George Packer: The Fall of Conservatism. Subtitle: "Have the Republicans run out of ideas?" Don't know if this is part of a longer project, or if it's just meant to touch on such recent books as Rick Perlstein's Nixonland and Sean Wilentz's The Age of Reagan, but Packer's May 26, 2008 New Yorker article digs up some revealing dirt on the making and breaking of the new right. He starts by interviewing Pat Buchanan:

"From Day One, Nixon and I talked about creating a new majority," Buchanan told me recently, sitting in the library of his Greek-revival house in McLean, Virginia, on a secluded lane bordering the fenced grounds of the Central Intelligence Agency. "What we talked about, basically, was shearing off huge segments of F.D.R.'s New Deal coalition, which L.B.J. had held together: Northern Catholic ethnics and Southern Protestant conservatives -- what we called the Daley-Rizzo Democrats in the North and, frankly, the Wallace Democrats in the South." Buchanan grew up in Washington, D.C., among the first group -- men like his father, an accountant and a father of nine, who had supported Roosevelt but also revered Joseph McCarthy. The Southerners were the kind of men whom Nixon whipped into a frenzy one night in the fall of 1966, at the Wade Hampton Hotel, in Columbia, South Carolina. Nixon, who was then a partner in a New York law firm, had travelled there with Buchanan on behalf of Republican congressional candidates. Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, "burned the paint off the walls." As they left the hotel, Nixon said, "This is the future of this Party, right here in the South."

Note that Nixon's interest wasn't ideological: he was looking for a sizable block of votes he could get out in front of. Nixon's 1968 campaign was one of finnesse, attempting to scrape by a divided and disheartened Democratic Party without disclosing how much he too would become a source of division and disarray. But no sooner than Nixon won, he started working on his majority for 1972:

This strategy was put into action near the end of Nixon's first year in office, when antiwar demonstrators were becoming a disruptive presence in Washington. Buchanan recalls urging Nixon, "We've got to use the siege gun of the Presidency, and go right after these guys." On November 3, 1969, Nixon went on national television to speak about the need to avoid a shameful defeat in Vietnam. Looking benignly into the camera, he concluded, "And so tonight -- to you, the great silent majority of Americans -- I ask for your support." It was the most successful speech of his Presidency. Newscasters criticized him for being divisive and for offering no new vision on Vietnam, but tens of thousands of telegrams and letters expressing approval poured into the White House. It was Nixon's particular political genius to rouse simultaneously the contempt of the bien-pensants and the admiration of those who felt the sting of that contempt in their own lives.

This was when Nixon unleashed Spiro Agnew to practice what Kevin Phillips, the political demographer and author of The Emerging Republican Majority working for Nixon, had called "positive polarization."

Nixon was coldly mixing and pouring volatile passions. Although he was careful to renounce the extreme fringe of Birchites and racists, his means to power eventually became the end. Buchanan gave me a copy of a seven-page confidential memorandum -- "A little raw for today," he warned -- that he had written for Nixon in 1971, under the heading "Dividing the Democrats." Drawn up with an acute understanding of the fragilities and fault lines in "the Old Roosevelt Coalition," it recommended that the White House "exacerbate the ideological division" between the Old and New Left by praising Democrats who supported any of Nixon's policies; highlight "the elitism and quasi-anti-Americanism of the National Democratic Party"; nominate for the Supreme Court a Southern strict constructionist who would divide Democrats regionally; use abortion and parochial-school aid to deepen the split between Catholics and social liberals; elicit white working-class support with tax relief and denunciations of welfare. Finally, the memo recommended exploiting racial tensions among Democrats. "Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country," Buchanan wrote. "We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention." Such gambits, he added, could "cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half."

Packer asserts that the "Nixon White House didn't enact all of these recommendations," but Perlstein's book provides a pretty comprehensive listing of how they tried, with a few further dirty tricks added as occasions arose. Note that the emphasis here is on undermining the opposition party than it is to achieve any political ideals.

