Prometheus 6

And practically all we ever hear from.

"Pseudoconservativism is among other things a disorder in relation to authority, characterized by an inability to find other modes for human relationship than those of more or less complete domination or submission. . . . The pseudo-conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition. . . . [He] sees his own country as being so weak that it is constantly about to fall victim to subversion; and yet he feels that it is so all-powerful that any failure it may experience in getting its way in the world . . . cannot possibly be due to its limitations but must be attributed to its having been betrayed."

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 1965.

Conservatism: From Fringe to Mainstream

When Professor Hofstadter diagnosed pseudoconservatism from the dominant tradition of cold war liberalism, he was describing a fringe element, which is why he appended the "pseudo" prefix: Birchers, Minutemen, and McCarthyite remnants of the ideological wars of the 1950s. The only "conservatism" he was apparently comfortable with was the Eisenhower/Rockefeller variant of the New Deal consensus.

Writing 40 years ago, Hofstadter did not seem to grasp that a new political consensus based on conservative ideas would become the ascendant political expression in the United States. Beginning with Goldwater's candidacy and culminating in Republican control of Congress in 1994, conservatism became as dominant in American politics as liberalism was in Hofstadter's day.

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From Friedrich von Hayek to Ann Coulter

At some point during the mid to late 1990s, dominant conservatism began to replicate the signs of intellectual decay that liberalism showed 30 years earlier. It probably started with movement conservatives' growing obsession with the Clinton family: not as political opponents to be defeated in a war of ideas, but as demonic incarnations of evil who had to be destroyed by any means necessary. As movement conservatives rolled and snuffled in sexual scandal like felines in catnip, there was a corresponding decline in intellectual argumentation. Instead of Wealth and Poverty, bookstore shelves bent under the weight of scandal-mongering exposes of Clinton's sexual dalliances.

As of this writing, more than three years after Clinton's departure from office and two and a half years after the most devastating attack on American soil in history, the magazine Human Events has seen fit to e-mail me a special offer: the "blockbuster" book by R. Emmitt Tyrrell on - Osama bin Laden? A conservative policy analysis of Iraq? The looming fiscal crisis of Social Security and Medicare? Not a chance. Tyrrell's magnificent opus is titled Madame Hillary. The offer promises that I "won't be able to put this book down" as it exposes Mrs. Clinton's diabolical machinations to enslave the guileless American people. And if I subscribe to Human Events for 70 weeks, I will receive this bonus: the "52 most dangerous liberals in America playing card set." Tom Daschle, the American incarnation of Josef Stalin. One is already thinking about rustling up a fourth for whist. Whether the demon du jour is the Clintons or not, conservative books, conservative talk radio, and conservative web sites show a uniform intellectual deterioration.