Core Values Conservatism

I've been meaning to get back to the topic of the (bleak?) future of conservatism.

Robert Stacy McCain responded to some of my recent essays in his post, "Meghan and 'Progressive Republicans'." And now Ross Douthout's new essay is discussing "The Case For Small Government," which is a commentary on Charles Murray's recent lecture to the American Enterprise Institutute, "The Happiness of the People." Douthat disagrees with Murray's economistic foundations for conservatism's future. That is to say, Douthat suggests we look past a "costs and benefits" approach to ideological rejuvenation on the right. There should be, for example, more to the debate than questions of "how big the American welfare state should be overall, and whether we should copy Western Europe or disdain it."

I'm simplifying here, so be sure to check out both Douthat and Murray, but I think the question of "how big should the welfare state be" is a good one for elaborating some of the issues I've raised, and for addressing the direction that Robert Stacy McCain's been taking the discussion.

Now, McCain's taking on the earlier advocacy on the right for a "national greatness conservatism," and in particular he's hammering David Brooks, who's been in the news lately as an Obama administration lackey. McCain's right, of course, and the Brookes and Meghan McCains of the party might as well join up with the Democrats, for if we adopt the "moderate" programs these folks are pushing, we might as well have a one-party Democratic state.

But I want to return to my earlier discussion of "Constitutional Conservatism," which draws on the recent essay by Peter Berkowitz at Policy Review. Recall the two key themes Berkowitz offered as a way to move conservatism foward: (1) big government is here to stay, and the right needs to vigorously advocate limiting the growth of government, rather than speaking of a rollback to a "small" state, and (2) the sexual revolution is permanent, and the folks on the right need to recognize the reality and accommodate themselves to the facts.

Robert Stacy McCain has focused on the economic dimensions of the Obama administration's neo-socialist program, and McCain's privileged "economic liberty and limited government" at the expense of an activist program on the right for social conservatism (or so it seems to me).

Now, that's fine, and McCain makes a powerful and moral case for a political economy of liberty. Part of this theme, however, is that George W. Bush was not conservative, and while that's true (as the administration expanded big government in the domestic realm with the Medicare prescription drug benefit, among other things), the Bush administration's attempt to promote an "opportunity society" has either been forgotten by those disgusted with the last eight years of GOP power, or simply not taken as seriously as it should be as a way to get back on track. So, I think folks on the right need to be more clear about what they're saying: Are we just saying "no" to the Obama administration's power grab - a good thing in itself - or are we offering a realistic limited government agenda that is principled but pragmatic - and by pragmatism, I don't mean the David Brooks spineless variety.

So, in my estimation, we need more specifics: The discussion above should not be construed to rule out actually reducing the size of government in some areas. How about returning to calls to eliminate whole cabinet departments? Commerce and Education can go, as far as I'm concerned, and whatever regulatory or policy programs and institutions in place in those agencies can be downsized - especially in the education realm - and transferred to other departments. I'm sure a few other cabinets might be eliminated, say, Homeland Security, which was simply the creation of a war-on-terrorism bureaucratic gargantuan that fared poorly in its biggest test on the Gulf Coast in 2005. Thus, by all means, let's think about not only better economic policies that preserve liberty (low taxes), but we should also return to the ideas of Barry Goldwater, who in fact offered a plan to downsize the federal state in his classic manifesto, Conscience of a Conservative. So yes, limit governmental power, and reduce bureaucracy where we can, but be specific and not ideologically dogmatic. Perhaps 50 years ago we could have reduced the size of government by 10 percent annually, in the process of shifting to state-centered federalism. But I'm not confident that such a program is likely today. Again, conservatives might achieve some key reductions as outlined above, but on the whole we need to be stressing liminting government, and especially restraining the continued growth of government as that being promised by the political logic and program of today's secular collectivists.

I'm neoconservative, of course, and McCain's right to remind us that popular excoriations of the neoconservative agenda are mostly, in fact, demonic caricatures of the paradigm. Such demonization is popular with the America-bashing left, and the attacks have actually been successful in delegitimizing the neoconservative movement as a (perceived) viable foundation for moving forward on the right. That's regrettable, naturally, since much of the conservative successes during the Reagan years were in the social realm of families and values, and such traditionalist policies have their ideational foundations in the hot-house fermentation of neoconservatism's attacks on the left's social degenerations.

Gabriel Schoenfeld, in a recent op-ed at the Wall Street Journal, provided a needed reminder that the "neocons" have been the leaders in promoting personal responsibility and social traditionalism. I think Schoenfeld's naive to suggest that President Obama will return to his earlier intimations of "New Democrat" policy sensibilities. The fact is that the GOP's the right home for an agenda that takes personal responsiblity and morals seriously, and it's frankly not at all difficult to meld a new conservative ideological agenda that combines economic liberty with social values (see, for example, Richard Land's recent piece on this, "Stay Faithful to Core Values").

Thus, let me be clear: I do not discount the need for an economic agenda promoting liberty. Lord knows the Obama administration's going to use every opportunity it gets to expand government, and the "economic crisis" has worked wonders for both progressive fortunes and the left's destruction of freedom. What I do affirm is that conservatives will be better off seeking to limit government's expansion by acknowledging, as Berkowitz does, that "the era of big government is here to stay," and the folks on the right "should retire talk of small government and concentrate on limiting government."

I do not fully agree with Berkowitz on his social policy recommendations, however. He suggests, for example, that the right "should refrain from using government to enforce the traditional understanding" of society's norms and institutions. While we ought not expand government to "enforce" traditionalism, conservative politics and the conservative policy agenda must advocate for the restoration of values as the basis for a good social order.

One of the most important messages in Goldwater's Conscience of a Conservative is that man is not simply an "economic creature." That is to say, liberty is not just a matter of limiting the state for the preservation of economic freedom. Full measure of human liberty is both economic and spiritual, and hence to talk of constitutional originalism, as does Robert Stacy McCain at his post, is to recognize that the Founders' limitations on state power were designed to preserve the inherent natural rights of man, and these include life, liberty, and property; and the notion of life is considered here in the most robust sense as not just the preservation of the body itself, but further in the fullfillment of God's capacity in man as a spiritual being. As Goldwater notes, conservatives have "learned that economic and spiritual aspects of man's nature are inextricably entwined." We cannot separate one from the other, so while I do not disagree with Robert Stacy McCain, I'm looking for a conservatism that takes social values as essential to the premise of limited government and constitutional liberalism (that is, "hard classical liberalism," in the libertarian sense).

All of this is to say that we need to advance virtue without "paternalistic assistance from government laws, rules, and regulations," to borrow directly from the thoughts of Jason Pappas. We will need some version of this model if the GOP is to remain a conservative party. How all the various factions can work things out to form a viable electoral coalition remains to be seen, but I'm convinced that both classically liberal conservatives and social traditionalists will combine to make the core alliance that will drive the Republicans back to power.

The Resurgence of Small Government Conservatism?

I've been marveling over the diversity among Republicans of late on the question of which set of conservative values will prevail in the post-Bush era. The current ferment has got me thinking: Is Reagan the model, as he's often mentioned in the debate over the conservative future?

Some readers might recall Time's cover story earlier this year, "How the Right Went Wrong." The article was a paean to President Reagan:

These are gloomy and uncertain days for conservatives, who — except for the eight-year Clinton interregnum — have dominated political power and thought in this country since Reagan rode in from the West. Their tradition goes back even further, to Founding Fathers who believed that people should do things for themselves and who shook off a monarchy in their conviction that Big Government is more to be feared than encouraged. The Boston Tea Party, as Reagan used to point out, was an antitax initiative.

