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By Elvin Lim

Rick Santorum had a great night, but he would need to win 70 percent of the delegates moving forward to unseat front-runner Mitt Romney. That’s not going to happen, but it’ll be a painful road toward the increasingly inevitable. As late as it is in this game, powerful conservatives like Thomas Sowell, Rush Limbaugh, and Tony Perkins are still advocating for Rick Santorum and other non-moderate candidates. Every day they continue to do this, they make less likely confident predictions from outside the beltway that Republicans will come together in the fall against Obama.


The problem could go away if Rick Santorum bowed out, but he has absolutely no reason to. At worst he would be a Hillary Clinton — a serious challenger to the eventual nominee, someone who ran a very credible campaign, and the candidate all eyes will turn to first in the next nomination race. Since all the benefits accrue specifically to Santorum and all the cost is diffused across the entire party, the candidate is here to stay for as long as Romney has not clinched his 1144th delegate.

This means that Romney wouldn’t be able to turn to a frontal, undistracted campaign against Obama just when Americans check out, tune out, and head to the beaches in summer. Most Americans would have made up their minds about their vote by then, and there may not be enough time between September and November for the constant barrage of negative messages and psychological massaging to convince independents that Obama is so bad that he needs to be fired.

The Republican “establishment,” otherwise read as Romney’s supporters, fear this more than anything, and for the love of God — no pun intended — simply don’t understand why Tea Partiers and Southern evangelicals are continuing on the road to electoral perdition. Yet while resentments are building and intra-party strife is festering, it isn’t the moderate Republicans but the Rush Limbaughs of the world who are ironically assuming that an upper-crust, French-speaking Mormon from the Northeast who entered the one percent by way of Wall Street would be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again before the party faces Barack Obama. Hubris!

Next up are Washington, DC and Wisconsin. That means relatively cash-strapped Rick Santorum now has a windfall of a week and some to gloat over his victory in Louisiana, and consolidate the narrative that he is a credible candidate and the truly conservative alternative to Romney. Yet each time the Republican Party has thrown an anti-Romney candidate a lifeline — and doing so has been the leitmotif of campaign 2012 — it has deprived itself of one in the real contest that is to determine the eventual occupant of the White House.

All this is also to say that we are witnessing the maturation of American conservatism. For years observers have described liberalism as a bloated tent filled with too many strange bedfellows. But all we were saying is that it is necessary for a dominant ideology to co-opt many disparate factions in order to form a governing majority. Finally, American conservatism, nearly 60, is big enough to have its own internecine feuds played out in the public square (and not just in the Na

One of the great, and perhaps unexpected, emerging forces in American politics of the last decade has been the Tea Party. On February 19, 2009, CNBC commentator Rick Santelli delivered a dramatic rant against Obama administration programs to shore up the plunging housing market. Invoking the Founding Fathers and ridiculing “losers” who could not pay their mortgages, Santelli called for “Tea Party” protests. Over the next two years, conservative activists took to the streets and airways, built hundreds of local Tea Party groups, and weighed in with votes and money to help right-wing Republicans win electoral victories in 2010. In the The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism, Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson go beyond images of protesters in Colonial costumes to provide a nuanced portrait of the Tea Party. We asked Vanessa Williamson about her research, and what was behind both the grassroots protests and national movement.

What did you find most surprising in your research and interaction with the Tea Party? On balance, how were you received by the people you interviewed?

When we would first reach out to local Tea Party groups, they were often quite suspicious of us, particularly because we come from Harvard University. Many we spoke to in the Tea Party believe that East Coast liberals are elitists who look down on “everyday Americans” like themselves. They also wondered, since our politics are not in line with theirs, whether we were truly interested in understanding their political activity, or whether we just wanted to attack them.

Meeting in person, however, people were extremely welcoming – which surprised us, at least at first, given how nervous people had been over email. Partly, it may be that getting to see us in person made us seem less intimidating or suspect. But also, these older, middle-class people, particularly those in the South, have very strong norms of hospitality. They frequently referred to us as their guests, and went out of their way to make us comfortable in their meeting places and homes. Only on one occasion was anyone less than polite to us at a Tea Party event – and numerous other members were clearly unhappy with the outburst, and several went out of their way to apologize privately afterwards.

How would you assess importance of the web in helping to spread and sustain the Tea Party’s messaging?

The web has played a crucial role in helping organize what would otherwise be a relatively dispersed group of older, extremely conservative people. In fact, we suspect that those in the Tea Party, particularly the older members, became more Internet-savvy as a result of their Tea Party activity! But the Internet has also allowed for the spread of ideas that are sometimes far outside the mainstream of political discourse. Some of the more conspiratorial concerns we heard (for instance, about the need to revive the gold standard, about the imminent threat of martial law, about the dangers of modernizing the electric grid) occasionally appeared on Fox News or conservative talk radio, but largely survive online.

