Convervatism is a political philosophy whose chief characteristic is an avowed tendency to resist rapid change and to support traditional norms. The term is much used in the context of politics – either to describe movements which attempt to preserve aspects of the status quo, or, more specifically, to describe a particular ideology of this sort in the Western countries. Conservatives are the counterpart to radicals and revolutionaries.

Conservative, as a descriptive word, is generally opposed to progressive, or more specifically to liberal, socialist or revolutionary ideologies. It is often used as a synonym for right-wing, though there are significant right-wing movements that are far too radical or reactionary to be properly considered Conservative.

Political conservatism is, broadly speaking, support of traditional political views and values. Consequently, what might be conservative in one society might be quite radical in a different society. In addition, in some cases people who regard themselves as conservatives may advocate quite radical reactionary changes to the status quo.

Conservatism as an anti-ideology

Attempts at defining “conservatism” run into an immediate problem. Conservatism, by definition, is sceptical of plans to new-model human society after an ideological model. It is more a habit of mind than a doctrine. As such, it is easier to define conservatives in reference to what they oppose than what they support.

While the word Conservatism is often used to simply describe the attitude of supporting how things as they currently are, it can also refer to a social doctrine originated by Edmund Burke. Burke wrote at a time when European thinkers were beginning to develop the ideology of modernism, which emphasizes progress guided by reason. Conservatives are not opposed to progress per se, although they are often more doubtful about it than followers of many other ideologies. Conservatives do not reject reason completely, but they place much more emphasis on tradition or faith than is common in other schools of political thought. According to the author of the Conservatism FAQ, the essence of conservatism is “its emphasis on tradition as a source of wisdom that goes beyond what can be demonstrated or even explicitly stated.”

The conservative world view emphasises the unknowable. Existing institutions have virtues that cannot be fully grasped by any single person or interest group. An attempt to modify the complex web of human interactions that form human society for the sake of some doctrine or theory runs the risk of running afoul of the iron law of unintended consequences. Conservatives attempt to remain vigilant against the possibility of moral hazards.

Rather, the conservative embraces an attitude that is deeply suspicious of any attempt to remake society in the service of any ideology or doctrine, whether that doctrine is libertarian, socialist, or developed from some other source. They see history as being full of disastrous schemes that seemed like good ideas at the time. Human society is something rooted and organic; to try to prune and shape it according to the plans of an ideologue is to invite unforeseen disaster. Conservatism is more of a mindset than a doctrine. It is ad hoc by necessity. It is easier to say what it is not, than to define it. Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind envisions a conservatism that is as hostile to the levelling wrought by the market economy as it is to the plans of socialists and social reformers.

Conservatism and tradition

Conservatives emphasize traditional views of institutions such as the family and the church. Generally speaking, they are less likely to consider unmarried couples, even those with children, as families. On the issue of homosexuality, they are quite unlikely to consider gay couples as families, also even when they have children. They usually oppose the adoption of children by gay couples, and they are extremely unlikely to countenance legal recognition of gay or other unorthodox family structures. In religious life, they are likely to reject any reinterpretation or modification of traditional beliefs, such as in areas of morality and biblical scholarship.

The relationship of political conservatism to the religious right is a perennial source for commentary. It could be argued that the religious right is scarcely conservative: it is instead a movement for social reform with a strong ideological basis, wishing to remake society through forced obedience to its version of Christian values. The religious right is called conservative primarily because there is a strong element of nostalgia in its plan for social reform; it sees liberal, secular society as deviating from a better world that it believes used to exist. Its plan to remake the world involves reviving an older vision. Were reactionary a neutral term, it would apply here.

A similar tension might be said to exist between conservatism and patriotism. Conservatives, out of their respect for traditional, established institutions, tend to strongly identify with nationalist movements, existing governments, and the military. Conservatives often believe that these institutions embody admirable values like honour, duty, courage, and loyalty. They are independent sources of tradition and ritual pageantry that conservatives tend to admire. They suspect their political opponents of being too open to foreign influences, and too intellectually remote and elitist to feel nationalistic pride. In admiring these institutions, conservatives may be less attentive to the fact that these institutions are often the causes for major social change; and that they tend to break down regional differences and local customs, and mix together people from widely differing regions and backgrounds.

Conservatism and Fascism

To speak of nationalism, of course, is to call to mind the ugly history of Fascism. Is there a difference between conservatism and Fascism? Some liberals will be tempted to say no.

But conservatism, at its root, is an attitude of political and social quietism. The big plans of the Big Man, the noisy and levelling mass movements, the Führerprinzip, and the personality cults that are central to most systems that are called Fascist totalitarianism ought to be deeply unsettling to the conservative mindset. In history, it is a regrettable truth that some conservative traditionalists have been drawn to Fascist movements. Some may have admired the moral and military renewal that Fascist leaders promised. Others may have only thought Fascism a more palatable alternative to socialism. Conservatism stands for learning from the mistakes of the past, and primum non nocere is an essential conservative principle. Almost all contemporary conservatives vow that they “won’t be fooled again.”

Conservatism and conservation

Although the conservation movement has roots in social conservative anti-commercial values, the relationship between political conservatives and green politics is uneven. Some on both sides, with very solid anthropological and other scientific backing, view ecological conservation and respect for traditional lifeways as a part of fiscal conservativism and necessary to preserve traditional values. Others note the generally socially liberal and sometimes radical accounting reform, monetary reform and education reform goals of Greens and conclude that they have nothing in common with conservatives. In the UK, a Blue-Green Alliance is an alignment of these “green” and “right” forces, although in the US the terms Green Republican or Green Libertarian have come into use to imply the same. Dan Sullivan has written on the convergence of Libertarian and Green views in the USA.

Conservatism and critical theory

A large body of writing has been produced by the critical theorists associated with the Frankfurt School, vaguely critical of the “hegemony” of “late capitalist” “discourse.” At least a part of the agenda of this body of doctrine, especially as it relates to multiculturalism, and objects to the steamrollering of local folkways by the commercial media originating in affluent urban societies, seems to be fundamentally aligned with cultural conservatism. This, too, is a world-view that is sceptical of the claims of modernism to represent unalloyed progress, and is sceptical of the claims of any ideology to represent anything but the selfish will of the ideologue.

But although the literary critical theorists seem to have abandoned Marxist dialectical materialism in exchange for a neo-Platonic idealism based on a postulate of universal social construction, conservatives are understandably leery of its Marxist origins, its pervasive moral relativism, the egalitarianism that seems to be its only moral absolute, its harping on race and gender roles, and its fascination with the “transgressive”. Still, it may be that the chief dividing line between these two critics of modernism is the lack of a shared jargon.

Conservative political movements

Contemporary political conservatism, in most western democratic countries has two important aspects:

* Fiscal conservatism: the support of a traditional economic system of a place (or of an idealized version of such a system, perhaps never fully realized).

* Social conservatism: the support of traditional values, i.e., morality, and particularly of religious morality; also, support of governmental restrictions on personal behavior with an aim of upholding traditional values.

It is possible for one to be a fiscal conservative but not a social conservative; in the United States at present, this is the stance of libertarianism. It is also possible to be a social conservative but not a fiscal conservative. At present, this is a common political stance in, for example, Ireland and among some American leftists.

Some have claimed that conservatism is the attitude or lack thereof that justifies whatever state of things currently are. In a communist country, conservatives are communists; in a mercantilist country, conservatives are mercantilists; in a social-democrat country, conservatives are social-democrats; in a feudal country, conservatives are for feudality; in a libertarian country, conservatives are libertarians. Yet this cannot be the whole story; there is an independent justification of the attitude of conservatism, which tends to favour what is organic and has been shaped by history, against the planned and artificial. Some commentators have argued that despite the movement’s rhetoric, it has been an agent for change, and the traditions which it supports are in fact of relatively recent invention.

Within the United States, there are several distinct elements to conservatism. The Neoconservative movement originates in American liberalism, primarily from the Northeast or the West Coast, but is marked by a significant move to the right from the 1960s onwards. Palaeoconserativism, by contrast, originated in other parts of the United States; its proponents are unlikely to have once been liberals.

Conservative views on the economy often overlap with those of libertarians, but they disagree with the libertarian position on social issues. However, there are some libertarians whose views on social or cultural issues are closer to conservatism than most libertarians are, such as Llewellyn Rockwell or Murray Rothbard; these are sometimes called paleolibertarians.

Other strands of conservatism have been influenced by the counterrevolutionary Catholic thought of figures like Joseph de Maistre, and the distributism of G. K. Chesterton and the French traditionalists (e.g. Henri Corbin). Some conservatives positions originated from the Frankfurt School, after taking (like the neoconservatives) a turn to the right — such as the editors of Telos.

Paleoconservative publications: Modern Age, Chronicles

Neoconservative publications: Commentary, The Public Interest, First Things (has expressed controversial attitudes towards religion and against separation of church and state that many other neoconservatives reject).

In the United States and western Europe, conservatism is generally associated with the following views:

* Personal responsibility

* General opposition to “big government” policies or state inverventionism

* Support for Judeo-Christian religious and moral values.

* Support for strong law enforcement and strong penalties for crimes.

* Restraint in taxation and regulation of businesses.

* Support for a strong military, and well-defended protected borders with regulated immigration

* Support for drug prohibition.

* Opposition to (or support for lessening) many state-run social programs such as welfare and medical care

* Opposition to policies such as affirmative action and multi-lingual education which can be perceived as un-patriotic or government favoritism of minority groups.

Conservatives differ widely on some issues as well. For example, many support open international trade, while some support some form of protection for domestic business such as import tariffs.

Conservatives in different countries

What constitutes conservative politics and policies, obviously, will depend on the traditions and customs of a given country.

In the United States, most persons who call themselves conservatives believe strongly in the Second Amendment and are deeply opposed to gun control. In many other industrialized democracies, guns are strictly regulated - in Japan and the United Kingdom it is extremely difficult for a private citizen to own firearms, and the conservative movements of those countries do not generally favor changing these laws. It is likely that most conservatives in those countries would actively oppose a movement to make gun ownership as unregulated as it is in the USA.

The concept of social conservatism may in some countries, for instance in Continental Europe, represent a paternalist interest for the social conditions of the people, exemplified by Brismarck’s reforms on old-age pensions and health insurance, and in other countries represent the promotion of traditional values and religious morality.

In non-democratic countries, conservatives may be the advocates of the existing non-democratic government. For example, in China the conservatives are the leading Communist party officials, while in Iran the conservatives are the hardline Islamic fudamentalists. In these nations, the “conservative” label characterizes people who are against sudden and radical changes in the form of government and believe that the nation is best served with a focus on stability rather than on political or economic revolution.

In Latin America, conservatives traditionally aligned with the Roman Catholic Church, against separation of church and state, against extending voting rights to decendants of Native Americans, and against public education. As in the USA and many other parts of the world, during the 20th century mainstream conservatives gradually moved their positions to closer to that of the traditional liberals. In Latin America, with the more liberal clergy of the post Vatican II era, conservatives are less strictly aligned with the Church, but continue to afirm what they consider traditional Catholic values.

Conservative goals can vary not only between countries, but in the same country over time. Many conservatives (see Dixiecrat) in the USA once supported enforced racial segregation, but no mainstream conservative today (see United States Republican Party) would advocate this position.

Although some conservatives generally today agree on the value of free markets and reducing regulation (although to a much lesser extent than favored by libertarians), there is great disagreement on moral questions. Many conservatives feel it is proper for government to take strong actions against homosexuality, abortion, and drug abuse. Other conservatives are concerned that such actions constitute unwarranted intrusion on personal freedom.

History of conservatism

The modern split between conservative and liberal can be traced back to the English Civil War and the French Revolution. Broadly speaking, the predecessors of the conservatives tended to be opposed to the revolution and changes in the monarchy, and conversely for the predecessors to the liberals. Early conservative thinkers included Edmund Burke who argued forcefully against the French Revolution.

Although conservativism shares a common historical root, the beliefs of different conservatives have diverged so that it is difficult to state what constitutes conservative doctrine except in the very broadest terms, and different conservatives will often strongly disagree among themselves.

In this sense conservatism is not a consistent ideology per se, and does not refer to any particular idea, unless a reference is given as to the country and times considered.

Conservatism in the United States

In the United States, the Republican Party is generally considered to be the party of conservatism. This has been the case since the 1960s, when the conservative wing of that party consolidated its hold, causing it to shift permanently to the right of the Democratic Party.

In addition, many United States libertarians, in the Libertarian Party and even some in the Republican Party, see themselves as conservative, even though they advocate significant economic and social changes - for instance, further dismantling the welfare settlement or liberalising drug policy. They see these as conservative policies because they conform to the the spirit of individual liberty that they consider to be a traditional American value.

On the other end of the scale, some Americans see themselves as conservative while not being supporters of free market policies. These people generally favour protectionist trade policies and government intervention in the market to preserve American jobs. Many of these conservatives were originally supporters of neoliberalism who changed their stance after perceiving that countries such as China were benefitting from that system at the expense of American production.

Finally, many people see the entire American political mainstream as having reached a conservative consensus, with the federal government being run by successive “Republicrat” and right-wing Republican administrations. In support of this theory, they point out that the only recent Democratic President (Bill Clinton) was from the moderate, conservative wing of the Democratic Party. They also suggest that many progressives are switching to the Green Party and thus leaving the electable mainstream.

Americans are often stereotyped by western Europeans as conservative due to their religious and right-wing tendencies as well as what they consider to be puritan attitudes towards sex and drugs (particularly alcohol).

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Neoconservatism (United States) (Wikipedia)

Neoconservatism is a conservative movement with origins in the Old Left that has been very influential in formulating hawkish foreign policy stances by the United States.

Old Left origins

The intellectual founders of neoconservatism, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, and most prominently Irving Kristol, were all alumni of City College of New York, known then as the “Harvard of the proletariat” due to its highly selective admissions criteria and free education. They emerged from the (largely Trotskyite) Old Left and retained these origins in the factional New York intellectual debates of the 1930s. The Great Depression radicalized the student body, mostly children of Eastern European Jewish immigrants sometimes on the edge of poverty, who were introduced to the new and revolutionary ideas of socialism and communism.

Opposition to the New Left and Détente with the Soviet Union

Later to emerge as the first important group of social policy critics from the working class, the original neoconservatives, though not yet using this term, were generally liberals or socialists who strongly supported the Second World War. Multiple strands contributed to their ideas, including the Depression-era ideas of former Trotskyites (world socialist revolution parallels their desires today to spread democratic capitalism abroad often by force), New Dealers, and trade unionists. The influence of the Trotskyites perhaps left them with strong anti-Soviet tendencies, especially considering the Great Purges targeting alleged Trotskyites in Soviet Russia.

The original “neoconservative” theorists, such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz were often associated with the magazine Commentary and their intellectual evolution is quite evident in that magazine over the course of these years. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s the early neoconservatives were anti-Communist socialists strongly supportive of the civil rights movement, integration, and Martin Luther King. However, they grew disillusioned with the Johnson administration’s Great Society. They also came to despise the counterculture of the 1960s and what they felt was a growing “anti-Americanism” among many baby boomers, in the movement against the Vietnam War and in the emerging New Left.

According to Irving Kristol, former managing editor of Commentary and now a Senior Fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute in Washington and the Publisher of the hawkish magazine The National Interest, a neoconservative is a “liberal mugged by reality.” Broadly sympathetic to Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic goals to spread American ideals of government, economics, and culture abroad, they grew to reject his reliance on international organizations and treaties to accomplish these objectives following decolonization and the entry of many African and Asian states into the United Nations, which tilted the body toward recognizing Third World interests. As the radicalization of the New Left pushed these intellectuals further to the right in response, they moved toward a more aggressive militarism. Admiration of the “big stick” interventionist foreign policy of Theodore Roosevelt remains a common theme in neoconservative tracts as well. Now staunch anti-Communists, a vast array of sympathetic conservatives attracted to their strong defense of a “rolling-back” of Communism (an idea touted under the Eisenhower administration by traditional conservative John Foster Dulles) began to become associated with these neoconservative leaders. Influential periodicals such as Commentary, The New Republic, The Public Interest, and The American Spectator, and lately The Weekly Standard have been established by prominent neoconservatives or regularly host the writings of neoconservative writers.

Academics in these circles, many of whom were still Democrats, rebelled against the Democratic Party’s leftward drift on defense issues in the 1970s, especially after the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. Many clustered around Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat, but then they aligned themselves with Ronald Reagan and the Republicans, who promised to confront charges of Soviet expansionism.

Generally they supported a militant anticommunism, minimal social welfare (to the consternation of extreme free-market libertarians), and sympathy with a traditionalist agenda. Its feud with the traditional right, especially William F. Buckley’s National Review over the welfare state (although the staff of the present National Review are recognisably neo-conservative) and the nativist, protectionist, isolationist wing of the party, once represented by ex-Republican Pat Buchanan, separated them from the old conservatives. But domestic policy does not define neoconservatism; it is a movement founded on, and perpetuated by a hawkish foreign policy, opposition to communism during the Cold War and opposition to Middle Eastern states that pursue foreign and domestic policies which do not align with U.S. interests. Thus, their foremost target was the old Richard Nixon approach to foreign policy, peace through negotiations, diplomacy, and arms control known, détente and containment (rather than rollback) of the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the process that would lead to bilateral ties between the People’s Republic of China and the US. There is still, today, a rift between many members of the State Department, who favor established foreign policy conventions, and the neoconservative hawks.

Reagan and the neoconservatives

Led by Norman Podhoretz, these “neoconservatives” used charges of “appeasement”, alluding to Chamberlain at Munich, to attack the foreign policy orthodoxy in the Cold War, attacking Détente, most-favored nation trade status for the Soviet Union and supporting unilateral American intervention in places like Grenada and Libya. These activists condemned peace through diplomacy, arms control, or inspection teams, comparing negotiations with relatively weak enemies of the United States as appeasement of “evil”.

During the 1970s political scientist Jeane Kirkpatrick increasingly criticized the Democratic Party, of which she was still a member, since the nomination of the antiwar George McGovern. Kirkpatrick became a convert to the ideas of the new conservatism of once liberal Democratic academics. During Ronald Reagan’s successful 1980 campaign, he hired her as his foreign policy adviser and later nominated her US ambassador to the United Nations, a position she held for four years. Known for her anticommunist stance and for her tolerance of right wing dictatorships, she argued that Third World social revolutions favoring the poor, dispossessed, or underclasses are illegitimate, and thus argued that the overthrow of leftist governments (such as the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile) and the installation of rightwing dictatorships was acceptable and essential. Under this doctrine, the Reagan administration actively supported the anti-Communist dictatorships such as Augusto Pinochet in Chile, Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, and the racist white rulers of South Africa.

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Some have attacked these views as simplistic and extreme, especially in light of the Vietnam War, which was by no means a revolution being orchestrated by the Soviets from Moscow, long a charge of neoconservatives who view Third World liberation struggles as illegitimate. The Vietnam War, for instance, was in many ways a direct successor to the French Indochina War, fought to maintain control of their colony in Indochina against an independence movement led by Communist Party leader Ho Chi Minh. After the Vietnamese communist forces, or Viet Minh, defeated the French colonial army at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the colony was granted independence. According to the ensuing Geneva settlement, Vietnam was partitioned, ostensibly temporarily, into a communist North and a non-Communist South. The country was then to be unified under elections that were scheduled to take place in 1956. However the elections were never held and the South fell under a US-backed military regime representative of the small, middle class Christian minority.

Neoconservatives, however, have tried to counter these points, arguing that the chances of democratization in a Communist state were slight, in contrast, from their standpoint at least, to the authoritarian but pro-Western South Vietnam. Neoconservatives argued that in unstable situations the United States should try to align itself with the “less offensive” regime or armed faction, which almost certainly would be any faction or regime hostile to a pro-Soviet rival, rather than stay out of the conflict altogether, as some liberals advocated. Neoconservatives thus argued that Communist states could not be democratized and must be “rolled back” to further US strategic interests, which were shaped by the domino theory during the Cold War era.

Before the election of Reagan, the neoconservatives sought to stem the antiwar sentiments caused by the U.S. defeats in Vietnam and the massive causalities that the war induced; and indeed this was a difficult task, which they have ostensibly accomplished, considering the hawkish mood of the US public after the September 11th attacks. The lowest casualty estimates, based on the now-renounced North Vietnamese statements, are around 1.5 million Vietnamese killed. Vietnam released figures on April 3, 1995 that a total of one million Vietnamese combatants and four million civilians were killed in the war. While liberal thinkers tended to point to the massive civilian deaths as a direct result of America’s involvement in the war, neocons saw the loss of life from a different perspective. In their view, the millions of war casualities, and more importantly the millions of executions and tourtures that had occured in the post-war Communist regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia, proved that America had failed to follow through on her commitment to her non-Communist allies in the region. They saw the Vietnam war as a series of mismangements, led mostly by a left-leaning congress sympathic to the extremely vocal (and in their view, largely unimformed) anti war movement. Thus, while Vietnam created great distaste among many Americans for ever trying to intervene in a third world war again, to neo cons, the war simply proved that America must never fail again.

Reagan, however, did not move toward protracted, long-term interventions to stem social revolution in the Third World. Instead, he favored quick campaigns to attack or overthrow leftist governments, favoring small, quick interventions that heightened a sense of post-Vietnam quagmire military triumphalism among Americans, such as the attacks on Grenada and Libya, and arming rightwing militias in Central America seeking to overthrow radical leftist governments like the Sandinistas. Moreover, the Reagan administration’s hostile stance toward the Soviet Union, the so-called “evil empire” (despite significant changes since the Stalin-era), the abandonment of Détente would force the Soviets to greatly improve their productive capabilities in order to reciprocate the new arms build-up, especially amid talks of “star wars” missile defense. By the time Gorbachev would usher in the process that would lead to the political collapse of the Soviet Union and the resultant dismantling of the Soviet Administrative Command System with Glasnost (political openness) and Perestroika (economic restructuring), the Soviet economy suffered from both hidden inflation and pervasive supply shortages and was in little position to be able to match US spending on armaments.

