I have posted this here before, but the events of the past year have only, for me, reinforced the points that I make below. Contemporary US conservatism is brain dead and that's not likely to change anytime soon. It's clearly best thought of as a pathology rather than an intellectually serious tradition of political thought. -----------------------------------
Back in the late 1940s - early 1950s when modern conservatism was getting started with people like Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk, Friedrich Hayek, along with ex-leftists like Max Eastman and James Burnham, they were challenging what was then the prevailing political consensus of the ruling class, which enbraced the limited social democracy that came in with the New Deal. Hence, these people were forced to attempt to develop penetrating critiques of the liberalism of FDR, Truman, and their successors. In other words, they had to take on the arguments for economic planning, a broad welfare state, extensive government interventions in the economy, etc. and attempt to refute them while spelling out a convincing case for a return to an expanded role for markets in economic life. Thus, Hayek's ruminations on the 'socialist calculation' problem, which he generalized into a critique of economic planning, Burnham's critiques of 'bureacratic collectivism' which, following his swing to the right, he was able to wield against social democracy and New Dealism, etc.
Not surprisingly, some of these people therefore produced work of high intellectual caliber. For instance, the work of Hayek and von Mises on the 'socialist calculation' problem has had the honor of being taken seriously by eminent socialist and Marxist economists (i.e. Oskar Lange, Abba Lerner, Ernest Mandel, Paul Cockshott) although these people have responded to Hayek's arguments in diverse ways. Bill Buckley, while not himself a particularly original thinker, was able to assemble a team of astute conservative writers and thinkers around his magazine, National Review. Since these people back in the 1950s and early 1960s were fighting was very much an uphill battle, they were forced into doing some good work. All this began to change, once the ruling class, from the mid-1970s on began to turn against the Great Society and New Deal, and sought to roll back the gains, made not only by popular movements in the 1960s but even the earlier gains made back in the 1930s. Now the mainstream of the US and UK ruling classes began to openly embrace the ideas that people like Hayek, Buckley, Milton Friedman, Kirk and their friends had been advancing for years. Socialism, as always, was trashed but now the welfare state itself was denounced as an impediment to economic efficiency and productivity and as inimical to individual liberty. In this way, the interests of the rich were promoted at the expence of the poor.
Not surprisingly, millions and millions of dollars began to flow into all sorts of right-wing think tanks and institutes: from the the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, all the way on down. Wealthy right-wingers began to flood major universities with contributions in order to endow chairs and departments that would advance rightist positions in the academic world. Certain disciplines like economics and to a lesser extent, political science, fell under right-wing domination. The hegemony of the right in the political discourse of the US and Great Britain seemed assured. Even when center-left governments ruled (the Clinton Administration in the US and Tony Blair's New Labour in the UK), discussions of economic and social policy proceeded on the basis of right-wing assumptions. And yet, one cannot help noticing that a certain rot seems to be setting in here. The right has in power, proven no more able to resolve the contradictions of capitalism than were the liberals and social democrats.
Lower taxes and less regulation have proven to be no more of a panacea than had increased government spending and the creation of new social programs had been for the liberals and social democrats. Almost thirty years ago when Thatcher and Reagan came to power, the right could portray itself as offering fresh ideas for solving problems that had proven intractable for
the liberals and social democrats. But now we are here thirty years later many of the old problems still unresolved along with new problems that seem beyond the ken of the best brains of the right.
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