Should John McCain lose — as it appears he will — it will be for a long list of reasons. But one of the biggest is the implosion of the right-wing coalition that allowed economic conservatives, social conservatives, neo-cons and the intelligensia to co-exist. This is the point that E.J. Dionne Jr. makes in today’s column.
McCain’s campaign is both the logical conclusion to this implosion and the conservative movement’s final death knell, uncovering an emptiness at its core created by an unbridgable gulf between its two major camps.
For years, many of the elite conservatives were happy to harvest the votes of devout Christians and gun owners by waging a phony class war against “liberal elitists” and “leftist intellectuals.” Suddenly, the conservative writers are discovering that the very anti-intellectualism their side courted and encouraged has begun to consume their movement.
The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity — and Sarah Palin. Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans, learned manifestoes by direct-mail hit pieces.
In the end, Dionne writes,
There is no unified “right” or “center-right,” which is why we are no longer a conservative country, if we ever were.
Conservatism has finally crashed on problems for which its doctrines offered no solutions (the economic crisis foremost among them, thus Bush’s apostasy) and on its refusal to acknowledge that the “real America” is more diverse, pragmatic and culturally moderate than the place described in Palin’s speeches or imagined by the right-wing talk show hosts.
Hank Kalet 