US VS. US:

The American conservative (Tony Blankley, September 25, 2002, Washington Times)

The American Conservative (AC, hereafter) is every bit as unbridled in its contempt for modern conservatism as National Review at its founding was for then-modern liberalism. In their mission statement, the editors of AC accuse "the array of conservative media outlets" of competing "over which can bray loudest for the widest war, the most ambitious expansion of an American imperium." The AC accuses modern conservativism of casting "aside every relevant American foreign policy tradition--from Robert Taft-style isolationism to prudent Dwight Eisenhower-style internationalism, in favor of go-it-alone militarism, where America threatens and bombs one nation after another, while the world looks on in increasing horror."

The magazine's editors will attack "the global free-trade economy, free the immigration debate from the prison to which it has been consigned . . . and reignite the conversation that conservatives ought to have engaged in since the end of the Cold War, but didn't." [...]

Neo-conservativism--which Mr. Buchanan correctly describes as the "dominant, nay, the only American conservatism worth talking about"--is overweaning in its hubris and yearning for an imperial America. Indeed, only a few months ago, Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard featured an argument for a new colonialism.

Moreover, both modern conservatism and modern Clintonian liberalism seem indifferent to the grinding, obliterating, effects of globalism on traditional cultures and values not only around the world, but here in America as well. While modern conservatism claims to champion traditional values, it cheers on a global economic process that--even more than liberal judges--is a mortal threat to those values. As the AC's mission statement observes: "We believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in man's taste for the familiar, for faith in god. We believe that true conservatism has a predisposition for the institutions and mores that exist." Understanding conservatism in those terms, the concept of radical conservatism ought to seem oxymoronic. Only a generation ago conservatives could credibly argue that conservatism constituted the absence of ideology. Conservatives used to argue that liberalism (even 19th century non-socialist liberalism) was fatally flawed because it exalted contemporarily created ideas over the long, evolving institutional wisdom of our civilization. It is a measure of the success of modern, ideological conservatism that the phrase "radical conservatism" seems to make sense. And it is a substantial part of The American Conservative's mission to try to yank back the conservative designation from a movement that has morphed from Bill Buckley's Catholic, principled conservatism into a collection of radical ambitions and schemes--some of which may be vitally needed, but arguably are not conservative.

An essential facet of genuine pessimistic conservative is the stubborn refusal to accept victory. So, for instance, the Buchananites and even Mr. Blankley, who's usually more temperate, can engage in the absurd notion that American conservatism is defined by the neoconservatives under Bill Kristol at a time when a genuine conservative, George W. Bush, is President of the United States. Sure, if you're inside the Beltway or reading the blogs you can be left with the mistaken impression that neoconservatism is regnant, but you'll find few in the Red States who've ever even heard of the neocons and if you look at the Bush agenda--from tax cuts to faith based social programs to privatization of Social Security and education to anti-cloning, anti-euthanasia, anti-drug, and anti-abortion regulations to waging the war on terror in explicitly religious terms--you see that there's little left of neoconservatism other than the elevation of Israel to a special relationship status on a par with Britain, and even here, the impetus has come as much from Christian fundamentalist millenarians as from the neocons.
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 30, 2002 12:15 PM