Damon Linker has a brutally accurate take on the mainstream right's response to Sam Tanenhaus's vibrant pamphlet, The Death of Conservatism. He's right about many things, including the fact that zombie populist 'conservatism' can still win elections. My favorite passage:
Take Peter Wehner’s representative remarks about the book, published on Contentions, Commentary’s group blog. A former assistant to Karl Rove in the Bush White House, Wehner is a master of deploying the rhetorical trick that contemporary conservatives use to convince themselves that they’re always right. At bottom, it amounts to a high-minded version of the old Pee-Wee Herman taunt, “I know you are, but what am I?” There are countless examples. A handful of liberals stupidly describe conservatives as fascists, so Jonah Goldberg responds by writing several hundred pages about the threat of liberal fascism. (Get it?) Liberal Jews frequently congratulate themselves for their secularism, so Norman Podhoretz produces a book in which he claims that Jews treat liberalism as a religion. (Clever!)
And Sam Tanenhaus defends a moderate version of conservatism against the ideological thinking that dominates the right and Wehner responds by saying that “Tanenhaus is precisely what he condemns in his bookan ideologue, a man of dogmatic fixity, a person of knee-jerk liberal reflexes.” Oh, what a wily man you are, Peter Wehner, turning the tables on him like that and relieving yourself of the burden of self-examination. That was a close one! (Liberals, meanwhile, will be quite understandably perplexed by Wehner’s suggestion that a man who generously praises Nixon’s pre-Watergate domestic and foreign policy, as Tanenhaus does, is actually a liberal “through and through.”)