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Conservatives on the couch: a diagnosis.

Article Excerpt
CONSERVATISM is in crisis. Everyone is saying so, and everyone is right. But the nature of the crisis, its causes and possible solutions, is badly misunderstood.

The fact that Republicans are facing a tough election is not a crisis. Even if the election goes as badly as it plausibly can, Republicans will have more seats in Congress than they have had for most of the history of the modern conservative movement. Conservatism has survived worse. In 1986, Republicans lost the Senate, the only chamber of Congress they held. That election had serious consequences for conservatives: It allowed liberals to block the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and thus to end conservatives' chances of reforming the federal judiciary for 20 years. But 1986 now looks like a blip in a trend line of rising conservative political strength.

This year's election looks rather like the one 20 years ago. Then, as now, a Republican president was in his sixth year of office. (In the last nine sixth-year elections, the president's party lost, on average, 34 House seats and seven Senate seats.) Then, as now, there was no sign of any ideological shift leftward by the public. Democrats are benefiting from public weariness with the GOP, not any upsurge in positive feelings toward their own party. Democratic pollster Doug Schoen says that the public has not moved in a liberal direction on any philosophical or policy issue. The factors that have led to public disenchantment with Republicans over the last two years--gas prices, scandals, the handling of Hurricane Katrina, even the Iraq War--do not signal any long-term turn away from conservatism.

Yes, even the Iraq War. Conservative opponents of the war say that its unpopularity is dragging down every other conservative cause, and that the conservative coalition should therefore jettison the neoconservatives who have been the war's most aggressive advocates. It is possible to disagree with this political judgment without taking a view of the merits of the war. Clearly the war's unpopularity is hurting conservative candidates in this fall's elections. But the question is whether this effect is specific to this year or will extend into the future. I suspect the former.

The country may now become averse to extensive foreign interventions for years, as it did after the Vietnam War. But that does not mean it will turn away from the relatively hawkish forces in American life. In the decade and a half following the fall of Saigon, hawks did quite well in American politics, if not in setting policy. In other words: The Democrats did not pay a political price for leading the country into the trauma of Vietnam; they paid a price for their too-dovish reaction to that trauma.

NEITHER BLAME NOR PANIC

Yet the argument that conservatives need to ditch the neocons to survive...