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Frum quietly announces Bush’s surrender to liberalism
David Frum writes:
… I wonder if the real message of the Roberts confirmation is not this: The Supreme Court—and maybe the federal courts generally—are about to become much less important players in American public life than they have been since the mid-1950s. Just as the presidency diminished in importance from 1865 until 1901, and the House went into relative eclipse in the 1930-1970 period, so the next two or three decades may turn out to be a period of relative hibernation for what was once the most hyperactive branch. I know, I know that could turn out to be one of those prophecies that one may someday have to eat (if pixels can be eaten)—but at the moment, it sure does look probable to me.On the surface, it would seem that Frum is telling his conservative readers that something good has happened from a conservative point of view, namely that the activist liberal Supreme Court of the last 50 years is going to be replaced by a non-activist, conservative Court. In fact, that’s not what he’s saying at all. What he’s saying is this: The courts have been important and active since 1950 in revolutionizing America. Conservatives have been wanting for decades to turn this revolution back. With the White House and both houses of Congress in Republican hands for the first time in memory, the conservatives had their first real shot at turning it back. But as a result of Bush’s selection of Roberts, a man best known for his small “c” conservative-type deference to liberal precedent, there is no chance that the liberal revolution will be turned back. The revolution has occurred, and Bush has picked a chief justice who will leave it in place. It’s not that judicial activism has been defeated. It’s that there’s no need for judicial activism any more, since activism has already accomplished its work. In short, Frum’s real message to conservatives is that the liberal revolution has triumphed, and that they must accept this. This message is in conformity with what Irving Kristol described in his important 2003 article, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” as the central mission of neoconservatism:
[T]he historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.Kristol’s revealing remark in turn takes us back to Norman Podhoretz’s important 1996 article, “Neoconservatism: A Eulogy,” in which, as I’ve discussed before, he claimed that neoconservatism had become indistinguishable from conservatism and so had ceased to exist as a distinct movement, whereas what he really meant was that neoconservatism had (in accordance with the program described by Kristol in 2003) taken over conservatism and changed it into neoconservatism. Based on all the above, we can say that the career of neoconservatism has consisted of two stages. In the first stage, it joined with the conservative movement, took it over, and changed it into neoconservatism, all the while (never forget about that boob bait for the bubbas) continuing to call this neo-ized, universalized, “Propositionalized” conservatism “conservatism.” In the second stage, this neoconservatism-called-“conservatism” surrendered to and turned into liberalism, while, once again, still calling itself “conservatism.”
The only question remaining is, how far to the left will this “conservatism” ultimately go? To illustrate the problem, a friend has a bet with me that by the year 2022 at least one state of the Union will recognize human-animal marriages. Will the “conservatives” of 2022 be saying, “We support same-sex marriages between humans, only bigots oppose that, but marriages between humans and animals, well, that’s just going too far, that goes against conservative principle”? Email entry |