Editor, NYT Book Review, thinks conservatism is dead

Ed Driscoll interviews James Piereson of the Manhattan Institute. An interesting post and video concerning the Left's view of conservatism. Sam Tanenahaus, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, had bad timing with the publication of his book on the death of conservatism just before the Sept. 12 Tea Parties. But Tanenhaus uses a European definition of conservatism.

Tanenhaus is not altogether certain as to the causes of this collapse, at times suggesting that conservatives undid themselves because they were corrupt and unprincipled in their pursuit of power and at others suggesting that they lost the support of the American people because of their devotion to right-wing “orthodoxy.” The one thing about which he is certain is that he dislikes conservatives—intensely and unremittingly so, judging by the rhetoric deployed in this book. Tanenhaus says at various points that conservatives are out to destroy the country, that they are driven by revenge and resentment, that they dislike America, and that they behave more like extremists and revolutionaries (“Jacobins”) than as genuine conservatives. In this sense, he has resurrected the liberal literature about Sen. McCarthy and “the radical right,” and sought to apply it to contemporary conservatism as if nothing of importance had happened in the meantime. All of this is nonsense, of course, and given some of the author’s previous writings, particularly his biography of Chambers, one had reason to hope that he would have produced something more elevated than the partisan assault against conservatives that he has packaged in this book.

There have been predictions of the death of conservatism before. There have also been predictions of the death of liberalism. But liberalism keeps conservatism going when liberals are in power, and vice versa. Partly because power corrupts.