But everything that Reagan said in 1985 about "the other side" could easily apply to the conservatives of 2007. They are handcuffed to a political party that looks unsettlingly like the Democrats did in the 1980s, one that is more a collection of interest groups than ideas, recognizable more by its campaign tactics than its philosophy. The principles that propelled the movement have either run their course, or run aground, or been abandoned by Reagan's legatees. Government is not only bigger and more expensive than it was when George W. Bush took office, but its reach is also longer, thanks to the broad new powers it has claimed as necessary to protect the homeland. It's true that Reagan didn't live up to everything he promised: he campaigned on smaller government, fiscal discipline and religious values, while his presidency brought us a larger government and a soaring deficit. But Bush's apostasies are more extravagant by just about any measure you pick.

One of the Bush-era apostates is Michael Gerson, who's got a new book out, Heroic Conservatism. Gerson's a former Bush administration chief speechwriter, and he champions a vision of a muscular, missionary conservativism that's a far cry from the small-government groundings of the Reagan Revolution.

Ross Douthat's got a review of Gerson's book up today at Slate, "The Future of the GOP." He makes a powerful case that Gerson's "heroic conservatism" is the wrong remedy for what's ailing the Republican Party. While Gerson promotes big government policies and Wilsonian idealism in international affairs, those to the left of him (it might be thought) will not warm to his ideas with his ties to the Bush administration:

Nor is Gerson likely to find a ready audience among conservatives. His year as a [Washington] Post columnist has earned him few friends to his right, given the regularity with which he has piously scolded his fellow Republicans for being too partisan, too tightfisted, and too bigoted. (In a characteristic column, he defended Bush's proposed immigration reform by accusing its foes of betraying Jesus Christ himself: "The Christian faith teaches that our common humanity is more important than our nationality. That all of us, ultimately, are strangers in this world and brothers to the bone; and all in need of amnesty.") The publication of Heroic Conservatism was met by a predictable burst of criticism from conservative pundits, in which National Review's Mark Krikorian summed up the general anti-Gerson consensus by demanding: "Why is this man called a conservative?"

It's a fair question. As the world understood the term conservative in, say, 1965, Gerson isn't one. Like many Americans who've crowded into the GOP over the last four decades—blue-collar Catholics and Jewish neoconservatives as well as evangelicals—the militantly libertarian spirit of the midcentury Right is largely foreign to him. But on the road from Goldwater to Reagan, and thence to George W. Bush, the conservative movement transformed itself from a narrow claque into a broad church, embracing anyone and everyone who called themselves an enemy of liberalism, whether they were New York intellectuals or Orange County housewives. This "here comes everybody" quality has been the American Right's great strength over the past three decades, and a Republican Party that aspires to govern America can ill afford to read the Gersons of the world—social conservatives with moderate-to-liberal sympathies on economics—out of its coalition.

Particularly since Gerson's central argument is basically correct: American conservatism needs to stand for something besides government-cutting if it hopes to regain the majority that George W. Bush won (and quickly lost). At its best, Heroic Conservatism is a necessary corrective to the right's mythologizing of its own past, which cultivates the pretense that small-government purity has always been the key to Republican success. By way of rebuttal, Gerson points out that conservatives tend to win elections only when they convince voters that they mean to reform the welfare state, rather than do away with it entirely. This was true of 1990s success stories like Rudy Giuliani in New York and Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin; it was true of the Contract With America, a far less ideological document than right-wing nostalgists make it out to be; and it was true of Ronald Reagan himself, who slowed the growth of government but hardly cut it to the bone. The insight isn't unique to Gerson; it dates back to the original, '70s-vintage neoconservatives. But it seems to be slipping away from the contemporary GOP, whose primary contenders—save perhaps for Mike Huckabee—are falling over one another to prove their small-government bona fides, and whose activists have persuaded themselves that tax cuts and pork-busting will be their tickets back to power.

Speaking of Huckabee: His rise in the polls is garning attention among conservative pundits. Robert Novak hammered him in a column today over at the Washington Post:

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem.

The rise of evangelical Christians as the force that blasted the GOP out of minority status during the past generation always contained an inherent danger: What if these new Republican acolytes supported not merely a conventional conservative but one of their own? That has happened with Huckabee, a former Baptist minister educated at Ouachita Baptist University and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The danger is a serious contender for the nomination who passes the litmus test of social conservatives on abortion, gay marriage and gun control but is far removed from the conservative-libertarian model of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan.

So who's to fill the yearning for a return to the Goldwater/Reagan consensus? Can it be Ron Paul, who's quixotic White House bid is stirring the souls of small government types across the land?

Patrick Ruffini, over at Townhall, pumps up such speculation on Paul's unusual ascendance in his piece today, "Ron Paul Has Won":

In the past few months, Ron Paul has dramatically raised the profile of libertarianism inside the Republican Party. My small-l libertarian friends seem more comfortable describing themselves as such, even though they’ll go out of their way to disassociate themselves from Ron Paul and the big-L kind.

Libertarianism in the GOP took a big hit on 9/11, and it’s slowly coming back, with Ron Paul as the catalyst. Its underlying ideals still have appeal well beyond the cramped confines of the LP. If it’s possible to be known as a pro-life, pro-war, pro-wiretapping libertarian, then sign me up. Markos too brands himself a “libertarian Democrat,” though he’s never read Hayek and supports big government social programs.

Some campaigns can win big without ever coming close to winning an actual contest. Pat Robertson’s 1988 campaign signaled that Christian Conservatives had arrived in the GOP. Ron Paul is doing the same for libertarians. This is not a counterweight to the religious right per se, since Paul is identified as pro-life, but it does potentially open up a new army of activists on the right not primarily motivated by social/moral issues.

Not every losing single-issue candidate succeeds like this. Immigration-restrictionists still lack an outlet in the GOP, thanks to Tom Tancredo’s embarrassing tone-deafness as a candidate. Sam Brownback’s campaign had hoped to galvanize single-issue pro-lifers, but was hobbled by his dry persona. Duncan Hunter looks mostly like a campaign for Secretary of Defense.

Assuming Paul loses, where does small-l libertarianism go from here? His movement already did the smart thing by making peace with social conservatism. Libertarianism is no longer aligned with libertine stances on abortion and gay rights.

To become the ascendant ideology within the GOP, I suspect they’ll have to find a way to do the same thing on national security. The war on terror writ large is the one big thing social and economic conservatives agree on, and Ron Paul is vocally aligned against both.

Mainstream Republican libertarians might be gung-ho for Paul’s small-government idealism, they might adopt Glenn Reynoldsish skepticism of the homeland security bureaucracy, and even John McCain has lately made a thing of ripping the military-industrial complex, but there is no way — I repeat NO WAY — they will embrace Ron Paul if he continues to blame America for 9/11 and imply that America is acting illegally in defending itself around the globe. Even if they aren’t the biggest fans of the war, most people that are available for Ron Paul on the right are by temperament patriotic and will never vote for someone who sounds like Noam Chomsky.

Ruffini captures a tremendous amount of tension within the GOP's small government comeback movement. It's a tension, in my opinion, that marks a fatal direction for conservatives and the GOP. There's nothing wrong with seeking a return to fiscal conservatism (notice how Fred Barnes argues this week that shrinking the federal government is not impossible, with references to Reagan administration spending discipline). Yet, notwithstanding the concerns of the most hard-core libertarian Republicans, the expansive scope of government ought not to be something modern conservatives should abhor.

First, a dramatic reduction of the size and scope of the federal government's reach and power is utopian. Trends since World War II have dramatically increased the power of the federal government over the states, in areas as diverse as national security policy to local community development block grants. Second, there remain too many areas of both foreign and domestic policy that cry out for a combination of innovative thinking and can-do pragmatism.

