Opinion on Opinion: Is the Conservative Movement Dead? (1)

             Every conservative ought to read James Kurth’s article suggesting that Conservatism has “reached the end of the road.” http://www.fpri.org/articles/2012/12/crisis-american-conservatism-inherent-contradictions-and-end-road   And if they disagree, they had better be able to explain why, because his historical analysis is well written and insightful.  I like his work, but I do disagree with his conclusions.  Here is why.

            First a warning. I don’t think Kurth’s introduction represents his overall presentation well, because he begins with the idea that Republicans and Conservatives (he seems to use the terms interchangeably) suffered a crushing defeat in the elections last November.   Well . . . from my perspective  . . . not so fast.

Mitt Romney was good man.  But he was a weak (if well financed) candidate. His emergence as the Republican representative negated their most important weapon: widespread unhappiness with Obama Care. Romney could have gained traction on this issue at any time by saying “I really wanted care like this to work at the state level.  We tried hard in Massachusetts.  It’s didn’t work. It can’t. We ought not destroy the existing medical care system relearning this hard lesson at the national level.”   Romney just would not say those words. Doing so might have changed the outcome of the election.

Also, he had zero defense or foreign policy experience. (How could he let Obama win the day with the "horses and bayonets" comment?)  And Obama was right about how Romney made his money - by money manipulation and destroying firms and sending jobs overseas. There is nothing illegal about that.  But talk all you want about “creative destruction” – Romney did not make his millions by creating American jobs. And that came back to haunt him.

 And yet he lost by less than 5%. Change 3% of the vote in the right places, and Obama would be out. That is hardly a "crushing defeat" for the conservative cause.

In the Senate, conservatives did not lose to a tidal wave of liberal ideology. Several terrible candidates who claimed to be conservatives lost after self-inflicted wounds. And in the House, the Conservatives did well. So despite the disappointment of the Presidential outcome, I do not see the election as a rousing turn away from conservatism. Thus, I find the premise of the article as stated in the introduction to be wrong.

But it IS true that the Republican message is completely adrift, and I DO believe that is because conservatives cannot articulate their own traditional conservative beliefs. (Which, by the way, have their roots in England and the Reformation, not in "Europe" as the author suggests.)   Short version of Kurth’s argument: American Conservatism suffers from a breakdown between the three groups that it represented for the last 50 years. They no longer share a vision, and they may not be able to share a party.

I will explore his reasoning and its implications in the next post.