Writing last week in the Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes
sharply rebuked “paleoconservatives” (especially
Patrick Buchanan) for allegedly weakening the Bush presidency and
hurting the Republican Party’s chances in the upcoming midterm
elections. According to Barnes, “the paleocon message is not an
electoral winner.” He says it’s “gloomy, negative, defeatist,
isolationist, nativist, and protectionist.” And what does Barnes
identify as the “paleocon message”? He cites securing the nation’s
borders, reining in excessive government spending, protecting the
American economy, opposing the Dubai Ports World deal, and
criticizing President Bush’s “crusade for democracy” in the Middle
East. Funny, these sound like winning issues to me. Let me
explain.
Barnes devotes most of his anti-paleocon diatribe to criticizing
proposals for building a fence along our border with Mexico and
“for stepped-up border security in general.” He calls these
proposals “nativist.” Barnes even argues that taking steps to
prevent illegal immigration “clashes with the welcome mat laid out
by the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor.” Apparently, Barnes
subscribes to the view that anyone desiring to come to the United
States — whether for good or ill — should be free to waltz across
our borders unimpeded. For him, the presence of 10-20 million illegal immigrants in the country
— including, let’s not forget, Islamic terrorists and violent
narcotics traffickers — is no cause for alarm.
But it is cause for alarm for the vast majority of Americans.
Public opinion polls consistently show that out-of-control
immigration is one of the public’s chief complaints. For example, a
Quinnipiac University poll from February 2006 showed that 57
percent of registered voters consider illegal immigration a “very
serious” problem, while another 31 percent consider it a “somewhat
serious” problem. And a Time poll from January 2006 showed
that 74 percent of adults believe the federal government is not
doing enough “to keep illegal immigrants from crossing into this
country,” and 61 percent disapprove of how President Bush is
handling the illegal immigration problem. (See here.) Not surprisingly, a majority of Americans — and
large majorities in Texas and Florida, both of which are critical
to a Republican victory in 2008 — oppose the President’s amnesty
and guest-worker plan. (See here.) In short, the “open borders” position is a
political liability that the Republican Party would be wise to
avoid.
As for Barnes’ argument that clamping down on illegal
immigration risks alienating Hispanic voters, he’s delusional if he
believes that an “open borders” policy works to the long-term
political advantage of the Republican Party. Despite President
Bush’s gains among Hispanic voters, Hispanics continue to support
the Democratic Party by a wide margin. (For an analysis of the 2004
election results, see here.) Unless the Republican Party reverses
course on such issues as bilingual education, affirmative action,
entitlement reform, and government spending, it is extremely
unlikely that a majority of Hispanic voters will ever support the
Republican Party. As the Center for Immigration Studies concluded, “the
prospects of a widespread Latino conversion to the Republicans are
more fantasy than reality.” Republicans should not base their
immigration strategy on such flimsy hopes.
Like other elites, Barnes contemptuously dismisses the illegal
immigration problem as a figment of Americans’ “nativist”
imaginations. I strongly disagree with Barnes on this issue, but my
point here is simply that his political analysis is wrong.
Confronting the illegal immigration problem is an electoral winner.
In 2008 the American people are likely to elect the candidate whom
they believe will best protect us from out-of-control immigration
(just as they elected George W. Bush in 2004 because they believed
he would best protect us from Islamic terrorism). That’s why
Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton has been staking
out a surprisingly tough position on immigration since the 2004
election. Unlike Barnes, she doesn’t denigrate Americans’ growing
concerns over immigration (at least not openly). On this issue,
Hillary’s political antennae are better tuned than Barnes’.
What shocked me even more than Barnes’ terrible advice to back
away from immigration reform, was his comment — meant as a
criticism — that “[e]xcessive government spending [is] a worry of
all conservatives but especially paleocons.” Apparently,
“compassionate conservatives” like Barnes now openly subscribe to
the liberal political philosophy that the path to electoral success
lies on the tax-and-spend highway. A more complete rejection of
everything the Republican Party stands for is scarcely imaginable.
For decades, the core belief of the Republican Party has been that
a constantly expanding federal government is incompatible with the
principles of limited government, individual freedom, and free
enterprise, upon which this great country was built and prospered.
This message catapulted Ronald Reagan to resounding victories in
1980 and 1984. Yet Barnes would have us believe that this message
“is not an electoral winner.” Public opinion polls clearly show
otherwise. (The following data are taken from here.)
