Jonah raises an excellent question - do conservatives of a non-libertarian stripe have a leg to stand on in their criticisms of the Bush Administration's domestic policy? After all, he argues, the ideological touchstone of this Administration has been a critique of libertarianism and small-government conservatism, and if we don't like what Bush has wrought - with immigration "reform" being the latest example - than don't we need to admit that the critique was a mistake, and join Jonah in becoming "more libertarian in response to the Bush years"? In effect, he's tossing the same accusation at Rod Dreher that Andrew hurled at David Brooks a while back: Andrew argued that Bush has gone wrong by being too Brooksian, Jonah suggests that Bush has gone wrong by steering too close to Crunchy Condom (and a Pat Buchananesque "conservatism of the heart," for that matter), and the upshot for both Andrew and Jonah is that the reform-conservatives have been discredited, and only a purer small-government conservatism retains any credibility. If innovation gave us Bush, then innovation must be a bad idea.
In a narrow sense, Jonah's quite obviously right: The Bush years represented, at least in part, an attempt to reform conservatism to meet the challenges of a new era, and the failures of this Administration are therefore something that reformist conservatives of every stripe - whether they're crunchy, Brooksian, Salam-Douthatian (there's a mouthful) or what-have-you - are going to have to live with going forward. They're arrows in the quiver of the Reagan-plus-nothing crowd: Any time someone says that "conservatism needs to adapt to cope with the challenges of X, Y or Z" from here on out, someone else will be able to sneer and say "that's the attitude that gave us the prescription drugs benefit and the Bridge to Nowhere!"
And yet in a broader sense, the Goldberg-Sullivan argument doesn't really make any sense at all. To begin with, it attributes a deep ideological consistency to an Administration that's rather obviously been making things up as it's gone along. Yes, Bushism has been defined by (to quote myself) "an accomodation with big government" right from the beginning, and small-government conservatives knew - or should have known - that Bush was no Phil Gramm. But the content of that accomodation has been driven more by expedience than by any kind of intellectually-consistent revision of conservatism. In 2000, you'll recall, Bush campaigned on the theme of "compassionate conservatism" and made tax cuts and education reform his signature issues. "Compassionate conservatism" gave us very little - the (underfunded) faith-based initiatives and some innovative small-bore anti-poverty policies, his AIDS-in-Africa push, and sundry other humanitarian efforts - and many of the people associated with it, from John DiIulio to David Kuo, soured on the Bush Administration long before a lot of small-government conservatives did. Tax cuts gave us, well, tax cuts. Education reform gave us No Child Left Behind, the only major Bush-era policy innovation that actually attempted to use federal power to advance conservative ends, which was what the boosters of "big-government conservatism," notably Fred Barnes, claimed the Bush era was all about. In fact, for the rest of the Bush years, "big government conservatism" became an umbrella that covered a series of policy innovations undertaken purely out of political calculation. Certainly, neither Rod Dreher nor David Brooks were begging for steel tariffs, or the prescription-drugs benefit, or the energy bill or the transportation bill. These were attempts to buy off swing voters - successful attempts, in the case of prescription drugs; Bush lost the over-sixty vote by five points in '00 and won it by eight points in '04 - and reward the party's interest groups, not attempts to crunchify the Right or reform government in a conservative direction.
Indeed, insofar as Bush emphasized an ideological theme after No Child Left Behind was passed and the faith-based initiatives were (sort of) implemented, it was the "ownership society," not "compassionate conservatism" - a message much more congenial to libertarian conservatives, I would presume, and one that led to the signature domestic-policy push of Bush's second term, the politically-disastrous quest to reform Social Security, as well as various attempts to woo the mythical "investor class" with dividend tax cuts and HSAs. Then of course came immigration "reform," which is an ideologically-unclassifiable effort: It unites free-market absolutists with some of the evangelicals who shaped the original "compassionate conservatism" language, while taking fire both from cultural conservatives like Rod and a collection of empiricists - a George Borjas here, a Heather Mac Donald there - who seem (to me, at least) to be carrying on the tradition of 1970s-style neoconservatism.
So the idea that the Bush years have represented the apotheosis of "compassionate conservatism," or "crunchy conservatism," or a Brooksian "Hamiltonian conservatism," is at once reductionist and just plain silly, as is the notion that everything save libertarianism has been discredited by the follies of the last six years. To argue otherwise is to indulge in a right-wing version of the kind of crude ideological determinism that produced, say, this Alan Wolfe essay on "why conservatives can't govern," which suggested that any sort of conservatism save government-cutting purism is doomed to end in Abramoffian corruption and "heckuva job, Brownie" incompetence. I mean, please. Tell it to Tommy Thompson, or Rudy Giuliani, or Jeb Bush. Tell it to Ronald Reagan, for that matter - the real Ronald Reagan, I mean, not the small-government plaster saint. There's more to conservative governance than the failures of George W. Bush, and I fail to see how (to take a personal example) "Sam's Club Republicanism" is descredited by the transportation bill, steel tariffs, or Medicare Part D, when the only thing they have in common is that they aren't libertarianism.
And if we start insisting that anyone whose rhetoric or ideas were ever adopted, co-opted, or gestured at by this Administration needs to repent in sackcloth and ashes, well, let's just say that Rod Dreher and Pat Buchanan are pretty low on the totem pole of people with some 'splaining to do.
Who cares what Goldberg thinks. He's a neocon shill who's made a career out of attacking real conservatives. He has sought to discredit real conservatism (e.g. Burke's value-centered historicism, De Maistre, etc.) and replace real conservatism with left-wing Jacobin universal abstractions. He's a disgrace. He should be permanetly deported to Israel.
Posted by Real Conservative | June 4, 2007 12:52 PM