On that note, I like how Douthat concluded his review of Gerson's book at Slate:

To last, and matter, conservatism needs an agenda that partakes less of Gerson's evangelical moralism and more of the realism that defined the original neoconservatives. It needs a foreign policy whose idealism is leavened with a greater sense of limits than this administration has displayed; and a domestic policy that seeks to draw contrasts with liberalism, not to imitate it, by emphasizing responsibility rather than charity and respect rather than compassion. Above all, it needs to think as much about meeting the concerns of working- and middle-class Americans, the constituents that first Nixon and then Reagan won for the GOP, as it does about the dissidents and addicts that a "heroic conservatism" would set out to save.

Given this warning, where do we go from here?

My neoconservatism supports a muscular national security policy, and a large, well-funded defense bureaucracy to back it (and I deeply distrust the antiwar fringe libertarians backing the Paul campaign). I also see that with our international preponderance comes great responsibility. Perhaps we'll need more prudence in a post-Bush world, but we should not recoil from the robust use of power to achieve American interests.

Note, though, that some observers forget that neoconservatism also offers a powerful domestic agenda of support for traditional values, personal responsibility, and the rejection of the social welfare paternalism of Great Society liberalism (we can do domestic policy, but we must be more judicious in our approach and more effective in implementation). Neoconservatives are especially upset by the descent of traditional morality as a guiding ethos for the new generations (a distrust the marks another break from doctrinaire libertarianism).

In other words, government is not the problem, but is a possible solution to many policy dilemmas. The key, I would argue, is to move with intelligence and pragmatism. An ideological agenda along these lines - one that recognizes that government, i.e., the state - holds a promising avenue for a restoration of conservative ideology after the Bush presidency.

Core Values and Foreign Policy

I've been reading Dan Riehl's posts the last couple of days. Dan's fleshing out what it means to be conservative in our new age, and in the context of Ross Douthat's appointment to the New York Times, he's got some particularly pointed words for neoconservatism, and he laments more broadly the disgraced ideological fragmentation on the right:

Any real voice of conservatism today, and it hardly exists, has been all but relegated to radio talk where it's often too easily marginalized as a sort of carnival bark, even in cases when it is not.

Truth be told and in what I hope is a passing mood, I'm mostly sick of it and hard-pressed to find good reason for good conservatives not to simply go off the grid. If the day ever comes for conservatives to have a serious voice again, I'm unconvinced it will be through the GOP and I know for a fact, it'll never be through the New York Times. And the events that would have to take place for conservatives to have a meaningful voice again are so profound, I can't bring myself to entertain the thought just now.

I actually touched on this a bit in my post yesterday, "Core Values Conservatism."

I was writing primarily about domestic policy in that post, however. Recall in particular the point Peter Berkowitiz made the other day, when he suggested the path forward for partisans of the right is to grapple with the realities of big government and to accommodate the sexual revolution. I have some issues with Berkowitz's argument, as I noted at my post, but here I need to reiterate Berkowitz's assumption that the future direction of conservatism includes a robust, forward-looking foreign policy orientation as given. The U.S. is certainly in for some retrenchment in foreign affairs, but much of America's difficulties in foreign policy will be found more so in the economic realm than the strategic. As the news this week showed, for example, for all the talk that China might dump its holdings of U.S. Treasury securities, "Beijing has not given indications of any major shift in its current investments or future buying plans." Moreover, at the level of the international system, for all the talk of American decline, there's no viable challenger to U.S. preponderance, and recent poll findings suggest that U.S. public support for the United Nations is at an all-time low. When the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold. That is, our economic and political fortunes have dramatic implications for the well-being of the world community. The primacy of America's outward orientation is here to stay, and folks who identify as paleoconservatives, who call for a "come home America" isolationism, are not only near-sighted to America's strategic interests, but unpatriotic as well.

Recall yesterday, in "Soft on Our Enemies," I mentioned Barry Goldwater's libertarian nationalism in foreign policy. Goldwater, whose 1964 campaign is often seen as the beginning of the modern conservative movement, evinced an intense clarity on the nature of the Soviet threat during the early Cold War. His theme? Liberty at home depends on security abroad. This verity is no less appropriate in the age of Islamist terrorism than it was during the era of Marxist-Leninist revolutionary expansionism.

So, let me shift here to a brief discussion of neoconservatism. I want to suggest that not only has neonservatism been wrongly and unnecessarily identified as an exclusive theory of foreign policy, there's also a natural affinity between classically-liberal conservatism and the neoconservative orientation. Indeed, the future of the right will depend on some sort of strategic alliance between "hard classical-liberals"and socially-traditional neoconservatives.

As Robert Stacy McCain recently pointed out, neoconservatives are former liberals who were mugged by reality. While Irving Kristol is usually held up as the central example, I like Norman Podhoretz and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Their writings on race (Podhoretz, "My Negro Problem - and Ours") and social welfare policy (Moynihan, "The Negro Family: The Case For National Action") are among the best in public intellectualism in the last 50 years. Not only that, the policy successes of the neoconservative paradigm were achieved in the Reagan administration's righteous assault on big-government handouts to "welfare queens," for example, and Charles Murray's argument that public-assistance makes poverty worse was validated by the GOP's 1996 welfare reform legislation. Whereas some have suggested that neocons are indifferent to the right's pro-life agenda, this is more a function of individual policy priorities - and a faltering devotion to the neoconservative moral vision - than an explicity hostility to pro-life politics.

Keep in mind that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin - who is the darling of social conservatives - is doctrinally neoconservative in her robust embrace of inalienable rights worldwide, and in her vision of American's exceptionalism in both the domestic and international realms.

All of this might remain controversial for some traditionalists, perhaps Dan Riehl and others. But folks must keep in mind that erstwhile (neo)conservatives such as David Brooks, David Frum, Richard Perle are soft-and-squishy self-promoters who have abandoned the populist persuasion that's necessary for the rejuvenation of the political right. These people are cancers on the cause. They'll push a fluffy electoral centrism over the clarity and vision of ethical rationalism.

As I noted previously, the way forward for the GOP is to build an alliance between between hard classical-liberals and socially-traditional neoconservatives. If the "neocon" label is essential "toxic" for many on the right, that's fine. Neoconservatism preceded the Bush doctrine and "compassionate conservatism." Its clarity of moral purpose will remain, and for building a victory coalition going forward, I'll simply be advocating a "core values conservatism," one that combines the primacy of the pro-life movement for total human dignity with moral clarity in international politics - a combination that Barry Goldwater advanced for a strong and successul ideological right in earlier decades.

Conservative Troubles in '08?

By now it's well established that contemporary conservatism is in disarray. Are the reports of conservatism's death greatly exaggerated?

A couple of today's authors at the Washington Post don't think so, particularly Jonah Goldberg and George Will.

Start with Goldberg:

As pretty much everyone has noticed, the Republican race hasn't exactly followed any of the scripts laid out for it. Mitt Romney has been hacked apart like the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." John McCain's fortunes -- which had been bouncing up and down like a printout of Dick Cheney's EKG -- have suddenly spiked northward after his victory in New Hampshire. Fred Thompson ran a brilliant "testing the waters" campaign from his front porch, but when he tried to walk on the water, he sank like a basset hound trying to swim. Pushing the poor beast under the waves was Mike Huckabee, whose down-home folksiness makes Thompson look like David Niven.

Huckabee's surprise surge in Iowa has made him this season's pitchfork populist, albeit a much nicer one -- sort of a Disneyland Pat Buchanan. Then there's Ron Paul. He started out as the designated wack job, then became so successful that the Des Moines Register had to cast Alan Keyes in the role of hopeless firebrand wingnut for a brief campaign cameo. And it's a sign of how poorly Rudy Giuliani -- once the indisputable front-runner -- has done that I'm now mentioning him only after Paul.

Of course, this could all change with the next contest.

