Several years ago, Jonathan Chait routinely slighted Peter Wehner as the George W. Bush administration’s “Minister of Propaganda,” but Chait’s more sympathetic to him now that Wehner is among the so-called reform conservatives who are, as Chait wrote in a Friday New York magazine blog post, “trying to coax the Republican Party back toward sanity.”
Chait’s peg was Wehner’s New York Times op-ed which criticized Tea Party conservatives for their “apocalyptic view of American life during the Obama era.” Chait objected to Wehner’s implication that such widespread doom and gloom from right-wingers is unprecedented and countered that an “apocalyptic strain has regularly infused conservative rhetoric…Ronald Reagan warned that, if Medicare passed…future generations would no longer know ‘what it once was like in America when men were free.’ (Conservatives continue to tout that speech today, as if it had proven prescient rather than deranged.)”
In fact, Chait suggested that the overall reasonableness of the GOP decreases as right-wing influence over the party increases: “Republicans have often governed cautiously, made compromises, changed course, and so on. But this has merely reflected the degree to which conservatives have failed to hold total control of the party.”
From Chait’s post (emphasis added):
The “reformocons,” the small coterie of pundit-adviser-activists trying to coax the Republican Party back toward sanity, [do] politically significant work…But the task of talking sense to the senseless is tricky business, involving lots of soft whispering and noble lies. Peter Wehner, the former Karl Rove aide, has taken on an important role in this movement, but his recent New York Times op-ed urging conservatives to be less crazy, reveals just how cautiously the reformocons must tread.
The rhetorical tack adopted by Wehner is to insist that No True Conservative would do things that are not only common features of conservatism, but actually its defining traits. He denounces Republicans who have taken “an apocalyptic view of American life during the Obama era”…
Actually, an apocalyptic view of American life is the very thing that propelled conservatism to power in the first place…
The first moment when conservatives seized actual control of the party came, of course, in 1964 through the Goldwater movement. The Goldwater activists were driven by conspiratorial thinking. The campaign’s main tract, “A Choice Not an Echo,” written by Phyllis Schlafly, argued that the party could never lose if it campaigned wholeheartedly on conservative issues, but it had been betrayed by “a small group of secret kingmakers, using hidden persuaders and psychological warfare techniques”…
[An] apocalyptic strain has regularly infused conservative rhetoric. Milton Friedman compared John F. Kennedy’s program to fascism. Ronald Reagan warned that, if Medicare passed, the government would inevitably force doctors to live in cities where they did not want to, and future generations would no longer know “what it once was like in America when men were free.” (Conservatives continue to tout that speech today, as if it had proven prescient rather than deranged.)
…The conservative movement has always stood for the idea that big government is wrong not just prudentially but in principle. The main thrust was that it didn’t matter if government worked, it should be cut because the government simply had no business fulfilling anything beyond a few limited tasks like defense, infrastructure, the role of law, and so on...
…Republicans have often governed cautiously, made compromises, changed course, and so on. But this has merely reflected the degree to which conservatives have failed to hold total control of the party. The mainstream wing held significant control over the party well into the Reagan administration (when conservatives bitterly assailed mainstream advisers for suppressing Reagan’s “true,” conservative instincts.) Small vestiges of the old moderate Establishment even lasted into the George W. Bush administration, which was generally governed in full partnership with the conservative movement, and was famously disdainful of empiricism or self-correction.
