Moron the conservative movement

Daniel Larison ventures to tell us "who lost conservatism":

As the cliché goes, there are three main factions in the conservative movement: social conservatives, economic conservatives and national security conservatives. Each faction has received blame for the right’s electoral troubles in inverse proportion to its responsibility. Fiscal conservatives, reformers and moderates all tend to agree that social conservatism is somehow the right’s albatross. But social conservatives had the least influence in the Bush White House and the least responsibility for Bush’s unpopular policies. Aside from the so-called “faith-based initiative,” which many Christian conservatives opposed, social conservatives saw little return for their reliable support.

Economic conservatives have been roundly criticized for the tax cuts that, combined with increased spending, have created a massive federal debt. They are blamed for forcing the GOP to adhere to disastrous free market dogmas that supposedly led to the financial crisis. By and large, however, the GOP adhered to nothing of the kind. From trade to finance, collusion with and government support for corporations were normal for the Bush administration, which was regularly at odds with the most libertarian members of the House GOP on these issues. Indeed, economic conservatives are mostly guilty of sins of omission and acquiescence.

The faction most responsible for the GOP’s political failure is national security conservatives.

I beg to differ with this analysis, rather strongly. Larison is telling conservatives what they only slightly don't want to hear, and they'd be unwise to drink his bromide.

It is true that social conservatives saw few of their wishes carried out by the Bush Administration. That does not exculpate them from blame for conservatism's fall, however, not in the slightest. Because the things that social conservatives wished for - an abortion ban, a gay marriage ban, religion in the science classroom, prayer in school, and research bans left and right - are so batshit crazy that even the hint, even the whiff of them, was enough to seriously scare the heck out of moderate America.

People noticed Terry Schiavo. People noticed the stem cell research ban. George W. Bush adopted the tone of social conservatism, and that was quite enough for most people, thank you very much.

As for economic conservatives, to let them off the hook is to do a disservice to...well, just about everyone and everything. Larison claims that in failing to block deficit spending, economic conservatives committed a sin of omission, not of commission. Wrong. Pushing for infinite tax cuts is a sin of commission. Claiming fraudulently that tax cuts boost tax revenues is a sin of commission. Throttling financial sector regulation, environmental regulation, and health-and-safety regulation - ostensibly in the name of a "free market ideology" that no real economist would call by that name, but in fact just to facilitate fraud and chicanery and wrongdoing on the part of politically well-connected companies - is a sin of commission.

Strike two, Larison.

Now, this is not to say that "national security conservatives" (by which we mean "fascists," even though we politely use the term "neocons") escape their big heaping helping of blame. And Larison is right that the American public, like all publics, is particularly unforgiving of military failures.

But I suspect that conservatives could have easily passed off Iraq as a management failure - the blundering of one particularly inept individual named George W. Bush. The financial crisis, on the other hand, strikes straight at the heart of economic conservative ideology. And the slow shift in American opinion toward tolerance of gays makes the intransigence of social conservatives stick out like a sore thumb. When they write conservatism's obituary, I suspect that Iraq, awful as it was, will be only a footnote, as Vietnam is now a footnote to the fall of the post-WW2 Democratic majority.

The fact is, conservatives did suffer for a military misadventure, but they suffered for much, much more than that. If conservatism is going to make a comeback in American public life, it is going to need to rethink infinite tax cuts, rethink gay-bashing, rethink infinite deregulation, rethink religion in schools.