New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus put his finger on American conservatism’s original sin inadvertently last month at the American Enterprise Institute. He noted that while conservatives once chafed under the soulless leftist managerialism of the New Deal, they let ex-leftist conservative guides such as James Burnham and Irving Kristol lead them on a long march through the institutions they despised to build a managerial class of their own.

In Tanenhaus’ telling, Kristol showed conservative business and political leaders that New Deal managerialism had bred a liberal “new class” of academic, think-tank, and media experts who trafficked in words more than in deeds or missions accomplished. He counseled conservatives to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy for the kind of capitalism and politics conservatives can profit from and enjoy. They might even restore virtue that way to Progressives’ necessary reforms and secure the enlightened “national greatness” conservatism of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose American admirers would soon include Kristol’s son Bill, David Brooks, and Tanenhaus himself.

Kristol’s auditors took his advice seriously, turning American conservatism’s deepest contradiction -- its inability to reconcile its yearning for ordered liberty with its obeisance to every whim of capital -- into a tragic flaw that is poisoning our election campaigns.

Through lavishly-funded initiatives such as those I encountered in New York City’s Manhattan Institute and on college campuses, and in vast private ventures such as Rupert Murdoch’s “journalism," conservatives generated a parody of the liberal “new class,” an on-message machine of talkers, squawkers, power brokers, and greedheads which Slate's Jacob Weisberg dubbed “the Con-intern.” Their social ideas resemble Margaret Thatcher’s more than Disraeli’s, driven by a corporate capitalist materialism that's as soulless as the Marxist dialectical materialism of their elders’ nightmares. It deepens social anomie and liberal relativism, giving an eerily false ring to right-wing rhapsodies about its contributions to civic-republican virtue.

So far, the conservative “new class” has excused the displacement of the liberal counterculture with a degrading over-the-counter culture; of the New Deal’s oft-lampooned make-work programs with the public non-response to Katrina; and of the dreaded “Vietnam syndrome” with the worst strategic blunders in American history. Beneath their civic chimes and patriotic bombast, the spirit of republican vigilance writhes in silent agony, forsaken by conservatism itself.

Tanenhaus knows all this, and at AEI he hinted that Irving Kristol knows it but has become cynical and followed the money: “One could look over the trajectory of Mr. Kristol’s brilliant career and see that he’s in a different place in the 1990s than he was in the 1970s,” Tanenhaus said, recalling that Kristol used to cite Matthew Arnold’s cultural visions against Milton Friedman’s vindications of greed.

Tanenhaus’ wistful pleas for a politics of decency made me wonder what conservatism can do now besides push profits and disgrace itself by spewing guns, God, racism, sexism, and war to distract us from the heartbreaking consequences for the civic-republican ethos. TPM blogger “sphealey” characterized that ethos as “a fundamental allegiance to getting along, and specifically to handling losses without developing longstanding grudges” that could be undermined “if a small group had ever gotten together and made an agreement to subvert the system and behave destructively in a coordinated manner.” By the time “the rest of us figured out what was happening,” sphealey concludes, “our only alternative would have been to terminate the system. If trust had been destroyed it could not have been replaced. Strong as our Constitutional system is, I don’t think it was ever intended to resist a large-scale, long-term, tightly-organized effort to subvert it from within.”

Without question, the Con-intern has destroyed a lot of trust. Whoever the Democratic nominee is, Republicans will be the party not of memory or hope but of hate: The only mystery is how and in what breathtakingly vicious ways it will try to swift-boat Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards. That should be the main general-election campaign issue for all Americans, who should wear buttons and prepare themselves to say, “There they go again.” The Democratic nominee’s campaign should dedicate itself, as another TPM blogger put it, to “stand against the agit-prop and brass knuckles of the Right… by calling it out for what it is, loudly and clearly and repeatedly in terms so unmistakable that they slice through the media filters and reach into the culture.”

Tanenhaus stopped short of saying this, for many conservatives of reputed discernment and high purpose have been sucked into the maelstrom, including the Kristols (Bill edits Murdoch’s Weekly Standard), the Podhoretzes (Norman and Norman’s son John), the humiliatingly honor-obsessed Kagans (Thucydides scholar Donald and his sons Robert, the grasping power historian, and Frederick the Great AEI military strategist), the sophistical David Brooks. It has compromised even Tanenhaus, biographer of the ex-leftist conservative zealot Whitaker Chambers and of William F. Buckley, Jr., who doubted recently that conservatives should have let in neo-cons in the first place.

In his AEI lecture Tanenhaus did plead for a conservatism of virtue and moral poise. He credited “my hero Bill Buckley” for reading anti-Semitic and other extremists out of the movement, as he rightly wished leftists would, too. He cautioned against a conservatism of revanchism and revenge that tries to destroy liberalism with “a language of accusations,…. of treason at home and of leftists who have the same values as Osama Bin Laden.” He called for a culturally textured, sophisticated conservative critique and assailed “magazines I used to write for, such as Commentary, which accused the New York Times magazine, my newspaper, of violating the Espionage Act because it published an article exposing a surveillance program. That’s revenge,” he said.

But I find no such moral poise or textured critique in the preponderance of liberal-bashing book reviews Tanenhaus has run. And certainly not in the pieces he himself has written, some of which really bear noting. The person in his AEI audience with whom Tanenhaus seemed most engaged – he referred to him respectfully at least four times – was David Frum, a tribune of those who do want to roll back the welfare state and even a “national greatness conservatism” that would care for both rich and poor. Perhaps we will be reading more of Frum in the Times' Week in Review section, which Tanenhaus will now be running along with the Book Review.

