Conservatism's Growing Pains

In their new book The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write of the New York Times’s decision earlier this year to appoint a reporter to cover conservatives, “one could argue that it was a tacit admission by the nation’s paper of record that it had somehow missed the biggest story in American politics of the past half century.” That reporter, David D. Kirkpatrick, extends his paper’s coverage of the (heretofore, by the Times’s standards) nonevent with a front-page story today entitled “Young Right Tries to Define Post-Buckley Future.”

The story’s thesis is indisputable – that the right is engaged in internal bickering in an era of conservatism’s seeming triumph in many areas of American life and politics. I’ve written before that the most interesting intellectual battles today are less between left and right than among conservatives, whose opinions on myriad issues, most notably the war on terrorism and the role of government, demonstrate true intellectual diversity.

Kirkpatrick quotes several people that I, along with many readers of this blog, have known for years. He leaves out some interesting details and background, but by and large he succeeds in leaving his readers with a more complete understanding of the right than many of them probably had when they went to bed last night.

It’s clear to those who follow the conservative movement that its leaders must better articulate, in policy and cultural terms, a sufficient response to the attacks of September 11. Proponents of the war on terrorism, and this blog is clearly among them, need to formulate a more coherent strategic framework within which the war itself will be fought and through which it will be explained. Analogies to the Cold War are on target as far as they go, but they don’t go far enough in demonstrating the threats to America’s sovereignty and safety posed by terrorists and the rogue states that harbor them. The spread of democracy will play a key role in this effort.

We’ll write more on conservatism in the future. And let’s hope the Times, and other major news outlets, do the same.