The comeback of neoconservatism under George W. Bush

Many critics charged that the neoconservatives lost their raison d’étre following the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the 1990s, neoconservatives were once again in the opposition side of the foreign policy establishment, railing against the post-Cold War foreign policy of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, which reduced military expenditures. They accused it of lacking “moral clarity” and the conviction to unilaterally pursue US strategic interests abroad. In the writings of Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Max Boot, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, William Bennett, Peter Rodman, and others influential in forging the foreign policy doctrines of the Bush administration, the history of appeasement with Hitler at Munich in 1938 and the Cold War’s policies of Détente and containment (rather than rollback) with the Soviet Union and the PRC, which they consider tantamount to appeasement at Munich, are constant themes. Early in the Bush administration, neoconservatives were particularly upset by Bush’s non-confrontational policy toward the PRC and Russia and what they perceived as Bush’s insufficient support of Israel, and most neoconservatives perceived Bush’s foreign policies to be not substantially different from the policies of Clinton.

However, following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and The Pentagon, the influence of neoconservatism in the Bush administration appears to have increased. In contrast with earlier writings which emphasized the danger from a strong Russia and the PRC, the focus of neoconservatives shifted from Communism to the Middle East and global terrorism.

Richard Perle

In his well-publicized piece “The Case for American Empire” in the conservative Weekly Standard, Max Boot argued that “The most realistic response to terrorism is for America to embrace its imperial role.” He countered sentiments that the “United States must become a kinder, gentler nation, must eschew quixotic missions abroad, must become, in Pat Buchanan’s phrase, ‘a republic, not an empire’,” arguing that “In fact this analysis is exactly backward: The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition; the solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their implementation.”

Neoconservatives won a landmark victory with the Bush Doctrine after September 11th. Thomas Donnelly, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential conservative thinktank in Washington that has been under neoconservative influence since the election of Reagan, argued in his AEI piece “The Underpinnings of the Bush doctrine” that “the fundamental premise of the Bush Doctrine is true: The United States possesses the means”—economic, military, diplomatic”—to realize its expansive geopolitical purposes. Further, and especially in light of the domestic political reaction to the attacks of September 11, the victory in Afghanistan and the remarkable skill demonstrated by President Bush in focusing national attention, it is equally true that Americans possess the requisite political willpower to pursue an expansive strategy.”

The Bush Doctrine, a radical departure from previous US foreign policy, is a proclamation of the right of the United States to wage pre-emptive war, regardless of international law, should it be threatened by terrorists or rogue states. The legitimacy of this doctrine, though questioned by many in the US and especially abroad can be seen as a change from focusing on the doctrine of deterrence (in the Cold War through Mutually Assured Destruction) as the primary means of self-defense. There is some opinion that preemptive strikes have long been a part of international practice and indeed of American practice, as exemplified, for example, by the unilateral US blockade and boarding of Cuban shipping during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The doctrine also states that the United States “will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” This is designed to create a deterrence to countries that seek to use military might to oppose the United States’ policy.

In contrast to more conventional foreign policy experts who argued that Iraq could be restrained by enforcing No-Fly Zones and by a policy of inspection by United Nations inspectors to restrict his ability to possess chemical or nuclear weapons, neoconservatives attacked this policy direction as appeasement of Saddam Hussein on the grounds that the policy was ineffectual. Proponents of war sought to compare their war to Churchill’s war against Hitler, with speakers like United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld comparing Saddam to Hitler, while comparing the toleration shown to Saddam to the 1930s appeasement of Hitler. Prior to the 2003 war in Iraq, Bush compared Saddam Hussein to Stalin and Hitler and harked to the theme of “appeasement.” Like the Nazis and the Communists, Bush said, “the terrorists seek to end lives and control all life.” But the visage of evil conjured up by Bush during his European trip was not that of Bin Laden, who still lives and threatens, but that of Saddam Hussein. Iraq’s dictator was singled out as the “great evil” who “by his search for terrible weapons, by his ties to terrorist groups, threatens the security of every free nation, including the free nations of Europe.”

Paul Wolfowitz

However, these sweeping comparisons have been questioned due to the initial support of Iraq by the United States and a history of legitimate conflict with Kuwait. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran threatened to divert Iraq from the secular nationalism of the Sunni-dominated Ba’athist regime. In addition, Iraqi Shiites, many of whom were sympathetic to Iran’s Ayatollah, accounted for the majority of Iraq’s population. The pretext for the bloody, protracted Iran-Iraq War was a territorial dispute, but most attribute the war as an attempt by Saddam, supported by both the US and the USSR, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansionism of radical Iranian-style revolution. The war with Iran left Iraq bankrupt. No country would lend it money except the United States and borrowing money from the US made Iraq its client state. Iraq had also borrowed a tremendous amount of money from other Arab states, including Kuwait, during the 1980s to fight its war with Iran. Saddam Hussein felt that the war had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq, and so all debts should be forgiven. Kuwait, however, did not forgive its debt and further provoked Saddam by slant drilling oil out of wells that Iraq considered within its disputed border with Kuwait. In 1990 Saddam Hussein complained to the United States State Department about Kuwaiti slant drilling. This had continued for years, but now Iraq needed oil money to pay off its war debts and avert an economic crisis. Saddam ord ered troops to the Iraq-Kuwait border, creating alarm over the prospect of an invasion. After talks with April Glaspie, the United States ambassador to Iraq, assured him that the US considered the Iraq-Kuwait dispute an internal Arab matter, Saddam sent his troops into Kuwait. Thus, the actual historical record would seem to cast doubts on the view among neoconservatives that Saddam’s wars have been tantamount to Hitler’s. However, the grain of truth coming with the idea was that Saddam promoted his invasion of Kuwait as an Arab reunification, similiar to the abolition of the artificial internal border of Germany, that had been approved by the U.S. at just that time. Glaspie had not rejected that comparison.

Neoconservative foreign policy pundits, however, emphasize an abstract evil in their polemics, de-emphasizing the complexities of autocratic governance in the Developing World. Today, the most prominent supporters of the hawkish stance inside the administration are Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Neoconservatives perhaps are closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party today since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon than any competing faction, especially considering the nature of the Bush Doctrine and the preemptive war against Iraq.

However, at the same time, there have been limits in the power of neoconservatives in the Bush administration. The Secretary of State Colin Powell is largely seen as being an opponent of neoconservative ideas, and while the neoconservative notion of tough and decisive action has been apparent in U.S. policy toward the Middle East, it has not been seen in U.S. policy toward Communist China and Russia or in the handling of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

Neoconservatism has been influential in conservative agenda in the United States, emphasizing desires to increase defense spending significantly, the agenda to challenge regimes hostile to US interests and values, desires to push free-market reforms abroad, and the general support for a policy of militarism to ensure that the United States remain the world’s sole superpower.

Neoconservatives and Israel

The neoconservatives also support a robust American stance on Israel. The neoconservative influenced Project for a New American Century called for an Israel no longer dependent on American aid through the removal of major threats in the region.

The interest in Israel, and the large proportion of Jewish neoconservatives has led to the question of “dual loyalty.” A number of critics, such as Pat Buchanan, have accused them of putting Israeli interests above those of America. In turn these critics have been labelled as anti-semites by many neoconservatives (which in turn has led to accusations of professional smearing, and then paranoia and so on).

However, one should note that many prominent neoconservatives are not Jewish, such as Michael Novak, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Frank Gaffney, and Max Boot. Second, neoconservatives in the 1960s were much less interested in Israel before the June 1967 Six Day War. It has only been since this conflict, which has raised the specter of Israel’s military invincibility, that the neoconservatives have become preoccupied by Israel’s security interests. They support Israel’s role as the strongest ally of the United States in the Middle East and as the sole Western-style democracy in the region.

Moreover, they have long argued that the United States should emulate Israel’s tactics of pre-emptive attacks, especially Israel’s unprovoked, pre-emptive unilateral attacks in the 1980s on nuclear facilities in Libya and Iraq. Despite (or perhaps because of) condemnation by the United Nations, neoconservatives have admired such Israeli adventures, arguing that the United States, like Israel, should act in its national interests, regardless of international law.

The partisan support for Likud would suggest that their support for Israel is not merely motivated by blind ethnic loyalty, and the criticism of their critics of American politicians judged to be too friendly to Britain or the Soviet Union would suggest that dual loyalty is a genuine fear amongst Old Right conservatives.

Relationship with other types of US conservativism

There is conflict between neoconservatives and libertarian conservatives. Libertarian conservatives are distrustful of a large government and therefore regard neoconservative foreign policy ambitions with considerable distrust.

There has been considerable conflict between neoconservatives and business conservatives in some areas. Neoconservatives tend to see Communist China as a looming threat to the United States and argue for harsh policies to contain that threat. Business conservatives see mainland China as a business opportunity and see a tough policy against China as opposed to their desires for trade and economic progress. Furthermore, business conservatives appear much less distrustful of international institutions.

The disputes over Israel and domestic policies have contributed to a sharp conflict over the years with “paleoconservatives”, whose very name is taken as a rebuke to their “neo” (new) brethren. There are many personal issues but effectively the paleoconservatives view the neoconservatives as interlopers who deviate from the traditional conservative agenda on issues as diverse as States Rights, free trade, immigration, isolationism and the welfare state. All of this leads to their conservative label being questioned.

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Old Right (Wikipedia)

In the United States, the Old Right was a group of conservative Republicans of the interwar years, led by Robert Taft, who opposed United States membership of the League of Nations and the New Deal. They successfully fought to cut down immigration in the 1920s.

They were called the “Old Right” to distinguish them from their New Right successors of the Cold War who were more friendly to both foreign and economic intervention.

Christian right

The Christian right, or more generally the religious right, is a broad label applied to a number of political and/or religious movements with particularly conservative or right wing views. While such elements are found in many nations, the term is most commonly applied to groups within the United States.

Christian right groups, as the name implies, consist primarily of Christians, many of them Fundamentalists; some have been known to claim that their political positions are, or ought to be, the views of all Christians. In reality, American Christians hold a wide variety of political views.

Many elements of the Christian right sympathize with, support, and sometimes influence the United States Republican Party. For example, such support is thought to have provided considerable backing for the campaign of U.S. President George W. Bush.

Issues with which the Christian right is (or is thought to be) primarily concerned include opposition to the accessibility of abortion; legal rights of unborn children; opposition to much of the gay rights movement and the upholding of what they consider to be “traditional family values”; opposition to the right of all people gay and straight of being allowed to have anal sex or oral sex; and support for the presence of Christianity in the public sphere, as with school-sponsored prayer, government funding for religious charities and schools, and similar matters, regardless in many cases of the U.S. tradition of Separation of Church and State.

Christian left

The Christian Left is the intersection of left-wing or socialist ideals and Christian ideals.

For much of the early history of anti-establishment leftist movements such as liberalism and socialism, the Christian church was an important foe to progress. People viewed the church as part of the establishment. Throughout the United States, France, and Russia, the course of revolutions attacked the established churches and reduced their powers.

In the twentieth century, however, it began to be realized that the left and Christianity had much in common. It has been said the “Christ was the first communist” and there is an extremely strong thread of egalitarianism in the New Testament. Other common leftist concerns such as pacifism, justice, racial equality, human rights, and the rejection of excessive wealth can also be found in the Bible.

Religious groups were closely associated with the peace movements for the Vietnam War as well as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. Religious leaders in many countries have also been on the forefront of criticizing cuts to social welfare programs.

The Christian left has sometimes been viewed as a counterpart to the Christian right, but it is very different. While the Christian right is almost uniquely American, the Christian left is more global and multifaceted.

One of the most important strains of Christian left thinking has been in the developing world, especially Latin America. During and since the 1960s Catholic thinkers who opposed the despotic leaders in South and Central America allied themselves with the communist opposition. Out of this alliance arose Liberation Theology, a wide ranging attempt to integrate socialism and Catholicism. However, Pope John Paul II, a fierce opponent of communism in Europe, decided against Liberation Theology and led the Catholic Church to abandon it.

The Christian left also, usually, takes far more liberal stances on issues such as homosexuality and abortion. Some groups reinterpret the Bible, while to others it is more a matter of focus — viewing the prohibitions against killing, or the damnation of the wealthy, as far more important than those against homosexuals.

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Conservative values take hold on college campuses (Washington Times, 990131)

The current crop of college freshmen is indifferent about politics, keen on volunteerism and less apt to drink beer, engage in casual sex or support legalized abortion, according to a survey of a quarter-million students.

Considered as the tail end of Generation X, these students may be an indicator of a sea change toward more conservative views arising in America’s youngest citizens.

Beer drinking among college freshmen is the lowest in the 33-year history of The American Freshman survey, which polled 275,811 students at 469 colleges and universities. It was conducted by the University of California at Los Angeles and the American Council on Education.

Slightly more than half of all students — 51.6% — say they drink beer, compared with 52.7% the previous year and a high of 75.2% in 1981. If so, students who do drink appear to be consuming more, as binge drinking has worsened on college campuses, prompting the nation’s Greek fraternities to spend $30 million on liability costs associated with drunken parties.

Consumption of wine and liquor is at 54.9%, down from the 66.7% rate students reported in 1987. Smoking, the survey said, was up 5%.

Freshman support for keeping abortion legal declined for the sixth straight year, to 50.9%, compared with 53.5% in 1997 and 64.9% in 1990.

“As students become more aware of what abortion is, they know it’s not about freedom of choice but about one person’s right to live,” said E.J. Suh, spokeswoman for the Collegians Activated to Liberate Life, based in Madison, Wisc. In CALL’s seven-year history, its campus affiliates have grown from 23 to more than 300, she said.

Survey director Linda Sax suspects that abortion is less of an issue with collegians.

“It’s not that pro-life movements are stronger on campus; it’s just the pro-choice movements aren’t as strong as they have been,” she said.

Support for casual sex is also down. A record low of 39.6% of the freshmen agreed with the phrase, “If two people really like each other, it’s all right for them to have sex even if they’ve known each other for a very short time.” 42% of the students agreed with that statement in 1997; 51.9% did so in 1987.

“I don’t think students are more conservative about sex,” Miss Sax said. “I think it’s due to health concerns — that they are afraid to get AIDS.”

Gerald Celente of the Trends Research Center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., agrees that casual sex in terms of one-night stands is definitely out. “The AIDS issue is not the burning issue that it was,” he said, “but one thing has us puzzled. Bars and dance floors are filled, but they are segregated: Guys with guys and girls with girls.

“It’s a sceneless scene. When people meet each other, there’s none of this, ‘Let’s go back to my place.’ There’s a social fear driving this casual sex issue.”

The survey is one of the first indications of attitudes among those dubbed the “millennials” —children who were born starting in 1980. These are the children baby boomers waited until their 30s and 40s to have. Weaned during the Reagan era, they are reaching adolescence during the Clinton years.

They are a second baby boom destined to set the tone for the 21st century through the sheer force of their numbers and possibly a watershed for youth culture in the 21st century, as their parents were for the 20th.

Although 56.5% classified themselves as “middle of the road,” 20.8% called themselves “liberal,” and 18.6% labeled themselves “conservative.”

Their attitudes on homosexuality have remained stable over several years; exactly one-third (33.3%) of those polled agree homosexual relations should be prohibited.

Not surprisingly, this generation of freshmen is extremely adept at the Internet, according to the UCLA survey. Nearly 83% of freshmen use the Internet for research or homework and nearly two-thirds (65.9%) communicate via e-mail.

However, the numbers show racial disparities. Although 80.1% of freshmen attending private universities say they communicated by e-mail during their last year of high school, only 41.4% of students at public black colleges say they did so.

Miss Sax says it simply shows who can afford home computers.

“Black students have half the Internet use of other groups,” she said. “Asian students are the most likely to use the Internet.”

Despite White House scandals and the century’s only presidential impeachment trial, a record low 25.9% of freshmen name “keeping up to date with political affairs” as an important life goal, compared with 26.7% a year ago and a high of 57.8% in 1966.

Only 14% of the freshmen say they frequently discuss politics, compared with 29.9% in 1968. And a record low 3% of students plan to enter law, compared with 3.3% a year ago and a high of 5.4% in 1989.

Bill Strauss, a McLean historian and author of the 1991 book “Generations,” says this will change.

“Today’s high school kids really want politics to work,” he said. “Kids are developing a sense of personal responsibility. They’ll believe that character matters in leadership. They’ll come to resemble the GI generation (1901-24), who were raised in the ‘20s, which is similar to the ‘90s in the sense of moral decay. They’ll be more politically assertive by far than Generation X.

“And these kids are not going to reinvent the ‘60s. They see sexual activity — such as Bill Clinton’s —as negative behavior. I have seen surveys that, when broken down by age bracket, show that teens are the harshest on President Clinton. They feel if they behaved as he did, they’d be in huge trouble.”

When asked to list activities they engaged in during their senior year, the three most popular ones were using the Internet for research or homework (82.9%); attending a religious service (81.9%); and playing computer games (80.4%). However, when asked how many hours a week they spent in prayer or meditation, 34.8% answered none and an additional 32.4% answered “less than one.”

Most popular career choices were business executives, engineers, elementary teachers and computer programmers.

However, volunteerism has increased in interest. A record percentage of freshmen — 74.2% —gave of their time during their senior year, compared with 62% in 1989. Although only 21.3% of them reported attending schools that require community service credits for graduation, 42% of the freshmen said they donated at least one hour a week last year. That’s up from 26.6% in 1987.

Which goes to show, Miss Sax said, that students tend to put their energies locally, where they feel they can make a difference.

“Students feel the national political issues aren’t relevant to their lives, and there’s not much they can do to change them,” she said.

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Goldberg’s Conservative Canon A motley affair (National Review Online, 010209)

Jonah Goldberg

This week I received between 400-500 e-mails from readers seeking to settle the burning question of what the beverage of choice is in the White Trash Community. I have nobody to blame for this onslaught but myself. I literally asked for it. I haven’t scientifically tallied the votes and I have no intention of doing so.

By my rough accounting, the consensus is that Mountain Dew leads the pack (partly because so many Nascar fans drink it), slightly ahead of RC (Royal Crown) cola and Mello Yello and my original choice, Mr. Pibb. Then come any number of regional suggestions including various Wal Mart, Kroger, and Safeway generic brands. Tab, one fellow assured me, was the beverage of choice for “citified” trash.

Please, please, do not think for a moment that just because I have not mentioned putting peanuts in this or that cola, or that since I’ve neglected to mention Yoohoo or moonpies or Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, that I haven’t heard enough on these topics. I would run a poll to settle these issues but I am so sick of them I dread providing another outlet.

While reader discussion of White Trash sodie pop is a wellspring of wisdom (yes, that screeching sound you hear and burning rubber you smell comes from my whiplash- inducing topic change), there’s another topic that many readers continue to inquire about. They want to know what to read. When I tell them they should read Juggz, they say “no, no, what conservative books should I read?”

So, because I did C-Span this morning and Cosmo the Wonderdog insists that the squirrels in the park must be punished for their free-thinking ways sooner rather than later, I thought I’d proffer a selective reading list.

For those of you uninterested in this sort of thing, you can check out my syndicated column today addressing Clinton’s woes, or you could check out the piece I contributed for the Gipper’s 90th birthday.

OK, now that we’ve got rid of them, there’s a trick to suggesting conservative reading. Some people want to read the original conservative canon. You know the original, uncut junk. These are the books like The Conservative Mind or The Road to Serfdom which form the core of modern conservative philosophy.

But other people don’t want to read the Pentateuch if they’re already converted. These folks like to read about the movements such books spawned. In this category, most of the books are crap. Generally written by liberals and leftists who do not understand conservatism, the bulk of this stuff should be avoided.

Then there’s a third category. These are the crib-sheet books, the compilations, quote books, “dictionaries” and encyclopedias, that distill things down for people who have read a bunch from categories one and two, but don’t have time to thumb through The Unheavenly City or Crisis of a House Divided every time they need a quote. If you haven’t guessed, these are the most dog-eared tomes in my own library.

But here’s the problem. Many books are important because they were very influential when they were written; they plowed new ground. But this formerly new ground is now in the rear-view mirror and so it doesn’t have the same power of new insight anymore.

After all, when you’re standing on the shoulders of giants, the fifth guy down doesn’t seem as impressive as he used to. But there’s no way Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education could have been written if Bill Buckley hadn’t first written God and Man at Yale. But I’m not sure I would recommend G&M@Y to a conservative newcomer.

Also, you should remember that conservatism by it’s very nature doesn’t demand an all-purpose, answer-to-everything book (See “Big Bad Wolfe”.) Or, look at it this way. Ben Franklin’s scientific writings are important to the history of science, but not too useful for contemporary physics. On the other hand, if all you use are the Cliff Notes you’ll never have a real sense of what they’re referring to.

So, herewith are my suggestionsin no particular order for 10 books though perhaps not the 10 books that make up my all-purpose Swiss Army knife for conservative initiates.

1. The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, by George Nash. I have read most or all of this book about 37 times. It is exhaustively researched and gives a real sense of the internecine debates and conflicts within the movement. It was recently updated to include the Contract With America era, but I’ve not read the new stuff and I haven’t heard anything great about it. In certain conservative circles, people show off how old and beaten-up their copy is.

2. The Portable Conservative Reader, edited by Russell Kirk. The key word here is “portable.” There are scores of excellent conservative collections. The most exhaustive, I believe, is the four-volume The Wisdom of Conservatism, edited by Peter Witonksi, and I would be sent to the stockade if I didn’t mention Keeping the Tablets, edited by William F. Buckley and Charles Kesler (which may have been updated by now). No, Kirk’s Portable Conservative Reader is the kind of book you can carry around and read while waiting for a bus and it’s got a little something for everybody.

3. A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles, by Thomas Sowell, is an extremely useful analysis of the differences between the conservative world view and the liberal world view. Much of it is a survey of the great conservativeand libertarian thinkers but there is much excellent original analysis and it is eminently readable.

4. History of Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey. Warning! Warning! Danger! Young Conservative Geek!

Many Straussians believe that your eyes will catch fire if you read Leo Strauss directly and your IQ is not twice your bodyweight. I have never had this problem, but you can’t be too careful, so I avoid Strauss’ books like an all-you-can-eat buffet at an Indian-run Motel Six. But The History of Political Philosophy is a collection of Straussian essays that have been diluted enough that even middle-brows like me can understand (most) of them. This will give you the generally conservative take on many political philosophers. But really, really be careful, because it’s far from accepted orthodoxy even within the conservative movement. Outside the movement, it’s bonfire fodder. I cited an essay from there once in a college paper, and a professor circled the footnote and wrote in two inch block letters up the side of the page, “STRAUSS SUCKS!!!”

Gosh, I miss the academy.

