Failure of Conservatism: Getting The World Wrong

Robert L. Borosage launched the Failure of Conservatism conference at the National Press Conference on Thursday with a broad indictment of the conservative movement and with a cautionary note for progressives: “Ideas have consequences.”

Borosage, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, borrowed that phrase from leading conservative thinker William Kristol to point out that just as conservatives came to power in the 1980s and 1990s by forging a comprehensive world view that governed its politics and its path to power, progressives need to do the same. He outlined the themes in the commentary he wrote for the Thursday edition of the Chicago Tribune, “The Gipper Can’t Win This One,” and concluded by paraphrasing Reagan’s famous indictment of government: “Conservatism is not the solution to the problem. Conservatism is the problem.”

Many progressives believe that conservatives have done a better job of defining the political landscape and communicating their ideology, and “this conference will develop some clear lines of critique and attack” for progressives, he said.

John Judis outlined the roots of neoconservatism, and detailed its two stages – a Cold War phase that ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a second that emerged after the fall of the Pinochet regime in the Phillipines, and he called it “a right-wing Trotskyism.”

“We need to speak more clearly about what liberalism and conservatism means,” Judis said. Liberalism was allowed to be defined as global defeatism and radical social policies, while “conservatism” came to mean national defense and a “moderate lifestyle” at home.

Thea Lee, Policy Director for the Legislation Department of the AFL-CIO, said that conservatives have a “highly coherent and duplicitous strategy” of defining the success of the global economy as the success of American businesses. Trade, tax, currency policies are then geared to move jobs offshore, and countries that receive the new jobs are pressured to not regulate those jobs. Globalization, then, is used to drive down wages and working conditions at home. The upshot: Neither workers at home nor abroad benefit.

“We have a choice right now,” she said. “Do we demand a dramatic overhaul of these failed trade policies?” The discussion around trade needs to begin with the premise “that there is something deeply wrong with the way that we are looking at the world.”

Lee said there are signs that progressives are beginning to win “the war of rhetoric” on workers’ rights issues as business groups concede the need to support some workers’ rights issues in international trade agreements with developing countries, so it is an opportune moment to press the needs of American workers.

On immigration, conservatives have not made up their mind who they want to be, said Cecelia Muñoz, Senior Vice President, Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation, for The National Council of La Raza. C0nservatives are incapable of resisting the temptation to demagogue the immigration issue even as they want to embrace Latinos as a new voting bloc. At the same time, some conservatives are courting Latino immigrants by trying to get them to see themselves as “whites” who have a self-interest in embracing progressive economic and social policies. Progressives need to learn how to engage a diverse immigrant community in new ways that go beyond pigeonholing them as a “minority” racial group, she said.

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