Aggrieved Conservatives

by digby

I have hesitated to link to Rick Perlstein’s Princeton speech, published here on Huffington Post, because he makes a very kind statement about me in it, and I sound like I’m tooting my own horn by posting about it. But, I decided to post about it anyway, because what he says is so important for people to understand: Republican intellectuals like to promote themselves as the party of Goldwater the principled conservative and Reagan the optimistic conservative, but they are actually the party of Richard Nixon, the aggrieved conservative. Their penchant for secrecy, their disdain for democratic processes, their lawless political tactics and their belief that might makes right are best understood by looking at them in that light.

The modern Republican party set about ruthlessly building a political machine while wearing the mantle of principle and morality after Nixon’s fall. A machine is all they really are, but they persist in this fiction that they have a deep intellectual philosophy — “the party of ideas” and all that. I assume that many of them believe this. But any person of ideas is only welcome as long as he or she is useful, after which he is thrown on the ever increasing pile of liberal traitors.

Here’s one example of a conservative intellectual (one of the fathers of the neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol) making the Straussian argument that religion is necessary to keep the masses in line, but unnecessary for the highly educated mandarins who actually run things:

Because of Strauss’ teachings, Kristol continued, “There are in Washington today dozens of people who are married with children and religiously observant. Do they have faith? Who knows? They just believe that it is good to go to church or synagogue. Whether you believe or not is not the issue — that’s between you and God — whether you are a member of a community that holds certain truths sacred, that is the issue.” Neoconservatives are “pro-religion even though they themselves may not be believers.”

This noble hypocrisy on the part of intellectuals is required in order to encourage religious belief in ordinary people who would otherwise succumb to nihilism without it. In other words, Kristol believes that religion, which may well be a fiction, is necessary to keep the little people in line. This line of thinking has led him and other neoconservative intellectuals to attack Darwinian evolution because they fear it undermines religious belief.

(The author of this companion article writes, “ironically, today many modern conservatives fervently agree with Karl Marx that religion is “the opium of the people”; they add a heartfelt, ‘Thank God!'”)

I’m sure that the DC Neocon elites feel very secure that they are the ones running things. But as with so many other intellectual conceits of the conservative movement, it is awfully convenient that their “ideas” track with the needs of a Repubublican political machine. Here’s how the man who identified the evangelical community as an untapped voting block, Paul Weyrich, saw it:

“We are no longer working to preserve the status quo. We are radicals, working to overturn the present power structure of the country,” he declared. Weyrich describes his views as “Maoist. I believe you have to control the countryside, and the capital will eventually fall.” (David Brock, “Blinded by The Right” p.54)

I would submit that the Neos like Kristol and Podhoretz are just beltway pundit fodder for the Nixonian political machine. They think they are the mandarins but they are dupes too, of another sort, lending a phony intellectual heft to a movement that isn’t intellectual at all. Nixon would have hated them. Weyrich is his man. (Until he isn’t.)

I urge you to read Perlstein’s speech and description of what it was like to go into the belly of the beast and talk about this among the faithful. He’s got more guts than I do. Clearly he understands them better than they understand themselves:

The response to my address was, understandably, defensive. My co-panelist Stan Evans retorted that my invocation of Richard Nixon was inappropriate because Nixon had never been a genuine conservative. He added: “I didn’t like Nixon until Watergate.” I responded: “Thanks for making my point.”

Everyone understands, I assume, that Bush, Delay, Norquist and Reed too, are morphing into liberals as we speak.

Update: I couldn’t, for thel ife of me remember where I had recently seen this Kristol article, so I Googled it. thanks to a reader, I was reminded that it was in this great post by James Wolcot.

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