The University Bookman this month carries an online exclusive feature in response to Sam Tanenhaus’s editorial, “Conservatism Is Dead,” in The New Republic (February 09).

Responders include Roger Kimball, Austin Bramwell, Joseph Duggan, Daniel McCarthy, Lee Edwards, and James Poulos.

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Forget, please, "conservatism." It has been, operationally, de facto, Godless and therefore irrelevant. Secular conservatism will not defeat secular liberalism because to God both are two atheistic peas-in-a-pod and thus predestined to failure. As Stonewall Jackson's Chief of Staff R.L. Dabney said of such a humanistic belief more than 100 years ago:

"[Secular conservatism] is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today .one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth."

Our country is collapsing because we have turned our back on God (Psalm 9:17) and refused to kiss His Son (Psalm 2).

John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com

Recovering Republican

JLof@aol.com

John,

I appreciate your concern for the religious tradition in America. Many great statesmen, like George Washington who we celebrate this week, recognized that American political society was strong due in part to the ancient and, at the time, remarkably homogenous religious traditions of the American people. But I believe Washington and others recognized as well that that religious strength preceded politics. It was not formed by politics, nor could it be enforced by politics.

Conservatism is indeed a “pea-in-a-pod” together with liberalism, since conservatism as a movement (whether associated with the Republican Party or with more informal cultural institutions) was born in response to liberalism. Both are equally sons of modernity. Without modernity’s dislocations, neither would have emerged.

To dismiss political conservatism all together would, then, also require dismissing political liberalism all together. And among the results of political liberalism, I think it is good to remember, are some things which are beneficial and worthy of protection.

No society can live without a 'metaphysical dream' as that great American prophet Richard Weaver said sixty-odd years ago. Such a culture may linger, perhaps --on life-support as it were-- on the accumulated capital of an inherited fabric of intuitions concerning the ultimate purpose and meaning of human life and thus of human societies, but in the end, 'Life contracts and death is expected', to quote Wallace Stevens. One wonders whether secularist western Europe has already passed that 'tipping point'.

On the other hand, there is in our time a 'metaphysical dream'--or rather nightmare-- that has the vitality and vigor to inform the belief and behavior of millions, especially of the young. I refer, of course, to radical Islamism. What has the West, the culture formerly known as Christendom, to offer in response? Free love, I-pods and an ever-expanding GDP?

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End of Movement Conservatism

It seems to me that neoconservatism isn't so much a new movement in conservatism as it is a remnant with modern neo-conservatism. Sidenote: I think "Neoconservatism" as an idea is fundamentally good . Neoconservatism in practice, however..


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