Sympathy for Conservatives

I have to admit that I feel a little sorry for conservatives right now. CNN has a report about conservative bloggers and pundits meeting soon to figure out a way forward.

On Thursday, a group of prominent conservatives, including political and media strategists, will meet in Virginia to discuss just that. Media reports suggest a group of 20 people will talk about what the party needs to do in a Democrat-dominated government and what must be done in order to avoid a third cycle of defeats for Republicans in the next midterm elections.

I wish them well, but I think it's going to take awhile for the enormity of the Republican and conservative defeat to sink in. Setting a new direction will be a whole different issue.

Personally, I can't think of any element of conservatism that does not stand repudiated. Here's a few examples.

Small Government Conservatism--There can be no doubt that small government conservatism stands repudiated. There's three bottom lines here. The American public wants more government not less. The American public wanted government to resolve the financial meltdown and the American public wants more government regulation of the financial sector rather than less.

Market Approaches to government programs. Privatizing social security and medical accounts approaches to health care have been rejected as well. McCain's "market approach" to health insurance is one of the reasons why he lost and he would have lost by a lot more if he had really pushed social security privatizaation.

Religious and social conservatives. Add Sarah Palin to the long list of things that the public rejects about religious conservatism that includes the Terry Schiavo case, the attack on evolutionary theory, opposition to stem cell research, and opposition to the morning after pill and contraception. But the ultimate repudiation of social and religious conservativism is still on the horizon. Gay rights lost in California yesterday, but it's pretty obvious that gay marriage is going to eventually be legal all over the country.

Neo-conservative foreign policy. Even with the relative success of the surge, the American public still broadly rejects the Iraq War and wants American troops out of Iraq. And it isn't just that the public has repudiated the Bush administration's conduct of the war. The public has long concluded that the invasion itself was wrong.

Maybe I'm missing important dimensions of conservatism, but those are the four pillars of conservatism as I know them.

But the situation is actually worse.

The American public is also beginning to reject some of the secondary elements of conservatism. Let me just name a few.

1. Their instinctive belligerence.
2. The use of racial stereotyping and innuendo in conservative political campaigns.
3. The hostility of conservative constituencies to African-Americans, Hispanics, gay people, and other minorities.

In my opinion, the rejection of conservativism by the American public is so thorough and so energetic that what conservatives really need to do is rethink their sense in which they're American.

The rest of the country is moving away from conservatives so fast that they really need to grapple with their sense of how they're connected to the rest of American society. To the right, conservatives are the only "real" Americans.