Tanenhaus invoked Lionel Trilling’s distinction between honorable sincerity, which is anchored in faithfulness to a culture, and a phony, individualist “authenticity” that betokens the selfishness and narcissism of modern liberalism. But he didn’t mention Trilling’s observation that, against even the vapid liberalism of his own time, American conservatism was mainly a set of "irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” And Tanenhaus never explained what conservatives should actually affirm. He professed himself a “sympathetic observer” of the movement who follows the “tonality and atmospherics” of politics, not policy. In response to a question from AEI vice president Henry Olsen, Tanenhaus mentioned Whittaker Chambers’ observation to Buckley in 1970 that, as he paraphrased it, “You can’t build a clear conservatism out of capitalism because capitalism disrupts culture.”

Well, what about that? To its great glory and unending consternation, America will remain capitalist, but markets have to be honored in their place, and the best of those New Deal managerialists (John Kenneth Galbraith?) knew that that sometimes requires a republican vigilance which profit-maximizing corporations inevitably try to subvert. Asked by historian Michael Kazin to explain the prospects for a small-government conservatism that’s still tied to big government, including a military operation that's a virtual welfare state for its millions of participants, he responded, “I’d be interested to hear what David Frum has to say on that,” and mused a little about the Marshall Plan and a New Deal for the globe, confessing himself a “total ignoramus about globalization issues.”

The poignancy of Tanenhaus’ predicament reminds us that conservatism’s original sin lies not in its bombastic and noxious neo-conservative interlopers, accelerants of republican decay though they may be, but in the tragic nature of conservatism itself. Please indulge three short paragraphs of propositions about the trap in which conservatism is caught, not least because it is a liberal trap in which most of the rest of us are caught, as well.

First, when conservatives vow to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy from liberals, they mean sincerely to defend a classical, 18th-century liberalism that balances individuals’ rights to life, liberty, and property with those same individuals’ responsibilities as republican citizens who rise sometimes above narrow self-interest, to act on shared moral commitments and sentiments that sustain the republic. Conservatives know that a balanced society, like a whole person, strides forward on both a left foot of social education and security -- without which conservatives’ cherished individuality couldn’t flourish -- and a right foot of irreducibly individual freedom and responsibility -- without which even the best social engineering will turn persons in to clients, cogs, or worse. Society protects and nourishes the individual flame but cannot light that flame -- or extinguish it. One’s readiness or failure to light it originates in faith or natural law, which even a covenanted society may honor but cannot itself create or, ultimately, control. Conservatives charge that liberals have lost sight of this sublime truth and have over-emphasized public provision, swelling the left foot and hobbling everyone’s stride.

Second, elite liberals haven’t a credible answer to this. They've done too well by the system as it is to attack its growing inequities with more than symbolic, moralistic, or "money" gestures. Yet they can’t bring themselves to defend it very wholeheartedly, either. Sensitive to individual rights and sufferings, they want to strengthen the left foot of social provision without prescribing social responsibility. For that they rely on outside incubators of virtues and beliefs which the liberal state needs desperately yet cannot itself nourish or even enforce.

Finally, however, since we’re talking about swollen left feet and other maladies, most of the obesity and social mayhem rising around us is driven by the seductions and stresses of corporate consumer marketing and employment and, more broadly, of a capitalism that forgets or only opportunistically invokes John Locke’s Christian strictures, Adam Smith’s theory of the moral sentiments, and a civic-republican nationalism that might reasonably be elevated by serious “liberal education.” Instead of taking these things as seriously as they claim to, conservatives careen incoherently between conflicting loyalties to a national-security state and a post-nationalist global capitalism that dissolves republican virtues far more than terrorism has done. Call Jesse Jackson and Hillary Clinton insufferable scolds, if you wish, but there is such a thing as “economic violence” that does eviscerate the villages that raise the children. Wall Street does subvert Main Street and morals.

The many follies of Marxist ideologues left us with a taboo against criticizing capitalism, whose twilight they announced too often. But aren’t we now in a relationship to capitalism analogous to that of American colonials to the British monarchy early in the 1760s? Then, colonials still ardently professed their affection for and dependence on the crown and empire even as they began to sense that British sovereignty and dignity couldn’t be reconciled with their own. They wound up risking their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to rearrange matters.

Similarly, something basic will have to change relatively soon in how we configure and charter the vast profit-making combines that are not just degrading social equality and the rhythms and security of our daily lives but are also incapacitating us as cultural actors and, hence, as free citizens. Like most Americans of 1763, we would rather not face this daunting challenge, so we tolerate a growing burden of destructive distractions and distempers, eroticizing our pain or projecting it violently, and expending tremendous energy on false solutions.

Sam Tanenhaus, for example, tried fruitlessly in his lecture to square the circle of deceit drawn by the yawping brigades of conservative opportunists and partisans spawned years ago by Irving Kristol and others. At AEI he presented himself – a bit disingenuously, considering his job at the Times -- as a learned, unassuming fellow who would lead no one anywhere. No wonder that other conservatives think that ex-liberals and their progeny, who came to conservatism promising strategic savvy and rhetorical cover for excellent adventures, have only worsened its plight.

Don’t both conservatives and liberals need to rediscover the American civic-republican tradition and to sacrifice certain comforts to revive it? A year ago I tried to sketch something of that challenge in an essay about a long-forgotten uncle of Ned Lamont. On December 11 I have a long review essay of an important book about the “tough liberalism” of Albert Shanker in www.democracyjournal.com that takes up another aspect of the challenge.