Joe Klein: How the GOP Lost Its Way

"Stop moping around," former Governor Jeb Bush told an audience of conservatives convened by the National Review in Washington last weekend. That wasn't quite fair. The wingers weren't exactly moping. They seemed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after the election of 2006, wandering about in a state of shock, certain that it wasn't a failure of principles that had led them back into the political wilderness. "I've just come from our [Republican] congressional retreat," said Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin. "The leaders asked the caucus why we thought we'd lost our majority. Was it the war in Iraq? About a third of the hands went up. Was it corruption? About a dozen hands. Was it that we'd lost our way on spending and the need for small government? The majority of hands went up ... The American people came to believe that we're the party of Big Government. That's why they threw us out." Actually, no: it was Iraq and corruption. And worse, it can be argued that the failure in Iraq and the moral sloppiness that overtook the late, great Republican Congress were direct consequences of a 25-year political pendulum swing to the right, which has resulted in a vaulting arrogance overseas and a profound disrespect for good governance at home.

This was the first Washington "summit" since 1994 convened by the National Review, the magazine that helped found the modern conservative movement, and I must say that its followers have several things going for them: they are decorous and erudite. The presidency of George W. Bush elicited polite disdain compared with the ferocious ideological nuking that Bill Clinton suffered at the hands of the left wing of his party when Democratic postmortems were held after the 1994 congressional debacle. The intellectual quality of the proceedings was impressive but, as is always the case with ideologues, myopic. Churchill was cited extravagantly, but it was always the lonely, courageous Churchill warning about Hitler in the 1930s rather than the failed, frustrated Churchill who presided over Britain's Mesopotamian disaster in the 1920s, a folly largely of his own making.

Indeed, the Churchillian Fallacy seems very much at the heart of the conservative misreading of the Islamist challenge. Speaker after speaker compared the jihadis to Nazis and communists, as the President did two or three speech-cycles ago. There was a lot of melodramatic spew about this being the beginning stage of World War III or IV. John O'Sullivan, the National Review's editor-at-large, predicted major geostrategic shifts ahead, with the Europeans slipping over to the dark side at the behest of their Islamic immigrant populations. "Do you think," one summit-goer asked me, in an eruption of overwrought historicity, "this is 1914, 1938, 1942 or 1972?"