Klinghoffer: Conservatism Rife With "Hucksterism"
Writing in the Los Angeles Times, David Klinghoffer laments the decline of the discourse on the American right:
Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.
What has become of conservatism? We have reached a point at which nothing could be more important than to stop and recall what brought us here, to the right, in the first place.
Buckley's National Review, where I was the literary editor through the 1990s, remains as vital and interesting as ever. But more characteristic of conservative leadership are figures on TV, radio and the Internet who make their money by stirring fears and resentments. With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of "neocons" versus "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons.
When I was a college student in the late 1980s interviewing for an internship at National Review, Managing Editor Richard Brookhiser fixed me with a look and posed a question that might seem more natural in a religious than in a political context. "How did you become a conservative?" he asked.
Evangelical Christians, curious about their fellow believers, will sometimes ask something similar: "How did you become a Christian?" Among conservatives, most of us too had "born again" stories, but they were political rather than religious. (Though sometimes our philosophical paths led to new religious paths as well: The first step on my own journey to Orthodox Judaism was to become a conservative.)
Conservatism wasn't just a policy agenda, a set of partisan gripes or a football team seeking victory on the electoral field. Above all, it was a satisfying, sophisticated critique of modern, materialist culture, pointing a way out and up from liberalism.
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