In the aftermath of the Democratic victory in the November 2006 Congressional elections, obituaries of the conservative movement have been pouring forth thick and fast. These pronouncements read like a Rorschach test, with pundits and politicians on all sides seeing in the election results a confirmation of their own prejudices and hopes.

Hardliners such as Patrick Buchanan attribute the defeat to the Bush administration’s insufficient zeal in pursuing the Far Right’s prescriptions on affirmative action, isolationism, immigration, downsizing government and gay bashing. They accuse the GOP of having abandoned the base.

Some on the Right, such as Christopher Buckley, Joe Scarborough, and the Cato Institute’s Bill Niskanen, even went so far before the elections as to hope the Republicans would lose so they could learn a harsh but necessary lesson about straying from the anti-government gospel and indulging the corrupt behavior of their brethren. Writing on the eve of the election, Jeffrey Hart, a longtime senior editor of National Review, said that by following the Bush administration’s “disconnect[ion] from actuality,” the Republicans “stand to face a tsunami of rejection. They’ve earned it.”

Movement veterans such as Richard Viguerie declared that “Big Government Republicans” spent more time “seeking the favors of K Street lobbyists than listening to the conservatives who brought them to power.” Asserting that 40% of conservatives wanted the Republicans to lose the election, he declared “we must take that chance.”

Bruce Fein, an ardent opponent of affirmative action and much of the civil rights movement’s legal gains and goals, said about the GOP that “absolute power corrupts absolutely,” and that a Democratic victory “could help to restore checks and balances.”

Distinctions between “the party” and “the movement” are as big on the Right nowadays as they were on the Left blogosphere after the 2004 presidential election  “Most conservatives in and out of Congress think of themselves as conservatives first and Republicans second,” David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union declared after the elections.

Moderates such as David Broder of the Washington Post, Elizabeth Drew of the New York Review of Books and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, have blamed the Right’s electoral setbacks on its inability to hew to what they see as the inevitable centrism of American politics. For them swing voters hold the key. 

John Podesta of the Center for American Progress has detected a collapse in the Right’s core positions on national security, lower taxes and morality. The electorate’s rejection of the Right’s “stewardship of the Iraq war,” and voters’ views on congressional scandals, budget deficits and stagnant wages add up to “the end of the grand conservative experiment.”

Premature Triumphalism?

Clearly, the Right suffered a stinging defeat in the elections. The loss of Congress, which they had worked for forty years to control, is a very big deal. Such predictions should be viewed with caution, however. Reaganism was widely declared dead after the 1992 elections, two years before the Gingrich Revolution swept the Right into power.

Feminism has been regularly pronounced dead by Time magazine and many others over the years, but that movement has just mounted an impressive campaign in South Dakota to rout the right wing in a referendum on that state’s abortion ban.

The racial justice movement, often declared dead over the years, secured the renewal of the Voting Rights Act and is poised to launch a legislative offensive on civil rights. Environmentalism was pronounced dead a couple of years ago, shortly before renewed anxiety about global warming became an undisputed pressing political issue.

A spate of  books have pronounced liberalism dead with great regularity for decades, ranging from Theodore Lowi’s The End of Liberalism in 1969 (Lowi later hedged his bets by writing The End of the Republican Era—in 1996), to more recent efforts such as John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge’s The Right Nation, whose prediction of everlasting right wing dominance is looking decidedly shaky. Only last year Thomas Edsall’s Building Red America proclaimed the Right to be on the road to “permanent power.” He writes that “corruption, hubris, the costs of such externally generated catastrophes as Hurricane Katrina, government incompetence, and excessive risk-taking—as in the Iraq War—may take the GOP down in individual elections, but the party has exceptional recuperative powers, resourceful allies, and a profound distaste for defeat.”

Despite the obituaries, all of these movements are still with us because they reflect real power and durable conflicts in American society.

What are the Architects Saying?

None of the obituary writers, including those on the Right such as Buchanan, were inside players in either the Gingrich or the Bush/Rove political victories, or in the conservative nexus of think tanks, corporate K Street lobbying money and politicians put together by people like Rove and Norquist. Buchanan ran on a third party ticket. Viguerie, now leading the “conservative rebellion” against GOP apostasy, regularly denounced Reagan as a sellout, and is now toying with the idea of creating a third party, as did James Dobson of Focus on the Family in the run-up to the 1996 elections.

So what are the real architects of the right wing infrastructure saying? Behind closed doors Karl Rove has been cutting an  upbeat figure, urging his movement cohorts at one of Grover Norquist’s  post-election Wednesday meetings to get up off the canvas. He called the election a “transient, passing thing,” pointing to corruption, candidate overconfidence and, to a certain extent, the war on Iraq to explain the GOP thumping.

