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Behavioral therapy for conservatives
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If conservatism were an old friend you'd lost touch with over the years, you'd probably be getting rambling, incoherent, late night phone calls from it these days. That's because conservatism has reached one of those rough spots in life that we all reach as individuals from time to time, where every day brings a renewed sense of self-doubt and a need to reconnect with the once confident self your longtime acquaintances knew back when.
Whether you call it an identity crisis, or depression, or some combination of the two, it is a very real problem whose cruelest symptom is its self-compounding nature. You see, being depressed is depressing, and the longer you don't know who you are, the harder it is to remember who you were.
Fortunately, there is a path out of this period of darkness, and the first glimmers of its revelation appeared in an article by Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard and were amplified by William Kristol in the pages of The Washington Post this week. Between the two, we have a prescription for the encroaching darkness afflicting conservatism as it struggles to rediscover its old self.
According to Barnes's piece, the beginning stages of treatment rest in simply doing something. Anyone who's ever struggled with depression on a personal level knows, whether they've suffered it themselves, or vicariously through a loved one caught in its throes, there's a strong impulse to simply curl up into a ball and stay there. Then, once curled up, the victim engages in a vicious cycle of self-recrimination over the fact that they've curled up into a ball and can't seem to do anything about it.
Barnes's cure is simple: "Get up, and get a job!" Granted, you might not want to put it quite so bluntly to a suffering loved one, but that is the very essence of his suggestion, and it's one of the keys to recovery. The best way to combat the tendency to slip into self-defeating inactivity is to simply engage in activity, if even for its own sake. By getting up and doing something -- anything at all -- you reinforce the idea that you're not completely useless. And, in times like these, as conservatism struggles with its worsening impotence in the face of the opposition, that idea needs reinforcement more than ever.
Right now, according to Barnes, the primary task for conservatives is to take it to the opposition, win or lose. It's time stop lying in bed, pondering what brought them low, and get back to work fighting the things they were (or weren't) fighting against when they took the fall. Conservatives should just accept the fact that they may not win many battles -- for now. The key is to fight them. The longer they do so, the more it will become clear that there's still some fight left in them. Next thing you know, conservatives will actually think of themselves as fighters, rather than a pile of crumpled political tomato cans heaped on the canvas.
At the same time, Bill Kristol's piece offers the promise of rediscovering the conservative identity. And, best of all, it requires none of the sort of deep introspection which so many conservatives seem wont to engage in, but which only seems to result in the frittering away of time as the opposition marches merrily along, shaping history on its way. If conservatives are struggling to find out who they are, they can start by figuring out who they're not -- which is answered easily enough. Just take a look at the White House and Congress, and notice everything they're doing. All conservatives have to be is "not that."
According to Kristol's wisdom, conservatives face a choice: Spend the next ten years soul-searching to come up with answers to questions that have plagued conservatism from its very inception (for instance, "What is conservatism?"), or just get to work fighting the left? Given that the price of navel-gazing is now running in the trillions of dollars per year, and growing, the answer would seem self-evident. In taking Kristol's advice and simply engaging in the fight, at the very least, conservatism stands a good chance of rediscovering its true self -- perhaps the last chance for a generation. And, who knows? A few billion taxpayer dollars might be spared as a consequence.
The best part of these two approaches is that neither of them necessarily precludes all the rumination that many conservatives insist must take place. But, they each offer a respite from the all the incessant woolgathering of pundits and eggheads. There's also the added bonus of the occasional tangible benefit -- a dead spending amendment here, an embarrassed pork monger there. String together enough of those, and before you know it, you have the proverbial "growing sense of frustration" in the ranks of your opponents.
If conservatives will get out of the ditch right now and get to work, there's a good chance that we'll be hearing about that growing sense of frustration in 2010. And, given how quickly things can turn around in modern politics, it's not outside the realm of possibility that, in 2012, progressives will be tormenting one another with late night phone calls, lamenting what might have been, wondering where it all went wrong.
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