Packer also argues that the 2006 and 2008 elections mark a turning point:

This will be true whether or not John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, wins in November. He and his likely Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, "both embody a post-polarized, or anti-polarized, style of politics," the Times columnist David Brooks told me. "McCain, crucially, missed the sixties, and in some ways he's a pre-sixties figure. He and Obama don't resonate with the sixties at all." The fact that the least conservative, least divisive Republican in the 2008 race is the last one standing -- despite being despised by significant voices on the right -- shows how little life is left in the movement that Goldwater began, Nixon brought into power, Ronald Reagan gave mass appeal, Newt Gingrich radicalized, Tom DeLay criminalized, and Bush allowed to break into pieces. "The fact that there was no conventional, establishment, old-style conservative candidate was not an accident," Brooks said. "Mitt Romney pretended to be one for a while, but he wasn't. Rudy Giuliani sort of pretended, but he wasn't. McCain is certainly not. It's not only a lack of political talent -- there's just no driving force, and it will soften up normal Republicans for change."

It's not clear to me in what sense McCain isn't a conservative, and in particular isn't in thrall to the movers and shakers of the movement. In at least one critical area -- the neoconservative plot to militarily crush any conceivable opposition -- he's out in front of the movement. (It doesn't help here that Packer has his own imperialist blind spot.) Packer quotes Newt Gingrich: "The Republian brand has been so badly damaged that if Republicans try to run an anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins) anti-Clinton campaign, they are simply going to fail."

Yuval Levin, a former Bush White House official, who is now a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, agrees with Gingrich's diagnosis. "There's an intellectual fatigue, even if it hasn't yet been made clear by defeat at the polls," he said. "The conservative idea factory is not producing as it did. You hear it from everybody, but nobody agrees what to do about it."

Pat Buchanan was less polite, paraphrasing the social critic Eric Hoffer: "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket."

Of course, that whole bit about the Republicans being the "party of ideas" was one of their most blatantly cynical ideas. Their real achievement had less to do with constructing ideas than with selling them, with cajoling or coercing the media into carrying their water, giving them credibility where none was deserved. Great Communicator Ronald Reagan was particularly effective at this:

The Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, in his new book, The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (Harper), argues that Reagan "learned how to seize and keep control of the terms of public debate." On taxes, race, government spending, national security, crime, welfare, and "traditional values," he made mainstream what had been the positions of the right-wing fringe, and he kept Democrats on the defensive. He also brought a generation of doctrinaire conservatives into the bureaucracy and the courts, making appointments based on ideological tests that only a genuine movement leader would impose. The rightward turn of the judiciary will probably be the most lasting achievement of Reagan and his movement.

Wilentz sees Reagan as the movement's high-point. While Reagan achieved much of what he had intended, he also planted the seeds of the movement's decay:

In retrospect, the Reagan Presidency was the high-water mark of conservatism. "In some respects, the conservative movement was a victim of success," Wilentz concludes. "With the Soviet Union dissolved, inflation reduced to virtually negligible levels, and the top tax rate cut to nearly half of what it was in 1980, all of Ronald Reagan's major stated goals when he took office had been achieved, leaving perplexed and fractious conservatives to fight over where they might now lead the country." Wilentz omits one important failure. According to Buchanan, who was the White House communications director in Reagan's second term, the President once told his barber, Milton Pitts, "You know, Milt, I came here to do five things, and four out of five ain't bad." He had succeeded in lowering taxes, raising morale, increasing defense spending, and facing down the Soviet Union; but he had failed to limit the size of government, which, besides anti-Communism, was the abiding passion of Reagan's political career and of the conservative movement. He didn't come close to achieving it and didn't try very hard, recognizing early that the public would be happy to have its taxes cut as long as its programs weren't touched. And Reagan was a poor steward of the unglamorous but necessary operations of the state. Wilentz notes that he presided over a period of corruption and favoritism, encouraging hostility toward government agencies and "a general disregard for oversight safeguards as among the evils of 'big government.'" In this, and in a notorious attempt to expand executive power outside the Constitution -- the Iran-Contra affair -- Reagan's Presidency presaged that of George W. Bush.