OK, OK. The libertarians. I’ve got to deal with them. First off, if this was a list of the most important books, The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek would have to be near the top of the list. But for these purposes I would stick with two collections of Hayek’s writings. (4) The Essence of Hayek, edited by Chiaki Nishiyama (I know, I love his work too) and Kurt Leube. The second book would be (4) The Fatal Conceit. This is all the Hayek you’ll ever really need to read, but, remember, you must read some Hayek.

Now, let me digress here. As you know, I consider Libertarians to be like Celtic barbarians deployed by British kings in the Middle Ages against the Scots or the French. They are extremely useful for fighting your enemies, but you would never want one to actually sit on the throne. I consider Hayek to be much less of a libertarian than the abstraction-loving semi-anarchists who use the label today. Indeed, Hayek is distrusted by some pure libertarians because he didn’t write about Star Trek. No, just kidding. He’s distrusted by zealots because he had a go-with-what-works approach. I try to stay very clear of such arguments, but if you want the purist libertarian stuff, go read something by Ludwig Von Mises. Honestly, though, I don’t know what that would be.

If you want something more elegant and readable, I cannot recommend more Charles Murray’s slender and deviously persuasive (5) What It Means To Be a Libertarian. For what it means to be a neoconservative, I would not recommend any book with the word “neoconservative” in the title except either of the books by Irving Kristol: (6) Reflections of a Neocon or (6) Necon: Autobiography. But I would not say you should get both as there’s a lot of overlap.

The Paleos would cut my heart out with a spoon or maybe something even dullerlike their sense of humorif I didn’t put at least one of their tomes on the list. Richard Weaver pointed out a long time ago that ideas have consequences in his landmark work, (7) Ideas Have Consequences . To be honest, I haven’t cracked the book in a long time and I don’t think I ever read it cover to cover in the first place. But do as I say, not as I do.

Because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something pretty unusual as I’m pretty quirky. No wait, that’s not right. Because I’m quirky, I think you should read Robert Nisbet’s (8) Prejudices: A Dictionary (OUT OF PRINT). Quite simply, I love this book. It’s not particularly famous or influential, but it is the best bit of high-minded conservative crankiness around. If you find it in a used-book store, buy extra copies because you will want to give it away as a gift. The best thing about it is that each chapter is really, really short, which is great for my self-esteem.

9. Conservative Tradition in America by Charles Dunn and J. David Woodward doesn’t seem to get the respect it deserves. It’s a short, to-the-point and shockingly thorough survey of conservatism. It’s got lots of lists that lava-lamp intellectuals will find very useful.

10. There’s a big argument out there about when the last truly funny line of Stripes occurs. Some say it’s the moment Bill Murray says, “were gonna party Italian-style” on the parade grounds. Some people say it comes when John Candy insists, for the last time, that he gets the top bunk. Others say the moment the comedy died was when the soldier tells John Larroquette that Murray and Ramis took the EM-50 to get washed. There are some who are offended by the suggestion that Stripes wasn’t hilarious all the way through to the “a party for me!?” line.

This debate largely mirrors the debate over (10) Closing of the American Mind. I don’t know if it’s when Bloom starts talking about the Nietzscheanization of the Left or perhaps when he delves too deep into Kantianism. All I can tell you is that at some point, I found it so difficult to read I started saying, “Look! Clouds!” out the bus window about halfway through. That said, the first half is so brilliant and wonderful, like the first half of Stripes, the book is still worth it.

I hope this is helpful. I don’t know if you guys found this helpful, but if you like, we can do a similar list of famous articles, etc. In the meantime, Cosmo is muttering about the perfidy of squirrel Jacobinism.

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Ben Stein, Hollywood Rebel? Get this man a show! (National Review Online, 020927)

By Michael Long

Contrary to what it seems, actors don’t say much of anything controversial. Already you’re thinking that’s not true — Tim Robbins rips on the U.S. government, Rosie O’Donnell thinks gun owners are apes, and Pamela Anderson thinks stripping naked for animal rights actually draws attention to the animals.

Here’s your problem: You don’t know the definition of “controversy” — at least not the one that matters.

While the rest of us imagine controversial acts to be flag desecration, public lewdness, and saying something bad about the new preacher, Hollywood’s idea of controversy is daring to agree with the mainstream. For every vaguely religious Signs or patriotic We Were Soldiers, there are dozens more entertainments working the other side of the street: think of the Clinton apologetics of The Contender, the America-bashing of Born on the Fourth of July, or the Christian-smearing in the current The Good Girl.

Look around. The real Hollywood rebel is the only unabashed Republican out there, uber-nerd Ben Stein.

Resolved: If Hollywood wants a real rebel, Stein is the man, because he rebels against Hollywood’s biggest causes. Stein’s résumé begins with speechwriting in the Nixon White House, followed by a stint on the editorial staff of this “establishment” newspaper. For years he has written a monthly diary for the mega-conservative American Spectator magazine, and has done investigative writing for business-bastion Barron’s. When he’s not acting or writing, he’s teaching business ethics at church-supported Pepperdine University, and delivering speeches gratis around the country for pro-life causes. (Even his pedigree is nerd-intellectual-conservative. His father was the late Herb Stein, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and his mother was a conservative intellectual as well.)

As an actor, Stein is best known for one of his first movie roles, that of the monotone teacher in John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off — his monotone calling of the classroom roll (“Bueller? Bueller?”) is one of the most famous scenes in American movies. Since then, he’s appeared in hit films such as Soapdish, Honeymoon in Vegas, The Mask, and Dave; he’s been the pitch man for Clear Eyes and E-Trade, and he is a regular on NBC’s Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn.

His game show on Comedy Central, Win Ben Stein’s Money, is a pop-culture phenomenon about to start its seventh season, and after this batch of episodes is played out, all that’s left are reruns. Let’s hope he finds a new place in movies and TV, not only because he is clever and makes us laugh, but also because conservatives need every high-profile pop-culture personality we can get.

In Hollywood, there are conservatives who are screenwriters, executives, producers, or agents, but not many. Even fewer admit it, and none of them appear on-screen. Stein is perhaps the highest-profile personality in entertainment to speak out on the right to life, to assert that free enterprise is a great thing, to tell people they should be proud to have George W. Bush as our leader, and to offer Alex Baldwin and Barbara Streisand his personal help to pack if they want to leave the country because Bush won.

With Win Ben Stein’s Money riding off into the TV sunset, the otherwise multiloquent Stein will be a little less visible for a while. Not that he ought to have a show simply because he’s a conservative — though that would be fine, too. He ought to have a show 1) because he puts on a pretty cool show and 2) in the name of the liberals’ holiest grail, diversity. Sure, you’ve got your Queer As Folk on Showtime, showcasing the lives of gay minorities, but where do conservatives go for a little reinforcement via family sitcom or gritty cop drama? Bill O’Reilly isn’t exactly Sinbad in a suit and tie, and Sean Hannity isn’t out there doing droll comebacks to send that punching bag Alan Colmes into convulsions of laughter. Besides, these shows are on Fox News Channel — a fine place, but isn’t the goal of diversity to head off such ghetto-ization? Someone call the EEOC.

Stein is developing a talk show with Warner Brothers Telepictures. A talk show hosted by the king of drollery sounds like fun — and it looks like Bill Clinton is not going to be the new Arsenio of that world, anyway. But if it doesn’t work out, something ought to, darn it. Hollywood needs its only real rebel — even if he just happens to be its lone, loquacious conservative.

— Michael Long is an NRO contributor and a director of the White House Writers Group.

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What does ‘W.’ read after the Bible? (National Post, 0010)

The real influence behind the man who would be president

Donna Laframboise

When asked earlier this year what book, other than the Bible, had most influenced him, U.S. presidential candidate George W. Bush surprised many by citing a volume written by a former English professor whose specialty is the work of Charles Dickens.

Published in 1993, The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Underclass, has been required reading for Governor Bush’s Texas staff since his first term in office. These days, it’s described by his campaign strategist as “a road map to the governor’s attitudes on the role of government.”

The book’s author, Myron Magnet, is an unlikely Republican guru. As a graduate student, he protested the Vietnam War and, in his words, “helped barricade a building at Columbia” University. In the Eighties, he wrote a series of articles on poverty for Fortune magazine that eventually led to the ideas espoused in The Dream and the Nightmare.

“I was extremely interested in all the social questions that are at the centre of Dickens’ books,” he told the National Post. “The virtue of doing this for Fortune is that you are not only allowed but encouraged to go look at it with your own eyes. I traversed the country visiting homeless shelters, talking to their operators and the people in them. It was an eye-opener.”

Now editor of City Journal, an influential quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Magnet spends part of his time trying to sell “compassionate conservatism” to Republicans.

The central thesis of his book (of which 28,000 copies have been sold), is that poverty is more closely related to cultural factors than economic ones. In Magnet’s view, many of the values of personal liberation that Americans began embracing in the Sixties have profoundly harmed society’s most vulnerable. Programs aimed at helping the poor have proliferated in recent decades, he argues, but have succeeded only in producing a historically new phenomenon —an underclass of approximately 5 million Americans trapped in violent ghettos, intergenerational welfare dependency and homelessness.

People’s chances of escaping life in the underclass are hampered, Magnet says, by several factors. First, mass culture is dominated by middle-class individuals whose affluence cushions them when they behave irresponsibly. Teenage pregnancy, for example, may not be the end of the world for a middle-class girl, and unmarried pregnancy may be no hardship for Madonna. But for those on the margins, it is economically disastrous.

In Magnet’s view, a society that no longer values “deferral of gratification, sobriety, thrift [and] dogged industry,” but instead promotes doing whatever feels good, is a society that invites its poorest members to torpedo their own lives. “Poverty turned pathological,” he says, “because the new culture that the Haves invented —their remade system of beliefs, norms and institutions —permitted, even celebrated, behavior that, when poor people practice it, will imprison them inextricably in poverty.”

A second problem is middle-class snobbery, which disparages low paid work as demeaning, dead-end McJobs. “Most families don’t rise from poverty to neurosurgery ... in one generation,” writes Magnet. “It goes by stages, it takes time, and it often starts humbly. But if cleaning houses, making up hotel rooms, cutting meat or cooking French fries is being a sap ... rather than being decent and honest —then it is that much harder to put a foot on the bottom of the ladder.”

While wave after wave of immigrants find in menial jobs “their gateway to the American dream,” Magnet says U.S. ghettos are filled with young people who have been taught by mainstream culture to scorn “jobs flipping hamburgers [even though such jobs] are good at teaching what underclass kids lacking basic skills need first to learn about managing the world of work: how to show up on time, look presentable, be efficient and deal pleasantly with customers and bosses.”

Nor are the values necessary to succeed in life being transmitted to these kids in their own homes. “Many underclass children, already deprived of a father, also suffer bad mothering from harried, ignorant, isolated, poor and sometimes drug-dependent women,” he writes.

Regarding the common practice of setting up teenage moms in welfare-supported apartments, he says society has “created a machine for perpetuating that very underclass, by encouraging the least competent women —with the least initiative, the worst values and the most blighted family structures —to become the mothers of the next generation.”

“I’m sure,” he adds, “I will be accused of all sorts of things for suggesting that people likely to be incompetent parents shouldn’t be abetted in having babies to be supported by the state. But ... I find it cruelty to induce the bringing into the world of children who will be so badly nurtured.”

A third problem is that society undermines the self-confidence of those at the bottom by telling them the real answer to poverty involves making society more equitable on a grand scale —the implication being that their own efforts aren’t likely to amount to much.

“In the Sixties, just when the successes of the civil rights movement were removing racial barriers to mainstream opportunities, the mainstream values that poor blacks needed to seize those chances, values such as hard work and self-denial, came under sharp attack,” writes Magnet.

“Poor blacks needed all the support and encouragement that mainstream culture could give them to stand up and make their own fates. But mainstream culture let them down. Issuing the opposite of a call to responsibility and self-reliance, the larger culture told blacks in particular, and the poor in general, that they were victims, and that society, not they themselves, was responsible for not only their present but their future condition.”

The Dream and the Nightmare repeatedly acknowledges that the left-leaning middle class has genuinely tried to emancipate the downtrodden. The problem, he says, is that many of their Sixties-era assumptions about how to solve social problems have been flawed.

“The bitter paradox that is so hard to face is that most of what the Haves have already done to help the poor —out of decent and generous motives —is part of the problem,” he writes. “Like gas pumped into a flooded engine, the more help they bestow, the less able do the poor become to help themselves. The problem isn’t that the Haves haven’t done enough but that they’ve done the diametrically wrong thing.”

Magnet argues strongly for a return to more straitlaced social norms such as the restigmatization of unmarried motherhood —not because he’s a killjoy, but because he believes that’s how the poor will be empowered to escape their grim fate under their own steam.

He has no doubts about Governor Bush’s sincerity in embracing his message. “I don’t think he’s kidding,” says Magnet. “We need, above all, to have an educational system that gives poor people the tools that so many generations of internal and external migrants had when they reached the American cities. He’s very serious about that. He’s very serious about believing that families of welfare moms and their children are weak families. He’s very, very anxious about doing everything from a policy point of view he can to not encourage illegitimacy and, from a bully pulpit point of view, to making the case powerfully that kids need two parents.”

Personally, I’ve never before cheered on a Republican presidential candidate. But as the daughter of an auto mechanic, I know first-hand that I wouldn’t hold a university degree or a white collar job today if my own parents had swallowed the leftist view that the system is stacked against them, if they hadn’t lived cautiously, worked hard and valued education.

In Magnet’s view, a victory for Governor Bush will be a blessing for America’s poor. After reading his startling —and brilliant —book, it’s easy to believe he’s correct.

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The Fantasy Life of American Liberals: Three generations of left-wing idiocy are enough (Weekly Standard, 021118)

by Charles Krauthammer

THE ELECTION RETURNS are in, and the high priest of American liberalism has spoken. “If you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture,” warned Bill Moyers in his post-election PBS commentary. And not only will George Bush, right-wing radical, now attempt to impose a theocracy, he is preparing, among other depredations, “to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives . . . to transfer wealth from working people to the rich . . . [and] to eviscerate the environment.”

Odd. In a country where the great assault, such as it is, on “choice” consists of parental notification of teenage abortions, in a country where most people don’t particularly enjoy having their wealth “transferred,” where they support reasonable environmental regulation and believe in some separation between church and state, how could this conjunction of “piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money”—Moyers’s summary of Republicanism—command such public support?

Moyers doesn’t explain, it being perhaps imprudent to openly express contempt for a public whose tax money supports his show. Bob Herbert works for the New York Times and thus does not have the same dilemma. But as a prototypical paleoliberal, he offers the traditional explanation for the umpteenth defeat of liberalism at the polls: the beguiling smile. The GOP, you see, “wears a sunny mask, which conceals a reality that is far more ideological, far more extreme, than most Americans realize.” The voters are therefore not the total idiots Moyers makes them out to be. They are simply seduced, done in by the genial smile.

Ah, the genial smile. There have been three successful Republican presidents in the modern era (i.e., since the New Deal), all of whose successes confounded the liberal elites. It began with their inability to fathom how Americans could prefer Eisenhower to Stevenson. The smile. Ike was a fool who (in Captain Renault’s immortal phrase) blundered his way into Berlin, smiled his way into the presidency—and then whiled it away playing golf.

The next puzzle was Ronald Reagan, the “amiable dunce” (Clark Clifford’s famously obtuse characterization) who somehow brought down the Soviet empire. It was a Hollywood conceit that “Being There,” the Peter Sellers film about a retarded recluse who is taken for a mystical genius and becomes president, was a metaphor for Reagan. His genial smile concealed not just stupidity but evil intentions. No, not his evil intentions—he being too dimwitted even to merit moral opprobrium—but the evil intentions of those manipulating him behind the scenes.

Twenty years later, the liberal nightmare returns in the form of George W. Bush, another exemplar of the trinity of Republican success: geniality, empty-headedness, and evil. With him, there is a similar difficulty reconciling the apparent antitheticals: empty-headedness and evil. Once again this is explained by the Manchurian Candidate theory, Bush, the simpleton, being the puppet of a vast, dark, right-wing cabal.

This is a running theme, indeed an obsession, of Times columnist Paul Krugman, who wrote during the French election that the neofascist presidential candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen was a mirror image of American Republicanism. Except that things are worse in America because Le Pen lost and Bush won. “Le Pen is a political outsider. . . . So his hard-right ideas won’t be put into practice anytime soon. . . . In this country people with views that are, in their way, as extreme as Mr. Le Pen’s are in a position to put those views into practice.”

In America, the fascists have achieved power, riding the smile of their front man “boy king,” too dense perhaps even to know the interests he serves. This theme reached its comic apogee in Barbra Streisand’s now famous, gloriously misspelled antiwar memo to Dick Gephardt, in which she explained that the reason Bush was dragging the nation to war with Iraq was to serve the “oil industry, the chemical companies, the logging industry.” On to Baghdad—for the timber!

This is truly bizarre. George Bush, extremist? This is a president who passed an education bill essentially written by Ted Kennedy. His tax reform involves the most modest of rate cuts for the upper brackets and is what any Keynesian would have done in the face of a recession. It is, for example, more moderate than the (John) Kennedy tax cuts. The other alleged parts of his agenda—the environmental rape, the imposition of theocracy, the abolition of civil liberties (Moyers: “secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine”)—are nothing but the delusion of liberals made quite mad by defeat.

The last time the Republicans enjoyed unexpected political victory, the Gingrich revolution of 1994, the liberal consensus was dumbfounded. How to explain history going so wrong? Hence, a legend was born, the legend of the “angry white male.” In fact, that term had no empirical basis whatsoever. I did a search and found only three polls that even asked about anger. In all three, 70-80% of white male respondents denied being angry. In contrast, the Democrats’ victory two years earlier was sweetly dubbed “Year of the Woman.”

Why? Because it is an article of liberal faith that conservatism is not just wrong but stone coldhearted to the core. When Robert Nozick died earlier this year, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in his New York Times obituary, “The implications of ‘Anarchy, State, and Utopia’ are strongly libertarian and proved comforting to the right, which was grateful for what it embraced as philosophical justification.”

Liberalism needs no philosophical justification because it only wants to do good. Conservatives are grateful to find a thinker who can spin logic well enough to cover their tracks, providing “philosophical justification” for their rape and pillage.

And when this sleight of hand, this transmutation of evil into good, is accomplished not by a philosophical genius like Nozick but by yet another amiable dunce in the presidency, liberals become unhinged. The 2000 election they could attribute to simple theft; the 2002 election they could only attribute to a kind of cosmic false consciousness. Yet the voters seem to have known precisely what they were doing. It was not George Bush’s genial smile that got the most liberal state in the union, Massachusetts, not only to elect a conservative Mormon businessman as governor but to overwhelmingly approve the abolition of bilingual education, that totem of liberal social engineering. It was a triumph of experience over hope, the very definition of conservatism.

Such ideas cannot possibly be admitted. Hence the rage at Bush, the contempt for the electorate, and the spinning of deeply disturbed and highly entertaining conspiracy theories. Judging by their wild and crazy reaction to their defeat on November 5, one can only conclude that this election has left liberal elites further out of touch with reality than at any time in recent memory. As a former psychiatrist, I can confidently predict that logic and empirical evidence will have no therapeutic effect. It’s time for the Thorazine.

Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

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A Short History of Cultural Conservatism (Free Congress Foundation, 0212)

Bill Lind

Director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism

Through most of the Cold War era, American conservatism rested on the twin pillars of free market economics and anti-Communism. Culture was not a political issue, for the simple reason that America was culturally united. Traditional, Western, Judeo-Christian culture was accepted by the vast majority of Americans, including the American political Establishment, both political parties and most other elites as well. Rejection of Western culture was limited to a few small, eccentric bands in places like Greenwich Village.

By the early 1980s, however, the Free Congress Foundation recognized that this situation had changed. The New Left had launched a massive assault on Western culture in the academy, beginning in the 1960s. The cultural revolution in the academy had spread to wide segments of the general population, promoted especially by the entertainment industry. Most of the Democratic Party had gone over to the new anti-Western view, adopting its mantra of “racism, sexism and homophobia.” While free market economics was triumphing world-wide and Communism’s days were obviously numbered, America’s culture was turning into a moral sewer. Clearly, a new conservatism was needed in response — a conservatism built not on economics but on defense of traditional Western culture.

A few American conservative leaders, most prominently the great Russell Kirk, had long championed a cultural basis for politics. But Free Congress Foundation was the first Washington-based conservative think tank to take on the task of developing a new cultural conservatism, cultural conservatism aimed directly at the causes of America’s cultural decline (Dr. Kirk was strongly supportive of our efforts). Beginning in 1985, the Foundation published a series of Essays On Our Times that explored what a modern cultural conservatism might look like. In one of those essays, the Foundation offered a definition of cultural conservatism that has shaped its subsequent development:

Cultural conservatism is the belief that there is a necessary, unbreakable, and causal relationship between traditional Western, Judeo-Christian values, definitions of right and wrong, ways of thinking and ways of living — the parameters of Western culture — and the secular success of Western societies: their prosperity, their liberties, and the opportunities they offer their citizens to lead fulfilling, rewarding lives. If the former are abandoned, the latter will be lost.

Then, in 1987, the Foundation published its first book on cultural conservatism, Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda. This book briefly summarized the concept of cultural conservatism, then applied it to ten different policy fields, some familiar and some novel. In each field, it offered a series of goals related to restoring traditional Western culture as the American norm, then proposed some means to reach these goals, many of them innovative.

Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda was widely read by policy-makers in Washington, and it led to a second volume, Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice. Also published by the Free Congress Foundation, Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice was an anthology devoted largely to deepening the theory of cultural conservatism. With chapters by Russell Kirk, Michael Levin, Jeffrey Hart and Robert Woodson among others, the book had a significant impact among conservative intellectuals. Indeed, in its wake many other conservative think tanks began their own programs and projects on cultural conservatism.

As is its tradition, once others began picking up the major theme of cultural conservatism, Free Congress Foundation moved on to pioneer new aspects. Over the last several years, the Center for Cultural Conservatism devoted itself to researching the history and hidden agenda of our culture’s enemies. We quickly realized that the somewhat inchoate ramblings of the l960s New Left had crystallized into a full-blown ideology, the ideology generally known as “multiculturalism” or “Political Correctness.” In a new essay series on Political Correctness, we laid out its nature and historical origins, discovering that it is nothing less than Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms, largely through the work of the so-called “Frankfurt School,” the Institute for Social Research established at Frankfurt University in Frankfurt, Germany in 1923 and removed to New York City in 1933. To the essay series we subsequently added a video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, “Political Correctness: The Dirty Little Secret.”

