What Would Durkheim Do?

Let's cut right to the point:

Could I make one more suggestion? Maybe you could knock off trying to convince people that choosing a new label for your snake oil is an epistemological dilemma. Maybe then you could own up to the fact that the Bush administration "policy trajectory" differs from the Reagan policy trajectory only in that the latter had already licked all the icing off the cake. We ended the Reagan administration with a national debt nearly four times what we started with. This is not a bit of political esoterica, or a matter of interpretation. Or that you were happy to claim it all back when it was working electorally. Deficit spending hit town the same time Ari Fleischer did, and the fact that we were refusing to pay for Iraq and Afghanistan was, somewhat surprisingly, in all the papers, so it's a little strange to hear now that the administration still managed to hide the truth from AEI for so long. As for the rest of it, well, I made a vow during the ascension of St. Ronnie that I would never discuss federal spending with someone who imagines Social Security is an "entitlement" while a new aircraft carrier every two years is not, or who uses "government regulation" as a pejorative, while failing to disclose that he, like Reagan, would include food inspection, airline safety, and the requirement of driving on the right side of the room on his list of invidious nanny-statism.

The problem is not that conservatives have lost their way in their quest for The Perfect Reactionary Brand, it is that their ideas have always been bankrupt but for a while many voters were too distracted to notice. Not so now.

All political movements end, and for a long while I thought my own life would run its course before this ugly conservatism did. I may yet get to see the end of "Reaganism." Of course, the Republicans will be pushing hard on the racism button this cycle, so I'm not planning a party just yet. Americans have many noble impulses, but we also have a scary tendency toward sociopathy — of the 'god, guns, and nation' type. If the racists, proto-fascists, and fundamentalists* get together, they might be able to achieve another victory.

* I realize that these categories are not mutually exclusive.