I read through George Packer's New
Yorker article, "The Fall of Conservatism"
that Stacy mentioned yesterday, and I also would take issue with
it. Rather than starting with the development of intellectual
conservatism in the 1940s or 1950s, or of political conservatism
with Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign, Packer chooses to begin his
article -- and frame his entire piece -- around Pat Buchanan and
Richard Nixon crafting the Southern strategy in 1966. Most
conservatives would not even consider Nixon -- who supported price
controls and guaranteed income -- to be an ideological
conservative. But Packer would rather taint the entire intellectual
and political movement with two of its most controversial figures
from the outset. All political success for conservatives, to
Packer, seems to stem from dividing the country and running on a
negative appeal. Only deep into the article does he get to Ronald
Reagan, who he begrudgingly acknowledges "turned conservatism into
a forward-looking, optimistic ideology" before criticizing him.
But what really bugs me about about the article is, through an
over-reliance on quotes from David Brooks, believing in limiting
the size of government gets reduced to a "dogma." Among the quotes
offered by Brooks are, "The only thing that held the coalition
together was hostility to government" and, on the government
shutdown:
At the end of that year, when the radical
conservatives in the Gingrich Congress shut down the federal
government, they learned that the American public was genuinely
attached to the modern state. "An anti-government philosophy turned
out to be politically unpopular and fundamentally un-American,"
Brooks said. "People want something melioristic, they want
government to do things."
To Brooks, evidently, an aversion to the expansion of government
power is a sort of affectation, akin to not liking the color green
or the taste of fried flounder. But conservatives believe in
limiting the size and scope of government not because of some
random whim, but because it is a necessary way of preserving
liberty. Unlike anarchists, we believe that government is necessary
to protect individual rights -- through a police force that catches
criminals, a court system that prosecutes them and settles disputes
among individuals, and a military that protects us from foreign
threats. Far from being "fundamentally un-American," these are
precisely the principles on which the nation was founded. The
Declaration of Independence reads that "governments are instituted
among men" to "secure" our unalienable rights of life, liberty, and
the pursuit --not attainment -- of happiness. The U.S. Constitution
also envisioned a federal government of limited scope. As the
decades have gone by, of course, Americans' conceptions of what the
government should do has been greatly augmented, and we'll never
return to where we were in the 19th Century. But conservative
efforts to push back the expansion of government, however futile,
have been rooted in the belief that people are less free when they
are forced to hand over a large percentage of their wages to
support government programs that they have no use for and when
businesses are strangled by regulations. These beliefs are informed
by the experience of totalitarianism in the 20th Century, which
demonstrated the close relationship between political and economic
oppression.
That's not to say that Packer (or some of the people he quotes)
don't have any legitimate points about the difficulties facing the
modern conservative movement, both politically and intellectually.
I do think that conservatives need to do a better job of explaining
why our principles are relevant to the challenges America faces
today. But I see a big danger in conservatives adopting a myopic
view, making snap judgments based a few lousy election cycles for
Republicans, and concluding that they
should stop worrying and come to love big government -- as long as
it's family friendly. I never supported limiting the size of
government as a political operative who thought it was a winning
political strategy, but because I believe in individual liberty. So
I'm not going to stop fighting encroachments of the state because
David Brooks thinks it's un-American and David Frum has determined
it's not an effective political strategy for the Republican
Party.
topics:
Business, Constitution, Military, Conservatism
