Real Conservatives and the Petrocrats

Sci-fi author David Brin has an excellent blog post wondering if real conservatives will stand up to the thieves now in control of their movement:

During the subsequent long process of reappraisal and renewal (after Goldwater's defeat in 1964), those who were reinventing conservatism envisioned a values-oriented return to decent American norms... sort of an immune reaction to - and correction of - purported anti-individualism excess by a fetishistically paternalistic Left.

According to this expectation, a broadly populist political uprising on the right would lead to fiscal responsibility, reduced debt, cautious restraint in foreign policy, efficient and limited government, elevated social discourse, electoral and legislative transparency, emphasis on professionalism and readiness, rising personal wealth for most Americans, a renaissance of entrepreneurial small business and the fostering of healthy civil society through a Tocquevillian process that devolves power from elites to the people.

Read that list of expectations over and over again, as many times as it may take for the irony to sink in. Did this fantastically successful American political revolution, seizing nearly all of a great nation's significant institutions of power, accomplish any of its worthy surface aspirations? Any at all?

That is, aspirations other than raw power?

I suspect Brin, being a libertarian-leaning liberal, put his best possible spin on what conservatism stands for. Even I, who once called myself a conservative, never imputed that much nobility to the movement. But he is right about the effects. Conservatism these days is little more than corporatism, militarism, and absolute executive power, with cheerleading from the pulpits.

The answer, Brin says, is for real conservatives to copy what liberals did in 1947:

That was when several thousand moderate American liberals - having learned the truth about Stalin's Soviet horror - gathered their courage and resolve, stood up, and admitted that "the radicals of our side can be mad." In a combination of patriotism, pragmatism and idealism, they resolved to separate themselves, from any association with Communism, even at the level of nostalgic sympathy!
Nothing less would have sufficed. A schism of the left was necessary, in order to save the American left as a dynamic force in our national life.

Not only was this move courageous, it proved spectacularly successful. What ensued was not a defeat of American liberalism, but rather its greatest era.

Brin suggests what's going on today is "a return to the consistent pattern that dominated nearly every other urban culture in human history. A power-sharing arrangement between resource controlling aristocrats and mystical clerics, who chant justifications for aristocratic rule."

I don't agree with everything Brin says, especially the implication that Newt Gingrich might be the savior. But I do get where Brin is coming from:

If Newt and his friends want a better version of conservatism to survive and thrive, with a reputation for anything other than spineless dogmatism, they will heed the call of history, and stand up. Now, when we need them most.

In doing so, they will make this not a matter of "culture war" between rural and urban America, but a much simpler matter, about ejecting a nasty gang of thieves, in order to let our nation get back to business. In doing so, they will save their own movement. But don't hold your breath.