Republicans in Washington have run their party’s ship onto the
rocks and it is sinking rapidly. Conservatives, who should have
mutinied long ago, have to assert control now or they will be
forced to abandon ship. They cannot let Republicans sink the
conservative ideology along with the party’s political
fortunes.
Americans have lost confidence in Republican governance. A May
Washington Post-ABC News poll says it all: 56 percent of
the public would rather see Democrats in charge of Congress. It
took Democrats half a century to prove that their approach didn’t
work. Bush and the GOP Congress lost the trust of the American
people in just five years (12 if you count from the 1994 Republican
“revolution”). That’s very quick work.
Americans see the Republican Party’s leadership as
untrustworthy, which is a reputation it has earned. The challenge
for conservatives is to convince American voters that Republican
and conservative are not synonyms. Conservatives have to remind the
country that the principles Republicans claimed to uphold but
abandoned once in office still offer the best approach to governing
the country.
Conservatives need an aggressive campaign to hold Republicans
accountable for their apostasy and remind America that
conservatism’s Jeffersonian principles remain an untried and viable
alternative to the programs the two main parties are offering.
“The freedom and happiness of man… [are] the sole objects of
all legitimate government,” Jefferson said. What Republicans have
pushed for the past five years is not Jeffersonian conservatism. It
is a neoconservatism that has married big-government activism to an
ostensibly conservative political agenda. That is not what America
needs, nor is it what America voted for when it sent Republicans to
Washington in the first place.
When Americans handed Republicans the reins of government, they
thought they were getting a conservative regime, one that would be
honest, frugal and competent. Instead, they got a big government
regime that has been dishonest, profligate and incompetent.
HERE ARE A FEW EXAMPLES of the Republicans’ betrayal of those who
voted for them:
* Republicans promised never to waste taxpayer dollars, to
return control of numerous programs to the states, and never to let
domestic politics dictate military decision-making. They did the
opposite. Non-defense discretionary spending has grown twice as
fast under President Bush as it did under President Clinton.
According to research by Heritage Foundation analyst Brian Riedl,
under President Bush and the GOP Congress education spending has
risen 62 percent, Medicare 54 percent, highways and mass transit 30
percent, community and regional development 137 percent. And, of
course, all of that was done with borrowed money.
* Republican tax cuts flooded the treasury with ready cash, and
Republicans used that to buy loyalty — exactly what the people
booted Democrats from office for doing. They tried to buy seniors
with Medicare Part D, farmers with agriculture subsidies, parents
with No Child Left Behind, and small pockets of voters everywhere
with local pork barrel projects. They used the U.S. Treasury as a
political slush fund, just as they had attacked the Democrats for
doing.
* After promising to shrink the federal bureaucracy, Republicans
vastly increased the federal role in education, enormously expanded
Medicare, and created an entirely new and gigantic federal
bureaucracy, which, when needed, functioned exactly as
conservatives have always said huge federal bureaucracies will
function: poorly.
* After accusing President Clinton of using the military for
political gain, Republicans burdened the Pentagon and Homeland
Security with numerous unnecessary pork barrel projects and, worst
of all, let domestic political concerns prevent them from
effectively prosecuting a war. Is there any non-political
justification for the President’s refusal to commit more troops to
Iraq and Afghanistan? Militarily, it makes zero sense to send so
few troops to secure so much land. But politically, the more troops
sent overseas, the more flag-draped coffins sent home. Bush has put
domestic political concerns above national security, which
Republicans said they would never do.
On point after point after point, Republicans promised
conservative governance and instead delivered something else
entirely. Only on taxes have they been true to their word. For
those lies, Republicans deserve the ire of the American people.
Conservatism, however, does not.
IT IS IMPERATIVE THAT CONSERVATIVES remind Americans that the
Republican agenda of the Bush years has not been a conservative
one. That is a big challenge. The media continue to refer to most
Republicans, including Bush, as “conservative.” A May 31 AP story
is a good example of the myth that the Republican Party is a
conservative party. “In a party dominated by conservatives, the
last of the Northeast GOP moderates face several daunting
election-year trends…” begins the story’s second paragraph.
A party dominated by conservatives? Not at all true. But that is
the perception, and conservatives must break it. Though it is too
late to challenge apostate Republican incumbents in many state
primaries, there are some things conservatives can do. First and
foremost, they can vent their anger.
They can write letters to the editor (politicians and their
aides read these closely), and mail, e-mail, and call their
representatives and senators. They can call their local radio talk
shows and even copy the Club For Growth’s excellent practice of
targeting non-conservatives with issue ads in the local media
(issue ads, thankfully, are still legal at the moment). They have
to let Republican incumbents know in no uncertain terms that if
they do not fall in line immediately they will have no support in
November.
President Bush’s amnesty for illegal aliens appears dead thanks
to vocal opposition back home. Americans let their elected
representatives know that they would not stand for such
foolishness, and Congress got the message.
Conservatives have to do that on every other issue. It is not
enough for pundits to write columns and National Review to
pen scathing editorials. Grass-roots conservatives who used to make
up the GOP’s most loyal base have to speak up, now. They have to
tell Republicans what they want, not just complain to each other
about the jerks who promised to govern conservatively and then
didn’t.
At the same time, they have to make clear to non-conservatives
that they do not stand behind the GOP’s recent governance. If
Democrats do retake Congress, or even make significant gains, they
will proclaim it a victory against conservatism. It would be no
such thing. It would be a victory against lying, corruption,
incompetence, and a blatant disrespect for the intelligence of the
American voter. Conservatives have to separate their own message of
responsible, frugal governance from what the Republicans have
implemented, and they have to do it now.
THE AVERAGE AMERICAN VOTER must understand that there is another
alternative method of governing — one that he supported only a
dozen years ago. It might be too late to salvage the Republican
wreckage before November, but as long as the public knows that
conservative ideas still represent a promising and viable
alternative to the current mess that the Republicans have made in
Washington, there is hope for 2008. If the public becomes convinced
that conservatism is synonymous with the policies of the past five
years, the conservative movement could sink along with the GOP’s
majority. And that truly would spell bad news for everyone for
years to come.
A common refrain on America’s college campuses is that no one
really knows that communism doesn’t work because true communism has
never been tried. Of course, communism’s true believers will never
accept that pogroms, famine and massive state repression lie at the
very foundation of the ideology. The question for America is
whether it believes that huge budget deficits, clumsy foreign
policy and political corruption form the foundation of
conservatism.
Conservatives need to show America what those goateed professors
with portraits of Trotsky on their walls cannot show: that their
program for the country should not be condemned because in truth it
has never been tried, and if America wants good, responsible,
frugal governance, real conservatism is the only option.
