Monday, January 14, 2008

Breakin' up (a coalition) is hard to do

Jonah Goldberg, mainstream Republican and intellectual rival of Crunchy Conservative Rod Dreher, wrote in Sunday's Washington Post a concise and funny summary of the current cleavages in American political conservatism, circa 2008.

Goldberg is grumpy because the Reagan Coalition is disintegrating. But coalitions are meant to be temporary, not permanent. That fusionist Republicanism held on this long is a bit surprising. Just a few years ago, Karl Rove was talking convincingly of a "permanent Republican majority." How distant that now seems. I suspect it's all for the best, as soul searching always is, especially for political types.

It's hard to say what direction post-fusionist political conservatism might take, but I for one do not want to join a populist movement. I think any new iteration of conservative politics could, as David Brooks said, "embrace capitalism but be suspicious of capitalists," without descending into the victimology of economic populism or delusional isolationism.

BC

3 comments:

Unknown said...

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Anonymous said...

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