Much of this chaos is attributable to the fact that this is a very flawed field, or at least one ill-suited for the times we're in. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, then this year's Republican field looks downright dromedarian. This slate of candidates has everything a conservative designer could want -- foreign policy oomph, business acumen, Southern charm, Big Apple chutzpah, religious conviction, outsider zeal, even libertarian ardor -- but all so poorly distributed. As National Review put it in its editorial endorsement of Romney (I am undecided, for the record): "Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything -- all the traits, all the positions -- we are looking for."

But conservatives should contemplate the possibility that the fault lies less in the stars -- or the candidates -- than in ourselves. Conservatism, quite simply, is a mess these days. Conservative attitudes are changing. Or, more accurately, the attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives are changing.

How are they changing?

Well, check Goldberg, but the main point seems to be that "get-government-off-my-back" conservatism isn't currenlty hip in the electorate. Pent-up social demands have put conservatism in a bind: If small-state conservatism is going to work, markets and limited government still need to produce political, socio-economic outcomes in which a majority feel like they have a chance - that their children will have a chance. It's not clear this is case, with the economy, health care, fiscal stress, and international conflict all putting strains on government's ability to stay small and perform effectively.

How will this play out in the election this year, after the drama of the primary season has passed, and the press and politicians get down to offering tangible solutions to a considerably stressed populace? Can conservatives stay vital, be competitive, and offer hope?

George Will, looking beyond the early primaries last week, sees no positive dynamics on the right:

Nov. 4 could be their most disagreeable day since Nov. 3, 1964. Actually, this November could be even worse, because in 1964 Barry Goldwater's loss of 44 states served a purpose, the ideological reorientation and revitalization of the party. Which Republican candidate this year could produce a similarly constructive loss?

Today, all the usual indicators are dismal for Republicans. If that broad assertion seems counterintuitive, produce a counterexample. The adverse indicators include: shifts in voters' identifications with the two parties (Democrats now 50 percent, Republicans 36 percent); the tendency of independents (they favored Democratic candidates by 18 points in 2006); the fact that Democrats hold a majority of congressional seats in states with 303 electoral votes; the Democrats' strength and the Republicans' relative weakness in fundraising; the percentage of Americans who think the country is on the "wrong track"; the Republicans' enthusiasm deficit relative to Democrats' embrace of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, one of whom will be nominated.

Iowa and New Hampshire were two of the three states (New Mexico was the third) that changed partisan alignment between 2000 and 2004 -- Iowa turning red, New Hampshire blue. This month, Democratic participation was twice the Republican participation in Iowa and almost 22 percent higher in New Hampshire. George W. Bush won Iowa by just 0.67 percent of the vote. Whomever the Republicans nominate should assume that he must replace Iowa's seven electoral votes if he is to reach Bush's 2004 total of 286.

Republicans try to take comfort from the fact that 61 Democratic members of Congress represent districts that President Bush carried in 2004. But 37 of those won with at least 55 percent of the vote. Furthermore, 14 Republican representatives won in 2006 by a single percentage point or less.

Granted, in the past 150 years, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter (barely) are the only Democrats to achieve 50 percent of the popular vote. And this year Democrats might still give Republicans the gift of Hillary Clinton, who probably has a popular vote ceiling of 52 percent. A subliminal -- too much so -- subtext of Obama's message is that Clinton cannot receive the big mandate required for big changes: Enactment of Social Security in 1935 followed Franklin Roosevelt's 57.4 percent victory in 1932, and in 1965 Medicare came after Lyndon Johnson's 61 percent victory over Barry Goldwater.

But even if Democrats nominate Clinton, Republicans must remember that Bush's 2.4-point margin of victory in 2004 was unimpressive: In the 12 previous reelections of presidents, the average margin of victory was 12.9 points. Bush's 50.7 percent of the vote in 2004 was the third-smallest for a reelected president (Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton won 49.2 percent in 1916 and 1996, respectively). Kerry's 48.3 percent was the largest ever against a president being reelected. (In the 12 previous reelections, no losing candidate received more than 46.1 percent; nine of the losers received less than 45 percent.)

Tuesday's Republican primary is in one of the nation's worst-governed states. Under a Democratic governor, Michigan has been taxed into a one-state recession. Native son Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate who best understands how wealth is created, might revive his campaign by asking: Whom do you want to be president in 2010 when the Bush tax cuts, which McCain opposed, expire? Can automakers endure more regulations such as the fuel efficiency mandates that climate-fixers such as McCain favor? Do you want a president (Mike Huckabee, proponent of a national sales tax of at least 30 percent) pledged to radically increase the proportion of federal taxes paid by the middle class?

Republicans should try to choose the next president. They cannot avoid choosing how their party will define itself, even if by a loss beneath a worthy banner.

Romney gets a mini-George Will endorsement there. But on the larger analysis, the comparison to keep in mind is Michael Dukakis. The liberal former Massachusetts technocrat was hammered by the Republican Party Machine in 1988. Between outside attack ads and Lee Atwater-style take-no-prisoners political warfare, Dukakis dropped from a 17-point lead in public opinion to a traumatic defeat at the hands of George H.W. Bush.

There's no denying, of course, that '08 is shaping up to be the biggest election year for Democrats in decades. But with Iraq largely off the table as a volatile campaign issue, the Democrats have a huge challenge in presenting an alternative to conservatism that appears both competent and fiscally-prudent.

We're not going back to the New Deal or Great Society. The Democrats would like to...and conservatives need to drive that point home as the election year progresses. Much remains to be seen.

See more analysis at Memeorandum.

Has Anyone Heard From Sam Tanenhaus Lately?

From Robert Stacy McCain, at the American Spectator, "Whatever Happened to Sam Tanenhaus?" (via Instapundit):

HAS ANYONE HEARD from Sam Tanenhaus lately? Many weeks have elapsed since his byline has appeared in print, no one can remember the last time Tanenhaus appeared on TV, and certainly his friends must be deeply worried about him by now. Has Tanenhaus succumbed to chronic depression? Has he gone off on a binge in Las Vegas? Has he met with foul play? The thought of fi ling a missing person’s report has crossed my mind.

Readers may not remember the name Sam Tanenhaus, and may need to be reminded that three years ago the editor of the New York Times book review section was almost ubiquitous as a political commentator. In February 2009, a few weeks after President Obama was inaugurated, the New Republic published a cover story by Tanenhaus entitled, “Conservatism Is Dead: An intellectual autopsy of the movement.” The article was perhaps as remarkable for its length—nearly 6,700 words—as for its argument. According to Tanenhaus, what we had become accustomed to think of as conservatism is not actually conservative at all. The beliefs that animated the American conservative movement from its post-World War II origins to the triumph of Ronald Reagan’s presidency had somehow been replaced by a false consciousness, and the failure of this ersatz imitation produced the fatality to which Tanenhaus presumed to apply his forensic skill, thus: “After George W. Bush’s two terms, conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive ‘culture war’ waged against liberal ‘elites.’”

Any disagreement with the conclusions of this autopsy was brushed aside with a few sentences about conservative leaders who had not “absorbed the full implications of their defeat” and who “offered little apart from self-justifications mixed with harsh appraisals of the Bush years.” This was unacceptable, said Tanenhaus: “What conservatives have yet to do is confront the large but inescapable truth that movement conservatism is exhausted and quite possibly dead.” From there, he waded into the bogs of antiquity, in that misty dawn of conservatism’s emergence from the fever swamps of reaction.Tanenhaus went all the way back to Edmund Burke and then carried readers forward through more recent history to tell a narrative that, strange to say, located the point at which the movement went wrong in its unquestionable victories: the Reagan presidency and the subsequent capture of Congress in 1994. ConServatism was only respectable, it seemed, when it was powerless. Reagan’s success was a triumph of “revanchism” over “realism,” Tanenhaus asserted, while he likened Newt Gingrich—who led the GOP to its first congressional majority in 40 years—to French revolutionary Georges Jacques Danton. “The right, which for so long had deplored the politics of ‘class warfare,’ had become the most adept practitioners of that same politics,” Tanenhaus declared. “They had not only abandoned Burke. They had become inverse Marxists, placing loyalty to the movement—the Reagan Revolution—above their civic responsibilities.”

