I went and listened to the on-air debate between David Frum and Mark Levin at the urging of Massie and Sullivan, and I came away with the surprising conclusion that Levin definitely got the best of Frum (all use of the mute button aside). I think that’s because Frum is not acknowledging a sad fact: the dearth of charismatic political leaders on the right means that Levin’s incessant digs about relevance, as measured in “audience” for their respective work, actually matter. What good is the “idea leadership” espoused by Frum, Douthat/Salam, Brooks, et al. if it has little resonance with the mass of voters who make up the core of the Republican electorate?

The retort that Frum was unsuccessfully trying to make is that demagoguery, which is what Rush Limbaugh, Levin, and their ilk regularly engage in, is a sorry substitute for leadership. And, while that may very well be true, wonkery is an even more sorry substitute for leadership. The people don’t want nuance, substance, or even good ideas. They want something they can easily understand in sound-byte form, something that resonates with their simple, innate notions of justice, something they can repeat around the water cooler and feel good about. That’s something that writerly, intellectual types all too frequently miss. And, I hasten to add, it’s exactly what Barack Obama has been able to provide for the Democrats.

In response to a cracking good post by James Poulos over at Culture11, Matt Frost inadvertently hits upon something I’ve been working over in my head ever since Grand New Party came out: that conservatism and capitalism are headed for a long and painful divorce.

James, writing about a lecture by Harvey Mansfield the other day, presents the question for conservatism as a choice between going backwards and going slowly. This prompts Frost to muse thusly:

But one quote that springs to mind comes from, of all people, tedious socialist Karl Polanyi, who, despite his leftist bona fides, exhibits the wistful conservatism typical of the intellectual diaspora of Austria-Hungary.

He goes on to approvingly cite a passage from Polanyi’s essential The Great Transformation which praises the cautious approach the Tudors and Stuarts took towards the privatization of land in England.

Contra Mr. Frost, there’s really no contradiction in a skeptic of capitalism praising conservative governance, because there’s absolutely nothing conservative about capitalism. The Enclosure Acts, which Polanyi tells us the Stuarts and Tudors so wisely opposed, were nothing less than the groundwork for the establishment of private property. Without the ability to own land for private use, the profit motive could never successfully have taken hold and the Industrial Revolution would not have happened. The downside, as Polanyi points out, is that the Enclosure Acts absolutely ravaged the English countryside, destroying traditional rural life and forcing countless thousands into increasingly overcrowded cities.

Now as even “tedious socialist” Polanyi notes, the end result is that we’re all a whole lot better off due to the innovations of capitalism. The average member of the working class in the United States today enjoys more comforts than Pharaohs in Egypt could hope for. But we should never forget that capitalism is a revolutionary force that changes—and often violently destroys—anything that stands in its way.

The fact that conservatives in the United States are also free marketeers is a historical aberration. Though Grand New Party’s thought-provoking prescriptions attempt to harness market forces to help the working class, I don’t doubt that if push came to shove, Ross Douthat would favor curtailing capitalism in order to conserve aspects of society he thinks are vital. (I can’t guess what Reihan would say, as his writings are often so eclectic that they frustrate easy summary.)

It’s a fissure that will only continue to grow in the Republican Party as the irreconcilability of capitalism with traditionalism inevitably works itself out.

George Packer writes compellingly about the decline of conservatism by way of reviewing several new books. Great candid interview snippets from Pat Buchanan make this article a must-read.

Packer’s prognosis, in a nutshell, is that the coming re-emergence of a dominant Democratic Party will be due to the core liberal message being more appealing to large swaths of Americans than the essentially negative, reactionary, fear-mongering employed by the Republican Party since Nixon. He sees this as largely inevitable and systematic, and therefore somewhat misses what is really going on. For example, he writes a propos Ross Douthat and Reihan Salem’s new book:

Their ultimate purpose is political: to turn as much of the working class into Sam’s Club Republicans as possible. They don’t acknowledge the corporate interests that are at least as Republican as Sam’s Club shoppers, and that will put up a fight on many counts, potentially tearing the Party apart.

