Op-Ed Columns

The giant hissssing sound you hear is the implosion of the conservative "movement," which is a movement no more. America is entering a period of Democratic dominance, which may even make Barack Obama president.

But not necessarily.

It is conceivable, though unlikely, that John McCain could so win the trust and affection of the white working class that, together with his hard-core Republican base, he could squeak through to victory.

But the movement conceived by William F. Buckley, launched by Goldwater, ratified by Nixon, deified by Reagan, has collapsed under the cheerful, jaunty ineptitude of George Bush and the grim belligerence of Dick Cheney.

A tenderhearted God took Bill Buckley home this winter so he would not have to bear the sorrow of watching his intellectual child predecease him.

Big change is coming, welcome to the millions without health insurance, who are working hard but falling behind; scary to the superrich. A friend who manages wealthy families' money says literally trillions are being taken out of the country, but Asians and Europeans are bringing investments in.

It makes one wonder if the patriotism of some rich men goes any deeper than the American flag lapel pin on their $5,000 suits.

They are leaving behind the deflated shell of Buckley's alliance between religious traditionalists, small-government advocates, free-marketers and foreign-policy hawks, which meant fervent anti-communism.

When David Brooks, The New York Times' columnist, was a "movement" journalist in the 1980s, writing for all the right-wing journals, the attacks on regulation and the Soviet Union were exciting; to him they seemed "true."

But the Soviet Union collapsed and a global economy convinced even Democrats that free markets are good for the country. The Buckley pillars were falling down, revealing the dark and shrill side of a shrunken ideology.

It may be impolite to say, but nevertheless true, that a foundation of the modern Republican Party is racism. It was Goldwater's vote against civil rights legislation that enabled him to win 71 percent of the Deep South vote in 1964.

Nixon permanently welded the South to the Republican coalition with a cynically clever stratagem described by a young aide, Kevin Phillips, in his classic 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority.

Phillips described the reasoning behind Nixon's vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws thus: "Abandonment of civil rights enforcement would be self-
defeating. Maintenance of Negro voting rights in Dixie, far from being contrary to GOP interests, is essential if Southern conser-vatives are to be pressured into switching to the Republican Party…"

When the black man became a Democrat, the white South became Republican.

Conventional religious morality as part of Buckley's fusion ideology was eroded by scandal and by separation of important religious schools from the increasingly politicized Southern Baptist Convention.

First were the disclosures of homosexual scandals affecting Congressman Mark Foley and the national evangelical president, Pastor Ted Haggard. Then there is the fall of Ralph Reed, the former "face" of the Christian Coalition, known for its militant backing of the Republican "family values" agenda. Reed had mixed Christianity and dirty money to achieve political power.

Over time, the great Southern Baptist universities such as Baylor, Samford and Winston-Salem had freed themselves from the Convention, in part because of its emphasis on marginal GOP issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

A curious thing has happened recently to conservative critics of "social engineering," using government to achieve better lives for the downtrodden. The GOP has used tax engineering to achieve fabulous lives for the up-trodden.

In the hands of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay, Buckley's grand balloon has become a shrunken and sad thing, whose major tenets are: homosexuals must be humiliated, women's bodies belong to the State, fat cats need fattening and desert people will get democracy if we have to kill them and tear up their country to do it.

Nixon's political director gave this benediction: "Rove knew his voters, he stuck to the message with consistency, he drove that base hard — and there's nothing left of it. Today, if you're not rich, Southern or born-again, the chances of you being a Republican aren't great."

All the signs and numbers point to a great Democratic victory, but I was brought up short by an image in a George Packer New Yorker article of John McCain in the tiny eastern Kentucky coal-mining town of Inez.

He spoke to those people with humility and respect, leaving Packer with the impression that McCain could win by leaving with voters this impression of himself: "Here I am, a man in full, take me or leave me."

If the man with the strange name that much of the country still doesn't know wants to lead his party to what should be a blowout victory, he will need to go to small towns and working-class neighborhoods — to look and listen.

People who've led hard lives are dubious about political promises; they do not thrill to "the audacity of hope." They may respond to Barack Obama's one-nation message, if it is delivered as McCain did, with humility and respect.