Continue reading.

Welcome to American Power

Welcome to my new blog, American Power.

I've been meaning to establish a new blogging homepage for some time, since the "Burkean" in Burkean Reflections (my original blog), no longer reflects my fundamental political orientation. The fact is, when I started blogging I had just finished teaching a new course, Introduction to Political Theory. More so than other political philosophies covered in the class, I was drawn to Burkean thought for its emphasis on custom and tradition. I especially liked Burke's emphasis on continuity in culture - on prescriptive authority found in a nation's historical associations and traditions, and how such bases of authority formed a bulwark against revolutionary movements, and the rise of authoritarian leadership. I thus thought Burkean conservatism would provide excellent foundations for a traditionalist's analyisis of poltics and world affairs.

Yet I've become increasingly distressed under a Burkean identity of classical conservatism. While Burke will remain a key pillar of my thinking on the best social order, my forward orientation on America power and U.S. foreign policy diverges substantially from orthodox conceptions of Burkean restraint in foreign affairs. What's more, I've been disgusted, frankly, by some of the uses of Burke among some old-guard conservatives, who've championed Burke in a program of outright American isolationism and reactionary race doctrines.

Moreover, a couple of recent articles further convinced me that it was time to firmly authenticate the neoconservative foundations of my blogging project. One of these is a New York Times essay by David Brooks, which argues that the current GOP crisis is explained by the party's shift away from Burkean foundationalism:

Modern conservatism begins with Edmund Burke. What Burke articulated was not an ideology or a creed, but a disposition, a reverence for tradition, a suspicion of radical change.

When conservatism came to America, it became creedal. Free market conservatives built a creed around freedom and capitalism. Religious conservatives built a creed around their conception of a transcendent order. Neoconservatives and others built a creed around the words of Lincoln and the founders.

Over the years, the voice of Burke has been submerged beneath the clamoring creeds. In fact, over the past few decades the conservative ideologies have been magnified, while the temperamental conservatism of Burke has been abandoned.

Over the past six years, the Republican Party has championed the spread of democracy in the Middle East. But the temperamental conservative is suspicious of rapid reform, believing that efforts to quickly transform anything will have, as Burke wrote “pleasing commencements” but “lamentable conclusions.”

The world is too complex, the Burkean conservative believes, for rapid reform. Existing arrangements contain latent functions that can be neither seen nor replaced by the reformer. The temperamental conservative prizes epistemological modesty, the awareness of the limitations on what we do and can know, what we can and cannot plan.

Over the past six years, the Bush administration has operated on the assumption that if you change the political institutions in Iraq, the society will follow. But the Burkean conservative believes that society is an organism; that custom, tradition and habit are the prime movers of that organism; and that successful government institutions grow gradually from each nation’s unique network of moral and social restraints.

Over the past few years, the vice president and the former attorney general have sought to expand executive power as much as possible in the name of protecting Americans from terror. But the temperamental conservative believes that power must always be clothed in constitutionalism. The dispositional conservative is often more interested in means than ends (the reverse of President Bush) and asks how power is divided before asking for what purpose it is used.

Brooks' essay provides a useful service, which is to push today's GOP to more clearly identify the true ideology conservative partisans ought to genuinely champion. Brooks is correct, of course: Tradition and habit should always be respected. Yet in some areas of public and international life, new demands may impel a tweaking of ideational foundations to fit the needs of the day. The current era is one calling forth such demands, and unlike Brooks, I hold the Bush administration as offering a powerful legacy for the direction of Republican Party conservativism in the decades ahead.

Sure, I know what many readers might be thinking: "Wow, this Professor Douglas has lost his mind! The Bush administration? Sheesh! What a disaster." But I disagree. This administration - like any other in American history - has made mistakes and has often overreached. But President Bush is no intellectual lightweight, despite what detractors may believe (see James Lindsey and Ivo Daalder's, America Unbound, for an early look at the rigorous intellectual foundations for the Bush revolution in international policy). Indeed, Bush's agenda of global democracy promotion is well within the established traditions of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy, from Wilson to Reagan. There's no ignominy in the push to harness U.S. hegemony for the expansion of world freedom.

This point brings me to the second recent article that has affirmed the importance of making more clear the ideological identity for my writing: Joshua Muravchik's October 2007 essay in Commentary Magazine, "The Past, Present, and Future of Neoconservatism." Muravchik makes an awesome case - absolutely no apologies - for the power of neoconservative thought thus far and in the years ahead. The essay offers a fairly comprehensive review of neoconservativism's development. Here are the key elements Muravchik identifies:

First, following Orwell, neoconservatives were moralists. Just as they despised Communism, they felt similarly toward Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic and toward the acts of aggression committed by those dictators in, respectively, Kuwait and Bosnia. And just as they did not hesitate to enter negative moral judgments, neither did they hesitate to enter positive ones. In particular, they were strong admirers of the American experience—an admiration that arose not out of an unexamined patriotism (they had all started out as reformers or even as radical critics of American society) but out of the recognition that America had gone farther in the realization of liberal values than any other society in history. A corollary was the belief that America was a force for good in the world at large.

Second, in common with many liberals, neoconservatives were internationalists, and not only for moral reasons. Following Churchill, they believed that depredations tolerated in one place were likely to be repeated elsewhere—and, conversely, that beneficent political or economic policies exercised their own “domino effect” for the good. Since America’s security could be affected by events far from home, it was wiser to confront troubles early even if afar than to wait for them to ripen and grow nearer.

Third, neoconservatives, like (in this case) most conservatives, trusted in the efficacy of military force. They doubted that economic sanctions or UN intervention or diplomacy, per se, constituted meaningful alternatives for confronting evil or any determined adversary.

To this list, I would add a fourth tenet: namely, the belief in democracy both at home and abroad. This conviction could not be said to have emerged from the issues of the 1990’s, although the neoconservative support for enlarging NATO owed something to the thought that enlargement would cement the democratic transformations taking place in the former Soviet satellites. But as early as 1982, Ronald Reagan, the neoconservative hero, had stamped democratization on America’s foreign-policy agenda with a forceful speech to the British Parliament. In contrast to the Carter administration, which held (in the words of Patricia Derian, Carter’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights) that “human-rights violations do not really have very much to do with the form of government,” the Reagan administration saw the struggle for human rights as intimately bound up in the struggle to foster democratic governance. When Reagan’s Westminster speech led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy, the man chosen to lead it was Carl Gershman, a onetime Social Democrat and a frequent contributor to COMMENTARY. Although not an avowed neoconservative, he was of a similar cast of mind.

This mix of opinions and attitudes still constitutes the neoconservative mindset. The military historian Max Boot has aptly labeled it “hard Wilsonianism.” It does not mesh neatly with the familiar dichotomy between “realists” and “idealists.” It is indeed idealistic in its internationalism and its faith in democracy and freedom, but it is hardheaded, not to say jaundiced, in its image of our adversaries and its assessment of international organizations. Nor is its idealism to be confused with the idealism of the “peace” camp. Over the course of the past century, various schemes for keeping the peace—the League of Nations, the UN, the treaty to outlaw war, arms-control regimes—have all proved fatuous. In the meantime, what has in fact kept the peace (whenever it has been kept) is something quite different: strength, alliances, and deterrence. Also in the meantime, “idealistic” schemes for promoting not peace but freedom—self-determination for European peoples after World War I, decolonization after World War II, the democratization of Germany, Japan, Italy, and Austria, the global advocacy of human rights—have brought substantial and beneficial results.

