American Conservatism, R.I.P.?

One of the points I've stressed recently in debates over the GOP is that conservatism is mainly in the down-trough of the political cycle. Politics swings like a pendulum, and it could be some time before the current sense of popular support for the Democrats fades in favor of a return to the agenda and issues central to the Republican Party.

I don't by any means believe "conservatism's dead," despite all the big debates on that in recent weeks (here, here, here, and here, for example).

In any case, Dan Riehl sends us to this powerful, if not a bit depressing, essay on all of this from Jonathan Kay, "American conservatism, R.I.P.":

Conservatism as we know it is dead. Its last bastion of power, Washington, is being overrun as we speak, in a blitzkrieg operation fueled by popular panic and led by a charismatic field marshal. To the extent conservative ideology survives the onslaught, it will be as a guerilla force, making its presence felt on web sites and radio call-in shows but never in the corridors of real power.

Numbers tell much of the story. In fiscal 2008, U.S. federal outlays accounted for 21 cents of every GDP dollar. In fiscal 2009, Barack Obama's budget has that number jumping 33% — to 28 cents. The percentage of U.S. GDP represented by total public spending will shoot up from about 35%, when Barack Obama was elected, to well into the 40s . If you throw in the private share of U.S. health spending, which looks set to be swallowed by the public sector in coming years thanks to Obama's plans for a national health-insurance program, American governments will soon rule roughly half the economy — just like in socialist Europe and Canada.

In fact, from a conservative point of view, what Obama is doing is arguably worse than the well-entrenched redistributionist systems of government in Canada other OECD nations: Ottawa, at least, can pay (more or less) for the country's massive safety net. Obama, on the other hand, is building his net with money he doesn't have. The 2009 U.S. budget deficit — just the deficit, not the budget itself — will be 13% of GDP. In Canada, by contrast, the federal budget deficit is expected to be $13-billion, about 1% of GDP.

Beyond the numbers are U.S. policies that seemed unimaginable just a month ago: a massive, big-government plan to regulate greenhouse gases, huge tax hikes on the wealthy, the effective nationalization of much of Wall Street, a federal takeover of student lending, and — most important of all — the aforementioned plan for national health care. This is more than just a swing to the left — it is a complete repudiation of the political legacy left by Ronald Reagan, the most popular U.S. president in the living memory of most Americans. Obama even had the courage to say as much, declaring trickle-down economics to be "discredited once and for all."

As well as being a disastrous moment for American conservatives — and for their country more generally — this is also an epic turning point in the history of western ideas. Since World War II, the welfare state has made steady gains almost everywhere in the West, with the result that just about every form of risk known to mankind — from sickness, to unemployment, to poverty, to childbirth, to old age — has been socialized. Only in the United States had individuals been left reliant (if only to a certain extent) on their own values and wits. That lone exception to the global nanny state is now gone — the victim of a housing debacle that demonstrated that middle-class homeowners are too stupid to manage something as basic as a monthly household budget, just as Wall Street's brain trust is too dumb to operate an unregulated financial market. Condescension, after all, is the mother of socialism.

Who would have thunk it? From the 1980s onward, conservatism was supposed to be America's muscular ideology, as opposed to the soft liberalism peddled by the nation's elites. Instead, U.S. conservatism died with a whimper — a venerable creed knocked out for good in the space of just five recessionary months.

There's more at the link. I still don't think "conservatism died," but this is good food for thought anyway.

I'll have more later ...