Like everyone else, I thought it was the Democrats. After a
stinging and humiliating loss in November, a loss that hinged in
many ways on their position on the Iraq War, the party turned
around and gave Howard Dean (the architect of that position) the
leading role in post-election party reconstruction!? Their formula
for success in 2006 appears to be a reprise in substance and form
of their 2004 strategy: Bush is Hitler (or Mao — whichever makes
for a better MoveOn.org commercial). Meanwhile, Hillary is running
around talking about eliminating abortions. Surely it’s the left
that’s in crisis.
But then on second thought, the left did a bang up job of
keeping Social Security reform and U.N. reform (i.e. Bolton) off
the table, with help of course from their traditional allies in the
AARP and the New York Times respectively. This really
should be no surprise. Being the minority is pretty easy — your
job is to oppose the other guy. The majority has to actually forge
compromises, make deals, and run the country, something the left
hasn’t done in more than ten years.
But last week Andrew Sullivan warned,
contrary to what I had heard on Fox News, that it’s the right that
has the problem. See, the Republican Party is a coalition party,
and its two constituencies, which Sullivan calls “Conservatives of
Faith” and “Conservatives of Doubt,” are growing incompatible with
one another.
The manifestation of this tension in the conservative movement
is that the Republicans are now “willing to concern themselves with
aspects of human life that conservatives once believed should be
free of all government interference.” Education, gay marriage,
Terri Schiavo; all are examples of the party going back on its
principles.
What is the result? For Sullivan “unless the religious presence
within Republicanism becomes less dogmatic and fundamentalist, the
conservative coalition as we have known it cannot long endure.”
Sullivan, though, has over-simplified the whole problem. Yes, of
course the Republican Party is a coalition. The cracks and fissures
appearing now in the conservative coalition have always been there,
but they were always put aside because there were bigger battles.
Success has brought these disagreements to the forefront of
conservative discourse — so what.
Moreover, this does not explain all the contradictions in Bush’s
administration. No Child Left Behind is no more liked by the
conservatives of faith than those of doubt. Moreover, Bush’s
leftward turn on Social Security last week is sure to draw rancor
from both sides of Sullivan’s split.
In many ways the religious right feels just as neglected by Bush
and the Congress as does the libertarian right. The American
Conservative even ran a cover story in their April issue
subtitled “How the GOP Exploits Social Conservatives.”
The most accurate explanation of the Bush Administration’s
big-government tendencies is likely a peculiar mixture of ideology,
political reality, and median voter theory. But such analyses have
no ability to stir men’s souls, and Sullivan’s explanation does
this quite well. For him the skeptical (libertarian) conservatives
are being hounded out of the party by a cabal of religious
fundamentalism. His is a reactionary story, intended to affect a
sense of injustice amongst the unappreciated Conservatives of
Doubt. He censures this “new stridency,” a fundamentalist urge that
“by its very nature, eschews compromise.”
But the very nature of his condemnation betrays a similar
fundamentalism on the part of the libertarian conservatives. Theirs
is a fundamentalism of science and reason. Any opposition to stem
cell research is dismissed as reactionary and irrational, and even
splendid compromises such as Bush’s denial of federal funds to stem
cell projects are dismissed as catering to the religious elements
in the party.
If compromise is what Sullivan wants, then he should be willing
to accept a compromise on civil unions rather than insisting that
it’s gay marriage or nothing. Isn’t this a version of
fundamentalism (right or wrong)? Would Sullivan oppose Goldwater’s
suggestion that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice” on
grounds that it “eschews compromise”? Indeed, the critique of
fundamentalism often masks an objection to a particular brand of
fundamentalism.
No, real crisis, to the extent there is one, is within
libertarians who’ve allied themselves with social conservatives,
but now feel disrespected and forgotten. It is the libertarian who
agrees with Barney Frank on gay marriage but Bush on Terrorism that
finds himself mired in an exigency of ideology and praxis. For
these libertarians there’s an internal battle between moral
indignity and rational self-interest that appears hopeless. This is
the frustration expressed in Sullivan’s crisis.
The Christian right hasn’t changed and neither has Bush.
Libertarians on the other hand have found compromise with these
elements increasingly difficult. To try blame this crisis on the
“Conservatives of Faiths” is neither fair nor productive.
