But if you look at the surveys of Republican voters collected on Real Clear Politics that I cited earlier, you will find that Bush is stuck at well under twenty per cent. If you then add together the vote shares of Walker, Cruz, Paul, Carson, and Huckabee, all avowedly conservative candidates, you get a total of 53.1 per cent. Add in Rick Perry and Rick Santorum, and the conservative tally is even higher.
Based on this evidence, the G.O.P. doesn’t look like a party that is ready to embrace change. And that’s why Rubio already looks like an also-ran. Falling afoul of the three-strikes rule, he peaked one election cycle too early.
Conservatives Hate the Iran Deal Because They Hate All Deals
Ronald Reagan ran for president as a staunch opponent of the SALT treaty, but abided by its provisions anyway. He went on to sign the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, to massive right-wing dismay. Conservatives believed he had been “beguiled by Gorbachev, to the detriment of American interests,” reported the New York Times. The right mobilized against the treaty, comparing Reagan’s diplomacy to [Neville Chamberlain]
.. Conservative opposition to Obama’s expected deal with Iran is based on a critique of Obama’s peculiar failings. He is naive in the face of evil, desperate for agreement, more willing to help his enemies than his friends. The problem is that conservatives have made this same diagnosis of every American president for 70 years. They do not merely oppose this deal, they oppose all of them, because they believe evil regimes cannot be negotiated with. Their analysis of the Iran negotiations is not an analysis at all, but an impulse.
Conservatives Start to Take the Ferguson DOJ Report Seriously
Leon H. Wolf published a blog post at Red State titled, “Many Conservatives Are Blowing It on the Ferguson DOJ Report.” As he sees it, interpreting the news out of Ferguson has become “a part of ideological tribalism,” where conservatives “stand for the Ferguson PD” and “if you are a liberal you stand against them.” Liberals have thus resisted the information that Michael Brown never put his hands above his head and said, “Don’t shoot,” while conservatives have resisted information suggesting that “the Ferguson PD —as with many other municipal police departments in the country—truly is out of control, in that it recklessly violates the constitutional rights of the citizens of Ferguson and does so in a manner that has a clearly disproportionate impact on minorities.”
The Conservative Reaction
Conservatism is the theoretical voice of this animus against the agency of the subordinate classes. It provides the most consistent and profound argument for why the lower orders should not be allowed to exercise their independent will, to govern themselves or the polity. Submission is their first duty; agency, the prerogative of elites. Such was the threat Edmund Burke saw in the French Revolution: not merely an expropriation of property or explosion of violence but an inversion of the obligations of deference and command. “The levelers,” he claimed, “only change and pervert the natural order of things.”
By virtue of membership in a polity, Burke allowed, men had certain rights—to the fruits of their labor, their inheritance, education, and more. But the one right he refused to concede to all men was a “share of power, authority, and direction” they might think they ought to have “in the management of the state.”
.. Politicians and parties talk of constitution and amendment, natural rights and inherited privileges. But the real subject of their deliberations is the private life of power. “Here is the secret of the opposition to woman’s equality in the state,” Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote. “Men are not ready to recognize it in the home.” Behind the riot in the street or debate in Parliament is the maid talking back to her mistress, the worker disobeying his boss. That is why our political arguments—not only about the family but also the welfare state, civil rights, and much else—can be so explosive: They touch upon the most personal relations of power.
.. the conservative position stems from a genuine conviction that a world thus emancipated will be ugly, brutish, and dull. It will lack the excellence of a world where the better man commands the worse.
.. The conservative faces an additional hurdle: how to defend a principle of rule in a world where nothing is solid, all is in flux. From the moment conservatism came onto the scene as an intellectual movement, it has had to contend with the decline of ancient and medieval ideas of an orderly universe, in which permanent hierarchies of power reflected the eternal structure of the cosmos.
.. the Harvard political theorist Harvey Mansfield has declared, “I understand conservatism as a reaction to liberalism. It isn’t a position that one takes up from the beginning but only when one is threatened by people who want to take away or harm things that deserve to be conserved.”
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.
.. Where the traditionalist takes the objects of his desire for granted, the conservative cannot. He seeks to enjoy them precisely as they are being—or have been—taken away.
.. “If we want things to stay as they are,” in Lampedusa’s classic formulation, “things will have to change.”
.. The conservative not only opposes the left; he also believes that the left has been in the driver’s seat since, depending on who’s counting, the French Revolution or the Reformation.
Dinesh D’Souza has put the case most clearly:
Typically, the conservative attempts to conserve, to hold on to the values of the existing society. But … what if the existing society is inherently hostile to conservative beliefs? It is foolish for a conservative to attempt to conserve that culture. Rather, he must seek to undermine it, to thwart it, to destroy it at the root level. This means that the conservative must … be philosophically conservative but temperamentally radical.