I’m not sure that’s entirely right. From what I can tell from reading Douthat and Salem’s web writing, they’re implicitly hoping to build a new, more logical coalition than the unwieldy one that currently dominates the conservative political landscape. It’s not that they don’t acknowledge corporate interests as a key constituency in today’s Republican party, but rather that they see Republicans drifting away from Big Business and embracing cultural conservatism as the sure path to electoral majorities in the future. If it were to come down to fighting for lower corporate taxes versus social welfare and a pro-life platform, there’s little doubt to where Douthat and Salem’s priorities would lie—they’re hoping to remake the Republicans into a European-style Christian Democratic party. They don’t feel any pressure to worry about any of these cleavages yet, however, as the Democrats are running too far to the left for now to pose any threat of peeling Big Business away from them.

Overall, Democrats should take note of Douthat and Salem: the future will be about building new political coalitions, not about extending the viability of current ones. The current Democratic coalition between urbanites and big labor is as untenable as the Republican coalition between corporate interests and social conservatives. Obama is a unique political phenomenon, a gifted orator who might be able to sell core liberal principles to unlikely voters in the fall. But Democrats had better start thinking about what kind of new winning coalitions they might want to build during an Obama reign. They ought to figure out how to become the party of modernity and liberty, one that is fundamentally pro-urban, pro-environment and internationalist. With energy prices on the rise, the very existence of the Sam’s Club suburbanite and the rural religious social conservative will be squeezed, marginalized and eventually urbanized, rendering the Salem/Douthat-envisaged coalition less attractive a constituency than they seem now.

David Brooks yesterday:

Magazines are aspirational. *National Review*’s readers no doubt shared a hatred for Communism, but many of them simply wanted to be like Buckley. He had a Tory gratitude for the pleasures of life: for music, conversation, technology and adventure.

I don’t read National Review (apart from the guilty pleasures of the Corner), but I suspect my admiration for Buckley stems from my inner Tory: a nostalgia for the hierarchical class-based society of England.

Though I’ve never thought of myself as much of a conservative, I’ve always had a deep well of admiration for William F. Buckley. He was a bold public intellectual who fashioned a durable, powerful movement on the force of ideas alone. He never let social sensibilities get in the way of a cracking good argument, and disagree with him as you may well do, he had a viciously dismissive patrician wit which was great fun to behold.

Here’s to hoping that the public intellectuals of the future strive to fashion themselves in his mould than in the mould of the uncouth ruffians that pollute our public discourse today.

McCain is courting Huckabee. He threw his delegates to him in West Virginia to spitefully thwart Romney, the candidate of the Republican establishment. During his victory speech, McCain warmly congratulated Huckabee on his unexpected successes and cooly mentioned Romney only as an afterthought. Could it be that the establishment Right’s hatred for McCain is only matched by McCain’s hatred of movement conservatives?

In a rambling essay, unfocused even by her standards, Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review hints at this dynamic:

If you want the base to work for you, Senator, it’s most important that you be honest. Don’t try to remake the conservative movement; don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. When you speak to conservatives, play it straight: You don’t listen to Rush. You’re not comfortable at the Family Research Council. Don’t pretend otherwise.

I don’t think McCain’s pretending about anything—he’s very much trying to remake the conservative movement. He’d like to do an end-run around these self-appointed gatekeepers and use his “maverick” status to connect with Republican-leaning independents in a big way.¹ Pairing with Huckabee would get him the support of the religious working class without having to kow-tow to the likes of James Dobson. It’s a win all around!

Even if this is his strategy, it may not play out like that. The pressure will be enormous on movement organs² to align behind McCain. They may ask for some symbolic gestures and commitments from him in exchange for their backing. The pressure will then build on McCain to mend fences in order to increase his chances against a very strong Democratic candidate.

But we’ll see. McCain is old and prickly and stubborn—and liable to be spiteful just because he can. He might think that realigning the Republican Party to his outlook is more important than getting elected. Or he might just enjoy marginalizing all the enemies he’s made during his years in office.

Who said that the Democratic race was the exciting one to watch?