Think back to the spring of 1968. The U.S. is mired in Vietnam. The country is in turmoil. The sitting Democratic president abruptly pulls out of his campaign for re-election, and the leading conservative columnist of the day neither gloats nor does a victory dance.
It's nearly impossible to imagine this happening today.
We could chalk this up to the deterioration of civic discourse and the rise in political polarization. But it's really part of a much more significant shift that has fractured the right side of the political spectrum.
The columnist in 1968 was, of course, William F. Buckley Jr., and on President Lyndon B. Johnson's abrupt withdrawal from the presidential race, he was nothing if not circumspect. Why? Because as a classic conservative, Mr. Buckley understood the importance of stability and found the "burn, baby, burn" drumbeat from the left, which had forced President Johnson's decision, deeply unsettling.
In his column that week, Mr. Buckley opined that "instant guidance by the people of the government means instability, and instability is subversive of freedom." In other words, Mr. Johnson's withdrawal was too responsive. For Mr. Buckley, maintaining social order was of paramount importance, even if it meant helping to preserve the welfare state he deplored.
Sam Tanenhaus, book review editor at The New York Times (and Mr. Buckley's biographer), has just published a book exploring the right's shift from old-school classic conservatism to the revolutionary "movement conservatism" of today. He tells the Buckley/Johnson anecdote as he ponders one of the great political paradoxes of our times: How did a political ideology once devoted to "conserving" the past and balancing stability and progress become an ideology of insurrection?
The short answer, of course, is that conservatism has been betrayed, that what we today call conservatism - a politics of "grievance and resentment" - isn't.
Just listen to the ruckus over health care. Are there problems with the Democrats' proposals? Absolutely. But the tenor of criticism from so many on the right suggests they're more interested in destruction than resolution. As Mr. Tanenhaus puts it, the contemporary right defines itself "less by what it yearns to conserve than by what it longs to destroy." They call themselves conservatives, but the "I hope Obama fails" rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh is more reminiscent of the tantrum-throwing far left of the late 1960s than of classic conservatism.
