The editors of two of the country's most powerful publications, conducting a gloat-fest over the corpse of Reaganism last week, described their idea of true conservatives: Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.Newsweek Editor Jon Meacham asked a remarkable question of Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, in New York's Greenwich Village Wednesday evening: "Isn't Barack Obama the most significant Burkean in American politics today?"
"Burkean" refers to Edmund Burke, the 18th-century British parliamentarian who sympathized with the freedom-loving revolution in America while vehemently opposing the anarchistic revolution in France.
Tanenhaus, author of an impressive biography of ex-Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers, has just published "The Death of Conservatism," accusing today's conservatives of perverting Burke's vision.
Meacham and Tanenhaus provided a glimpse of the strange planet on which America's dominant journalists live.
According to Tanenhaus, "the engine of industrial capitalism" causes more upheaval than do leftist radicals. Tanenhaus called ex-President Clinton "a classically conservative figure" and charged that the muscular conservatism of the predominant wing of the Republican Party is "in opposition to much of what America does."
While merciless toward the right, the two were nearly servile regarding Obama. Meacham praised the president's restraint in showing "no interest in gun control or universal health care."
He apparently hasn't seen the YouTube clips of then-Sen. Obama endorsing a single-payer health system and an incremental strategy toward arriving at it. Nor has he seemed to notice last year's Supreme Court ruling rendering federal gun control unconstitutional.
"I've never seen anything like Obama in Philadelphia," Tanenhaus gushed of Obama's March 2008 speech on race. Candidate Obama was trying to distance himself from his longtime pastor, the anti-Semitic, anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But Tanenhaus said it proved he could "penetrate the minds of those who would dislike him or disagree with him."
For all the supposedly deep analysis of the history of political thought on show last week, Tanenhaus revealed that he thinks Edmund Burke was Scottish. (He was born and educated in Dublin.)
And he did indeed agree with Meacham that the man who taught the leftist agitation methods of Saul Alinsky "seems like a Burkean figure today."
On the other hand, to Tanenhaus most influential modern conservative writers and thinkers, like Charles Krauthammer, Michael Barone and even the late William F. Buckley Jr., of whom Tanenhaus is writing a biography, are not true Burkean conservatives but extremist "revanchists."