Who the “leaders” of the Tea Party are continues to be a subject of debate. Do you expect the Tea Party ever to have a centralized organizational structure?

No. In our book, we discuss the Tea Party as the confluence of three long-standing strands of conservativism, which worked together in new ways in the first years of the Obama Administration. First, older, white, middle-class conse

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By Elvin Lim

Something is afoot in American politics. There was a time when the rights of workers, even government workers, to collectively bargain, was taken for granted. There was a time when federal budget deficits were accepted as a necessarily evil but it was only a problem talked about and no one addressed. There was a time when it was political suicide to talk about extending the retirement age or reducing Social Security benefits. Whatever that is left of the political consensus of the last half-century is unraveling today into a cantankerous politics in which settled issues are now up for political re-litigation.

Democrats are on the defensive because they have never taken seriously the diversity of the Republican party, and have therefore failed to anticipate the insurgency of fiscal conservatism that began in 2009. They are fumbling to define a strategy to defend labor in Wisconsin because they have for so long been fighting a different enemy, neo-conservatism – which one might argue is a familiar cousin to liberalism in their shared commitment to budget deficits as an embarrassing but necessarily evil.

For so long relegated to second-place within the Republican fold, fiscal conservatism is today the pre-eminent breed of conservatism, sexier even than neo-conservatism. For so long presumed to be the heart of the Democratic party, labor knew not what to say when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker threw them a curveball, attacking the right to collective bargaining which had been entrenched for the last half-century. Democrats know how to protest wars, but they haven’t had to aggressively organize themselves to defend labor rights for half a century! Obviously, there are a many number of ways of making up a budget shortfall without attacking collective bargaining rights, but Wisconsin Democrats did not dive straight into articulating this odd connection. Instead, they appear to have conceded to the framing of the problem in fiscal terms (by accepting the Governor’s proposal that state employees pay 5.8 percent of their salary toward their pensions and 12.6 percent of their health-care premiums) and ended up restricting the range of argumentative exits left to them.

Successful political aspirants of the 21st century must understand the tectonic shifts which are occurring with increasing regularity in our politics. And politicians who are not nimble responders to the political cleavages of the day are condemned to fight the wrong battles. The reason why John Kerry lost in 2004 was because he was cast and perceived by a sufficient majority to be a flip-flopping pacifist. 2004 was not the time to challenge the wars abroad. (2008 was.) The reason why Democrats lost so many seats in Congress in 2010 was not because the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan weren’t going well enough, but because a new faction within the Republican party was able to bring domestic politics, and in particular fiscal issues, back on the national agenda.

For Democrats to stand a fighting chance in the congressional elections in 2012, they have to take the fiscal bull by the horns, even if it means renegotiating the relationship between the party and the clients of the Democratically-sponsored social-welfare state. Similarly, for social conservatives who want to advance their cause, they must piggy-back it on libertarian issues, as advocates for the de-funding of Planned Parenthood have wisely done.

Republican primary contenders should also note that seasons have changed. Dick Cheney is out, and Paul Ryan is in. There is a new issue du jour in town – though for how long, we don’t know – but it will likely be

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By Elvin Lim

The vitriol that liberals and conservatives perceive in each other is only the symptom of a larger cause. There is something rooted in the two ideologies that generates anger and condescension respectively, and that is why a simple call by the President for participants to be more civil will find few adherents.

Liberals are thinking, what is it about conservatism that it can produce its own antithesis, radicalism? Whether these be conservatives of the anti-government variety, such as Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bomber) or Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), or conservatives of the anti-abortion variety such as Clayton Waagner, Eric Rudolph, or the Army of God -all conducted terrorism to preserve a way of life.

One of the deepest paradoxes of American conservatism is that the preservation of the past takes effort. As William F. Buckley put it, conservatives “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” As the Founder of modern American conservatism noted, the enemy is History itself, because History moves. Congressman Joe Wilson took Buckley’s yelling advice to heart in 2009, when he blurted out “You lie!” to the President when he was addressing the Congress in the chamber of the House. Yelling is a far cry from shooting. But the point is that conservatism on this side of the Atlantic wasn’t exactly born a phlegmatic creed.