Yet, the ultimate aim of the essay is to provide a robust defense of neoconservatism against its critics. Here's the essay's disussion of the Bush administration and America's national interests following 9/11:

Whether or not a distinct neoconservative position could be discerned in the relatively calm 1990’s, everything changed, with a vengeance, after September 11, 2001....

Bush’s declaration of war against terrorism...[bore] the earmarks of neoconservatism. One can count the ways. It was moralistic, accompanied by descriptions of the enemy as “evil” and strong assertions of America’s righteousness. As Norman Podhoretz puts it in his powerful new book. Bush offered “an entirely unapologetic assertion of the need for and the possibility of moral judgment in the realm of world affairs.” In contrast to the suggestion of many, especially many Europeans, that America had somehow provoked the attacks, Bush held that what the terrorists hated was our virtues, and in particular our freedom. His approach was internationalist: it treated the whole globe as the battlefield, and sought to confront the enemy far from our own doorstep. It entailed the prodigious use of force. And, for the non-military side of the strategy, Bush adopted the idea of promoting democracy in the Middle East in the hope that this would drain the fever swamps that bred terrorists.

It is possible that Bush and Cheney turned to neoconservative sources for guidance on these matters; it is also possible, and more likely, that they reached similar conclusions on their own. In either case, the war against terrorism put neoconservative ideas to the test—and, in the war’s early stages, they passed with flying colors. The Taliban regime was ousted from Afghanistan quickly and without a major commitment of American forces. More striking still, a democratic government was established in Afghanistan—one of the least likely places on earth for it. Muammar Qaddafi, the ruler of Libya and one of the world’s most erratic and violent dictators, abandoned his pursuit of nuclear weapons, and in effect sued to bring his country in from the cold reaches to which Bush had assigned terrorism-supporting states. Finally, Saddam Hussein was toppled from power in a brief campaign with minimum loss of life.

Even more remarkably, Bush’s advocacy of democracy brought an immediate and positive reaction around the region. The Lebanese drove out Syrian forces after a 30-year occupation. In an unprecedented development, elections at various levels of government were held in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and a handful of other Arab states (and the Palestinian Authority), including most dramatically Iraq itself. The collective leadership of the Arab states, meeting at a summit, declared its commitment to “strengthening democracy, expanding political participation, consolidating the values of citizenship and the culture of democracy, the promotion of human rights, the opening of space for civil society, and enabling women to play a prominent role in every field of public life.”

Crowning all these events was one crucial non-event: the absence, despite the almost unanimous forecast of experts, of further terror attacks on the United States.

Muravchik also provides a penetrating response to the claims that American difficulties in Iraq discredit the neoconservative project:

According to one highly publicized article in Vanity Fair, several leading neoconservatives put the blame on poor execution of their ideas on the part of the administration. This is not a very satisfying analysis. Complaints about government incompetence dog every administration, almost always with justice, and there is no convincing evidence that the functioning of the present administration has been worse than that of its predecessors.

More specific and more convincing targets for blame are a few key decisions made by Paul Bremer, the chief of the allied occupation from May 2003 to June 2004, and by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Bremer’s decisions—to disband the Iraqi army and to undertake a purge of Baath party members so sweeping as to dismantle the Iraqi government—have been widely criticized. Whether it would otherwise have been easier to cope with the insurgency is hard to say, though the idea seems plausible. Rumsfeld’s insistence, backed by the President, on deploying to Iraq only a fraction of the troops requested by General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, seems more clearly to have courted trouble—a conclusion brought home all the more sharply by the apparent success of today’s “surge” in manpower.

In any event, the decisions about troop levels and about abolishing Iraq’s existing administrative structure had nothing to do with neoconservative ideas. The most that can fairly be said is that Rumsfeld was an ally of neoconservatives and that some among them, enamored of military technology or influenced by the Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi, endorsed his choices. Besides, whatever measure of responsibility may be placed on neoconservatives in this one matter, it pales in comparison to the errors of the realists in the George H.W. Bush administration who in 1991 chose to leave Saddam in power, and of the liberals in the Clinton administration who allowed Saddam’s defiance of his disarmament obligations to swell steadily over eight long years. Together, these failures left the problem of Saddam Hussein festering for George W. Bush to confront in the aftermath of 9/11, when it appeared in a more ominous light.

This article's a modern classic, and those who so easily and utterly dismiss neoconservatism would be irresponsible to disengage from the arguments it presents. Muravchik concludes the piece by rightly noting that neoconservatism isn't foolproof, that it doesn't hold all the answers. What it does do is offer a coherent and compelling approach to meeting today's international challenges, not the least of these being the war on terror:

By contrast, liberals and realists have no coherent approach to suggest—or at least they have not suggested one. That, after all, is why George W. Bush, searching urgently for a response to the events of September 11, stumbled into the arms of neoconservatism, unlikely though the match seemed. One can always wish that policies were executed better, but for a strategy in the war that has been imposed upon us, neoconservatism remains the only game in town.

Now, to conclude, let me assure readers that my basic blogging style and delivery will continue here at American Power. I remain as firmly committed as ever to providing incisive daily commentary and opinion on the big issues of the day. Indeed, the standards and goals anounced when I first took up blogging - especially my commitment to challenging anti-American nihilism - remain central to my ongoing enterprise. Popular features such as books reviews and my regular top-featured posts - like the Blog Watch series - will continue as unique attractions of this blog.

So, welcome again to all of those visiting my new blogging homepage. As regular readers know, I'm enthusiatic about blogging. Perhaps more importantly, I also greatly appreciate everyone who's been following my writing over this last 18 months or so. Thanks as well to all of those who've helped me get established on the web, a list of names which is much too long to enumerate in this post.

Jesse Helms, the Far-Right, and the GOP

The GOP's right wing debate on John McCain's impending nomination provides a needed round of partisan introspection on the future direction of the conservative movement.

I've discussed the McCain controversy forward and backward, although in more recent posts I've looked beyond talk radio puritanism to examine conservative doctrinal foundations (see "After Optimism? Redefining Conservatism in the Post-Reagan Age").

With growing evidence that McCain's candidacy is forging a new GOP coalition, what historical or ideological lessons might we draw from the far-right's successes in Republican Party politics in the last few decades?

David Greenberg 's new review of Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism, establishes some important points to consider:

Appearing on “Larry King Live” in 1995, Jesse Helms, then the senior senator from North Carolina, fielded a call from an unusual admirer. Helms deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, the caller gushed, “for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers.” Given the rank ugliness of the sentiment — the guest host, Robert Novak, called it, with considerable understatement, “politically incorrect” — Helms could only pause before responding. But the hesitation couldn’t suppress his gut instincts. “Whoops, well, thank you, I think,” he said. With prodding from Novak, he added that he’d been spanked as a child for using the N-word and noted (with a delicious hint of uncertainty), “I don’t think I’ve used it since.” As for the caller’s main point — the virtue of keeping down blacks — it passed without comment.

William A. Link, a historian at the University of Florida, recounts this incident in “Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism,” his hefty life of the blunt, bullheaded, hard-right leader who — more than anyone besides Ronald Reagan — embodied conservatism in the 1980s and beyond. Summoning a measure of sympathy for his rather unsympathetic subject, Link can be overly diplomatic in discussing, as he calls it, Helms’s “racial insensitivity.” But it’s to his credit that even when engaging Helms’s more odious views, he shuns stridency while still managing to demonstrate the centrality of Dixie-bred racism to Helms’s career — and to the book’s larger tale of Southern-style conservatism’s ascent since the 1960s.

