Paul Gottfried responding to Jonah Goldberg: THE DREK THAT PASSES FOR CONSERVATIVE WISDOM
The counterevidence is so overwhelming as to crush the human mind. Never before in our history have our state and federal governments been as large as they are right now, or spent as much money on social programs, or been as intimately involved in overseeing family affairs. Never in the past have there been so many government-employed, anti-discrimination officials supervising our commercial and interpersonal transactions. And only about 25% of the American public, consisting disproportionately of those over sixty, are disturbed by these trends. (I am using for this figure the present approval rating of Tea Party activism.) The rest of the voting public would seem to believe that current political trends haven’t gone far enough and that we need an even more controlling administration to monitor our behavior and redistribute our income.
What we see in the US, moreover, coincides with political and voting trends throughout Western and Central Europe. The only regions in our former Western civilization that is withstanding this turn toward the social Left are in Eastern Europe and Russia. Significantly, our “conservative” as well as liberal press denounces the Russian, Serbs and Hungarians, for being resistant to such family values as gay marriage and gay pride parades. Goldberg may be able to convince himself we’re becoming more conservative for a very clear reason. Whatever the US electorate and our consumer culture embrace will become for him an American “conservative tradition” once they are absorbed into the national life.
The push to abandon the label may pick up steam, but what will replace it? As movement conservatism was rather "fusionist" even before the bad neocons came along, there may be as many labels as groups that break away - "traditionalist," "nationalist," and so on...
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