Conservatism in America has always been about fighting back and taking back, articulated with a healthy dose of bravado and second amendment rhetoric. Sarah Palin understands this and that is why her crowds cheer her on. People like her because she is feisty. But that has also worked against her. Palin just couldn’t help herself but fight back when she was accused of inciting Jared Loughner into his shooting frenzy. Whereas the very liberal John Kerry thought he was above the fray and was slow to respond to the Swift Boat veterans’ attacks against him, Sarah Palin is often too quick to respond to her attackers, and sometimes she does so without having considered her choice of words (like “blood libel.”)

That is why House leaders about to stage a vote against Obamacare are about to traverse a dilemma-ridden path. To say what they want to say requires outrage and gusto, but when they do this they risk being accused of giving fodder to the would-be Jared Lee Loughners in their midst.

This is not to say that there isn’t vitriol on the liberal side. But it is of an entirely different form. Whereas conservatives are apt to feel anger, liberals project condescension. Again, part of this is structural, because Progressivism of any variety has one thing on its side – history itself. Because in the long run, Progressives have change on their side, they only need to wait and the world as conservatives know it shall pass. This, in part, explains liberal condescension. Conservatives conserve because they want to insulate themselves against the vicissitudes of life and History’s inexorable movement. Progressives or liberals, on the other hand, embrace change because they feel it is inevitable.<

Earlier this month, Harvey Kaye led a discussion of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, Common Sense, and Other Political Writings at the Bryant Park Reading Room. It got me thinking: what is the influence of Paine on Americans today? Who among us are the devotees? Are we over-quoting, over-citing, over-appropriating his politics?

So, I decided to introduce Harvey Kaye to Elvin Lim, and ask if they wouldn’t mind corresponding about this matter. They readily agreed. Below is the first of four installments of this conversation; the second of which will appear tomorrow.

Kaye is the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America, and Professor of History, Sociology and Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. Lim is author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University,  and a regular contributor to OUPBlog.

Hi Harvey,

I’m almost done reading your book, and I read it, in part, as a call to return Paine as much to the American Left or Center as he has been appropriated on the Right in recent decades.

To get things started, I’d start with a contrarian volley. If Paine was the major harbinger of the democratic impulse in American society, I do wonder if he nevertheless has a natural affinity to the American Right. I say American, because Burkean conservatives / traditionalists, American Tories of the Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver variety, have always been a minority within the American conservative movement. The conservatism that has had any salience in America has been of the Barry Goldwater / Reagan kind. This mainstream conservatism has always been trenchantly populist.

A reason why, I propose, is that the conservatism that emerged in the 60s was anti-New Deal and anti-establishment. And that was a natural fit with the ideas of the revolutionary generation. Paine et al were not (yet) concerned with building “a more perfect union” – that would be left to the Founding generation. In the 1770s, the concern was one of NEGATIVE liberty, freedom from tyranny (and this was sometimes operationalized as freedom from government – hence the high correlation with natural rights talk).

It is perhaps no surprise then, that the Federalists who took over the reigns of government in the 1790s were in fact highly anti-democratic and anti-Jacobin. (The electoral college, the Senate, and the Supreme Court were institutional instantiations of their anti-democratic bias.) The Federalists had seen the dangers of too much anti-governmentalism and now saw the virtues of POSITIVE liberty, which could only be delivered by good government.

I wonder what you thought of my “affinity” arg

Jennifer Burns is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia.  Her new biography, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, follows Rand through her meteoric rise from struggling Hollywood screenwriter to best-selling novelist.   Burns highlights two facets of Rand’s work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government.  In honor of Jennifer Burns’s The Daily Show appearance (be sure to tune in 11 tonight!) we have posted an excerpt below.

“I am coming back to life,” Rand announced as the Nathaniel Branden Institute entered its second year of existence.  Watching Nathan’s lectures fill, Rand began to believe she might yet make an impact on the culture.  Roused from her despair, she began once more to write.  In 1961 she published her first work of nonfiction, For the New Intellectual, and in 1962 launched her own monthly periodical, The Objectivist Newsletter. Over the course of the decade she reprinted articles from the newsletter and speeches she had given in two more books, The Virtue of Selfishness and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.  Although she occasionally talked of a fourth novel, Rand had abandoned fiction for good.  Instead she reinvented herself as a public intellectual. Gone were the allegorical stores, the dramatic heroes and heroines, the thinly coded references to real politicians, intellectuals, and events.  In The Objectivist Newsletter Rand named names and pointed fingers, injecting herself directly into the hottest political issues of the day.  Through her speeches and articles she elaborated on the ethical, political, and artistic sides of Objectivism.