According to a Pew Research Center poll from January 2006,
Americans support President Bush’s income tax cuts by 50 to 38
percent, and by a similar margin favor making his capital gains tax
cuts permanent. Another Pew Research Center poll from October 2005
shows that, although Americans are concerned about the size of the
federal budget deficit, they oppose raising taxes by 70 to 26
percent or cutting defense spending by 58 to 36 percent. However,
they favor reducing social spending by 47 to 41 percent. And a Fox
News/Opinion Dynamics poll from March 2005 shows that 54 percent of
registered voters think that the taxes they pay are too high. Most
strikingly, by a margin of 71 to 12 percent, respondents in the Fox
News poll said they were bothered more by how the government spends
their taxes than by how much they pay in taxes. Plainly, a large
majority of Americans favor policies that leave more money in their
pockets to spend as they choose, not as some government bureaucrat
— or corrupt member of Congress — chooses. Reagan understood
this; Barnes apparently does not.
In his article, Barnes does not explain why the remaining
positions he identifies as “paleoconservative” — i.e., protecting
the American economy, opposing the Dubai Ports World deal, and
criticizing President Bush’s Middle East policy — are electoral
losers. To the extent Barnes is objecting to Patrick Buchanan’s
personal positions on these issues (many of which I disagree with),
he should say so. I certainly don’t deny that Buchanan would make a
poor presidential candidate. But as a general proposition, Barnes
is wrong to suggest that a more “nationalistic” approach to
economic issues and a more “America first” approach to security
issues would be politically unpopular. Quite the contrary.
Consider, for example, the controversy over the Dubai Ports
World deal. The prospect of an Arab Muslim country managing several
ports in the United States, including New York Harbor, raised both
economic and security concerns in many Americans’ minds (including
many respected leaders of the Republican Party). These concerns
erupted into a firestorm after George W. Bush pledged to use his
first presidential veto on any bill intended to block the deal. Is
this Barnes’ idea of smart politics? If so, he should go into a new
line of work, pronto. A Rasmussen poll from February 2006 showed that 64
percent of adults opposed the deal, while only 17 percent supported
it. The result, predictably, was an embarrassing political defeat
for the President. Once again, we see that Hillary Clinton, who led
the Democratic opposition to the deal, displayed sharper political
instincts than Barnes (or Bush). Most troublingly, she was able to
align herself with the “average” American’s views on this issue —
which is supposed to be a Republican strength.
Lastly, I completely reject Barnes’ suggestion that “good”
Republicans must support the President’s Middle East policy, no
matter what. Barnes specifically criticizes “paleoconservatives”
for “reject[ing] Bush’s optimism about rolling back the
dictatorships of the Middle East.” What is Barnes talking about?
Other than Iraq, whose long-term viability remains an open
question, where are we “rolling back the dictatorships of the
Middle East”? The world’s leading terrorist state, Iran, continues
to pursue nuclear weapons, which a recent USA Today/CNN Gallup poll showed most Americans think
will be used on the United States and/or Israel. At the same time,
Iran brazenly supports the jihadist forces in Iraq. Has Bush
toppled this regime? No. Ditto for Syria. Not to mention Saudi
Arabia, which we continue to treat as an “ally” despite its
financing of Islamic extremism across the globe, including in
our own country
As I argued last fall the forceful vision that
underlay the original Bush Doctrine (which I wholeheartedly
supported) has died out. What it has been replaced with satisfies
no one, including many people on the Right who would like to see
America act even more aggressively in dealing with Islamic
terrorism. While the Democrats’ message of weakness and
accommodation remains unpopular among the American people, it is
clear that the status quo on this issue will be a political
liability in 2008. I predict that the eventual Republican nominee
will support either a “Fortress America” strategy, backed by a
credible threat to engage in massive retaliation against
terror-sponsoring states if we suffer more attacks, or a return to
the original Bush Doctrine, with its emphasis on preemptive
military action to defeat and deter terrorists before they strike.
Either way, President Bush’s current Middle East policy will be
subjected to sharp criticism. Barnes may think this is disloyal,
but it is political reality.
In sum, what Barnes identifies as the “paleocon message”
represents a number of different issues, policies, and perspectives
that many Republicans, not just readers of The American
Conservative, find compelling. I certainly do. If this makes
me a “paleocon,” so be it. More importantly, however, these are
issues on which a majority of the American people strongly disagree
with Barnes’ political recommendations. Hmm. Barnes or the American
people? I’ll pick the American people every time. And so should any
Republican politician who wants to be living at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue come January 2009.