Most recently, through a series of writings by Free Congress President Paul Weyrich (also available on this website in the FCF Store) and another series of essays titled “Against the Grain,” the Foundation has proposed a new strategy to deal with America’s cultural disintegration: cultural independence. Instead of trying to retake existing cultural institutions from the forces of Political Correctness, we propose that cultural conservatives should build their own separate, parallel institutions. This is already occuring in primary and secondary education through the home schooling movement. The Foundation seeks to promote similar efforts in respect to every major cultural insitution, including higher education, the media, entertainment, and high culture including art, architecture and music. While these would begin as institutions for a cultural minority, their success would over time make traditional Western culture once again the majority American culture.

If you want to learn more about cultural conservatism and perhaps become personally involved in the movement to restore America’s traditional culture, all of the publications and materials mentioned above are still available from the Free Congress Foundation: both books (Cultural Conservatism: Toward a New National Agenda and Cultural Conservatism: Theory and Practice) the Political Correctness essay series and the video documentary history of the Frankfurt School, and the “Against the Grain” essay series on cultural independence. These publications are all available from the FCF Store by clicking here.

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Social conservatives come out of the closet (National Post, 000711)

Social conservatives have watched with keen interest the growing media attention focused on social conservatism and its goals. Since the media have ignored and marginalized this segment of the Canadian populace for years, we find the attention both exciting and amusing.

Obviously, the basis of this renewed attention has been the Canadian Alliance leadership race. It is intriguing to witness the nationwide debate that has been ignited: Will social conservatives impose their views on the country? Why are family-oriented institutions supporting Stockwell Day?

Stockwell Day and Preston Manning’s ability to articulate social conservative values within a culture of political correctness has encouraged many conservatives to speak out. The candidates’ willingness to openly discuss sensitive issues — such as heterosexual marriage and the rights of the unborn — on the national stage has signalled a maturing for Canada’s social conservatives, a much larger number than many pundits had imagined.

It has been amusing to watch commentators and columnists acting as if they had witnessed the ascension of some mythical creature. That so many Canadians are, at the very least, open to hearing what social conservatives have to say has left many commentators dumbfounded.

In light of the media’s consistently mean-spirited portrayal of social conservatives, it is astounding to witness the growing ranks of those Canadians — particularly among the young — willing to be identified with the movement. After all, social conservatives have recently been characterized as scary, repent-or-be-sent Christians, as intolerant xenophobes who threaten progress, as narrow-minded Neanderthals on the fringe of society.

Such descriptions display the venom, oversimplification and intellectual licence employed by many opponents of things conservative. Many peddle fear, their propaganda a collection of half-truths. Their interpretation of freedom of expression means freedom for them, silence for the dissenter.

Social conservatives, as Mr. Day has repeated time and again, espouse a platform of respect. While Canadians hold a variety of disparate views, social conservatives believe those views and their proponents have essential self-worth and are deserving of respect, dignity and a public voice.

Social conservatives, although not perfect, are not monsters. They are women and men of various backgrounds, nationalities, faiths and ideologies, desirous of the respectful right to hold and practise deeply held values, ideas and beliefs without being branded as pariahs.

Social conservatives recognize the diversity of our culture and understand that pluralism demands mutual respect — my freedom is essentially dependent on your freedom whether we are in agreement or are ideological opponents.

It is here that social conservatives come into stark contrast with many of their politically corrrect rivals.

Social conservatives believe that public debate and the democratic political process should determine public policy. The continuing characterization of social democrats as simple-minded zealots out to dupe Canadians is ridiculous. The “imposition” of a social conservative platform would require some 40 per cent of the electorate’s vote in an election. It is absurd to assert that a socially conservative “agenda” can be foisted on this country against the will of the electorate.

Anyone who believes that such a fraud is possible must also believe that Canadian voters are unreasoning and incapable, a view held by many left-leaning elitists: those who believe the state, not its citizenry, knows best.

Social conservatives believe Canadians deserve more credit. If voters choose socially conservative candidates in the next election, it will not be the result of foolishness or stupidity. Rather, it will demonstrate the electorate’s belief that those candidates represent their views and goals for Canada.

This social conservative belief in, and preference for, the democratic political process stands in contrast to the practice of many left-wing organizations that prefer to use the legal system to force their agenda on Canadians. These organizations don’t trust Canadians to vote properly so they turn to the courts in pursuit of their agenda and rely on judicial activism to impose their values and beliefs on society.

For example, the Canadian Foundation for Children, Youth and the Law recently challenged Section 43 of the Criminal Code that allows parents to use reasonable force to discipline their children. The CFCYL knows full well that most Canadian parents have spanked their children and would not support this intrusion into their parental rights. Reasonable and loving parents, like all reasonable and right-thinking Canadians, are opposed to child abuse and fully support the existing laws that outlaw abuse. But the CFCYL, with the assistance of more than $50,000 in grants from the federal government, ran to the courts in an effort to sidestep the democratic political process and the dissent of the good and loving parents working hard to raise their children.

Had its efforts been successful, the CFCYL could have trampled on the rights of parents, turning law-abiding citizens into criminals — all this occurring outside of the democratic political process. The CFCYL essentially argued that it, and not parents, was the most qualified to decide the best interests of our children. Fortunately, the judge determined that Section 43 is constitutional, keeping the CFCYL and the government out of our homes. The CFCYL has indicated it will appeal the decision.

The ludicrous accusation that social conservatives will impose their agenda on an unsuspecting Canadian electorate is nothing more than a smoke screen to mask the fear of those who clearly sense that Canadians are rejecting a left-wing agenda in support of a more conservative view. We need not fear social conservatives with their strong support for the democratic political process. Rather, we should question the motivation, goals and agenda of those alarmists and elitists who, with their disregard for the intellect and wisdom of the average Canadian, would ignore the democratic political process and impose their will through fear-mongering and legal manoeuvring.

Jay Barwell is director of communications and Derek Rogusky is senior researcher at Focus on the Family Canada, a Vancouver-based Christian charity.

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Europe’s Hidden Conservatives: The young and the free thinking (National Review Online, 030225)

By Richard Miniter

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM — On a cold, wet night, on the steps of neoclassical Belgian Stock Exchange building, a man with a gray ponytail was passing out antiwar, anticapitalist leaflets in French and German. A few other protesters milled nearby. If you were a CNN assignment editor, this tiny knot of old radicals was your story.

But walk about the steps and you would find a more surprising story. On the floor of the stock exchange more than 300 free-market activists, journalists, and politicians had gathered to celebrate the first ever “CNE Capitalist Ball,” organized by the think tank I work for, the Centre for the New Europe.

The black-tie event drew guests from both old and new Europe — from Britain and France to Montenegro and Poland. Indeed every European country now has a free-market institute or one in the works. (Tiny Albania is trying to get two think tanks off the ground.) And nearly every one of them sent a representative. The crowd would have been larger if the fire marshal would have allowed it.

While a member of the Swedish parliament railed against the dangers of socialism and extolled the efforts of the former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar’s efforts to liberalize his country’s economy, Bill Dal Col, an adviser to Steve Forbes, turned to me and said: “I can’t believe that I’m hearing this in Europe.”

He’s not the only one. In the past few weeks, the news from Europe has been packed with massive antiwar protest marches, French diplomatic efforts to undermine President Bush, German dithering, and endless helpings of political waffles from Brussels.

Seen from the U.S., Europe is a monolithic miasma of anti-American fever, high taxes, and absurd regulations. That view is about two years out of date.

In fact, socialism is slowly withering away in Europe. Since 2001 left-wing governments have been defeated in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland and Denmark. Ireland now has a solid conservative coalition government. Technically, France, Belgium and Luxembourg have center-right governments, but laissez faire seems to mean something different in French these days. Yet even the French are cutting taxes and reining in their vast welfare state, albeit slowly.

Even Britain’s Tony Blair governs to the right (he recently privatized the London subway, among other things). So inside the EU, there are only three center-left governments left: Germany, Sweden, and Greece. The German social democrats are at their lowest levels of support in the polls since 1933. Less than 26% of Germans support Gerhard Schroeder’s party. Sweden now has the largest free-market party in Europe (think libertarians who don’t like drugs), which now commands the second-largest block of seats in the Swedish parliament. Only Greece remains a socialist basket case. So 9 out of 15 EU governments have center-right governments (counting Blair). Another two have large conservative movements that could throw the bums out.

And as the Left loses power and influence, anti-Americanism fades. Notice that the eight prime ministers who recently signed a letter in favor of America’s coming liberation of Iraq were all from center-right governments elected or reelected in the past two years? Or flip the question around: What do Germany, Belgium, and France have in common? Germany has a left-wing coalition government, Belgium has a left-right coalition government and French president Jacques Chirac spent the last two decades “co-habiting” with a Socialist-Communist party coalition government. Anti-Americanism is a left-wing thing, not a European thing.

More important than the politicians and electoral victories is the growing array of free-market think tanks and activist groups across Europe. They make up a swelling army of scholars and writers who appear in the European television or write articles for influential newspapers arguing for open markets, lower taxes, and less red tape.

Many of these activists belong to the Stockholm Network, a pan-European free market group that recently hosted a conference entitled “Is Socialism Dead?” in Brussels. Some 80 think-tank presidents, activists, and journalists attended the conference. (To brighten your day, check out this.)

At the Stockholm Network conference a few weeks ago, I met Chresten Anderson, founder of Denmark’s new think tank the Market Center. He could have followed the path of so many Danes and moved to America. Indeed, it would be easy for him to do so. He speaks flawless English and has an American wife. But the 26-year-old has moved back to Copenhagen to start that nation’s first free-market think tank on a shoestring, throwing away several lucrative private-sector opportunities. “I’m still young,” he explained “and I really believe in this.”

Slowly the network of free-market groups is changing Europe. There are many small, but hopeful signs of a conservative renaissance in Europe. Think-tank leaders say that conservative arguments are starting to resonate with ordinary people and are taken more seriously by the continent’s op-ed editors. Small businessman and even executives are increasingly writing them checks. A new group seems to emerge in Europe every month.

Traveling around Europe, one finds a sense of excitement among young leaders. Today the European free-market movement is roughly were the American movement was in 1977. The good news: It is no longer 1968 in old Europe. But it is not yet 1980, either. And no Thatchers or Reagans have appeared yet.

Still there are many Europeans like Anderson. Too bad the American media can’t seem to find them.

— Richard Miniter is a senior fellow at the Center for the New Europe, a Brussels-based free-market think tank. He is also the author of The Myth of Market Share.

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The book that helped shape Bush’s message (Austin American-Statesman, 990127)

by Dave McNeely

What does Gov. George W. Bush mean by “compassionate conservatism”?

Basically, government should do as little as is necessary. But while we have a responsibility for ourselves, we also have a responsibility for each other.

Midway through his recent gubernatorial address, Bush said:

“Government can’t solve all our problems.... The real answer is found in the hearts of decent, caring people who have heard the call to love their neighbors as they would like to be loved themselves (T)he danger to Texas (is) if the dream is not available to all, it diminishes the dreams of the entire society.”

Bush’s demand that people take responsibility for themselves, which he says undergirds almost every decision he makes has been shaped by a 1993 book that blames the social and political permissiveness of the 1960s for many problems since then.

That book, “The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties’ Legacy to the Under-class,” argues that overzealous efforts by the Haves to help the Have-Nots actually made their situation worse, not better.

In the relaxed moral and sexual attitudes of the 196Os—the attitude that, as Bush characterizes it, “if it feels good, do it”—personal liberation lapped over into political liberation, observes author Myron Magnet.

That quest for personal liberation on the part of the Haves, influenced by left-leaning media and political figures, “withdrew respect from the behavior and attitudes that have traditionally boosted people up the economic ladder—deferral of gratification, sobriety, thrift, dogged industry, and so on through the whole catalogue of antique-sounding bourgeois virtues,” says Magnet.

Bush read the book before his first campaign for governor in 1994. Karl Rove, Bush’s principal political adviser, describes it as a road map to the governor’s attitudes on the role of government. Bush also met with Magnet about a year ago.

Magnet, who has a doctorate in English literature from Columbia University, is a member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine and a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, where he is editor of City Journal, a quarterly magazine on urban affairs. The book grew out of a series of stories on poverty and social policy Magnet wrote for Fortune in 1987 and 1988, interviewing homeless and underclass people, public officials, shelter operators and others.

Some of Magnet’s conclusions about the social policy of the 1960s:

“(T)he new culture held the poor back from advancement by robbing them of responsibility for their fate and thus further squelching their initiative and energy.

“Instead of telling them to take wholehearted advantage of opportunities that were rapidly opening, the new culture told the Have-Nots that they were victims of an unjust society, and if they were black, that they were entitled to restitution, including advancement on the basis of racial preference rather than mere personal striving and merit.

“It told them that the traditional standards of the larger community, already under attack by the counterculture, often didn’t apply to them, that their wrongdoing might well be justified rebellion or the expression of yet another legitimate ‘alternative life-style.’ . . .

“The new culture ... allowed the neighborhoods of the Have-Nots to turn into anarchy, and it ruined the Have-Nots’ schools by making racial balance, students’ rights, and a ‘multicultural’ curriculum more important than the genuine education vitally needed to rise.”

Meanwhile, the liberal elite Haves, to make themselves feel better, “acquiesced in dubious and ultimately destructive measures such as the parceling out of rewards on the basis of race . . . or the excusing of criminals as themselves victims (or) the lifetime public support of able-bodied women whose only career was the production of illegitimate and mostly ill-parented children.” So what’s the right thing?

“(T)he required solution is for the poor to take responsibility for themselves, not to be made dependent on programs and exempted from responsibility,” Magnet argues. “For the breakdown of the poor to be healed and the moral confusion of the Haves to be dispelled, we need above all to repair the damage that has been done to the beliefs and values that have made American remarkable and that for two centuries have successfully transformed huddled masses of the poor into free and prosperous citizens.”

From Bush’s inaugural address: “Every child must learn to read . . we must get children the help they need. . . (They) must also be educated in the values of our civil society . . to say yes to responsibility, yes to family, yes to honesty and work, and no to drugs, no to violence, no to promiscuity or having babies out of wedlock.”

If anyone is in doubt about Bush’s attitudes, this book is a good primer. How resonant that message is may well be tested in the 2000 election.

McNeely writes about politics for the American-Statesman. You may contact him at dmcneely@statesman.com or 445-3644.

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The godfathers of ‘compassionate conservatism’ (Dallas Morning News, 000416)

Authors’ works have helped shape candidate Bush’s core philosophy

By Bill Minutaglio

When Myron Magnet sat on the couch with George W. Bush three years ago, he had a feeling that the Texas governor had finally found the philosophy he was looking for.

The writer had been invited to Austin by Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. Bush’s longtime political strategist. The idea was for the Manhattan-based Mr. Magnet to lecture the governor and his staff on his theory that less government was better government.

Along with Marvin Olasky, a University of Texas journalism professor and author, Mr. Magnet has been instrumental in shaping the bedrock of Mr. Bush’s public policies - something the leading GOP presidential contender describes with the catch phrase “compassionate conservatism.”

The two men, far and away, have been the spiritual and intellectual godfathers of Mr. Bush’s core philosophy.

In Austin that day in 1997, Mr. Bush told Mr. Magnet that his 1993 book The Dream and The Nightmare, had changed his life.

The work suggests, in large part, that the true legacy of the 1960s was a laundry list of societal ills that the United States is still paying for.

“I gleaned when I went down to see him that it [the book] had crystallized things that he had been thinking about for a long time,” said Mr. Magnet, who edits the urban policy publication City Journal and helps run The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “The book kind of contains the formula for compassionate conservatism.”

“Leading thinker’

But just a few miles away from the Governor’s Mansion, Mr. Olasky, an intellectual ally of Mr. Magnet’s, might suggest that he, also, had the literal formula for Mr. Bush’s by-now-famous philosophy.

In the foreword to Mr. Olasky’s upcoming book, Compassionate Conservatism, What It Is, What It Does, and How It Can Transform America, Mr. Bush calls the professor “compassionate conservatism’s leading thinker.”

In his 1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion, Mr. Olasky also outlines his belief that the country erred in its thinking that a big, generous government could solve social problems.

When Mr. Olasky wrote it, he had no idea that his then-little-known tome would become the rage among GOP leaders - and that it would eventually be a key part of Mr. Bush’s presidential aspirations.

In that book Mr. Olasky suggested that social problems are better solved by the private sector - churches, faith-based institutions, volunteers, civic-minded corporations.

The over-reliance on government, something Mr. Olasky and Mr. Magnet say was amplified in the 1960s, created an enormous underclass hopelessly addicted to welfare and other social programs, Mr. Olasky argued.

What Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky pushed hard for was a return to a day when people helped themselves - and when neighbors helped one another.

It was, both men maintained, a more moral and efficient way of running society and government.

Critical evolution

Critics said the men were advancing a cold-hearted abandonment of the poor by advocating slicing thousands of Americans from helpful federal programs.

Critics have also blasted Mr. Olasky in recent weeks, suggesting that his writings might have anti-Semitic sentiments and that he needed to be held accountable for what they said were attacks on women in a 1998 scholarly journal.

“God does not forbid women to be leaders in society, generally speaking, but when that occurs it’s usually because of the abdication of men. . . . I would vote for a woman for the presidency, in some situations, but again, there’s a certain shame attached,” said Mr. Olasky. “Why don’t you have a man who’s able to step forward?”

Mr. Olasky, who was once an avowed Marxist, has staunchly defended his theories, suggesting that reporters misinterpreted and took them out of context.

One thing is clear: Both Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky entered Mr. Bush’s orbit about the same time.

In 1993, Mr. Bush watched his father step down from the presidency, and he almost immediately kicked off his own campaign to run against then-Gov. Ann Richards.

At the same time, Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky were evolving into the intellectual darlings of what some people would eventually call The Republican Revolution - the Newt Gingrich-led attempt to cement the GOP’s hold on the electorate.

Intellectual arsenal

Searching for moral, historical and sociological arguments on which to base their strategy, some GOP leaders turned to the books by Mr. Magnet and Mr. Olasky.

For many GOP leaders, including former Education Secretary William Bennett, the books provided the intellectual ammunition in the war against what they perceived to be big-government, Democratic excesses.

Things kicked into high gear when Mr. Bennett gave Mr. Gingrich a copy of Tragedy of American Compassion as a Christmas present. In short order, Mr. Gingrich was suggesting to anyone who would listen that the book was required reading.

Word trickled to Austin, to Mr. Rove and Mr. Bush, and meetings were arranged between the governor and the authors.

Aside from having Mr. Magnet lecture his staff and advisers, Mr. Bush also asked Mr. Olasky to counsel him on how to overhaul the state’s welfare system - how to introduce the Olasky-Magnet theories into Texas.

“I looked forward to the opportunity to talk some baseball [with the governor],” Mr. Olasky said. “In our discussion, though, he showed . . . an understanding of the history of poverty fighting.”

Rebuffing criticism that Mr. Bush is simply interested in cutting welfare rosters and maybe sending some warm political overtures to Christian leaders, Mr. Magnet defends the governor’s embrace of “compassionate conservatism.”

“I felt that this was a guy who really did have an idea where he wanted to go,” said Mr. Magnet. “He wanted to undo the cultural revolution of the ‘60s and lead America back to decent values and social policy based on decent values.”

“Weasel words’

Democratic leaders, including Vice President Al Gore, have said that Mr. Bush isn’t really leading anyone with his attempts to be a “compassionate conservative.”

In November 1998, Mr. Gore announced that Americans could stand to have more than “crumbs of compassion” - and Democratic National Committee national chair Joe Andrews added that “compassionate conservatism is a contrived cop-out.”

And, as the GOP primary season heated up last year, ex-Gov. Lamar Alexander from Tennessee labeled Mr. Bush’s “compassionate conservative” title as “weasel words.”

One of Mr. Bush’s clearest, most personal defenses of his philosophy comes, fittingly, in his own words inside his friend Mr. Olasky’s yet-to-be released book.

“Compassion demands personal help and accountability, yet when delivered by big government it came to mean something very different,” Mr. Bush said.

“We started to see ourselves as a compassionate country because government was spending large sums of money and building an immense bureaucracy to help the poor. In practice, we hurt the very people we meant to help.”

==============================

The neos and paleos duke it out at home (National Post, 030329)

David Frum

WASHINGTON - The war in Iraq has triggered an ideological war inside the American conservative movement and the Republican party. The ideological war may lack the deadly seriousness of the fighting on the ground. But if morale on the home front matters in wartime, and it does, then this ideological war has its significance too.

Since 9/11, some of the most vociferous domestic opposition first to the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan and then to the Iraq war has come — not from the American Left as might have been expected — but from the American Right.

“Cui bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?

“Answer: one nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.”

That’s Pat Buchanan speaking in an article published September 24. (The reference to the Nazi slogan “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer” is unlikely to have been a coincidence.)

Or consider this, from a column by syndicated columnist Robert Novak written the very day after the 9/11 attacks: “Unlike Nazi Germany’s and Imperial Japan’s drive for a new world order, however, the hatred toward the U.S. by the terrorists is an extension of its hatred of Israel rather than world dominion. Stratfor.com, the private intelligence company, reported Tuesday: ‘The big winner today, intentionally or not, is the state of Israel.’ Whatever distance Bush wanted between U.S. and Israeli policy, it was eliminated by terror. ... The United States and Israel are brought ever closer in a way that cannot improve long-term U.S. policy objectives.”

Both Buchanan and Novak have alleged — and their charges have been echoed by a second string of Internet journalists — that the war on terror has been orchestrated by a “cabal” (Buchanan’s words) of “neoconservatives.”

In Canada, the term “neoconservative” is used to describe the strongly market-oriented right-wingers who displaced in the 1980s the squishier Stanfield/Clark Progressive Conservatives. In the United States, however, the word refers to a group of intellectuals who began their careers as anti-communist liberals and who migrated rightward during the social turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s.

From the start there were frictions between the newcomers and some members of the older conservative cohort of conservative intellectuals — or, as they came to nickname themselves, the “paleoconservatives.” Paleos complained that neos got too much attention from the media and too many prestige positions from Republican administrations; the neos in turn tended to dismiss paleo complaints as sour grapes from second-raters.

