwhile:
Under fire, neoconservatives out of government are regrouping. This summer saw the rebirth of the Committee on the Present Danger–the third incarnation of a group first launched in the 1950s and restarted in the 1970s to promote a hard line against Soviet communism. Norman Podhoretz, one of the movement’s leading thinkers, laments the darkening mood of “gloom and doom,” in particular the “newborn pessimism among supporters” of the Iraq war. “Things have gone not badly, not disastrously, but triumphantly,” he declared at the group’s inaugural conference last month. The group posits that the United States now faces another existential threat and has dubbed the struggle “World War IV,” the Cold War being World War III. The group’s chairman, former CIA Director James Woolsey, says its rebirth recognizes that “people are to some extent choosing up sides. . . . Get the job done or go back to the ’90s” –before 9/11 and Bush’s pre-emption doctrine. “A number of critics have a nostalgia for an earlier era,” he warns. But with a toxic mix of Arab and Islamist totalitarianism, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorists, he says, “those days are gone with the wind.”
Woolsey predicts “the long war of the 21st century” will last decades. The fight between neocons and other cons might last just as long.
If the Dems pull off a win this fall, it’s well worth thinking about how to stoke these divisions over the next few years as the Republicans re-group. This fault in their coalition is a big one and its worth driving a wedge in as deeply as possible.
HT to Pastor Dan
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