By the 1990s, to be sure, this racism was rarely articulated so starkly, or even manifested so consciously, as it was by the talk-show caller. But for more than four decades in public life — first as an influential journalist defending Jim Crow in the 1960s in North Carolina, then as “the most important conservative spokesman in the Senate” — Helms was obsessed with race; it was his political weapon of choice. In 1972, as a recent convert to the Republican Party, he won election to the Senate on school busing and kindred issues. In 1990, he aggressively played the race card — broadcasting a TV ad that showed white hands crumpling a job rejection letter — to repulse a challenge from Harvey Gantt, an African-American. And in his five Senate terms Helms led most of the major fights against racial change, opposing the creation of a Martin Luther King holiday in 1983 and the civil rights bill of 1991.

This disposition, of course, was hardly peculiar to Helms. On the contrary, he succeeded because he tapped into grievances — felt by the unbigoted as well as the nakedly prejudiced — that liberals were promoting black progress at the expense of struggling whites. He may have struck Northern liberals as a backwater buffoon, but his skill in framing racially charged issues, like busing and affirmative action, was instrumental in building today’s conservative movement.

By the end of his career, it is true, Helms’s malign wizardry with racial issues failed him. In 1993 his Senate colleague Carol Moseley Braun, an African-American, bested him in a floor fight over granting an extension of a patent to the United Daughters of the Confederacy for a design that featured the original Confederate flag. So stirring was her appeal that even Howell Heflin of Alabama, himself a Helmsian creature of the Old South, decided to oppose the extension, declaring, “We live today in a different world.” Hence the irony of backlash politics: even as Southern conservatives like Helms soared to power because of an antagonism to rights-based liberalism, they did so amid a national culture that was steadily growing more tolerant, more liberal.

Is the Helmsian model of Republican politics an anachronism?

Greenberg suggests it is. Yet, Harold Ford, who in his 2006 Senate bid was the target of Republican-financed, racially-charged attack advertising, might argue to the contrary.

To be clear: While it's obvious that today's GOP is not rife with Jesse Helms wannabes, the party's far-right faction nevertheless continues to stir allegations of intolerance on issues such as gay rights, immigration, and racial politics (I've been the subject of some myself).

The criticism's usually a caricatured version of principled political positions.

Still, it's hard to miss, for example, some apparent and highly-charged non-white animus in recent controversies over immigration reform in 2006 (and frankly during current debate over McCain's earned legalization for illegals as well). Indeed, some of the current outrage on the far-right over immigration reform would make Jesse Helms downright proud.

Having said that, it remains the case that this year's Republican race has demonstrated the marginalization of conservative talk radio mandarins (many of whose listeners formed the core of conservative partisans Helms brought into the GOP in earlier years).

As it looks now, the McCain campaign's been backed increasingly by moderate Republicans and independents, voters who'll likely form a potential winning Republican coalition in the fall.

Note, also, that while deep conservatives in last night's Potomac primaries backed Mike Huckabee over McCain roughly 2-to-1, exit polling found that three-quarters said they'd be satisfied with him as the GOP standard-bearer in November.

Considering McCain's alleged apostasies among the irrational right, yesterday's election data suggest that conservatives may indeed be different than those in the time of Helms' grip on the movement.

Conservatism: Old, Gloomy, and Dead?

Is conservatism out of touch with today's needs to the point of anachronism? Fareed Zakaria thinks so in his piece, "The End of Conservatism":

Conservatism grew powerful in the 1970s and 1980s because it proposed solutions appropriate to the problems of the age—a time when socialism was still a serious economic idea, when marginal tax rates reached 70 percent, and when the government regulated the price of oil and natural gas, interest rates on checking accounts and the number of television channels. The culture seemed under attack by a radical fringe. It was an age of stagflation and crime at home, as well as defeat and retreat abroad. Into this landscape came Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, bearing a set of ideas about how to fix the world. Over the next three decades, most of their policies were tried. Many worked. Others didn't, but in any event, time passed and the world changed profoundly. Today, as [David] Frum writes, "after three decades of tax cutting, most Americans no longer pay very much income tax." Inflation has been tamed, the economy does not seem overregulated to most, and crime is not at the forefront of people's consciousness. The culture has proved robust, and has in fact been enriched and broadened by its diversity. Abroad, the cold war is won and America sits atop an increasingly capitalist world. Whatever our problems, an even bigger military and more unilateralism are not seen as the solution.

Today's world has a different set of problems. A robust economy has not lifted the median wages of Americans by much. Most workers are insecure about health care, and most corporations are unnerved by its rising costs. Globalization is seen as a threat, bringing fierce competition from dozens of countries. The danger of Islamic militancy remains real and lasting, but few Americans believe they understand the phenomenon or know how best to combat it. They see our addiction to oil and the degradation of the environment as real dangers to a stable and successful future. Most crucially, Americans' views of the state are shifting. They don't want bigger government—a poll last year found that a majority (57 percent) still believe that government makes it harder for people to get ahead in life—but they do want a smarter government, one that can help them be safe, secure and well prepared for political and economic challenges. In this context, conservative slogans sound weirdly anachronistic, like watching an old TV show from ... well, from the 1970s.

"The Emerging Democratic Majority," written in 2002, makes the case that perhaps for these broad reasons, the conservative tilt in U.S. politics is fast diminishing. It gained a brief respite after 9/11, when raised fears and heightened nationalism played to Republican advantages. But the trends are clear. Authors John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note that several large groups have begun to vote Democratic consistently—women, college-educated professionals, youth and minorities. With the recent furor over immigration, the battle for Latinos and Asian-Americans is probably lost for the Republicans. Both groups voted solidly Democratic in 2006.

Political ideologies do not exist in a vacuum. They need to meet the problems of the world as it exists. Ordinary conservatives understand this, which may be why—despite the urgings of their ideological gurus—they have voted for [John] McCain. He seems to understand that a new world requires new thinking.

So McCain's not that conservative after all, eh? He'll be the one to revive a fading, flailing movement, if need be.

But, first, I'm not so pessimistic on conservativism, especially if it means the opposite, the comeback of big-government liberalism. We've tried that approach as well, and the resulting social paternalism and welfare handouts have been expensive and counterproductive.

We do need competent government, but Michael Dukakis can tell you what it's like running on that platform. A little time away from the Bush administration, and we'll hear less attacks on incompetence and more demands for programmatic clarity, especially under a Democratic administration.

In foreign policy, Zakaria's area of expertise? We've never really been "conservative" in the Burkean sense, certainly not in the 20th century. Wilsonianism under both Democratic and Republican administrations has prevailed, and this strain will continue to some degree after Bush.

Hopefully, for American security, we'll have a more muscular national security neoconservative Wilsonianism under a McCain administration. The Democratic version will be truly like Wilson's foreign policy, relying on international institutions, and unable to get support to commit American muscle for the demands of world politics.

Conservatism's not dead, just in need of a half-time.

What Can an Aircraft Carrier Teach Us?

Back in 1999 or so, the USS Abraham Lincoln made a port o' call visit in Santa Barbara, dropping anchor a mile out from the little breakwater harbor at the coastal resort town (where I lived at the time).

The Navy's public affairs staff opened up the ship to the public, and I was able to take the chartered whale-watching boat out to the carrier for a tour of the ship, which I followed up with a walk on the deck of this behemoth. I sat down at the bow, right above the protective netting that's lined all around the top-deck to catch those who might fall over the side.

The lift elevators from the aviation maintance deck to the flight deck were standing idle, and a sailer was out for a late afternoon jog around the perimeter. I walked along the center of the deck, by the jet catapults, and looked northward into the sunset over the water, thinking to myself, this is American power!

Of course, this was a couple of years before 9/11, and I thought of American's global role at that time as the benign hegemon, and frankly most of those on the political left did as well, or at least that's what was in evidence by the very little antiwar protest activity against the Clinton administration's air-war over Kosovo. (As some have said, for the far left-wing, U.S. wars launched for humanitarian purposes are fine - it's the exercise of military might in the pursuit of raw material self-interest that's evil.)

