>> Speaking of braindead right-wingers, Jonah Goldberg once actually
>> said something that was pretty plausible on this score. He said
>> conservatives all have a common corpus of Great Classic Works of
>> conservative political philosophy, like the ones you mention above,
>> whereas liberals or "progressives" have nothing like that. Who is the
>> great thinker of American liberalism? I mean that contemporary
>> liberals actually recognize and cite as a maître à penser of their own?
>
> Arthur Schlesinger? Paul Krugman? A little further left, Naomi Klein?
>
> But as Irving Kristol once put it: "American conservatism lacks for
> political imagination. It's so influenced by business culture and by
> business modes of thinking that it lacks any political imagination,
> which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left....If you
> read Marx, you'd learn what a political imagination could do."
But if you read Up From Liberalism, or even that ghost-written screed Conscience of a Conservative, you get a real sense of a full-fledged ideology being delineated. More than a series of policy proposals and not just a bunch of anodyne, mom-and-apple-pie bromides, but a real effort to unite a set of moral priorities (e.g., individual "responsibility" trumps human wellbeing) with a vision of how the world works (laissez-faire economics and a manichean view of good us vs. evil them), consciously based on the classics (Hayek, Christianity). It's not like some monument to human thought or anything, but it's a real worldview: Here's our understanding of the human condition; here's the politics that flow from that; here are the policies we want.
I like Krugman, but while I haven't read his Conscience of a Liberal book, I imagine it's (a) a bunch of data on inequality, health insurance, etc.; (b) a potted analysis of the rise of the US conservative movement; and (c) some policy prescriptions, plus a bit of pep-talking for liberals. Did you know Krugman once wrote that his vision of the good society was Sweden in 1980? If that were to be taken literally, it is so utterly divorced from anything that exists in contemporary American politics/policy/commentary that it would cry out for some deeper philosophical justification. But he has no interest in giving one.
The thing about that Kristol quote is that Kristol himself solved that problem in the 1970's to a great extent. I think the quote is meant to express frustration with an older style of conservatism that he himself helped to supplant. The whole neoconservative analysis of capitalism's necessary role as a disciplining and regulating force to rein in social deviance; the deliberate introduction of the figure of the entrepreneur as the hero of the economy, to replace the villain role of the corporate executive; it all worked really well, and it came largely from Kristol.
I actually tend to think that conservatism is in trouble right now because of its *programmatic* rigidity, not because the essentials of the ideology are being rejected. Right now, conservatism is Americanism, which is why Obama more or less embraces it at a rhetorico-ideological level. Matthias is right: Today, liberalism is just a flexible, pragmatic conservatism, while conservatism is a rigid, dogmatic conservatism.
SA