Through the 1990s, the two factions came to regard each other with greater and greater animosity. But the vast conservative mainstream, the millions of people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, vote Republican, and watch Fox News, remained nearly perfectly unaware that either faction existed at all.

9/11 changed all that. The terror attacks on the United States struck seemingly out of nowhere. Americans were suddenly eager for explanations of who the culprits were — what their motives had been — and what should be done to defend against them. This appetite for information created an opportunity that both the neos and the paleos rushed to fill.

According to the neos, culpability for the terror attacks belong to extremist Islam — and that ideology in turn had won adherents because of the political and economic failure of the Arab and Islamic world. Their solution: Defeat the extremists on the battlefield — and then fix the failures of the Arab and Islamic world through political reform.

The paleos were having none of this. Through the 1990s, their resentment of the often-Jewish neos had expressed itself in the form of an ever-more strident hostility to the state of Israel and (in Buchanan’s term) Israel’s “amen corner” in the United States. As they saw it, the U.S. had brought 9/11 on itself. “9/11 was a direct consequence of the United States meddling in an area of the world where we do not belong and are not wanted,” said Buchanan in September 2002. “We were attacked because we were on Saudi sacred soil and we are so-called repressing the Iraqis and we’re supporting Israel and all the rest of it.” The right response: withdraw from the region, downgrade the relationship with Israel, and above all — leave Saddam Hussein’s Iraq alone.

The Iraq war, Robert Novak charged in a column of December 26, 2002, was really “Sharon’s war.” And if that sounded like the kind of language used by the anti-war demonstrators in the European streets, the resemblance was not entirely coincidental.

France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen and Austria’s Joerg Haider oppose the Iraq campaign every bit as stridently as do the continent’s communist parties; Islamic extremists and environmental extremists chant the same slogans at the same rallies. The war on terror is transforming the politics of the whole world, to the point where it’s no longer clear that political terms like “left” and “right” can retain their old meaning. All that is clear is that in the 1990s as in the 1930s, defeatism in the struggle against fascism is making allies of the far left and the far right.

==============================

Conscience Conservatism: Because “Compassion” Alone Is Not Enough (Free Congress Foundation, 030507)

President Bush deserves credit. Not only has he proven himself to be a strong leader of our nation in the post-9/11 era, but the President has also demonstrated that he is a savvy political leader too as exemplified by his masterful effort in leading his party to victory in the 2002 mid-term election.

Moreover, the phrase that is often used to describe his brand of politics is “compassionate conservatism,” which resonates well in today’s political climate, particularly as Americans start focusing more of their attention on domestic politics after our victory in Iraq. But it is also one that initially raised doubt on the conservative side. Certainly, the Education Bill is one example in which there was too much “compassion” rather than conservatism when it came to appropriating money.

However, the President and Mrs. Bush are to be commended for their frequent visits to schools to tell children about the importance of education. No doubt this plays well with suburbanites who can feel assured that we have a president who cares. But the Bushes are going to places where conservatives need to be seen more often, and the message that they deliver is one that needs to be sounded more often in our society.

There is an important question though that begs asking, particularly by social conservatives, given that it is our movement that can provide the moral compass that can lead our country to rediscover the values that served us well in the past and can do so in the future.

That question is this: Is compassion enough?

Think of our country that we live in now and think of what life was like fifty years ago.

Frank Sinatra may have made the hair of many parents stand on edge, but his style would strike many of today’s young people as being downright vanilla compared to the heavy metal and rap stars of today who inject violence and sex into their work and their own public lives. The movies adhered to a moral code and churches mobilized their memberships against those works considered to be indecent. Even liberals believed in God, and while sports and movie stars did not lead perfect lives, they were expected to conduct themselves as ladies and gentlemen in public.

Las Vegas was still a pretty small town then. It had not yet become the capital of a huge, multi-million dollar gambling industry that is drawing more and more Americans into a destructive habit.

Compassion was certainly present in life back then too, particularly on a neighborly basis because communities like the one where I grew up back in Racine, Wisconsin were much stronger as were institutions such as the church and civic and fraternal organizations like the Knights of Columbus and the Elks. But that compassion was buttressed by a stronger sense of right and wrong that was prevalent throughout American society.

Now, compassion is often presented as just writing a check, particularly by our liberal opposition who have had the Federal government dole out billions upon billions of dollars indiscriminately in the name of compassion. The President deserves our thanks for his hard work in highlighting the work of volunteers who make their contributions in sweat and time, showing us that true compassion cannot be measured by the amount of the check.

But the compassion that President Bush likes to promote, a genuine kind-heartedness, is only one definition of the word. People need to realize that compassion can lead people astray too.

Compassion for predatory priests led church officials to overlook compassion for the victims of their sexual abuse. Compassion for homosexuals means overlooking the sinful activities that have greatly contributed to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. Compassion for the poor led lawmakers to let our welfare system become a trap that perpetuated poverty for millions of Americans.

Therefore, compassion is only one quality that we need to make our society function properly, and that desire to be generous and kind means little unless it is accompanied by a force of tougher, sterner stuff that can enable us to make discerning, stern, but ultimately fair and moral judgments.

Furthermore, compassion in today’s society is usually reserved for the poor, but we need to realize that there is a values deficit in this country, and it is present in not just our poorest households but also some of our most affluent. That deficit may be most glaring in the minds of many members of our younger generations who take to heart the lyrics of the songs of Madonna or Eminem in the way that we do the Psalms.

If social conservatism is to truly lead our country then we must offer more than compassion. We need to reinvigorate the conscience of all Americans to help them to rediscover that sense of right and wrong and what are the true right choices to make in life. This is something that is too important to be left to Hollywood actors or rock stars or authors of books about self-esteem.

A conservatism based on the conscience can lead individuals to realize that traditional values are still the best values. It can play a vital role in helping those institutions, such as the church, that need to recover their moral bearings. If we work to reform or even to supplant those institutions that have become corrupt, then we will have gone a long way toward reinstilling faith in traditional values and the American way. If we work to clean up our entertainment, we will have gone even further to help Judeo-Christian morality take hold once more in our society.

Compassion has an important role to play in American life. But when guided by a conservatism of the conscience, the two can develop a synergy that can bring about even more beneficial changes to our society. The two are complementary, and the President’s support for pro-life measures and abstinence education are examples where his compassion is undergirded by that strong sense of what is morally right.

Certainly, compassion cannot be blamed for the failure of our corporations and even the federal government to adhere to strict accounting standards that provide the truth to the stockholder and the taxpayer. However, unless we take decisive action soon, think of the surprise that will await many younger citizens on the day the Social Security system’s house of cards comes crashing down. If the lawmakers of our government and the managers of businesses possessed strongly developed consciences that respect the difference between right and wrong enough to take action, then they would stop such malfeasance without hesitation.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, we were fighting to preserve the integrity of the family and the central role that traditional values played in American life. We lost that battle, and it was a polarizing one. We need to realize that today our task is to promote the application of Judeo-Christian principles in today’s society. It means separating ourselves from the contemporary culture while throwing a life preserver to those immersed in the cultural cesspool who are struggling to retain their sense of decency and integrity and morality.

It means reaching out to the disaffected and demonstrating that the so-called traditional values are functional values that work and are just as relevant today as they were in the days of your grandparents. Conscience conservatism will not be an easy message to communicate so careful thought needs to be given to new strategies and tactics directed at those who need to see our hand reaching out to them. Many of the people we need to reach share our commitment to Judeo-Christian values but felt ignored by us in the past or we felt they ignored us. If we continue to leave each other alone, we will both lose. Together, in the America of the 21st Century, we can do much good.

Is the conservative movement of today up to the challenge?

Let’s hope so for the sake of our nation.

Paul M. Weyrich is Chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation.

==============================

The State of Conservatism (townhall.com, 030710)

It’s no secret that conservatives are independent, opinionated and contentious. But of late there seems to be an inordinate amount of feuding and fussing going on. Conservatives, neoconservatives and paleoconservatives are using pretty strong language about each other.

Not too long ago, National Review featured a cover article by David Frum who declared war on paleoconservatives, calling them “unpatriotic” conservatives who should be read out of the movement for “turning their backs on their country” and failing to support the war on terrorism.

Chairman David Keene of the American Conservative Union responded that Frum had painted “with far too broad a brush” and said that while he supported the war in Iraq he did not like “nation-building.”

The current neo-paleo feuding reminds me of the early 1980s when conservative professor Stephen Tonsor unloaded on neoconservatives at a national meeting of the Philadelphia Society:

“It has always struck me as odd, even perverse,” said Professor Tonsor, “that former Marxists have been permitted, yes invited, to play such a leading role in the Conservative movement of the twentieth century.

“It is splendid,” the professor continued, “when the town [madam] gets religion and joins the church. Now and then she makes a good choir director. But when she begins to tell the minister what he ought to say in his Sunday sermons, matters have been carried too far.”

Neoconservatives strongly protested Tonsor’s stinging remarks, as they should have, because their significant contributions to the conservative movement are indisputable. President Reagan, as you will recall, called upon neoconservatives like Jeane Kirkpatrick to serve in his administration in a variety of important positions.

The truth is that our movement needed then and needs today traditional conservatives, neoconservatives, libertarians, and honest conservatives of every variety. I applaud the recent suggestion of Donald Devine, who headed the Office of Personnel Management under President Reagan, who has called for a return to fusionist conservatism.

Conservatives should absorb the best of the various branches of the conservative mainstream and forge a consensus as the Founding Fathers did so brilliantly at the writing of the Constitution over two centuries ago.

I am not disturbed at all by the current vigorous debate—it is a sign of the vitality of the conservative movement. Debate and dispute are a healthy thing as long as they do not descend into vituperation and ad hominem arguments.

As for myself, whenever anyone asks me what I am, I reply—”I’m not Old Right or New Right or Paleo Right or Neo Right. I’m ... Just Right.”

Let us continue to debate but let us debate not personalities but principles, not individuals but issues, not ideology but ideas.

And what do conservatives stand for in the year 2003? The same principles that have guided us for 30, 50, 225 years. They include:

* The private sector can be depended upon to make better economic decisions than the public sector in 99 out of 100 cases.

* Government serves the governed best when it is limited.

* Individuals must exercise responsibility along with freedom.

* There is an enduring moral order.

* Peace is best protected through military strength.

* America should not hesitate to use its power and influence to shape a world friendly to American interests and values.

My friends, as we stand here today, the conservative movement is alive and well and just about everywhere.

The transforming power of modern conservatism over the last several decades has been unmistakable. In the late 1940s, we seemed to be headed for a socialist world in which despots like Stalin and Mao could only be contained, not defeated. In the 1990s, we celebrated the collapse of communism and the adoption of liberal democracy and free markets around the world because of the leadership of charismatic conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

The impact of modern conservatism here at home has been equally profound. There is strong skepticism about Big Government, a “leave us alone” attitude among the people that stretches back as far as the Founding of the Republic.

Because of conservative initiatives, several of the nation’s leading cultural indicators such as violent crime, the number of Americans on welfare, the teenage suicide rate, and the child poverty rate have declined sharply. There is even a significant shift in the public’s attitude about abortion, particularly the abhorrent practice of partial birth abortion.

The liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in 1947 that “there seems no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of socialism in the United States through a series of New Deals.”

Five decades later, the conservative columnist George Will wrote that we have experienced “the intellectual collapse of socialism.”

The one political constant throughout these 50 years has been the rise of the Right whose path to national power and prominence was often interrupted by the death of our leaders, calamitous defeats at the polls, constant feuding within the ranks over means and ends, and the perennial hostility of the prevailing liberal establishment.

But through the power of our ideas—linked by the priceless principle of ordered liberty—and the effective dissemination and application of those ideas, the conservative movement has become a major and often the dominant player in the political and economic realms of the nation.

And let me make an important distinction here. The conservative movement is an independent political movement not linked to any political party. We are not the lap dog of any politician, no matter how powerful or influential. Simply put, we are not for sale.

We are committed to preserving the permanent things like freedom, faith and family. We have kept our eye on the North Star of the Constitution. And because we have been faithful to our principles, you and I, on this Fourth of July, have much to celebrate.

Back in 1776, John Adams wrote his wife Abigail that the anniversary of our independence should be observed with great fanfare: “with pomp and parades ... shows and games ... and sports and guns and bells ... with bonfires and illuminations, from one end of the continent to the other, and from this time forevermore.”

It was on July 4th, 1776, President Reagan noted, that one of history’s greatest adventures began, when a small band of patriots in Philadelphia resolved to stake their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the cause of freedom and of independence.

For well over two centuries now, America has prospered, guided by a deep faith in God and an unquenchable thirst for freedom.

Along the way, our ancestors faced terrible trials—the snows of Valley Forge, the crucible of a civil war, two global conflicts, a great depression, a Cold War that lasted more than 40 years. But they prevailed.

Today we are engaged in a new and different kind of conflict—a War on Terror—where the enemy plots in secret and strikes without warning. But I am confident that we shall meet this challenge as we have met every other challenge in our history—with faith, with determination, and with trust in each other.

That is America’s secret weapon—we the people.

As President Reagan said, an abiding belief in the people is how we have kept the spirit of our American Revolution alive—a spirit that encourages us to dream and dare, to take great risks or to make great sacrifices for a greater good.

This is the spirit of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, of the Wright brothers, Charles Lindbergh and our astronauts, of Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater, of Phyllis Schlafly and Clare Boothe Luce, of Russell Kirk and Richard Weaver, of Bill Buckley and Rush Limbaugh, of Robert Kreible, Henry Salvatori, and Richard Scaife—of all the philosophers and popularizers and politicians and philanthropists who have played their part in the ascendancy of American conservatism these past 50 years.

If we stick together as our Founding Fathers did, and if we remain true to our ideals as they did , we can be certain that our greatest days—America’s greatest days—lie ahead.

Happy Birthday, America!

Lee Edwards, Ph.D. is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

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My Catholic President? Explaining Bush in Italy (NRO, 030814)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay was commissioned for the August issue of the Italian journal Studi Cattolici. A shorter version appeared in Il Giornale (Aug. 2). It is reprinted with permission.

Since 1978, I have lived in Washington, D.C., and have seen every president since that time (beginning with Jimmy Carter) in public meetings and in private conversations. But I was a close follower of the presidents already two decades earlier; one of my first published articles (in the 1950s) was an assessment of Eisenhower presidency. I contributed some unsolicited speech drafts to the Kennedy campaign of 1960, and received a letter of thanks. A lifelong registered Democrat, although an increasingly conservative and disaffected one, I covered the presidential campaigns of 1964, 1968, and 1972 for various publications, especially Newsday (Long Island, N. Y.). Later I was hired by the presidential campaigns of Democrats Ed Muskie, and then George McGovern in 1972, and indeed became chief speechwriter for vice-presidential candidate Sargent Shriver from August on.

I loved riding around on the press bus, into small towns and flying between big cities, often three in one day. So four years later, I campaigned for Shriver, later Jimmy Carter, and then Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in 1976. In the 1996 and 2000 primary campaigns I went out on the campaign trail again for Steve Forbes (and thus in 2000 in opposition to George W. Bush). Although he eventually lost in both his campaigns, Steve Forbes changed the direction of American politics, by putting on the national agenda such powerful issues as fundamental reform of the tax code and the “flat tax;” personal old-age-assistance accounts; personal medical accounts; and crucial attention to the “moral ecology” of the nation. His speeches stand up still as solid intellectual contributions to the national discourse.

Thus, in writing about George W. Bush, I do so in the context of the candidates I have known in the last half-century, and in the light of the ideas I set forth in my book on the U.S. presidency, originally entitled Choosing Our King (1974), its latest edition re-titled Choosing Presidents (1992).

I cannot think of a president who, once in office, so surprised both his critics and his followers as George W. Bush. True, people expressed surprise at how adroit Reagan was as a political leader, particularly with the Congress, and how truly brilliant as a communicator. But George W. Bush as president had surprised everyone by the high quality of his speeches, and by the bold and ambitious agenda he has step by step organized, one stunning challenge after another. After the suicide attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, for instance, many who had earlier opposed him publicly thanked God that Bush (not Gore) had been elected the preceding year. The young Bush instantly became the voice of the best in the American spirit. He was prayerful and reverent. His public leadership was fearless and steely eyed. When he asked people for their prayers, people who had never met him before knew he meant it. Among evangelicals and others there are many highly active prayer groups, some of them worldwide, praying intensely for him daily.

The desire of G.W. to do the right thing, conscientiously, is palpable.

WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN W.

Never have Catholics had so solicitous a friend in the White House. Bush met early and often with the cardinals, usually without press attention. He also called into existence a lay Catholic “sounding board” led by the editor of the lay journal Crisis, Deal Hudson, to stay in almost daily contact with his top staff. No president has ever been stronger on “the culture of life,” or a more consistent supporter of the vision set forth by John Paul II. So pro-Catholic are the president’s ideas and sentiments that there are persistent rumors that, like his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, G. W. might also become a Catholic. These rumors probably have no substance but merely verbalize an impression: How could the president’s express ideas be so Catholic unless...?

Many Europeans have a hard time sympathizing with the American Republican party. For in Europe they are so inured to statist modes of thinking that there is nothing like the Republican party. From my own experience, I can sympathize on this point. Only slowly, and over intense inner resistance, did I myself come to side more with Reagan’s vision of the world than with the social-democratic Democrat-party ideas I had been educated in during my youth. For one thing, the Republican grasp of the dynamism of economic life is much closer to reality, and less statist and (yes) less corrupt. Republicans have a strong sense of community, but their community is the local communities, the “little platoons” written of by Edmund Burke, and families. These are what they reverence, not the state.

Show Democrats a problem, they look for a new state program — always costly, usually inefficient, and probably counterproductive in the long run. Republicans look to see what people, pulling together in associations, can do for themselves.

For the Republicans, “liberty” is the powerful and dynamic social ideal. For the Democrats, “security” is the most powerful organizing tool. Crying “security,” they seek to attract majorities, and to direct the flow of history toward the construction of an ever more watchful and solicitous state. The Democratic style suggests motherliness, the caring nanny. The Republican style suggests manliness and the valiant woman.

It is a kindergarten error to think that Democrats represent a social vision, whereas Republicans represent the lonely individual and a vision of “individualism.” The Democrats represent a statist vision; with them, it is always the state that cares, acts, regulates, watches over its helpless flock. The Republicans represent the “mediating institutions” of civil society — all those social forces that mediate between the individual and the state, and that turn a “mob” into a “people,” as Tocqueville observed in contrasting the France of 1789 with the America of 1776. “The first law of democracy,” he wrote, “is the law of associations.” Where the French, facing a problem, turn to the state, Tocqueville noted, Americans turn toward one another and form associations, local, national, and international. This vision of mediating structures is the social philosophy that President Bush named “compassionate conservatism.” It is a direct rebuke to the statist vision of compassion promulgated by the Democrats.

Another difference between the philosophy of “compassion” pursued by the Democrats and that pursued by the Republicans is that, in words President Clinton made famous, Democrats emphasize “feeling your pain,” sensitivity, caring intentions. (The left presents itself as a kind of parallel to, or substitute for, religious feelings.) This emphasis on the heart also accounts for the disdain which leftists express for those on the right, whom they regard as either stupid or evil, or both, and decidedly beyond the pale of human decency.

By contrast, the Republicans define compassion in view of results achieved. Good intentions don’t count. (The road to hell is paved with them.) They don’t much admire sensitive feelings, or delicate expressions of solicitude. “Talking the talk” doesn’t count — they think Democrats do altogether too much of that. What counts is results: actually improving the daily lives of the purported recipients of compassion. Europeans may have noticed how often Bush describes himself as a “results-oriented guy.”

For example, the War on Poverty launched by President Lyndon Johnson (a Democrat) in 1965 authorized immense federal expenditures to reduce poverty. It made Democrats feel better, even morally superior. But what were its results? Mixed, at best. A boon for the elderly, whose lot was on the whole much improved. But for young adults and their children, immensely destructive. Between 1965 and 1980, rates of violent crime, mostly among those the War on Poverty meant to help, soared from 200 per 100,000 citizens to 581 per 100,000. The percentage of children born out of wedlock exploded from 40 per 1,000 live births in 1965 to 110 per 1,000 in 1980. Why not? The state paid for it. Thus did the nanny state produce the fatherless family. By 1985, some 80% of black children in areas of concentrated poverty were born into a home from which fathers were absent; and the number (but not the percentage) of white children born out of wedlock surpassed that of blacks. To his credit, President Clinton signed the Welfare Reform legislation of 1996, pressed upon him for years by a Republican Congress, and this reform brought results that stunned the social science elite.

President Bush’s greatest weapon is that the press always underestimates him. (I think that the president’s malapropisms — as when he sometimes says something like “misunderestimates” instead of “underestimates” — may be deliberate, just to throw tinder on the bias of the press, so that it will blaze up higher.) He likes to be underestimated. People always say he can’t do whatever he announces, and then quietly and steadily he gets it done. He has gotten vote out of vote through the Congress that way, after almost universal predictions that he was bound to lose.

During the spring and summer of 2002, for instance, the president had one spokesman after another — Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice — say in public that he already had the authority to go to war in Iraq even without consulting Congress or the U.N. The press said that was because he couldn’t win that vote in either place. But, then, the Congress began to demand a chance to vote on the issue. So did the U.N. After a long delay, the president finally agreed. By that time it was September, just before the November congressional elections, and now suddenly Democrats who had begged to have a chance to vote, dreaded the obligation they had begged for. The president won easily.

The vote in the U.N. was much more difficult, but Secretary Powell managed to build a powerful consensus behind a sufficiently strong first resolution in November, 2002. The U.N., after all, had demanded to take up the subject. (The second resolution, in February of 2003, failed.) In this way, Bush astutely feinted, inducing his opponents to introduce the most difficult issues for him at the moment of worst timing for themselves.

So successful has the president been at being “misunderestimated” that his Democratic opponents have stopped making jokes about how empty-headed he is. After all, if Bush is stupid, and still keeps beating them on every issue, then what does that make them?