In any case, the Abraham Lincon's a Nimitz Class warship, the largest in the world. The Navy's fleet boasts 10 of these mighty warships currently in service, including the USS George Washington (pictured above) and the USS Theodore Roosevelt, among others.

What can we learn from these ships?

P.J. O'Rourke offers his perspective in his essay, "24 Hours on the 'Big Stick': What You Can Learn About America on the Deck of the USS 'Theodore Roosevelt.'":

The Theodore Roosevelt and its accompanying cruisers, destroyers, and submarines can blow up most of the military of most of the countries on earth. God has given America a special mission. Russia can barely blow up Chechnya. China can blow up Tibet, maybe, and possibly Taiwan. And the EU can't blow up Liechtenstein. But the USA can blow up .  .  . gosh, where to start?

But I didn't visit the Theodore Roosevelt just to gush patriotically - although some patriotic gushing is called for in America at the moment.

O'Rourke spends some time on the operations of a Nimitz Class carrier, but continues on some of the deeper signifcance of his experience, with reflections on the life of John McCain:

Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do--voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's. I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There's Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there's the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: "Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?"

Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lifelong lesson in conservatism. The ship is immense, going seven decks down from the flight deck and ten levels up in the tower. But it's full, with some 5,500 people aboard. Living space is as cramped as steerage on the way to Ellis Island. Even the pilots live in three-bunk cabins as small and windowless as hall closets. A warship is a sort of giant Sherman tank upon the water. Once below deck you're sealed inside. There are no cheery portholes to wave from.

A one-day visit to an aircraft carrier is a lesson in conservatism?

I have to agree, except in my case that'd be "neo"-conservativism!

Photo Credit: "Shipping Out: Sailors line the flight deck of the USS George Washington as it prepares to depart to its new station in Yokosuka, Japan," Time.

Internal Battles on the Right

I've forgotten the exact essay by now, but sometime back I wrote that I wasn't going to battle against fellow conservatives. As an early McCain supporter last year, I'm still seeing sore wounds from some of my fellow partisans who were zinged repeatedly in my posts (or let's just say that Ed Morrissey's not linking to my blog, not to mention Mike's America).

I mention this in light of my comments yesterday, in "Rush Limbaugh: Leader of the Republican Party?," and some of the responses therein.

So let me be clear: I'm not criticizing Rush Limbaugh. I watched his speech to CPAC on Saturday and I was getting my own "rush" of adrenaline, endorphine, or some other "right-on" chemical-emotional reaction while listening to the guy. The big "El Rushbo" hit all the right notes, chumming the waters of both left and right as no other contemporary commentator can do. My only point, and this would seem uncontroversial, is that Limbaugh is by no means the leader of the GOP, which should be clear from the title of my entry. On the other hand, it's pretty much a slam dunk that Limbaughs' the leader of today's conservative movement. He's consistently opposed big government and concessions to the "bipartisan" Titanic that's gotten us into so much trouble these last few years.

Oh sure, I criticized Rush last year and his supporters as "Rushbots" because some of the attacks on McCain's campaign were dishonest and frankly irrational.

But I'm not criticizing Rush today. Conservative have really no time to be creating internal enemies. I'm not so naive to say that we won't have our battles, but the faster a "new right" consensus emerges that amounts to something of a guiding agenda for the movement, the better off we'll be.

Jonah Goldberg hits on this today in his essay, "The Tired War on Rush Limbaugh." I thought the piece was pretty unoriginal at first, considering how Goldberg was going off on the Democrats and their attacks on conservative talk radio as "the font of all evil." Really? Folks need to look no farther than the continuing debate on the "Fairness Doctrine" to understand that the rising tide of tea-party conservatism is the biggest threat to the left's totalitarian agenda - and thank God for that!

So I was pleased when Goldberg turned his focus to the political right, where the real challenges to a Republican revival are located:

The more interesting war on Limbaugh comes from the right. My National Review colleague John Derbyshire has written a thoughtful article for the American Conservative disparaging the "lowbrow conservatism" of talk radio. His brush is a bit too broad at times. Some right-wing talkers, such as Bill Bennett and Dennis Prager, can be almost professorial. Michael Savage, meanwhile, sounds like the orderlies are about to break through the barricades with straitjacket in hand. Derbyshire is nonetheless right that conservatism is top-heavy with talk-radio talent, giving the impression the right is deficient in other areas and adding to the shrillness of public discourse.

Another point of attack comes from "reformist" conservative writers, such as blogger Ross Douthat of the Atlantic and former Bush speechwriter David Frum. They argue that conservatism is too attached to talk-show platitudes and Reagan kitsch. They want conservatives and Republicans to become more entrepreneurial, less reflexively opposed to government action. Hence, the New Reformers object to Limbaugh's role as an enforcer of ideological conformity. What's good for Limbaugh, many of them argue, guarantees that the GOP will become a powerless rump party only for conservative true believers.

I'm dubious about that, but I do have a suggestion that would help on both fronts. Bring back "Firing Line." William F. Buckley Jr., who died almost exactly a year ago, hosted the program for PBS for 33 years. He performed an incalculable service at a time when conservatives were more associated with yahoos than they are today. He demonstrated that intellectual fluency and good manners weren't uniquely liberal qualities. More important, the "Firing Line" debates (models of decorum) demonstrated that conservatives were unafraid to examine their own assumptions or to battle liberal ones.

Now, again, let me indicate right away where I stand on this, since I might be seen as more on the intellectual side of things (and hence a soft and squishy conservative like David Brooks, David Frum, or Ross Douthat). Recall that I'm neoconservative, and that means I take tradition and values as key to any sustainable outlook for the right. I also see foreign policy as not just another issue within the party platform, but as a problem that defines the identity of someone who claims to stand up for American values. Hence, while I'll engage the Brooks' or Douthats, I'll have no truck with folks like Daniel Larison who might as well be Democrats.

Conservatives need to ask themselves about the big picture: What do we want? Getting back in power is important, but should we acquiesce to what many recognize is likely a permanent expansion of the welfare-entitlement state? Folks decry the notion of "moderation," but how do we define that? Is former President Bush a "moderate" because he grew the government under his watch? As the Wall Street Journal has pointed out many times, the costs for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq account for much of the increase in government spending as a percentage of GDP, and while the administration okay'd the expansion of Medicare, Bush spent all of 2005 campaigning for Social Security reform which would have sought to move the country toward privatization, and hence a shift toward shrinking governmental dependence and fostering an "ownership" society.

I don't have all the answers to these questions, but I do know that conservatives won't have to worry about the Democrats as long as we're looking to slit each other's throats.

Here's what Paul Ibrahim has to say about moderates:

It is non-conservative Republicans who have gotten the party to where it is today. It is the massive spending and government enlargement that have forced a significant part of the base to abandon the GOP. It is the pork projects and the related corruption of “moderates” that have dragged down the Republican brand. The people who have decidedly not been the downfall of the Republican Party are its conservatives.

So, let's talk more about this. What is a non-conservative Republican? Is it a neocon "warmonger" like me, or a "soft intellectual" like David Brooks? Or is it a wonkish Harvard graduate like Ross Douthat?

I know where my loyalties lie, and that's with regular folks and bedrock values. In contrast, the Democratic Party is out to destroy this country, and when Rush Limbaugh said he wanted that nihilist agenda to fail, I said "hallelujah"!

We need more people to speak clearly like this, but we also need more people to welcome truthsayers like Geert Wilders into the spotlight as well. And apparently, that wasn't happening at CPAC.

So let's get it together. We have to speak truth to this leftist agenda, both home and abroad. By all means, yes, let's debate and refiine our ideas, but we should never forget that conservatism is what's going to save this country, and what the "next right" agenda requires is a little more attention to defining conservatism in the age of Obama. We should be perfectly happy to go back to Goldwater's ideas to do it, but we should also remember that even the "wisdom of the ages" gets an update now and then.