Despair on the Right

America’s conservatives are tearing themselves apart although their defeat is by no means certain. They’re especially enraged by McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin.

Two weeks prior to the election, many Republicans are convinced that something has gone fundamentally wrong with the campaign. The former combat team of neo-conservative authors has been conspicuously silent and out of sight. Instead, the playing field belongs to their critics.

Take for example Peggy Noonan. She’s certainly a conservative heavyweight, not only because she writes a weekly column in the Wall Street Journal. She’s actually a legend among neo-conservatives. A former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, her weekly column still channels his teachings for a large number of conservatives today.

The main target of Noonan’s criticism is John McCain’s decision to select Sarah Palin as his running mate. Noonan wrote in her column, “the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics.”

For Noonan, the drama already begins with Palin’s speech patterns and her constant dropping of syllables in order to appear more “folksy.” Noonan wonders if Palin considers it snobbish to speak proper English. When does healthy populism morph into dangerous propaganda?

She observed Palin for seven weeks and concluded, “. . . there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office.” Noonan writes that Palin “just says things” and “doesn’t seem to understand the implications of her own thoughts.”

Palin, meanwhile, appears to be corroding the innermost heart of the Republican Party. While portions of the party admire Palin for her sheer chutzpah and some supporters literally pray to her during her appearances, she’s also embarrassing to the party elite. Heather MacDonald of the conservative Manhattan Institute says she expects “a vice president to put together sentences that cohere into a minimally logical progression of thought” and don’t end up “in syntactical dead-ends and non sequiturs.” For Colin Powell, Palin’s nomination was one of the reasons he decided to support Obama. The conservative columnist David Brooks even went so far as to call Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican party.”

Nowhere is the rage stronger than at the National Review, the magazine considered for half a century as a “meditation room” for conservatives. When columnist Cathleen Parker wrote that Palin was an embarrassment and called for her to quit the ticket, she was inundated with 12,000 letters from readers. Not very many of the letters fell into the fan mail category. The next issue of the National Review omitted her usual column, but they still can’t get any peace and quiet.

Last week, novelist Chris Buckley, son of National Review founder William F. Buckley and heir to his father’s conservative intellectualism, wrote, “Sorry Dad, I’m voting for Obama.” The National Review perceived that as disloyalty and fired him.

Buckley had only speculated about what he perceived as John McCain’s transformation. He once saw McCain as “authentic” and “unconventional,” as someone who told the truth to the faces of the powerful. But now, Buckley says, “McCain has changed.” He thought the election campaign had distorted him. He had become “inauthentic,” Buckley said. He added that McCain’s arguments change “and lack coherence.” Of McCain’s promise to balance the federal budget by the end of his first term, Buckley asks, “Who, really, believes that?”

It’s precisely that lack of coherence that disappoints conservative followers. David Brooks, who once worked on a biography of John McCain, says he had hoped McCain “would create a grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century.”

Perhaps the conservative intelligentsia expects too much from their standard bearer. One candidate can’t make up for all the deficits of an entire political party. “Ideas have consequences,” the conservative mentor William F. Buckley proclaimed a half-century ago. At that time, the goal was to break the spiritual and cultural monopoly of the political left. The effort was so successful that the right was able to reclaim intellectual air superiority that lasted through the Bush era.

If ideas have consequences, then the absence of ideas also has consequences. McCain’s flightiness and inconsistence may quite possibly be more than merely personal character traits. The lack of ideas may well symbolize the intellectual exhaustion of American conservatism. Conservatives fought for lower taxes for 40 years. They won. Taxes can’t go any lower. They also waged a 40-year war for privatization and deregulation. Since the Wall Street crash, they’re discovering that they can’t make that their platform any longer, not even in capitalist-proud America.

Questions about national direction can go on for years, perhaps even decades. But in two weeks we’ll see whether the debate among conservatives has reached beyond the tight circle of party elites and upset the rest as well.