Don't count the Republican party out

It is, of course, slightly encouraging to note that conservative intellectuals are (all too slowly) becoming disenchanted with the Republican party. But don't count the Republican party out quite yet.

I was young during Watergate, but I remember: a president forced to resign, many of his closest advisers tried, convicted and jailed, the Republican party in disgrace. Four years later, Ronald Reagan is president and G. Gordon Libby soon has his own radio show. I was a little older after Reagan & Bush pere: a half-trillion bailout of the Savings and Loans, contempt of Congress and outright treason. Eight years later, Bush fils is president and every obvious failure and excess of the Reagan administration is not only repeated but expanded by an order of magnitude.

The Republican party is taking the exactly correct strategy: temporarily give up the intellectuals and protect the base. Revolutions — including the American Revolution — have been won outright with the enthusiastic support of only 20-30% of the population. Intellectuals are whores: they'll come up with reasons to support whoever takes political power. If and when the Republican party uses their solid base to regain political power, the intellectuals will quickly fall into line.

(It was misguided of the Russian and Chinese revolutions to directly attack the privilege of the intelligentsia. Just because they're whores doesn't mean they're not powerful. Intellectuals do not need to be persuaded or coerced. They can be bought off — cheaply — and will then enthusiastically support and defend any cause, even one as retarded as the far-right neoconservative agenda.)

There are two issues that leave me unimpressed by conservative intellectual "apostasy". First, they are not correctly identifying conservative ideology as foundational to Republican excesses. The theme, rather, is that the Republicans have somehow become "unconservative". Second, the liberal bourgeoisie has not itself created a coherent unifying narrative to capture their own intellectuals: the liberal intelligentsia is all over the map. Thus the conservative intellectuals disenchanted with the logical consequences of their ideology have no ship to jump to.

(Of course the real problem is not the moral and practical failure of conservative capitalism, but of capitalism in general, conservative and liberal. But that's an issue for another post.)

There's simply no reason for history not to repeat itself: a (more or less) liberal Democratic president, taking office with high hopes but without a coherent unifying intellectual narrative ("hope and change" is a slogan, not a narrative), later dashed to pieces by its own inevitable mistakes and compromises.