The Performative Outrage Of ‘Conservatives’ Is Further Evidence Of Their Failure

The performative outrage from professional conservatives over my column last week, which argued that the conservative movement has largely failed and we should stop calling ourselves conservatives, was as revealing as it was predictable.

Bill Kristol called me a fascist. John Podhoretz said I’m a power-hungry fanatic. David French warned I was fabricating an existential threat to the American idea. Matt Lewis, perhaps the most candid of the lot, was just happy that “far-right extremists” like me will no longer besmirch the good name of conservatism, which he’d like to keep for himself.

There are two things happening here. The first is a reflexive defensiveness from a class of establishment media pundits who have, as Iowahawk explained back in 2015, worn the “conservative” label like a skinsuit for decades. To claim, as I did, that the conservative project has failed feels to them like an indictment, which it is. 

The failures of conservatism stretch back more than a half-century, but over the past two decades in particular the left has made spectacular gains on nearly every front while issues that ordinary conservatives care about — immigration, traditional marriage, the ability to support a family in a decent community — have been more or less ignored by a conservative commentariat that whiled away the time on National Review cruises, agitated for endless wars abroad, and cracked jokes for octogenarian donors. It’s nice work if you can get it, but it didn’t conserve much. 

The second thing happening with these apoplectic reactions is just basic self-preservation. Claiming to be conservative is how the erstwhile leaders of the conservative movement project power and influence in the corporate media. If the conservative label is exposed as fraudulent, and the conservative project is revealed to be a failure, then their standing as arbiters of what is and isn’t conservative might simply disappear. They need “conservatism,” as it has long been understood, to be believable and relevant so they can keep up the appearance that they stand for something other than professional grift. Those CNN gigs don’t grow on trees.

There’s also a sense one gets that these guys are really just saying — spluttering, in Podhoretz’s case — “Hey, who are you to criticize me?”

To steal a line from another power-hungry fanatic: It doesn’t matter who we are, what matters is our plan. 

More on the plan in a later column, but here’s a spoiler: It doesn’t involve seizing power in a fascist coup, shredding the Constitution, and ushering in a Catholic theocracy. That ridiculous charge, as disingenuous as it is lazy, is just a cheap way to avoid long-overdue critiques of the conservative movement and its manifestly unfit stewards.

No wonder, then, that Podhoretz’s complaint on a recent Commentary podcast is that what I and others on the “New Right” really want — but don’t dare say out loud — is a political order based on Rerum Novarum, the papal encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII in 1891, which Podhoretz grossly mischaracterizes as “hostile to capitalism,” “anti-modernity,” and the “birth of social

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