I'm tempted to argue that Reagan offered at most the illusion of success -- that his unique sunny optimism encouraged people to look beyond numerous questionable facts. Just as important, the optimism kept the movement's primordial hate under wraps -- temporarily, with Gingrich's 1994 triumph the signal event:

Instead of governing, the Republican majority in Congress -- along with right-wing authors, journalists, talk-radio personalities, think tanks, and foundations -- surrendered to the negative strain of modern conservatism. As political strategy, this strain went back to the Nixon era, but its philosophical roots were older and deeper. It extended back to William F. Buckley, Jr.'s mission statement, in the inaugural issue of National Review, in 1955, that the new magazine "stands athwart history, yelling Stop"; and to Goldwater's seminal 1960 book, The Conscience of a Conservative, in which he wrote, "I have little interest in streamlining government or in making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size. I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws, but to repeal them. It is not to inaugurate new programs, but to cancel old ones." By the end of the century, a movement inspired by sophisticated works such as Russell Kirk's 1953 The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot churned out degenerate descendants with titles like How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). Shortly after engineering President Bill Clinton's impeachment on a narrow party-line basis, Gingrich was gone.

Though conservatives were not much interested in governing, they understood the art of politics. They hadn't made much of a dent in the bureaucracy, and they had done nothing to provide universal health-care coverage or arrest growing economic inequality, but they had created a political culture that was inhospitable to welfare, to an indulgent view of criminals, to high rates of taxation. They had controlled the language and moved the political parameters to the right. Back in November, 1967, Buckley wrote in an essay on Ronald Reagan, "They say that his accomplishments are few, that it is only the rhetoric that is conservative. But the rhetoric is the principal thing. It precedes all action. All thoughtful action."

Then came George W. Bush:

According to [David] Frum, who worked as a White House speechwriter during Bush's first two years, Bush couldn't have won if he'd run as a real conservative, because the country was already moving in a new direction. Bush's goals, like Nixon's, were political. Nixon had set out to expand the Republican vote; Bush wanted to keep it from contracting. At his first meeting with Frum and other speechwriters, Bush declared, "I want to change the Party" -- to soften its hard edge, and make the Party more hospitable to Hispanics. "It was all about positioning," Frum said, "not about confronting a new generation of problems." Frum wasn't happy; although he suspected that Bush might be right, he wanted him to govern along hard-line conservative principles.

The phrase that signalled Bush's approach was "compassionate conservatism," but it never amounted to a policy program. Within hours of the Supreme Court decision that ended the disputed Florida recount, Dick Cheney met with a group of moderate Republican senators, including Lincoln Chafee, of Rhode Island. According to Chafee's new book, Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President (Thomas Dunne), the Vice-President-elect gave the new order of battle: "We would seek confrontation on every front. . . . The new Administration would divide Americans into red and blue, and divide nations into those who stand with us or against us." Cheney's combative instincts and belief in an unfettered and secretive executive proved far more influential at the White House than Bush's campaign promise to be "a uniter, not a divider." Cheney behaved as if, notwithstanding the loss of the popular vote, conservative Republican domination could continue by sheer force of will. On domestic policy, the Administration made tax cuts and privatization its highest priority; and its conduct of the war on terror broke with sixty years of relatively bipartisan and multilateralist foreign policy.

The Administration's political operatives were moving in the same direction. The Republican strategist Matthew Dowd studied the 2000 results and concluded that the proportion of swing voters in America had declined from twenty-two to seven per cent over the previous two decades, which meant that mobilizing the Party's base would be more important in 2004 than attracting independents. The strategist Karl Rove's polarizing political tactics (which brought a new level of demographic sophistication to the old formula) buried any hope of a centrist Presidency before Bush's first term was half finished.

Ed Rollins said, "Rove knew his voters, he stuck to the message with consistency, he drove that base hard -- and there's nothing left of it. Today, if you're not rich or Southern or born again, the chances of your being a Republican are not great." As long as Bush and his party kept winning elections, however slim the margins, Rove's declared ambition to create a "permanent majority" seemed like the vision of a tactical genius. But it was built on two illusions: that the conservative era would stretch on indefinitely, and that politics matters more than governing. The first illusion defied history; the second was blown up in Iraq and drowned in New Orleans.