Rand’s ideas were particularly attractive to a new generation of campus conservatives, who saw rebellion against a stifling liberal consensus as a basic part of their identity.  Unlike older conservatives, many right-leaning college students were untroubled by her atheism, or even attracted to it.  As Rand’s followers drew together in campus conservative groups, Ayn Rand clubs, and NBI classes, her ideas became a distinct stream of conservative youth culture.  Through her essays on government, politics, and capitalism Rand herself encouraged the politicization of her work.  In 1963 she even endorsed a new Republican on the scene, Barry Goldwater, a move that situated her as the leader of a growing political and intellectual movement.

At first look Objectivism may appear a freakish outgrowth of the turbulent 1960s, but it had significant parallels in American history.  Nearly a century before, similar reading clubs and political activism had sprung up around Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, a book uncannily similar to Atlas Shrugged, if diametrically opposite politically…

Rand made her network television debut in 1960, appearing on Mike Wallace’s celebrated interview show.  Her dark eyes flashing, she refused to be intimidated by the liberal Wallace and expertly parried his every question and critique.  Her performance caught the eye of Senator Barry Goldwater, who wrote Rand a letter thanking her for defending his “conservative position.”  Rand had not mentioned the senator by name, but he immediately recognized the similarity between their views.  Goldwater told Rand, “I have enjoyed very few books in my life as much as I have yours, Atlas Shrugged.”  He enclosed an autographed copy of his new book, the best-selling Conscience of a Conservative.  Shortly thereafter the two met briefly in New York.  Rand followed up this encounter with a lengthy letter urging Goldwater to support capitalism through reason alone.  Although she considered him the most promising politician in the country, Rand was distressed by Goldwater’s frequent allusions to religions.  The Conscience of a Conservative had been written primarily by L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law, and accordingly reflected the fusionist consensus of National Review.

In her letter to Goldwater Rand hammered on the need to separate religion and politics, a theme that would animate her for decades.  She singled out National Review for special criticism because it was a supposedly secular magazine that surreptitiously tried “to tie Conservatism to religion, and thus to take over the American Conservatives.”  If such an effort succeeded, Rand asked, what would become of religious minorities or people like herself who held no religion?  Goldwater’s response, which reiterated his Christian religious beliefs, was brief yet polite.  Rand had a powerful admirer, but not a convert.

As her depression lifted, Rand began to explore different ways she might exercise cultural influence.  She was newly interested in politics because of her esteem for Goldwater and her dislike of the dashing presidential contender, Jack Kennedy, to her a glamour candidate who offered no serious ideas.  She made her first venture back into political commentary with a scathing attack on Kennedy, “JFK: High Class Beatnik,” a short article published in the libertarian journal Human Events.  In the summer of 1960 she even dispatched Nathan to investigate the possibility of her founding her own political party. It was unclear if Rand saw herself as a potential candidate or simply a gatekeeper for others.  Nathan sounded out a few of Goldwater’s political advisors, who told him that Rand’s atheism severely limited her prospects.  Abandoning that idea, Rand returned once again to intellectual pursuits.  She sent her attack on JFK to the head of the Republican National Committee to be used as needed in Republican publications.

Shaking off her lethargy, Rand now began paying attention to the new following she had gained through Atlas Shrugged.  The book was an instant best-seller despite the largely negative reviews it received.  As with The Fountainhead enormous quantities of enthusiastic fan mail poured in.  Although Rand could not respond personally to ever letter, she was interested in her readers, particularly those who wrote especially perceptive or ignorant letters.  Nathan often interposed himself between Rand and the most objectionable writers, but in the early 1960s it was entirely possible to send her a letter and receive a personal response.  Sometimes she even engaged in a lengthy correspondence with fans she had not met, although her more usual response was to refer the writer to work she had already published.

The Nathaniel Branden Institute both capitalized on and fostered Rand’s appeal.  Nathan used the addresses from her fan mail to build NBI’s mailing list and advertise new courses.  As the lectures expanded into new cities, he took out newspaper advertisements describing Objectivism as the philosophy of Ayn Rand.  In 1962 he and Barbara published a hagiographic biography, Who is Ayn Rand?, which included an essay by Nathan on the fundamentals of her philosophy.  Slowly public perception of Rand began to shift, establishing her as a philosopher, not just a novelist.  The NBI ads and lectures made Objectivism into a movement, a larger trend with Rand at the forefront.

From the creator of the remarkable Shockheaded Peter theatrical experience comes an adaptation of Neil Gaiman's picture book The Wolves in the Walls. And now, after getting stellar reviews left and right in Europe, I am pleased as punch to announce that it is opening on our fair shores in Autumn of 2007 at The New Victory Theater. Wanna go?

Thanks to the Neil Gaiman blog for the link.