← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Okiereddust
Thread ID: 16001 | Posts: 1 | Started: 2004-12-17
2004-12-17 03:45 | User Profile
[URL=http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Francis/NewsSF110204.html]Chronicles Extra[/URL]
What will happen to American conservatism as a result of the 2004 election? Obviously, the answer depends largely on what happens in the election, and we won't know that until later. But that doesn't stop pundits from telling us anyway.
Pat Buchanan believes a "civil war" will break out inside the Republican Party over its ideological future. It will be a war between the Bush partisans and their neo-conservative allies on the one hand and, on the other, paleo-conservatives like Buchanan, advocates of an "America First," national interest-based foreign policy, economic nationalism and traditional conservatismââ¬âsmall government, constitutionalism and cultural traditionalism. The New Republic's Franklin Foer also thinks the paleos may have a future after the election.
The most recent contribution to this discussion comes from two British observers with The Economist, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, they suggest that whatever happens in the election, what President Bush has done to American conservatism is here to stay.
What Bush has done to conservatism, they argue, is to revolutionize it. He has embraced what they call "big government conservatism," reversing what both Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan supported. "The massive growth in the state during this presidency (faster than under Bill Clinton, even if you exclude the spending on the war on terror)" is at heart "a deliberate strategy."
Moreover, they claim that Bush's use of the state is conservative in that his intention was "to turn government into an agent of conservatism," using federal power to impose moral values in ways traditional conservatives rejected (not because they rejected the values but because they rejected the scale of federal power to impose them). Finally, "Bush's boldest contribution to reinventing conservatism" lies in his foreign policy, which centers on spreading democracy across the planet as a moralistic crusade.
Like a lot of foreign observers of America since Alexis de Tocqueville, these two don't get everything right, but they do spy trends many Americans tend to miss, and they are largely right about the impact of the Bush administration on the body of American conservatism. To put it another way, the impact of Bush on American conservatism has been a disaster.
It has been a disaster because every "contribution" the authors cite is not simply a modification or an adjustment but an abandonment of what traditional conservatism means and has meant. It is, in short, "neo-conservatism"ââ¬âand in a way that has nothing to do with "neo-conservative" as a codeword for "Jews."
The main neo-conservative writersââ¬âNorman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol and most othersââ¬âhave long insisted that they don't share traditional conservative distrust of the centralized stateââ¬âa distrust that was shared by traditional Jeffersonian conservatives, constitutionalists and libertarians. What the neo-cons wanted, wrote their "godfather" Irving Kristol, was "a conservative welfare state," while Podhoretz has written that from its beginnings "the neoconservatives dissociated themselves from the wholesale opposition to the welfare state that had marked American conservatism since the days of the New Deal." Today, thanks to the Bush administration, they have succeeded in disassociating American conservatism from American conservatism.
Bush's use of expanded state power for "moralistic" ends is consistent with neo-conservatism as well, though it mainly comes from his alliance with the religious right, a movement that has close ties to the neo-cons. But Micklethwait and Wooldridge may exaggerate the degree to which the president has actually embraced the religious right's agenda. Most I know in that movement are less than pleased with what he's done to advance it.
Most obviously, as the authors acknowledge, Bush's foreign policy is largely the creature of the neo-conservatives all by themselves. The crusade to spread democracy, especially in the Middle East, has been a neo-conservative obsession since at least the Reagan administration. Only under Bush did they have a green light to make it the central purpose of American policy abroad.
The trouble with Bush's adaptations of conservatism to fit the neo-con mold is that they are fundamentally inconsistent with what most American conservatives have always believed and believe today. Only by masking them with conventional conservative rhetoricââ¬âand by dwelling on how awful the liberal alternatives areââ¬âcan a Republican Party dominated by neo-conservatism expect to keep grassroots conservative support and remain in office.
And maybe it can and will. As neo-conservatism entrenches itself as the dominant and defining expression of conservatism, there will be fewer and fewer Americans who even remember what real conservatism is. Maybe they can still wage a civil war to take back their party and their nation, but the result of that civil war could be as much of a disaster as the last one.