Steven F. Hayward has a fantastic piece on the shift towards populism on the right.   Once, he argues, there was a symbiosis of sorts between elites and populists,  but the elites are now essentially in retreat and populists are filling the vacuum.  He writes:

During the glory days of the conservative movement, from its ascent in the 1960s and ’70s to its success in Ronald Reagan’s era, there was a balance between the intellectuals, such as Buckley and Milton Friedman, and the activists, such as Phyllis Schlafly and Paul Weyrich, the leader of the New Right. The conservative political movement, for all its infighting, has always drawn deeply from the conservative intellectual movement, and this mix of populism and elitism troubled neither side.

Today, however, the conservative movement has been thrown off balance, with the populists dominating and the intellectuals retreating and struggling to come up with new ideas. The leading conservative figures of our time are now drawn from mass media, from talk radio and cable news. We’ve traded in Buckley for Beck, Kristol for Coulter, and conservatism has been reduced to sound bites….

Consider the “tea party” phenomenon. Though authentic and laudatory, it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics. Meanwhile, the “birthers” have become the “grassy knollers” of the right; their obsession with Obama’s origins is reviving frivolous paranoia as the face of conservatism. (Does anyone really think that if evidence existed of Obama’s putative foreign birth, Hillary Rodham Clinton wouldn’t have found it 18 months ago?)

He later wonders:

Of course, it’s hard to say whether conservative intellectuals are simply out of interesting ideas, or if the reading public simply finds their ideas boring. Both possibilities (and they are not mutually exclusive) should prompt some self-criticism on the right. Conservatism has prospered most when its attacks on liberalism have combined serious alternative ideas with populist enthusiasm. When the ideas are absent, the movement has nothing to offer — except opposition. That doesn’t work for long in American politics.

Hayward goes on to acknowledge that while liberals Sam Tennehaus are right to challenge the declining intellectual firepower in the conservative movement,  a new equilibrium may be forming where populists like Glenn Beck seriously challenge the stock assumptions of the left, thus bridging some of the divide.  I think this is all very savvy stuff and worth pondering, but is he right?   Has the right lost intellectual firepower- has it lost its Buckley’s?   I’d say no, and yes.  Hear me out.  It seems to me that two things have happened in America over the last 25 years.

First, the elite right has become more institutionalized.  I’ve made this point before but it seems obvious, to me, that there are fewer distinct voices on the intellectual right.  Real and lasting power has brought with it the final banishment of FDR’s ghost.  Where before, opponents of the New Deal and the Great Society had to launch their attacks almost guerrila style, they’re now forced to fight a different sort of war.   Imagine a war against a Vietcong that couldn’t, or thought it didn’t need to, fight to force exhaustion and the depletion of morale?  I mean, victory brings with it expectations.  Maybe conservatives were contented with rhetorical bombs in the 50′s, but now that won’t satisfy.

Let me give you a few examples.  First, an obvious one: the John Birch Society.  Odd as it may seem now, the extremely fringe John Birch society was stacked with a lot of intellectual heavyweights.  Its founder, Robert Welch, was a verifiable genius.  And he’d pour through congressional transcripts absolutely grimly convinced that, based on what he read, Eisenhower was a communist.  It was nuts, but it was unique.  The folks that drove the enemy at home craze in the 50′s, McCarthy excepted (and he was really a pawn) were almost uniformly conservative elites.  Not Republican elites, mind you- that group was uniformly moderate.  The McCarthyites were highly educated John Birchers, CEO’s from the National Association of Manufacturers, etc.  Smart people.  Even the intellectuals who weighed in more tepidly- the one’s that survived McCarthy’s disgrace- the Buckley’s of the world, used ideas and language that would seem radical today in what is, by any fair accounting, a more conservative country.

Why?  Well, most of these forces were the same folks who’d failed miserably to dismount FDR 3 times- the same forces that raged against the New Deal fruitlessly as Republican mandarins cut deals with moderate presidential nominees in 4 straight contests.  They’d poured unheard of millions into unseating FDR and, later, Truman, though it meant a moderate Republican President (Landon, Wilkie, Dewey) they didn’t much like.  They’d watch those moderate candidates gain the endorsements of a strong majority of the nation’s newspapers and most of the nation’s elite.  And to no avail.  This doesn’t always breed crazies like the Birchers, but it does breed inventiveness.  It breeds new ways of thinking about these things- new strains of thought, united around new causes. How else do you get to 50+1?

Which brings us to the second thing that’s happened in American life: conservatives no longer have any rallying cause.  The remnants of the New Deal and the Great Society- and there’s more left than we think- are essentially entrenched and accepted.  Every conservative can agree Medicare must be reformed.  Almost no conservative, elite or not, will suggest that it ought to be abolished.  And that’s a legacy from a nearly disgraced President, who conservatives can easily disparage personally.  There’s nothing of the FDR myth attached to Johnson.  It should be easier to take his successes apart, but its somehow harder.

National Defense, once an issue that had broad agreement on the right, has become less clear: it feels like the pre-Korea right, before Republican isolationists discovered they were willing to engage an outward foe, so long as he was on their ocean.  Iraq and Afghanistan have complicated things.  Even those who feel we need to be there are rethinking the practicality of being there, and there, and everywhere at once- in apparently interminable guerilla wars which seem designed to sap political will and military strength, and which never come to a satisfying conclusion.  It doesn’t feel as simple as the binary of the Cold War.

So conservative elites have stagnated.  They can’t, or won’t, attack the excesses of the pre-1992 left, and its new excesses haven’t borne fruit yet.  The bitterness isn’t apparent.  So they’re left to wait until new mistakes are made, and new bureacracies pile up and constrict freedom and limit competitiveness.  The only other option- really, is to attack themselves: for spiraling deficits under Reagan and the Bush’s; for expansion of government programs under the guise of compassion; for interminable wars fought unsatifactorily, even though the ends are justifiable.  And no one attacks themselves.  This- this, is why you see the Glenn Beck’s of the world playing the role William Buckley played in the past.  There’s no else left.  Everyone else is either complicit or tired, or both.

Is it a permanent solution?  Probably not.  Populism, unthreaded to serious ideas, ultimately eats itself.  It, as Hayward notes, lacks focus.  But, it’s a start until a new generation of thinkers- unwedded to the past- come in with fresh eyes and ears to hear.  Only then can the symbiosis, which worked so well during the days of Buckley, function properly in the present.  Until then we’re at loggerheads.

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Matthew E. Miller can be contacted at Obilisk18@yahoo.com or at his Pawlentyesque blog