Nor has he given up on plans for long-term dominance. “1938 was a huge wipeout for the Democrats,” he says, “do you think that was the end of the New Deal?” Norquist, also playing a strategic game, is urging Congressional conservatives to fire up hard line tax cutting and government downsizing proposals, and lose, lose, lose in a strategy of ideological purity. This will provide motivation, he believes, for the conservative base to return to the fold in 2008.

For this to materialize, Rove claims that the Right must focus hard on winning back four key voting blocs that defected in 2006: Catholics, Hispanics, suburban moderates and people with less than a college education. He also thinks the GOP must do better among African-Americans and Latinos. All this can happen, says Norquist, providing Iraq is “in the rearview mirror” by 2008. An unlikely prospect to say the least, if the American Enterprise Institute, headquarters of the “surge” has its way.

Other conservative architects place their hopes for a right wing revival on grimmer possibilities. National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr., sounding oddly like a Marxian crisis theorist, suggests that an economic collapse fueled by foreign creditors calling in their chips could bring the masses back to their senses and his movement to power.

The consensus position on the Right, laid out at a conference held by the National Review Institute a few weeks ago, is that conservatism didn’t lose, the GOP lost. The institutional power of the Right is still intact in the White House, the Supreme Court, and among corporate-backed K Street lobbyists. K Street is now picking its fights more carefully in tandem with its think tanks (on the minimum wage, competitive bidding for government drug purchases, and gutting Sarbanes-Oxley, for example) and courting Democratic influence to move its agenda on selected issues such as immigration.

“Some Bright Spots”

On race issues, the right wing, far from dead, is preparing for a major offensive. Fresh numbers just out show that the conservative foundation infrastructure is alive and very much in the game of resegregating America: in 2006 the Bradley Foundation contributed $450,000 to Ward Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute, $100,000 to Roger Clegg’s Center for Equal Opportunity, and $75,000 to the Center for Individual Rights, which litigated the University of Michigan affirmative action cases.

Amidst all the gloom and doom in the aftermath of the November elections, some on the Right point to Connerly’s victory in Michigan’s Prop 2 battle to ban affirmative action as a “bright spot,” as Ryan Anderson put it in the Catholic neoconservative journal First Things. Stymied in Congress, we can expect their numerous “public interest” litigating organizations to continue firing cases up to the Supreme Court, which will soon decide whether school boards can continue to take steps to integrate public schools.

They are also turning to the states to gin up divisive ballot initiatives on race and gender. Connerly himself has promised to deliver more of these bright spots in a “Super Tuesday for Equality” election in November 2008 in several states (he’s exploring nine so far, including Illinois, Missouri, Oregon and Wisconsin).

Connerly is no longer shy about publicly genuflecting to his wealthy and influential financial backers for the Michigan initiative’s success. He singled out Wall Street bigwig Thomas L. Rhodes, who chairs the boards of both the Bradley Foundation and National Review; the Center for Individual Rights; and donor John Uhlmann. Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, which just launched a website to gear up a legal attack on affirmative action around the country, also came in for high praise in Connerly’s celebrations in the aftermath of Prop 2’s success.

Now Comes the Hardest Part

Unfortunately the laboratory where the “grand conservative experiment” was devised will continue to brew up dangerous concoctions for years to come. The good news is that the elections have shown that the conservative movement can be fought and defeated with good ground-level and national politics, an aggressive legal movement, and a well-sustained think tank and community-based activist infrastructure extending beyond the boundaries of the Beltway.

Many have said that the Right is out of ideas and has grown lazy, corrupt and, as William F. Buckley, Jr. put it, ideologically slovenly. To a certain extent this is true, and this has indeed created an opening for progressives to bring a new generation of policy ideas into intellectual combat on issues ranging from the role of government, to how stable and strong communities can be defended from destructive gentrification, to how the massive apparatus of human rights violations called the prison system can be reformed.

On the other hand, the Right remains unchastised. We see the ice cold treatment of Katrina’s victims, who didn’t even merit a mention in President Bush’s State of the Union address. We see the looming and potentially ugly constitutional confrontation on war powers, and the possibility of unsanctioned war with Iran. Now also the willingness for some on the Right to move from policy and ideological argumentation to open McCarthyism and barely concealed threats, not just against the Left this time, but against mainstream politicians such as Hillary Rodham Clinton, public figures like Jimmy Carter, and journalists like Seymour Hersh. This should temper our triumphalism, to say the least.

The Federalist Society’s John Yoo, an architect of the Bush administration’s torture policies, has weighed in against civil libertarians and pacifists concerned about the violation of basic constitutional freedoms under the guise of wartime necessity. Peace may not be all it’s cracked up to be, he tells us. After all, Yoo writes, “slavery and Jim Crow were the products of peace, not war.”

Complacency about the Right afflicted mainstream and progressive activists in the 1980s and 1990s. This has been turned around in the last few years. Forgetting this lesson would be a great mistake.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault in Urban Democracy and Smart Government, and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.