The Death of Conservatism
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Sam Tanenhaus’s essay “Conservatism Is Dead” prompted intense discussion and debate when it was published in The New Republic in the first days of Barack Obama’s presidency. Now Tanenhaus, a leading authority on modern politics, has expanded his argument into a sweeping history of the American conservative movement. For seventy-five years, he argues, the Right has been split between two factions: consensus-driven “realists” who believe in the virtue of government and its power to adjust to changing conditions, and movement “revanchists” who distrust government and society–and often find themselves at war with America itself.
Eventually, Tanenhaus writes, the revanchists prevailed, and the result is the decadent “movement conservatism” of today, a defunct ideology that is “profoundly and defiantly unconservative–in its arguments and ideas, its tactics and strategies, above all in its vision.”
But there is hope for conservatism. It resides in the examples of pragmatic leaders like Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan and thinkers like Whittaker Chambers and William F. Buckley, Jr. Each came to understand that the true role of conservatism is not to advance a narrow ideological agenda but to engage in a serious dialogue with liberalism and join with it in upholding “the politics of stability.”
Conservatives today need to rediscover the roots of this honorable tradition. It is their only route back to the center of American politics.
At once succinct and detailed, penetrating and nuanced, The Death of Conservatism is a must-read for Americans of any political persuasion.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The arguments are more surprising than the conclusions in this slender book that simultaneously celebrates and mourns the end of the harshly ideological strain of conservatism that reached full flower during the presidency of George W. Bush. Tracing the movement's intellectual history from Edmund Burke to Rush Limbaugh, Tanenhaus (Whitaker Chambers), editor of the New York Times Book Review, argues that the "contemporary Right define itself less by what it yearns to conserve than by what it longs to destroy" and that pragmatic Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have usurped the Republicans' once winning focus on social stability. Tanenhaus argues that Republicans must moderate their focus on ideological purity if they are to return from the political wilderness and offers trenchant criticism of the liberal excesses that previously led to a long Democratic exile from the White House. Tanenhaus's positions are not entirely consistent, however; he aligns Nixon with George W. Bush and his destructively "revanchist course" before praising Nixon's "prodigious gifts" and "sheer intellectual ability." But the author recognizes the need for two strong parties to compete in American politics, and his impeccably well-written book insightfully summarizes the highs and lows of American conservatism over the decades.