THE WAR

Perhaps nothing has better revealed Bush’s character to the world than his steadiness in the face of overwhelming public opposition to his decision to go to war in Iraq. Agree with him or not, you have to say that in that one decision, he put his future as president on the line. There were a million ways in which his war plan could have gone wrong. For the sake of his career, it would have been far safer for him to hide behind public opinion. The chances of success — not sheer military success, but political success-seemed very slim. I know, because I supported him, and many close friends (and even family) urged me not to risk doing so publicly, because it could so easily end in disaster. But Bush knew his obligations as president and did not shrink from the dangers. He was a worthy commander-in-chief, and I suspect that the brave young men and women in the field were trying to live up to his example, and were grateful to be serving under such a commander.

I must suppose that it bothered the president greatly that Pope John Paul II was, in effect, encouraging the popular peace movement in Europe. These were in many cases the same people who back in 1982 tried to stop Reagan and the Allies from placing the Pershing missiles in Europe, in order to checkmate the Soviet SS-20s which were aimed at European cities, thus decoupling European nations from the United States in deterrence systems. On the one hand, it was hard for Americans who remembered those years to understand the Vatican’s current position. On the other hand, the pope made clear that he was no pacifist, and kept noting that self-defense is a legitimate reason for war, as a last resort. The pope said nothing anti-American. From an American point of view, moreover, it was better to have the pope antiwar than seeming to support “Christian” powers in war on an Arab leader, even if the latter was an unsavory dictator.

What Americans could not understand is why the Holy Father did not speak out against the horrific human rights abuses of Saddam Hussein; and, even if he did not, why did not the Vatican office of Justice and Peace, or the Vatican secretary of state, or the editors of Civilta Cattolica? We now know that over a million Iraqis perished under torture, in prison, or in various forms of mass killing under Saddam and the Baathist party. In March, I met an Iraqi bishop in Rome who was desperate to have Saddam’s killings stopped. Why was the Vatican silent?

Even worse were the gratuitous anti-American canards tossed to the press by a number of senior Vatican officials. Most difficult to understand is why such officials still (even now) keep boosting up the moral prestige of the United Nations, which has become a vicious secularist, anti-religious force in questions of sexuality and life, and whose political-military decisions are founded totally on the national interests of member states, rather than on desperate human suffering under massive savagery (as in Rwanda, Kosovo, and Iraq). Why would the Vatican commit its prestige to such a corrupt organization, which so often thoroughly opposes the Vatican’s moral agenda for a culture of life? Perhaps because we see its daily operations so close to us, in New York, many of us in America, while we believe the U.N. has its good uses, have slowly lost respect for it as a moral compass by which to guide one’s decisions.

Sadly, President Bush had to proceed in Iraq without the support of the one moral leader in the world he truly admires, and often quotes. Bush has learned a great deal from this Pope, as one can see from many of the president’s speeches.

Why, then, did the president go to war with Iraq? There were three dominant reasons: The weapons of mass destruction that Saddam was known to have had, and for which he had not accounted, as he was bound by the Peace Agreement of 1991 to do; the danger that al Qaeda was operating in Iraq, and had the delivery system (as manifested on 09/11/01) to do grave injury to the United States and many other countries; and the horrific abuses which Saddam regularly practiced upon scores of thousands of his own people, as well as the bribery and intimidation he employed to threaten many of his Arab neighbors. In brief, Saddam Hussein was a radical de-stabilizer of international order, and the fingerprints of his intelligence service had shown up in the first World Trade Center bombings of 1995, the plot disrupted in the Philippines during the Millennium Year to bomb a dozen international aircraft in flight over the Pacific, and elsewhere.

No man in history had ever killed so many Arabs and Muslims as Saddam Hussein, and with these bitter experiences in mind, neighboring Arab states were happy to see him removed from the scene. Many good fruits have already emerged: tentative steps toward a two-state solution for the Palestinian/Israeli crisis, the mutually agreed withdrawal of U.S. troops from Saudi Arabia, and a rethinking of past illusions nearly everywhere in the Arab world in the light of falsehoods earlier accepted about Iraq. The discovery of the extent of Saddam Hussein’s bribery of Arab journalists throughout the Middle East through records captured in Iraq has provided one rude awakening. Many turned out to have been on Hussein’s payroll. No wonder so much information had been false.

There is one feature of the war that Bush is especially proud of. The American force was extremely well trained in the demands of war-fighting in accord with jus in bello standards, and raised the observance of them in modern times to a new level of achievement. Ignored by American secularists in the press and the academy, just war doctrine is taught with rigor and devotion in the U.S. military academies and throughout the officer corps. New precision weaponry made it possible to use guided weapons to destroy one building, or part of a building, while leaving its neighbors intact, and thus to single out exclusively military targets as much as is humanly possible. Soldiers were trained to withhold fire against civilian targets, unless first fired upon — and a significant number of American youngsters lost their lives on that account. One clear proof: Refugee camps built at Iraq’s borders were only lightly occupied, for there was never reason for people to flee; they saw soon enough that the Americans were trying not to hurt them.

In a word, agree with him or not, one can see that Bush had given serious moral thought to this possibly presidency-destroying decision. He exhibited a kind of moral courage and toughness that not many world leaders have. He is not a follower of the crowd, but a leader, willing to go against the crowd when he believes he has good moral arguments to do so.

Another case of that occurred at the end of May, in domestic politics. Just having come out of a minor recession, the U.S. economy is weak and unemployment is 6percent — too high for Americans. Facing the expenses of the war, and already seeing fresh deficits in the national budget, opinion polls showed the American people were not much in favor of the tax cuts Bush was proposing to get economic dynamism moving again. Nearly everyone predicted defeat in Congress. So Bush took his arguments for the tax cut to the people, campaigning almost non-stop for more than two weeks in different cities in nearly all parts of the country. People may not like the tax cuts, but they do like Bush, and day-by-day his arguments made sense to more and more people.

The Democrats cried, “Tax cuts for the rich!” in typical leftist class divisiveness and appeals to envy and resentment. Bush argued that unemployment is the problem, that jobs are created by investment, and that people invest when incentives make investment attractive, not when taxation takes too much of what investors would otherwise gain. A majority of Americans are now investors, since all those with private pension plans, including a huge proportion of today’s unionized workers, depend on the steady growth of their investments. This new majority could see from their own experience the power of Bush’s argument. Bush attacked the longstanding government practice of taxing dividends twice — once when profits are received by corporations, a second time when these profits are paid out to stockholders. All those retired persons who see those dividends arrive in their monthly checks, high or low, felt that injustice when they opened the mail.

To make a long story short, Bush won again. One more victory that a month earlier everyone was saying was surely lost. Bush does not follow the polls. He changes the polls by leadership.

A GREAT PRESIDENT?

My conclusion has several parts. For there are many ways in which George W. Bush is a better man than I had imagined from what I had heard about him before he was elected three years ago. First, he gives the most consistently eloquent speeches since Ronald Reagan, and I believe a fair literary comparison will show that Bush has given really good ones more often and more consistently. He may not deliver them in as silken a way as Reagan, but they are intellectually and spiritually meaty. (At least two small volumes of these speeches have already been published in booklet form, and are available through the White House; the reader should look at them.)

Bush is also more analytical about political situations, foreign and domestic, than I earlier imagined he could be. He is bold and farseeing — whether the issue is taxes or war, he seizes the hidden dynamic behind reality and tries to change. In the Arab world, the hidden problem is dictatorship and the daily abuse of the human rights of the vast majority of Muslims. That must stop. In Saddam Hussein’s case, it has been stabbed. Each month, 5,000 children will not die as they had been because of Saddam’s diversion of funds for “Oil for Food.” In the matter of taxes, the hidden dynamic is that if you want less investment in new jobs, you place high taxes on it; if you want more investment — therefore, more dynamism in the economy, and more jobs — you cut taxes. No matter how popular or unpopular the idea is.

More and more critics, agree that Bush thinks big. He goes for the bold solution, not the timid one; the difficult agenda, not the modest one. Bill Clinton talked tearfully about Africa, but Bush moved swiftly from being touched by the immense sufferings from AIDS in Africa to moving into immediate action. He conceived of a dramatic and ambitious plan to attack AIDS in Africa, and then moved to mobilize the rest of world to double the amount the United States is committing to the task. Characteristically, he demands results, not warm feelings.

It is too early to say that Bush is a great president. But already people are asking themselves how great will he end up being? Only good, but not great — say, about the level of John F. Kennedy (whose promise was cut off prematurely)? Up to the world-changing level of Ronald Reagan? On the latter point, one can only say that comparisons are beginning to be made. As Reagan spurred a huge increase in the number of the world’s democracies — including a good number in the former the Soviet Union — will G.W. open up a tide of fledgling democracies in the Arab and Muslim world? Will he in that way undercut, and thus eventually defeat, world terrorism? Will he eventually come to be a figure much revered in the Arab world, as a Western leader who cared about their plight, and on their behalf demanded results?

History is always opaque. My task is not prediction but assessment of Bush’s performance so far. I judge it to have been, up to this point, far, far better than expected, even by many of his supporters, and even — well, let me say it — splendid. Not many in the past have faced more sudden and difficult dangers, and handled them with equal command.

Well done, sir. Keep it up.

— Michael Novak is the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize for progress in religion and the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Big-Government Conservatism (Wall Street Journal, 030815)

How George W. Bush squares the fiscally expansive / conservative circle.

IS PRESIDENT BUSH really a conservative? When that question came up this summer, the White House went into crisis mode. Bush aides summoned several of Washington’s conservative journalists to a 6:30 a.m. breakfast at the White House to press the case for the president’s adherence to conservative principles. Aides outnumbered journalists. Other conservative writers and broadcasters were invited to luncheon sessions. They heard a similar spiel.

The White House needn’t have bothered. The case for Bush’s conservatism is strong. Sure, some conservatives are upset because he has tolerated a surge in federal spending, downplayed swollen deficits, failed to use his veto, created a vast Department of Homeland Security, and fashioned an alliance of sorts with Teddy Kennedy on education and Medicare. But the real gripe is that Bush isn’t their kind of conventional conservative. Rather, he’s a big government conservative. This isn’t a description he or other prominent conservatives willingly embrace. It makes them sound as if they aren’t conservatives at all. But they are. They simply believe in using what would normally be seen as liberal means—activist government—for conservative ends. And they’re willing to spend more and increase the size of government in the process.

Being a big government conservative doesn’t bring Bush close to being a moderate, much less a liberal. On most issues, his position is standard conservative: a pro-lifer who expects to sign a ban on partial birth abortion, he’s against stem-cell research and gun control, and has drawn the line at gay marriage. His judicial nominees are so uniformly conservative that liberals are furious.

On taxes, Bush is a supply-sider. He’s gotten large tax cuts that would have slashed even deeper if a few moderate Republicans hadn’t balked. His interventionist foreign policy has near unanimous support among conservatives. His backing of tough internal measures against potential terrorists has riled civil libertarians but pleased most conservatives.

Yet conservative critics insist Bush is no Ronald Reagan—and they’re right. Reagan was the leader of the conservative movement before he entered the White House. In his initial years as president, he cut taxes as boldly as Bush and curbed domestic spending. But Reagan was a small government conservative who declared in his inauguration address that government was the problem, not the solution. There, Bush begs to differ.

The essence of Bush’s big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he’s willing to broaden programs and increase spending. Thus his aim in proposing to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare is to reform the entire health-care system for seniors. True, the drug benefit would be the biggest new entitlement in 40 years. But if paired with reforms that lure seniors away from Medicare and into private health insurance, Bush sees the benefit as an affordable (and very popular) price to pay. Bush earlier wanted to go further, requiring seniors to switch to private health insurance to be eligible for the drug benefit. He dropped the requirement when queasy congressional Republicans balked. Now it’s uncertain whether Congress will pass a Medicare bill with sufficient market incentives to justify Bush’s approval. Should he sign a measure without significant reforms, he won’t be acting as a big government conservative.

On education, Bush and Kennedy joined to pass the No Child Left Behind Act. Its only real reform was a mandate for states to test student achievement on the basis of federal standards. Many conservatives, including some on the president’s staff, felt this wasn’t sufficient reform to warrant boosting the federal share of education spending. Still, Kennedy and other liberals aren’t happy either. They’d expected even more spending.

When I coined the phrase “big government conservative” years ago, I had certain traits in mind. Bush has all of them. First, he’s realistic. He understands why Reagan failed to reduce the size of the federal government and why Newt Gingrich and the GOP revolutionaries failed as well. The reason: People like big government so long as it’s not a huge drag on the economy. So Bush abandoned the all-but-hopeless fight that Reagan and conservatives on Capitol Hill had waged to jettison the Department of Education. Instead, he’s opted to infuse the department with conservative goals.

A second trait is a programmatic bent. Big government conservatives prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive. Promoting spending cuts/minimalist government doesn’t do that. Bush has famously defined himself as a compassionate conservative with a positive agenda. Almost by definition, this makes him a big government conservative. His most ambitious program is his faith-based initiative. It would use government funds to expand social programs run by religious organizations. Many of them have been effective in fighting drug/alcohol addiction and helping lift people out of poverty. So far, the initiative has had only a small impact, its scope limited by Congress.

Another trait is a far more benign view of government than traditional conservatives have. Big government conservatives are favorably disposed toward what neoconservative Irving Kristol has called a “conservative welfare state.” (Neocons tend to be big government conservatives.) This means they support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare). Bush wants to reform Social Security and Medicare but not shrink either.

Bush has never put a name on his political philosophy, though he once joked that it was based on the premise that you could fool some of the people all of the time and he intended to concentrate on those people. An aide characterized Bushism as “an activist, reforming conservatism that recognizes it’s sometimes necessary to use the power of the government to change the status quo.” I doubt that Bush would put it that way, but at least it distinguishes him from the ordinary run of conservatives. He’s a different breed.

Fred Barnes is the executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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The Neoconservative Persuasion (Weekly Standard, 030825)

What it was, and what it is.

“[President Bush is] an engaging person, but I think for some reason he’s been captured by the neoconservatives around him.”

—Howard Dean, U.S. News & World Report, August 11, 2003

WHAT EXACTLY IS NEOCONSERVATISM? Journalists, and now even presidential candidates, speak with an enviable confidence on who or what is “neoconservative,” and seem to assume the meaning is fully revealed in the name. Those of us who are designated as “neocons” are amused, flattered, or dismissive, depending on the context. It is reasonable to wonder: Is there any “there” there?

Even I, frequently referred to as the “godfather” of all those neocons, have had my moments of wonderment. A few years ago I said (and, alas, wrote) that neoconservatism had had its own distinctive qualities in its early years, but by now had been absorbed into the mainstream of American conservatism. I was wrong, and the reason I was wrong is that, ever since its origin among disillusioned liberal intellectuals in the 1970s, what we call neoconservatism has been one of those intellectual undercurrents that surface only intermittently. It is not a “movement,” as the conspiratorial critics would have it. Neoconservatism is what the late historian of Jacksonian America, Marvin Meyers, called a “persuasion,” one that manifests itself over time, but erratically, and one whose meaning we clearly glimpse only in retrospect.

Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.

One of these policies, most visible and controversial, is cutting tax rates in order to stimulate steady economic growth. This policy was not invented by neocons, and it was not the particularities of tax cuts that interested them, but rather the steady focus on economic growth. Neocons are familiar with intellectual history and aware that it is only in the last two centuries that democracy has become a respectable option among political thinkers. In earlier times, democracy meant an inherently turbulent political regime, with the “have-nots” and the “haves” engaged in a perpetual and utterly destructive class struggle. It was only the prospect of economic growth in which everyone prospered, if not equally or simultaneously, that gave modern democracies their legitimacy and durability.

The cost of this emphasis on economic growth has been an attitude toward public finance that is far less risk averse than is the case among more traditional conservatives. Neocons would prefer not to have large budget deficits, but it is in the nature of democracy—because it seems to be in the nature of human nature—that political demagogy will frequently result in economic recklessness, so that one sometimes must shoulder budgetary deficits as the cost (temporary, one hopes) of pursuing economic growth. It is a basic assumption of neoconservatism that, as a consequence of the spread of affluence among all classes, a property-owning and tax-paying population will, in time, become less vulnerable to egalitarian illusions and demagogic appeals and more sensible about the fundamentals of economic reckoning.

This leads to the issue of the role of the state. Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on “the road to serfdom.” Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his “The Man Versus the State,” was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today’s America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not. Though they find much to be critical about, they tend to seek intellectual guidance in the democratic wisdom of Tocqueville, rather than in the Tory nostalgia of, say, Russell Kirk.

But it is only to a degree that neocons are comfortable in modern America. The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives—though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government’s attention. And since the Republican party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power. Because religious conservatism is so feeble in Europe, the neoconservative potential there is correspondingly weak.

AND THEN, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.) These attitudes can be summarized in the following “theses” (as a Marxist would say): First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies. This is not as easy as it sounds, as the history of the Cold War revealed. The number of intelligent men who could not count the Soviet Union as an enemy, even though this was its own self-definition, was absolutely astonishing.

Finally, for a great power, the “national interest” is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.

Behind all this is a fact: the incredible military superiority of the United States vis-à-vis the nations of the rest of the world, in any imaginable combination. This superiority was planned by no one, and even today there are many Americans who are in denial. To a large extent, it all happened as a result of our bad luck. During the 50 years after World War II, while Europe was at peace and the Soviet Union largely relied on surrogates to do its fighting, the United States was involved in a whole series of wars: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War. The result was that our military spending expanded more or less in line with our economic growth, while Europe’s democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs. The Soviet Union spent profusely but wastefully, so that its military collapsed along with its economy.

Suddenly, after two decades during which “imperial decline” and “imperial overstretch” were the academic and journalistic watchwords, the United States emerged as uniquely powerful. The “magic” of compound interest over half a century had its effect on our military budget, as did the cumulative scientific and technological research of our armed forces. With power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not. And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it, or the world will discover them for you.

The older, traditional elements in the Republican party have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism. But by one of those accidents historians ponder, our current president and his administration turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did. As a result, neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published.

Irving Kristol is author of “Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.”

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Swallowed by Leviathan: Conservatism versus an oxymoron: ‘big-government conservatism’ (NR, 030930)

Ramesh Ponnuru

“We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.” — President George W. Bush, talking to union workers on Labor Day

Franklin delano roosevelt’s rhetoric was more high-flown, and less therapeutic in emphasis. “Governments can err, presidents do make mistakes,” said FDR, “but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales. Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the constant omission of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” Both presidents’ statements are, however, close enough in meaning. They are bookends: one spoken when big government in America was young and disputed, the other when it is old and accepted.

President Bush has compiled a record to match his rhetoric. Indeed, during his presidency the federal government has acted even when people were not hurting. Bush has increased the federal role in education, imposed tariffs on steel and lumber, increased farm subsidies, okayed new federal regulations on campaign finance and corporate accounting, and expanded the national-service program President Clinton began. Since September 11, he has also raised defense spending, given new powers to law enforcement, federalized airport security, and created a new cabinet department for homeland security.

No federal programs have been eliminated, nor has Bush sought any such thing. More people are working for the federal government than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Spending has been growing faster than it did under Clinton. Conservatives are, of course, inclined to tolerate, indeed cheer, most of the government’s efforts to wage the war on terrorism. But non-defense spending has been increasing almost as fast as defense spending. Excluding defense and also entitlements, spending is up 28% over the course of Bush’s first three years. Now Bush is seeking to expand Medicare to cover prescription drugs, at a projected cost — almost surely an underestimate — of $400 billion over the next decade.

Spending is not, of course, the only way that the government can commandeer society’s resources. The regulatory state is alive and growing as well. Bush just passed up the opportunity to eliminate one particularly noxious regulation, the Department of Education’s Title IX edict, which has universities killing men’s sports teams to achieve “gender parity.”

Over on the left, and even among moderate liberals, the idea that Bush is a right-wing maniac persists. Harold Meyerson of The American Prospect has suggested that Bush resembles no president in American history so much as Jefferson Davis in his hostility to progressive government. But Bush’s record is inspiring considerable angst among his supporters. Most conservatives are critical of the governmental growth that Bush has allowed or encouraged. Some conservatives are also expressing concern about the return of deficits. The debate about how conservative Bush is, which began when he walked on the national stage in 1999, has been renewed. This time it has gotten mixed up with the considerably less edifying debate about whether he is a neoconservative (and about what that term means).

BUT IS IT CONSERVATIVE?

A minority of Bush’s supporters, however, have celebrated Bush’s alleged embrace of “big government conservatism.” The term is that of journalist Fred Barnes, the only known self-confessed adherent to the creed. Big-government conservatives, according to Barnes, use “activist government” for “conservative ends.” He writes in the Wall Street Journal, “The essence of Mr. Bush’s big government conservatism is a trade-off. To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, he’s willing to broaden programs and increase spending.” Big-government conservatives are realistic, says Barnes, about what conservatives can accomplish given the public’s support for a large federal role. They “prefer to be in favor of things because that puts them on the political offensive.” They “support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare).”

Peter Berkowitz, a moderate conservative academic, writes in the Boston Globe that “Bush’s conservatism is certainly less rigid and doctrinaire than that of Newt Gingrich and his minions, who swept to power in 1994 and, in a most unconservative spirit, sought to remake the federal government by drastically reducing its size.”

Irving Kristol touches on the same subject in the course of an essay for The Weekly Standard on neoconservatism. Kristol’s purpose is to claim that neoconservatism is “the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the ‘American grain’” because it is cheerful. Also, it is neoconservative policies that are responsible for whatever popularity Republicans have enjoyed. (That thesis would be less preposterous than it sounds if Kristol were correct in claiming that tax cuts are a distinctively neoconservative idea.) Neoconservatives want a government that promotes economic growth, combats cultural decay, and maintains a strong military and a robust foreign policy. They do not, however, fret about big government. “People have always preferred strong government to weak government,” he writes.

I may as well put my cards on the table at this point. I’m a small-government conservative who doubts there is any other kind. To put it in the positive terms that Barnes recommends, I favor the absence of all the government programs I’m against. I wish the Republicans of 1995 had succeeded in their modest plans to scrap a few of the less important cabinet departments, generally by placing the programs within them elsewhere, and to hold the growth of the federal government to $350 billion over seven years. I recognize that those Republicans were sometimes grandiose in their rhetoric. But I don’t believe that they should be spoken of as though they were a band of anarchist revolutionaries.

There are reasons to question whether big-government conservatism can succeed even on its own terms. A suspicion of statism and a love of individualism are very much in the American grain, but are sentiments somewhat alien to Kristol’s neoconservatism. An attachment to the right to bear arms, for example, is certainly a feature of the American Right that springs from our cultural history but with which neoconservatism has little to do. (And one doesn’t have to embrace the myth of America’s historical isolationism to wonder whether a sustained activist foreign policy is really in the American grain, either.)

