The Proof

A reader writes:

You wrote that your blog "can sometimes be an embarrassing series of recognitions of my own naivete". I often think of your blog as "The Education of Andrew". You are incredibly naive when it comes to the real, down-home nature of American conservatism. All this crap you complain about now - this is the real conservatism. This is the conservative id, broken through the conservative super-ego and run rampant. It's true there's some attempt by the super-ego to reassert some kind of control - you detailed several attempts last week, by Gates, Fitzgerald, etc. - but this is the real energy that underlies and animates much of American grassroots conservatism, and always has: a blend of intolerance, machismo, a cultural resentment stemming directly back to the Civil War, anti-intellectual no-nothingness, Christianism - with all its attendant arrogance, anti-democratic self-righteousness and hidden nihilism - and a just plain old blind pig-headedness, which GWB exemplifies in spades. Nary an Edmund Burke or Michael Oakeshott to be seen.

It's true the Bush years have been a perfect storm, the intersection of a particular modern conservative coalition with new media technologies, an almost equally corrupt liberalism, and world events, but if you cannot trace the strains we see in this current mess back into our long history, you just don't understand this country yet. Bush and company are not the exception, they're the proof; they're not something new, some aberration, they're just the same old same old come bubbling up from underneath and finally to power. And that's why Bush's (s)election in 2000 was the best thing that could have happened to this country, a real blessing in disguise. Now we can see what's really down there in the dark. We can reject it, and go on - and we'd better go on, because with what we have to face nationally, internationally and globally, we don't have much more time to waste on this stupidity. "Conservatism", as we have known it, is over. Too bad the cost has been so high. But as Jung said, those who will not learn will be made to feel.