The Skimmer

The Death of Conservatism

By Sam Tanenhaus; Random House; 123 pages

Burke. Buckley. Limbaugh? Modern conservatism has decayed from the positive, pragmatic force its founders envisioned into a bitter resistance movement that's given up on fresh ideas, argues Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review. While Richard Nixon backed national health insurance and Ronald Reagan tempered his muscular rhetoric with political flexibility, today's dominant conservatives are little more than "inverse Marxists," clenching an outdated dogma that would sooner see government destroyed than saved. The result is a shrinking movement inhabiting a "fringe orbit" irrelevant to the needs of today's America, an intellectual flatlining confirmed by Barack Obama's victory. Tanenhaus traces conservatism's history with respect and likens its crisis to the funk that bedeviled liberalism after the failures of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (though he glosses over modern-day extremism on the left). His essay is ultimately an elegy: with the atrophy of conservative thought, the loss of genuine ideological debate leaves all of us poorer.

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