Irving Kristol is too sanguine about the compatibility of a large welfare state, on one hand, and economic growth, cultural conservatism, and military strength on the other. Most conservatives believe that federal spending depletes resources that would otherwise be available to the private sector. Note, by the way, that the very programs that are doing the most to bankrupt the country are the ones that Fred Barnes reckons have “a neutral or beneficial effect.” These programs have also had cultural consequences. Social Security and Medicare helped to undo much of the economic basis of the multigenerational family, and Medicaid has been an invitation to fraud and abuse. More generally, the expansion of the federal role in health, education, and welfare has reduced the social role of organized religion (and would do so even if the government were less insistent on secularism; in that case, churches would over time become clients of the government).

Kristol’s notes toward a definition of neoconservatism conflate government’s size with government’s strength. That governments must be strong enough to effect their legitimate ends no sensible person would deny. But a central insight of conservatism has been that a government chasing after goals at once utopian, vague, and picayune — leaving no child behind, for example — is likely to neglect its core function of protecting its people from violence. Turning his gaze abroad, Kristol writes that “Europe’s democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs.” Just so.

The strongest point in favor of big-government conservatism is the practical political one: A reduction in the size and scope of the federal government is, in the short term at least, impossible. Even this point can be (and frequently is) overstated. The difficulty for conservatives is not, as is so often said, that “the public likes big government.” It is true that the public likes many large federal programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and student loans. But it’s not any deep public sentiment that keeps the Small Business Administration, or the sugar subsidy, alive.

It would be more precise to say that the constituency for smaller government is too weak to prevail. The beneficiaries of particular programs are intensely interested in their survival and expansion. Very few people are ideologically committed to their retrenchment or elimination. The outcomes of political battles are generally what one would expect given this balance of forces.

This political weakness is why the Gingrich revolution sputtered out, and Phil Gramm’s 1996 campaign never got going. Since then, antistatism has declined further. Welfare reform, the drop in crime, and the end of inflation made people look more benignly on government. President Clinton labored mightily to end the public’s association of government activism with hostility to middle-class values.

The weakness of antistatism has motivated every attempted ideological innovation within conservatism for the last 15 years. In different ways, Jack Kemp’s “empowerment” conservatism, Pat Buchanan’s “conservatism of the heart,” and John McCain’s “national greatness” conservatism have all sought to detach conservatism from a small-government philosophy that seemed to have no electoral value.

Although he is something of a prophet without honor in today’s Republican party, Kemp appears, in retrospect, to have been the most successful of these innovators. He was the most marginalized member of the elder Bush’s administration. Yet the second Bush has appropriated much of the political identity of Kemp circa 1990. Like him, Bush II is a tax cutter, a pro-Israel hawk, an unequivocal enthusiast for immigration. Kemp was fond of saying that people don’t care what you know until they know that you care, which is another way of saying that conservatives must be compassionate, and advertised as such. Like Kemp, Bush is eager to attract minorities and union members to his party, and is willing to embrace sometimes dubious outreach strategies to attain this goal. Like Kemp, Bush would rather reform than end government programs — and like Kemp, he is a big spender.

‘THROW AWAY THE BUDGET CUTTERS’

Small-government conservatives cannot say we weren’t warned about Bush. From 1999 through the present, he has taken plenty of opportunities to tell us that he is not one of those troglodytes who consider government to be the problem. For Bush, to say that government is the problem is, indeed, to take part in the “stale debates” of the past. Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, said that what united Republican voters was their desire to be left alone by the government. During the early days of his campaign Bush rejected that formulation: Government had higher purposes than merely leaving people alone. Marvin Olasky, an influence on Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” said, “Let’s throw away the budget cutters. I see that coming with Bush.” Looking at the trajectory of federal spending, one certainly must give Olasky credit for prescience.

Yet if small-government conservatives should have had no illusions about Bush, we also had good reasons to support him in 2000. Those reasons include, but go beyond, the nature of the Democratic opposition and Bush’s conservative positions on foreign-policy and moral issues. There was also the possibility that Bush, as president, would shift American politics to the right. Tax cuts could restrain the growth of government spending. Tort reform could weaken an important constituency for liberalism. Trade liberalization could undermine government activism (and labor unions). Above all, a free-market reform of Social Security could change the American electorate by making every voter a member of the investor class. By the late 1990s, most conservatives active in politics had concluded that a frontal assault on the welfare state was doomed to failure, and that conservatives would have to try an indirect approach: enacting reforms that would create the conditions for success in the future. Steve Forbes campaigned as the conservative alternative to Bush on a platform no bolder than that. If Bush were to deliver such reforms, it would make up for the day-to-day annoyances that his presidency would surely bring.

It’s important to note that this small-government strategy does not amount to going along with any government program that makes Republicans more popular. An editorial in the Washington Times recently argued that a new prescription-drug entitlement would be worth the cost, because it would get more Republicans elected . . . and in a few years they would reform entitlements. But even if the Republicans were to get 60 senators in this fashion — a big if — a party that had thus gained power would be likely to find itself bereft of its reformist zeal. For partisans of small government, the goal should be to strengthen the coalition for conservative governance more than to strengthen the Republican party.

Liberals have been following their own version of this strategy for many years. Since the collapse of the Clintons’ health-care plan in 1994, for example, they have sought incremental reforms that would make people more receptive to government-provided health care. Both parties are aware that they are fighting a kind of trench warfare, contesting small territories in bitter engagements in the hope of winning a better position for tomorrow’s battles.

When they judge how well the president has served them, conservatives ought to ask whether he is advancing the cause of limited government given the political circumstances. Surprisingly often, the criticism of Bush ignores those circumstances. In the intra-conservative debate about Bush, it is assumed that to approve of Bush’s performance is also to approve of the big government he has expanded, and that to oppose big government one must also condemn Bush. But the attitude conservatives should have toward Bush does not follow straightforwardly from the attitude they should have toward excessive government, because political considerations have to be taken into account.

The president’s conservative critics sometimes make it sound as though the idea for a prescription-drug entitlement sprang from his (or Karl Rove’s) head. But it’s not Bush’s fault that voters, including self-described conservatives, like the promise of free medicine. The entire Republican party, from top to bottom, concluded in 1999 that it would be politically perilous to stand against the idea. That doesn’t mean that the president’s behavior in this matter is above reproach — it would be nice if he would demand that the bill contain real free-market reforms, not just that it be bipartisan — but criticism should be based on actually available alternatives. Similarly, people talk as though the president set federal spending levels all by his lonesome. Bush has indeed made decisions worth criticizing: He could, for instance, have vetoed the farm-subsidy bill. But where’s the criticism of the congressional spenders, Republican and Democrat (all too) alike? More to the point, where’s the effort to reform a budget process that is designed to pump up the government?

When judged in this manner, some of Bush’s compromises will appear to be reasonable, some to be gratuitous sellouts. Still others will take time to judge. The steel tariffs were probably necessary to get Congress to give the president the authority to negotiate free-trade deals; we won’t know if it was worth it until some time in Bush’s next term (assuming he has one). In some cases, conservatives may decide that Bush made the right call given the political circumstances but that they should denounce him anyway, as part of their effort to change those circumstances. The steel tariffs may fall in this category, too.

Bush’s record will look very different if he succeeds in reforming Social Security in his next term. That program accounts for a fifth of all federal spending. Transforming it would surely outweigh the extra funding for national service. And while it is true that Bush never talks about government the way that Reagan did, we should remember that Reagan, too, was in practice willing to compromise to meet his priorities. Nor is the rhetorical contrast entirely to Bush’s disadvantage. Reagan’s tax cuts were justified, in part, on the theory that they would not set the federal government back too much: They would generate economic growth, which in turn would generate revenues. In 2000, Bush sold his tax cut as a way of taking money away from the federal government. This was, indeed, the central domestic-policy promise of his campaign: He would take money from the government and give it back to the people.

Where does this leave realistic small-government conservatives and “big-government conservatives”? It leaves them, presumably, as allies on 95% of the issues being debated in Washington, even as they disagree on what they would like Washington to look like in ten or fifteen years. Conservatives should, however, lament the necessity of letting our bloated government grow even further in the short term. They should not try to dress up this necessity as a coherent philosophy.

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“Conservatism” (Ottawa Citizen, 031106)

David Warren

Don’t we (that would be royal “we”) just write another essay on this topic every five years or so? I am trying not to remember my last one. For it seems to me, in retrospect, that I missed an important point about “conservatives” and “conservatism”, in our time. A very important point, now I think about it: that the thing itself has almost ceased to exist.

I remember the glorious morning when I discovered I was a “conservative”. This happened many years ago, at age twenty, over a rooming-house breakfast with my new Czech friend — one Miloslav Scholz. I was very young; he was older, and wiser, having among other accomplishments escaped from communist Czechoslovakia in 1968. This Milos, who remains a close friend, is in some respects the wisest character I have ever met. He has an ability to identify the obvious that is shared with few other human beings. Though to fully appreciate his greatness, you must imagine his Moravian accent, and the largeness of his teeth.

The reader may gasp to learn that, once upon a time, I considered myself to be a “liberal”. I “believed” in free markets, and free elections; in an objective moral order; in due legal processes; that laws were above men, and men above animals; and so on and so forth. I also believed all such things were worth fighting for, even in distant countries. As perhaps the only enthusiast in my Canadian high school for fighting the War in Vietnam, I was already tagged “right-wing”. But I couldn’t think of a more liberal cause than saving a helpless country from communist totalitarianism.

My intellectual heroes, in that long-ago adolescence, included figures of the Scottish Enlightenment — such as Adam Smith and David Hume. And such Englishmen as John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell (before he lost his sanity). I was an atheist, too; though on my way to losing my faith in atheism. I was only beginning to read alternative worldviews. I was nevertheless fairly certain that, if I wasn’t a liberal, there were no liberals.

“Varren, you fool,” explained my Czech friend. “You are living in the past. On this continent, today, people like us are called by the word, Conservatiff.” This came as a revelation to me, at the age of twenty.

But at the age of fifty, I am no longer convinced. I believe that the years and my own modest experience of the world, have conspired to make me what my youthful self would have called a conservative, indeed. Which means, in turn, that I no longer have the right to claim the word as a self-description. For it is one of the invariable rules of post-modern linguistic practice, that nothing may be called what it is.

The convention is instead to call things by their opposites. It began, perhaps, with the exchange of the words “liberal” and “conservative”, but by now has spread into every aspect of our political life.

Take so obvious an example as the words, “toleration, tolerance, tolerant”. It is the word we use today to describe people and ideas which are flagrantly intolerant. We apply it to those who work tirelessly to impose laws forbidding various kinds of public speech and behaviour. On the contrary, an “intolerant” person is, ten chances in ten, a person who takes it for granted that people who disagree with him have the right to their opinions.

In the case of this word “conservative”, something more has happened. The word had already been inverted to mean its opposite; to mean, in effect, what used to be meant by “liberal”. But then it continued to spin and weave in popular usage. This was because it came to be used as an epithet for “people we don’t like”. In the mid-seventies, a hard-line Stalinist — as left-wing a person as one could hope to find — became transmuted into a “conservative” of the “extreme right-wing” in liberal journalese. Today, I notice, mad mullahs, hard-line Wahabi sheikhs, and other violent Islamists are also called “conservatives”, to distinguish them from the broad majority of Muslims, whom we are left to assume are all “liberals”.

To be fair, the people who now agree to be called “conservatives” have been using the word “liberal” in the same tar-and-feathering way, though they haven’t succeeded in twisting it into quite such a pretzel. It still means only the opposite of a liberal, in the old-fashioned sense; nothing more complicated. A liberal today could be defined as, “a person committed to special privileges for preferred classes of men and women; who is suspicious of free trade and individual enterprise; and who thinks laws should be written by the social elites, and not by Parliament.”

It is hard enough to understand the nouns, but once adjectives are employed we progress towards the intellectual equivalent of the heat-death of the universe.

Consider, if you will, what might be meant today by the term, “social conservative”. It is applied to people who have strangely backward views about society; who are against things like killing unborn children, or publicly celebrating homosexuality. And they are categorized with persons in other cultures who advocate, e.g., stoning rape victims for adultery.

This can only mean, that a person who does not agree to the revolutionary overthrow of the social order is a “social conservative”, beyond the pale. The term has, in other words, been twisted so far around, that it has come out right-way-up again, but on a wheel off its axle. For what was previously “normal” is now labelled “abnormal”, and vice versa.

This fills me with hope. It suggests the possibility that with further twisting, other ideas may come out right again, albeit in a crazy, off-the-spindle sort of way.

In the meantime, I’m looking for another word to communicate the idea of “conservative”, other than the word “conservative” which must inevitably communicate something else. I am playing with the word “traditionalist”, which might, at the minimum, have the advantage of not being understood at all.

The idea itself is that all sound action within a society will come out of a development of that society’s own traditions, rather than from a negation or inversion of them. For it is a secret of society and nature, that few things are improved by turning them upside-down. It is one of those things that just works, like gravity; always worth another try.

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Toward A Conservative Conception Of Privacy (Free Congress Foundation, 031121)

Conservative defenders of privacy and constitutional liberties are focused at the national level on revising the provisions of the USA-PATRIOT Act that invite potential abuses by law enforcement and overhauling the CAPPS II proposal.

However, the state level is also important too, perhaps more important, because a citizenry that exercises vigilance in defense of its constitutional liberties at the local level is much less likely to stand for infringements at the national level. There is no better forum for activists to work than the state and local level, an area in which your impact is directly felt and experienced. Your state legislator and local officials are usually more accessible than your Federal legislators, and the process of initiative and referendum is available in many state and localities, providing an avenue for citizens to vote directly on issues involving privacy and liberties.

One important measure recognizing the importance of privacy that is desired by advocates who are not culturally conservative is the recognition of privacy in state constitutions.

For instance, California’s Constitution in its First Article, Section One declares:

“All people are by nature free and independent and have inalienable rights. Among these are enjoying and defending life and liberty, acquiring, possessing, and protecting property, and pursuing and obtaining safety, happiness, and privacy.”

Florida Constitution’s “Declaration of Rights” (Article One, Section 23) states unequivocally that “Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person’s private life except as otherwise provided herein.” It adds, quite properly, “This section shall not be construed to limit the public’s right of access to public records and meetings as provided by law.”

Those states with provisions in their constitutions protecting privacy are Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Montana, and Washington. Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana and South Carolina have provisions against “unreasonable intrusions.’

Conservative defenders of liberty and privacy may welcome the fact that there are state constitutions that address privacy as a right to be protected. Indeed, they may be helpful in defending home schooling, particularly if the parents in question are not religious, or if the state constitution has no specific language protecting religious freedom or parental rights.

But conservatives who believe in ordered liberty that respects the right to life should beware.

The idea of a right to privacy in much of the contemporary political debate is defined through the prism of abortion. Many libertarians and liberals understandably embrace such constitutional provisions, understanding that it will be interpreted in many state courts in the context of Roe v. Wade, which placed precedence on the right of the woman carrying the child in making a decision about her pregnancy. State laws prohibiting abortion are considered by many liberals and libertarians to be excessive and to lead to infringements upon a woman’s privacy.

Thus, there is an important difference between those who value life from the moment of conception and the liberals and libertarians who are concerned with protecting the public from excessive governmental intrusions into their lives and those of their family but who support abortion rights. Cultural and traditionalist conservatives recognize in this case the right to life for the unborn child must take precedence given that a human live is at stake. Thus, the state has a duty to outlaw abortion in all but extreme cases if it is to fulfill the wish expressed by our forefathers when declaring our nation’s independence that all Americans have the “unalienable rights” of life and liberty.

That fact acknowledged, the conservative defender of privacy and constitutional liberties still can play a vital role at the state and local level in seeking to protect privacy and constitutional liberties. After all, Russell Kirk in outlining conservative principles advised, “Constitutional restrictions, political checks and balances, adequate enforcement of the laws, the old intricate web of restraints upon will and appetite — these the conservative approves as instruments of freedom and order. A just government maintains a healthy tension between the claims of authority and the claims of liberty.”

Does your state constitution acknowledge the rights of parents, religious worshippers, and property owners? Does the lack of such provisions grant the state the right to interfere?

The latter right — property — is one addressed by Kirk: “Separate property from private possession, and Leviathan becomes mater of all…The more widespread is the possession of private property, the more stable and productive is a commonwealth…Getting and spending are not the chief aims of human existence; but a sound economic basis for the person, the family, and the commonwealth is much to be desired.”

On a practical level, the defender of privacy and constitutional liberties can work to ensure that provisions offering protection of parental rights, religious freedom, and property rights are indeed included in your state constitution.

Then, there is the handling of sensitive personal data?

Conservatives were clearly concerned about the Total Information Awareness program, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness in a move to make it more politically saleable program, before it was scuttled due to a rising public outcry. TIA intended to use data-mining techniques that, if misused, could cause significant infringements on the privacy of citizens. But there is a state level program called MATRIX that should also be of concern; it is considered to be a mini-TIA, funded by grants from the Justice Department and Office of Homeland Security. MATRIX should be of particular concern if you live in Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Utah. A number of states had pulled out of the program due to concerns about expenses or privacy, including Texas, Oregon and South Carolina.

The company charged with having helped to develop the MATRIX system is Seisent, a Boca Raton firm known for its massive database full of information from public records. LawTechnology News was moved to comment about Seisint’s “Accurint” service: “Hands down, the most crowded and positively unnerving demonstration at summer tradeshows was Seisint Inc.’s Accurint service, which helps lawyers and other researchers track down just about anybody.”

Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) introduced on the federal level a bill — S1484 — The Citizens’ Protection In Federal Databases Act of 2003 — with the intent of instilling more accountability in how Federal law enforcement, intelligence, and national security agencies are using databases. IT requires those agencies to report to Congress on what databases they have acquired, what types of information they contain, and it provides a prohibition of hypothetical modeling of people who may commit a crime.

Why not state versions of Wyden’s bill?

This is just one example where defenders of privacy and constitutional liberties working on the state level can be influential by not only seeking a legislative remedy but by helping to alert their fellow citizens to the importance of protecting privacy and liberties from the conservative standpoint of reining in unwarranted powers of the state, not championing unrestrained individualism no matter the cost in human life

There are other areas where the states may be lacking in protecting the privacy and constitutional liberties of their citizens.

A good guide for the activist to know what is or is not covered by his state’s laws is the Compilation of State and Federal Privacy Laws by Robert Ellis Smith and James Sulankowski (publisher: Privacy Journal.) That will be a good first starting point to begin to understand what can be done to better your state’s protection of privacy for families and individuals from excessive governmental intrusions or mishandling of personal information.

Despite the differences with liberals and libertarians on issues such as abortion, on many issues alliances can be built with them. In fact, it will be absolutely necessary to do so to achieve victory in the state legislature or at the polls. Indeed, a few weeks ago, COCL Update profiled Janine Hansen, the Nevada President of Eagle Forum, detailing her work with her states’ liberals and libertarians, as well as conservatives and moderates, who share concerns about the potential for abuse contained within provisions of the USA-PATRIOT Act.

Conservatives have a vested interest in curbing excessive governmental power. Frank Meyer, the political thinker during the early days of National Review, who sought to fuse traditional conservative and libertarian principles, is worth paraphrasing. The energy of today’s conservatism must be devoted to limiting the power of the state in an era different than what he confronted. Today’s conservative confronts government interest in harnessing powerful new surveillance and tracking technologies and continuing, heavy-handed bureaucratic regulation over our lives and property. Also, there is the new international and domestic threat of terrorism and, in reaction, new powers given to our government in the name of national security but the potential to be used for very different purposes against people other than terrorists.

Conservatives must be leaders in the effort to preserve individual freedom and the importance of traditional values as much as possible. We understand that order is important to ensuring the continuation of our nation’s freedom, whereas unrestrained libertarianism places greater value on liberty alone, vesting no real worth in order. On the other hand, an excessive value placed on order will destroy freedom.

The challenge confronting conservatives is to seek the proper balance between order and liberty. That calls for the exercise of eternal vigilance, guided by a practical and realistic outlook. From the standpoint of the activist, he needs to consider where his influence can be felt most. Naturally, what happens at the Federal level in regard to our privacy and constitutional liberties is very important. Conservative defenders of privacy and liberty have every reason to keep their eye trained on the Federal Leviathan to fight its attempts to encroach upon our liberties. But there is no better place to raise the awareness of the importance of protecting privacy and liberties than your own backyard. It is an effort worth making. The payoff will be in ensuring the protection of our essential freedoms and a continuing adherence to the traditions that are important to our country’s continued survival.

Steve Lilienthal is Director of the Center for Privacy and Technology Policy at the Free Congress Foundation.

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Teens More Conservative on Some Issues (Foxnews, 031208)

It may surprise some people to learn that today’s American teenagers have more conservative views than older generations on prayer in schools and abortion.

A brand new Gallup Organization study and another out of the University of California at Berkeley found that teens are more likely to be in favor of government restrictions on abortion and prayer during official school activities.

The findings mark a departure from the perception of teens as more progressive and liberal than adults, especially during protest-filled decades like the 1960s and ‘70s.

The Berkeley study suggests that while 59% of adults 27 to 59 want public schools to permit prayer at commencements and other official activities, 69% of teens support prayer during official school events.

And while 34% of respondents older than 26 supported government restrictions on abortion, 44% of those aged 15 to 22 and 32% of those 23 to 26 said they supported limitations. [32% of teens favor banning abortion entirely, but only 17% of adults said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances.]

Researchers and pollsters say the numbers could be due to a re-emphasis on religion and a more conservative voice coming out of the White House. And not everything has changed: The same studies show teens are still more liberal than adults on issues like same-sex marriage and the environment.

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God and Governing (WS, 031222)

What George W. Bush’s faith means to his presidency.

AMONG THE MANY FAULTS charged against George W. Bush it is probably his conservative Christian faith that most troubles the people who dislike him—or most infuriates the people who hate him. Kevin Phillips has gone so far as to argue that Bush has reshaped the Republican party into a coalition “unprecedentedly grouped around and influenced by Southern evangelical and fundamentalist voters and their wackier leaders.” This is one of those truisms that is routinely heard at Blue State cocktail parties.

