OpEd Contributor
“Brain-dead conservatives:” The instinct of a conservative
By: Erick-Wioods Erickson
OpEd Contributor
October 4, 2009
Re-reading Steven Hayward’s "Brain-dead conservatives" oped in today’s Washington Post for the third time, I realized I did not disagree with the points he was making. Rather, I think Hayward missed some points.
Hayward, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, writes of the tea party movement, “it is unfocused, lacking the connection to a concrete ideology that characterized the tax revolt of the 1970’s, which was joined at the hip with insurgent supply-side economics.”
I will ignore his point on the Birthers, who are not and have never been part of the conservative movement. The birth rumor, after all, started in Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign.
The history I studied from the 1970s suggests the tax revolts were not initially an organized thought-machine operating to put principle into politics. Rather, they started with average people being mad as hell, which in turn created spokesmen giving anger to that voice. Then leaders emerged — leaders who had been thinking the deep thoughts Hayward wants.
We should not look at the tea party movement and the voices surrounding it as shrieking voices of populist sentiment devoid of substance. They give voice to the instinctual level, or gut, of the conservative conscience.
What we see across the country are more and more people standing up realizing the direction we are headed is wrong. They are unorganized. They are unfocused. But they do not lack a “connection to a concrete ideology,” they just are not skilled or trained in the ideology.
There is no greater conservative sentiment than “stop.” Bernard Bailyn’s influential The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution laid out how conservative the American Revolution was.
The popular messages of “freedom” and “liberty” were not slogans of propaganda put forward by the 18th century equivalent of a 501(c)(4), but were very real and meaningful to the colonists on the street and in the fields.
While no one should expect a revolution against government from the tea parties, we should expect and hope for a revolution in conservative thought and an upheaval of at least the Republican Party as the tea party activists start putting down their protest signs and picking up campaign signs. Then, perhaps, they will move on to taking over their local political party.
“[T]he right must do better than merely invoking ‘markets’ and ‘liberty,’” Hayward writes. I agree. But I do not think it is the right per se invoking those words. Like the colonists in the late 1700s, it is the people invoking those words. The people have a fundamental understanding that those principles are good things and things on which the freedoms we enjoy in this country are premised.
From this tea party movement of ordinary citizens getting mad as hell, we will see intellectual leaders stand up and explain at the level Hayward wants why the activists are right and the left is wrong.
The intellectual leaders will then steady the foundation of the activists and then new political leaders will rise and some old leaders will be reinvigorated.
I would like to say I disagree with Steven Hayward, but I have already come to the conclusion in my present capacity that I am under an obligation to re-read and further study Hayek, Kirk, Friedman, and even St. Augustine.
Nonetheless, we should not be concerned by what is happening in the conservative movement; we should be excited by the opportunity to begin again with old ideas made new for a new generation of citizen showing itself to be instinctually conservative.
Erick- Woods Erickson is editor of Redstate.com.
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