The Fringe Movement of Conservatism

There’s an excellent op-ed piece in today’s Salon.com by Gary Kamiya, about how the McCain campaign is attempting (once again) to use Obama’s “blackness” as a way to scare white voters off the Democratic ticket.

But perhaps even more effectively, Kamiya makes the case that conservatism as an ideology in America has been reduced to a fringe movement — at least for the near future.

From the article:

McCain is playing dirtier than Goldwater did. But the smear game still may not work. And if McCain loses, it will be for the same reasons that Goldwater lost: because conservatism itself — which means the GOP, since it no longer has a moderate branch — has been discredited. The Republican Party under Nixon and Reagan succeeded because it was able to convince enough white Democrats and swing voters that it was the party of the “average American,” oppressed by federal bureaucrats and do-gooder programs like busing and affirmative action. It was able to conceal the fact that it was the party of the rich beneath a populist, race-tinged appeal to white resentment.

But the truth is that America is not a particularly ideological country, and Americans’ allegiance to conservative ideas has always been fairly superficial. Yes, our frontier mythology and tradition of federalism makes us less supportive of the welfare state than European countries — but New Deal-inspired programs like Social Security and Medicare are deeply rooted in our society. A loose, de facto centrism is America’s default position. By embracing cracked ideologies like trickle-down economics, by letting big corporations do whatever they want, and by religiously refusing to raise taxes, the GOP since Reagan has tilted much too far to the right. George W. Bush pushed the party over the cliff, with the final straw being his own unique contribution, a demented and pointless war.