Conservatives and radicals

We often see boxing matches between liberals and radical leftists. In one corner stand those liberals who, like myself, would not mind a Hillary Clinton presidency (although I prefer Edwards and Obama). In the other corner, we have the braying purists who view the Clintons and the Bushes as consubstantial. I chose my corner 25 years ago; I want nothing to do with the radicals and their idiocy.

Less-discussed are the recurrent bouts between the mainstream and radical forms of conservatism. Earlier tonight, I was reminded of that clash by an unlikely trigger: A sentimental piece of music playing on my car radio.

The piece was the suite from Richard Strauss' Der Rosenkavalier, which features the most bittersweet waltz in music -- the last waltz, the song of an aging beauty's final great love affair, and of a culture on the edge of apocalypse. The opera -- an elegant piffle set in Viennese high society -- premiered just a few years before World War I.

We think of politics when we think of Strauss because of his association with the Nazis. Throughout the Third Reich era, the great composer did a strange and maddening dance between collaboration and opposition. Although many insist otherwise, I do not think that he ever felt any real kinship with the stormtroopers and the racist ideologues. He certainly knew that Hitler posed a mortal threat to his Jewish grandchildren.

Strauss' flirtation with fascism arose, I think, from an old-line conservatism born of a romantic nostalgia. He was a man in love with a dream of what was. Hitler sold himself to such people by offering to make that dream real. But Hitler was no traditionalist, no mere rememberer of things past. He was a radical -- and, as it turned out, an apocalyptician of the highest order.

CUT TO: George W. Bush. And let's not apologize for the juxtaposition.

He, too, disguised his radicalism in order to sell himself to old-line conservatives. Many of those conservatives no longer buy the pitch. They have begun to see W as the man who, in the name of laissez faire capitalism, instituted a spectacularly inefficient system of corporate communism.

During the Katrina clean-up, crony companies would receive expensive no-bid government contracts. The cronies did nothing for this lucre. They merely hired subcontractors, who hired subcontractors, who paid rock-bottom wages to the actual laborers. If a small pile of garbage needed hauling, the public (or rather, our Chinese creditors) would fork over thousands of dollars, of which only a few hundred bucks might go to the schnook who did the hauling.

As in Louisiana, so too in Iraq -- and damn near everywhere else. All in the name of Adam Smith. His corpse must be spinning faster than a drill bit.

The Chinese now see Bushonomics for what it is: An unsustainable racket. Mainstream conservatives, it is said, have finally begun to awaken from the trance. Paul Krugman asks: Did they know all along? Is there really a difference between "old school" conservatism and radical reaction?

To what extent was total failure to respond to Katrina deliberate? To what extent was it incompetence? It's some mix of the two. But the Bush administration dismantled FEMA, which was one of the most admired agencies in the US government under Clinton. It did so partly because FEMA was turning into a place to reward cronies, and then it also tried to privatize its operations. So that's one motive. It did it partly because Bush doesn't care about good government, because he basically believes the government is always the problem. You don't care. Failure of government is not such a bad thing, because, although you may take political heat for it, the failures also can be used to make your point - well, government doesn't work

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But to just say this isn't true conservatism -- well, this is what conservatism has been in America for over forty years. It may not be what people would like. There are some people who may consider themselves conservative who don't recognize themselves in these people, but this is what the movement is. One of the things that I think is important to say is that we tend to sanitize and romanticize the early members of this movement. So people say, well, Ronald Reagan wasn't like Bush. Actually, he was, a lot. Ronald Reagan was, in fact, a race-baiting, slander-using, perfectly modern movement conservative, way back in the 1960s It's not that there was this idealistic, noble movement that turned mysteriously into what's in the White House right now. It's been the same thing all along.

Now that their monster has begun to wreck the house, conservatives claim no ownership of the beast they fed. Even so, Krugman may be a bit too harsh. Many American conservatives were, I think, like Richard Strauss: Fixated on a romanticized past, and blind to the rubble and ruin lying ahead.

Question: Did Bush -- as Krugman suggests -- intend this destruction?

We all know the story: As he skulked in the bunker with the Red Army drawing ever closer, Adolf Hitler ordered Albert Speer to destroy Germany's infrastructure -- a command which Speer disobeyed. On a psychological level, that apocalyptic order may have been the very reason why Hitler first got into politics.

Will future historians say something similar about George W. Bush, architect of the American apocalypse? Did this man insist on grabbing the steering wheel because he wanted to slam into a wall?