Packer interviews various people who argue that conservatism is still the principal political belief in the country today, but that conservatives need to find a more functional way of governing with their beliefs.

"If Republican politicians quote Reagan, their political operatives study Nixon," Frum writes. "Republicans have been reprising Nixon's 1972 campaign against McGovern for a third of a century. As the excesses of the 1960s have dwindled into history, however, the 1972 campaign has worked less and less well." He adds, "How many more elections can conservatives win by campaigning against Abbie Hoffman and Bobby Seale? Voters want solutions to the problems of today." Polls reveal that Americans favor the Democratic side on nearly every domestic issue, from Social Security and health care to education and the environment. The all-purpose Republican solution of cutting taxes has run its course. Frum writes, "There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well."

David Brooks "was even more scathing than Frum."

Brooks called the conservative think tanks "sclerotic," but much conservative journalism has become just as calcified and ingrown. Last year, writing in The New Republic, Sam Tanenhaus revealed a 1997 memo in which Buckley -- who had originally hired Brooks at National Review on the strength of a brilliant undergraduate parody that he had written of Buckley -- refused to anoint him as his heir because Brooks, a Jew, is not a "believing Christian." At Commentary, the neoconservative counterpart to National Review, the editorship was bequeathed by Norman Podhoretz, its longtime editor, to his son John, whose crude op-eds for the New York Post didn't measure up to Commentary's intellectual past. A conservative journalist familiar with both publications said that what mattered most at the Christian National Review was doctrinal purity, whereas at the Jewish Commentary it was blood relations: "It's a question of who can you trust, and it comes down to religious fundamentals."

Packer ends with some pap on Obama and McCain, including riffs on Obama as McGovern ("Goldwater was to Reagan as McGovern is to Obama") and McCain retracing LBJ's footsteps as the latter launched his Great Society War on Poverty.

While reading Perlstein's Nixonland, I noted a number of analogies between Obama's campaign and McGovern's -- most pointedly, the pivotal role Pennsylvania played in backing the party machine candidates. Other potential similarities have been narrowly avoided this time, like taking credentials disputes to the convention. The Democratic Party was in disarray at the time, split on two axes: over the still-raging Vietnam War, and between the old party bosses and reformers, mostly motivated by their opposition to the Vietnam War. The Iraq War divides today's Democrats, but less so, and the party bosses are long gone. But also looking back, we have 1972 as a lesson: the Party's desertion of McGovern may have seemed like a small thing at the time, but now it looms large, a turning point in the nation's history that we would have been better off not taking. The starkest example was George Meany's refusal to back McGovern: you can date the AFL-CIO's decline from that point -- if the unions weren't smart enough to realize that the escalating cold war was a form of class struggle aimed straight at their throats, you could even say they deserved what they got.

The Democrats are unlikely to be as divided this time, in large part because they've been so irrelevant they have nothing left to get defensive about. McGovern's change was directed as much against his own party as against Nixon, who seemed less a partisan threat than a peculiarly chameleonic form of slime. The Democrats still dominated Congress, most state and local governments, including almost every major city. They still thought of themselves as the establishment, and they still owned a lot of responsibility for the Vietnam War. McGovern couldn't change America until he cleaned up the mess in his own backyard, and that's where he got ambushed. Obama has had similar problems from Democrats who think that the way to win is to follow the Republican lead while feigning slightly more sanity. But those Democrats haven't had much of a winning record, especially now it's clear now how Clinton's two terms wound up playing into Bush's hand. (Not that Obama would ever define change so sharply.)

Then there's the Nixon role, which McCain doesn't seem to be up to (even if he wanted, which I wouldn't put past him). He's neither the incumbent of 1972 nor the disengaged statesman of 1968; rather, he's more like Humphrey in 1968, a lame substitute for a lamer duck, remembered somewhat fondly for integrity he has long since abandoned.