But what exactly is Bush’s religious belief and is there any way it can be explained without worrying Kevin Phillips even more? In “The Faith of George W. Bush” (Jeremy P. Tarcher/ Penguin, 200 pages, $19.99), Stephen Mansfield relates, with obvious sympathy, a story of spiritual awakening whose outline is well-known to Mr. Bush’s friends and enemies alike.

Bush grew up in mainline Protestant churches in Texas: Midland (Presbyterian) and Houston (Episcopal). Graduating from Yale, he returned to Houston, where he “listlessly worked a variety of jobs,” reserving his energies “for women, parties and boisterous games of water volleyball.” Several years later, working in Midland as an oil-company executive, he married Laura Welch. She took him to her Methodist church.

Should we worry about President Bush’s religion? What about the Founders’?

But Bush still felt a lack of purpose in his life—and began asking questions. In 1985, a remark of Billy Graham’s, made during a Bush family gathering, sparked a change. Bush decided, as he put it in his autobiography, to “recommit my heart to Jesus Christ. I was humbled to learn that God sent His Son to die for a sinner like me.” He started reading the Bible and joined a Bible-study group. Most dramatically, the day after a soggy celebration of his 40th birthday, in 1986, he quit drinking.

Mansfield writes believably that, because of his faith, Bush is a “better man.” And he is right to say that Bush’s faith helps us to understand his presidency. But Mansfield goes much too far when he writes approvingly of the “religious renovation” of government. Phrases like that would seem to confirm the worst fears of someone like Kevin Phillips. But Bush has never proposed any such renovation. Indeed, he took an oath to execute his office and defend the Constitution.

Carrying out that oath, Bush, like past presidents, must naturally, at times, consider the role of religion in public life. But here Mansfield’s book is thin. He doesn’t mention the Justice Department’s filings in the Cleveland school-choice case of 2001, defending the use of vouchers at religious schools. Nor does he discuss the administration’s argument (made earlier this month in the Supreme Court) on behalf of a college student who was denied a state grant because he planned to major in theology. And Mansfield’s discussion of the president’s “faith-based initiative”—government-funded social services that include church-sponsored programs—is superficial. He fails to grasp the principle behind the initiative’s defense of “charitable choice”: Religious charities applying for social-service grants shouldn’t be discriminated against simply because they are religious.

Bush’s commitment to human rights abroad—trying to stop sex trafficking, for example, or fighting AIDS—may derive from his religious conviction. But Mansfield doesn’t mention them. And on the big story of the Bush presidency—the war on terrorism—Mansfield gets it half right. He grasps that the president draws on his faith to frame the war in moral terms—the word “evil” is not exactly a secular word. But he neglects to note that behind Bush’s foreign policy is, among other things, a desire to spread religious liberty to countries where there has long been none.

SUCH AN IMPULSE is very American. As Alf Mapp Jr. makes clear in “The Faiths of Our Fathers” (Rowman & Littlefield, 184 pages, $24.95), the Founders were dedicated to the cause of religious freedom. And little wonder, when one considers the variety of their affiliations. Among the 11 figures that Mapp discusses—including Washington, Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Alexander Hamilton, George Mason, Charles Carroll, Haym Solomon—one may find deists, Anglicans, a Catholic, a Jew and even a Unitarian.

If the Founders were neither atheists nor fundamentalists, neither were they co-religionists. Thus America became the first nation to disestablish religion and to protect the free exercise of religion by law. It is this political tradition, duly informed by religion, that Bush draws upon in his own governing, for instance when he welcomes people of faiths different from his own, or of no faith at all.

Bush hasn’t used the word “evangelical” to describe his religious convictions, but in some ways it fits. Evangelicalism has a focus on conversion that can be traced back to the Great Awakening—the revivals that began in New England in the 1740s and spread down through the Middle Colonies and the South. The preachers at these revivals (and at later ones) stressed the importance of a “new birth,” i.e., a commitment to Christ. The great New England theologian Jonathan Edwards called it a new “sense of the heart.”

For almost two centuries, such Protestantism did much to shape the American character. But it lost its unified force in the 1920s, when various forms of theological liberalism captured the mainline churches. Evangelicalism re-emerged in the 1950s and has since assumed a higher profile in American society. Billy Graham, whom the president heard that day at a family gathering, has been its leading figure.

So it is that you may draw a line in American history from the Great Awakening to that day four years ago when candidate George W. Bush, asked by a reporter to name his favorite philosopher, replied, “Christ, because he changed my heart.” Bush did not say that Christ was his favorite political adviser. Ye who live in Blue States, please take note.

Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.

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Understanding the President and His God (New York Times, 040429)

By Alessandra Stanley

The question is not, When did George W. Bush accept Jesus as his personal savior? The “Frontline” documentary “The Jesus Factor,” on PBS tonight, raises a different issue: Do most Americans realize just how fervent the president’s evangelical faith really is?

“The Jesus Factor” is a little like those illustrated anatomy books where transparent plastic pages can be flipped to reveal the muscle, bone and organs beneath the skin. Stripping off the layers of patrician pedigree, Yale and his Texas business pursuits, the documentary lays bare Mr. Bush’s spiritual conversion and its consequences.

It is not a disrespectful look. Yet by pulling together well-known and long forgotten incidents and remarks, the program reminds viewers that this “faith-based” president has blurred the line between religion and state more than any of his recent predecessors: a vision that affects the Iraq conflict as well as domestic policy.

In the wake of Sept. 11 of course the religious influence seems obvious, since Mr. Bush has invoked a higher authority who has led him to battle “the evildoers.”

And at a time when Mel Gibson’s film “The Passion of the Christ” is one of the top-earning movies, and the “Left Behind” series of books, apocalyptic Christian thrillers by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins (the Antichrist heads the United Nations), has outsold John Grisham, the evangelical Christian movement is highly visible even in places like New York and Los Angeles.

But like the evangelical movement, the president’s born-again faith was not as striking to outsiders in 1987, when he moved to Washington to work on his father’s presidential campaign. At the time reporters mostly saw him as the Bush family bouncer, someone who kept an eye on disloyal staff members.

Nor were his born-again evangelical beliefs much more than a biographical footnote in Mr. Bush’s gubernatorial campaigns. Even in his 2000 presidential race most journalists placed Mr. Bush’s religious beliefs behind his family lineage, career and political ideology. His faith was mostly examined in the context of a midlife crisis: a black sheep’s self-styled 12-step program that helped him stop drinking and focus on a political career in Texas.

“The Jesus Factor” examines Mr. Bush’s faith by mingling his public pronouncements with interviews with friends; fellow members of the Community Bible Study group in Midland, Tex.; evangelical leaders; and Texas journalists who covered him.

Doug Wead, who was George H. W. Bush’s liaison to the religious right during the 1988 presidential campaign, says that the younger Mr. Bush was his ally, serving as a behind-the-scenes link between his father, an Episcopalian moderate, and the evangelical movement, which is a critical base for the Republican Party. Mr. Wead says his memorandums to the vice president came back to him annotated by someone who seemed very knowledgeable about evangelical Christians; Mr. Wead says he thought the candidate was handing them over to the Rev. Billy Graham, a Bush family friend. “But it turned out he was vetting them with his son,” Mr. Wead says.

Once the younger Mr. Bush’s faith took hold, it spread to his political ambitions. “I believe that God wants me to be president,” is what Richard Land, a leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, recalls hearing Mr. Bush say in a meeting with close associates on the day of his second inaugural as governor of Texas. Once elected president, Mr. Bush went to work. “We need common-sense judges who understand our rights were derived from God,” he says in a 2002 clip. “And those are the kind of judges I intend to put on the bench.”

The documentary revisits a 1993 interview Mr. Bush had with a reporter for The Houston Post, Ken Herman, on the day he announced his intention to run for governor. Mr. Herman recalls that Mr. Bush said he believed that a person had to accept Christ to go to heaven, a view that Mr. Herman published.

“The political ramifications of that were huge,” Mr. Wead explains. “And so he doesn’t talk about that anymore.” (During the 2000 campaign Mr. Bush said he thought schools should teach both creationism and evolution, but he has not been as forthcoming about which theory he personally prefers.)

The imprint of Mr. Bush’s faith can be seen on his appointments to the bench and on his decisions on embryonic stem-cell research and so-called partial-birth abortion. And religion also veins Mr. Bush’s discussion of war. Mr. Land describes him as a believer in “American exceptionalism.” Jim Wallis, editor in chief of Sojourners magazine, a liberal evangelical publication, refers to his talk of a divine mission as the “language of righteous empire.” [Kwing Hung: an oxymoron]

“The Jesus Factor” is an enlightening look at the president and the electoral clout of evangelical Christians. But one drawback of focusing so intently on Mr. Bush’s faith is that it screens out other perhaps equally important factors, like political expediencies, personality quirks and clashing interests, that inevitably influence decision making in the Oval Office.

And even some of the president’s closest allies say they are not sure when he is speaking from the pulpit and when from the Beltway. “There is no question that the president’s faith is calculated, and there is no question that the president’s faith is real,” Mr. Wead says. “I would say that I don’t know and George Bush doesn’t know when he’s operating out of a genuine sense of his own faith or when it’s calculated.”

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The left thinks legally, the right thinks morally (WorldNetDaily, 040921)

To understand the worldwide ideological battle – especially the one between America and Western Europe and within America itself – one must understand the vast differences between leftist and rightist worldviews and between secular and religious (specifically Judeo-Christian) values.

One of the most important of these differences is their attitudes toward law. Generally speaking, the Left and the secularists venerate, if not worship, law. They put their faith in law – both national and international. Law is the supreme good. For most on the Left, “Is it legal?” is usually the question that determines whether an action is right or wrong.

Take the war in Iraq. The chief leftist argument against the war – before it began, not later when no weapons of mass destruction were found – was that without U.N. sanction, attacking Iraq violated international law.

Whatever their feelings about George W. Bush or about attacking Iraq, for most of those on the Left, the rightness or wrongness of toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime was determined by its legality (i.e., whether it was authorized by the U.N. Security Council). On the other hand, for those who supported attacking Iraq, whether the war was deemed legal played no role in their assessment of its rightness or wrongness. To those who supported removing Saddam Hussein by force, if the United Nations did not authorize it, it was a reflection on the morality of the United Nations, not the morality of the war.

International law thus provides a clear example of the Left-Right divide. To the Left, an international action is right if nations such as China, Russia, France and Syria vote for it, and wrong if they vote against it. To the Right and to the religious, an action is good (or bad) irrespective of the votes of the world’s nations. They judge it by a code of morality higher than international law.

To cite one other contemporary example, the Left throughout the world opposed Israel’s 1981 air strike razing Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, thereby destroying his ability to manufacture nuclear weapons. Among major American newspapers, only the conservative Wall Street Journal supported the strike along with various religious Jewish and Christian groups. From the New York Times to Le Monde to your local university, there was outrage that Israel had acted against international law. It meant nothing to their judgment of Israel’s action that the leading mass murderer of the time had his nuclear weapons facility destroyed with the loss of but one life. All that mattered was that it was illegal.

To the Left, legality matters most, while to the Right, legality matters far less than morality. To the Right and to the religious, the law, when it is doing its job, is only a vehicle to morality, never a moral end in itself. Even the Left has to acknowledge this. When Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, she violated the law. Therefore, anyone who thinks she did the right thing is acknowledging that law must be subservient to morality. Why, then, must the overthrowing of Saddam Hussein be subject to international law as determined by Communist China, neo-KGB Russia, amoral France and the thugs who rule Syria?

The answer is to be found in the Left’s substitution of legal for moral.

And why is the Left so enamored of law?

First, the Left, which is largely secular, regards morality not as absolute, but as relative. This inevitably leads to moral confusion, and no one likes to be morally confused. So instead of moral absolutes, the Left holds legal absolutes. “Legal” for the Left is what “moral” is for the Right. The religious have a belief in God-based moral law, and the Left believes in man-made law as the moral law.

Second, whereas they cannot change God’s laws, those on the Left can and do make many of society’s laws. In fact, the Left is intoxicated with law-making. It gives them the power to mold society just as Judeo-Christian values did in the past. Unless one understands that leftist ideals function as a religion, one cannot understand the Left.

Laws are the Left’s vehicles to earthly salvation. Virtually all human problems have a legal solution.

Some men harass women? Pass laws banning virtually every flirtatious action a man might engage in vis-a-vis a woman. Flood legislatures with laws preventing the creation of a “hostile work environment.” Whereas the religious world has always worked to teach men how to act toward women, the secular world, lacking these religious values, passes laws to control men.

In fact, since it lacks the self-control apparatus that is a major part of religion, the Left passes more and more laws to control people. That is why there is a direct link between the decline in Judeo-Christian religion and the increase in governmental laws controlling human behavior.

Of course, the more laws that are passed, the less liberty society enjoys. But to the Left, which elevates any number of values above liberty – e.g., compassion, equality, fairness – this presents little problem.

All this helps to explain the Left’s preoccupation with controlling courts; passing laws; producing, enriching and empowering lawyers; filing lawsuits; and naming judges. Laws and the makers of laws will produce heaven on earth.

And that’s one reason the Left hates the America represented by George W. Bush. This country under this president says morality is higher than man-made law. To the Left, that (the supremacy of morality), not Saddam Hussein’s torture and rape rooms, must be fought.

Dennis Prager, one of America’s most respected and popular nationally syndicated radio talk-show hosts, is the author of several books and a frequent guest on television shows.

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The American conservative movement is optimistic and energetic (National Review Online, 041102)

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article originally appeared in France’s Le Monde.

Year by year, the American electorate becomes (in the European meaning of the term) more “liberal” — that is, more committed to liberty, less willing to heed elite opinion, and a little more religious and “traditional” in their moral ideals. Put another way, they become less like France. Less social democratic, less bewitched by the Left.

One index of this change is what is happening in two of America’s most “European” and left-leaning states, Wisconsin and Minnesota. Minnesota is the state most like Scandinavia, with a heavy Scandinavian population and a long left-wing tradition. It has not voted for a Republican president since 1972. Both Wisconsin and Minnesota voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996, and for Al Gore in 2000. Yet in recent years the governorships of Minnesota and Wisconsin and a growing number of their legislators, from the lowest ranks upwards, have been Republicans. And this year, George Bush is ahead in the polling in Wisconsin and close enough to be competitive in Minnesota. He might even win both — a thought that would have seemed preposterous months ago.

Across the nation, polling data also show that a growing number of students just entering universities have grave reservations about abortion, and are inclined to weigh heavily the right to life of the child in the womb from a very early age.

Part of the reason for this trend toward what the media insist on calling “conservative” values is that the Left has become so irrational. One of the great crusades of feminists, for example, is to defend “partial-birth abortion,” which is opposed by 68% (Gallup) of Americans. This practice takes an infant about to be born, turns it in the womb until its head emerges from the birth canal, and then uses forceps to crush the skull and remove the brain. The purpose is to count this gruesome practice as an “abortion,” protected as a woman’s right. The American Medical Association has testified that this practice is never necessary to protect the health of the mother. (Unlike European law, American law allows abortion during all nine months, right up until the birth of the baby.)

Another indication of the growing conservative drift of the country — or, rather, revulsion from left-wing illusions — is the strenuous effort of American politicians of the left to deny that they are on the left. They boast of their conservatism on certain issues, their moderation, their centrism. The Left, but not the Right, hates to be “labeled” — that is, called by their proper name. Conservatives are proud to be called conservatives — in President Bush’s case a “compassionate conservative.” Senator Kerry is always protesting against labels, and insisting that he is not a “liberal” (in the American sense, rather like “social democratic” in Europe). This fear of the left-wing label is as good an indication as any of the way the wind is blowing in America.

Roughly speaking, I think Americans see the world in this way. A crazy European ideology, Fascism, tried to replace democracy with dictatorship, and ended in concentration camps and a pagan Europe aflame. Meanwhile, another wild ideology, Communism, proposed a Mickey Mouse vision of economics and, except for a powerful military, kept the many nations forced into the Soviet Union at the level of a fourth-world economy, until the whole project collapsed. Americans find it hard to understand what Europeans find plausible in socialist economics.

Americans have experienced the great advantages of owning their own property, building their own businesses, inventing and discovering new goods and services. Enterprise is the second secret to American life — enterprise springing from creative economic imagination and personal initiative.

But the first secret to American life is the American love for association. Americans form associations for every public and private purpose. They raise money for these associations from among themselves. This is the thick communitarian side of American life. Each of us belongs to many different committees, voluntary associations, clubs, organizations, and we go to many, many meetings with others. In America, we do almost nothing all alone. We work in teams. (That may be why our favorite sports are team sports: baseball, football, and basketball.) We may be the best in the world in joining with others to achieve a multitude of common purposes, in immense variety. Instead of turning to the state, we turn to one another.

Americans get our sense of community from working with one another, not from the state. We get our dynamic, wealth-creating economy from personal initiative and creativity, not from the state.

Finally, there is the importance of religion in American life. The great French sociologist Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out in Democracy in America that what most made America different from Europe was religion. In America, religion was, from the very beginning, on the side of liberty, and liberty on the side of religion. The reason the American colonists had the courage to fight for independence against the British king and parliament was their Christian belief that the Creator held them accountable for their own liberty. Since liberty (as they believed) was the purpose the Creator had in mind in creating the cosmos, and in offering to humble humankind His friendship in freedom, then that same Creator was unlikely to abandon His subjects who chose the path of freedom. Britain had one of the two greatest armies and navies on earth at that time (the other was France), and the Americans had neither army nor navy. They put their trust in the hands of Providence, and they prevailed.

Ever since, anyone who would lead the Americans has had to show gratitude to the Almighty, express commitment to Him. Here there may be separation of the institutions of the churches and the institutions of the states, but there can be no separation of religion from the tissue of national life. President Bill Clinton, for example, spoke of religion far more frequently than George W. Bush, and was often praised for it. Some may have doubted how seriously he meant it, but he was in fact publicly and openly quite religious. It is a normal practice for a president. It is practically mandatory.

The largest single group of religious voters in America are the Catholics, who are about 25% of the voters. Catholics by the accident of their immigration are concentrated in the ten largest states by electoral votes, and they vote with higher regularity than Protestants. They are also in presidential races “swing” voters — that is, they vote sometimes for Republicans, sometimes for Democrats. So they are a crucial voting bloc. Presently, they are trending slightly toward Kerry; those among them who go to church weekly or more (about one third) are voting strongly for Bush.

More generally, about 63% of those Americans of any religion who attend church services at least weekly (about 14% of the American people) have voted Republican in recent years. About 60% of those who seldom or never go to church (also about 14% of the American people) vote Democratic. Religion has recently become one of the single greatest points of political division in America. This is quite new, since not long ago the Bible Belt, urban Catholics, and Jews used to form the three main pillars of the Democratic party.

These trends, too, have strengthened the optimism and energy of the “conservative” movement for change, represented by the Republicans. On the other side, never has so much private funding poured into a political campaign, including the $15 million George Soros committed to defeat Bush and the scores of millions contributed by his friends. Television is crowded by privately funded anti-Bush ads, in addition to the Kerry campaign ads.

The outcome will be interesting indeed.

As of mid-October, at the time of this writing, it is not clear whether John Kerry or George W. Bush will win the November 2 election, although Bush appears to be ahead in the polls by two or three percentage points. His lead is slightly greater in polling in several of the hotly contested “battleground” states than in the national polling. (This phenomenon is normal, because two of the most populous states, California and New York, tend to show huge Democratic majorities, while the other states tilt slightly Republican, as an aggregate.)

But the considerations listed above — both cultural-moral and economic — indicate why the strong tide of growing conservative sentiment (that is, in the European sense, “liberal” sentiment) seems still to be in motion, and at this point seems to favor President Bush.

— Michael Novak, former U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission and to the Bern Round of the Helsinki Talks, holds the George F. Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Conservative network celebrates 25 years (Washington Times, 041128)

Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Dinesh D’Souza, Rich Lowry — the alumni list of the Collegiate Network reads like a who’s who of spirited conservative thought.

Established 25 years ago, the Delaware-based CN was founded to counter the politicization of American campuses and to support conservative student journalists intent on making their voices heard.

The organization has fostered 85 independent publications at such liberal strongholds as Harvard, Yale and the University of California at Berkeley — furnishing operational grants, journalistic training, editorial resources, internships and mentoring.

“The rise of a conservative media counterestablishment and today’s dominance of conservatism in the broader American society is no accident,” said CN spokeswoman Sarah Longwell. “It came about because of the vision and dedication of those who labored over the past quarter century to win the hearts and minds of an entire generation.”

Indeed, talk-radio host Miss Ingraham and book author Mr. D’Souza were both former editors of the Dartmouth Review, founded in 1980 by disaffected staffers from the university’s liberal student publication.

National Review editor Mr. Lowry, meanwhile, was the former editor of the Virginia Advocate, a monthly journal that promotes conservative values at the University of Virginia. Author and commentator Miss Coulter once edited the Cornell Review, another conservative student paper.

Now, the next generation has arrived.

Student-run or not, CN publications routinely play hardball these days, sounding the alarm about liberal bias in the media, excruciating political correctness and questionable academic offerings.

The current issue of the Cornell Review, for example, takes on New York Times writer Maureen Dowd, categorizing her work as “lazy simplification ... showcasing Ms. Dowd’s willingness to employ tactics in the same sentence that she’s demonizing others for using. This is routine for Ms. Dowd; she’d be the worst pundit in America if the New York Times didn’t also print Paul Krugman.”

The paper has riled rival ideologies: In 1997, more than 200 protesters stole hundreds of Cornell Reviews and burned them in public while blocking traffic for several hours.

The university administration instructed police not to intervene in what was described as the “Nazi-style burning,” according to a Cornell Review account.

Meanwhile, CN methodically counters “Old Left” tendencies on campuses as well, exposing the foibles of affirmative action, the routine denial of funding for conservative college clubs and the “liberal orthodoxy” of speech and harassment codes.

It is a bona fide battle, said CN spokeswoman Miss Longwell, “to call higher education back to its touchstones of academic freedom and free speech and to promote unfettered debate and journalistic integrity in the mainstream media.”

The group also is proud of its alumni, she said, many of whom will join 100 student journalists on Thursday to celebrate CN’s accomplishments at an anniversary dinner in Washington. Keynote speakers include Mr. Lowry, plus William Kristol and Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard.

CN is part of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in Wilmington, Del., a nonprofit educational group founded in 1953 “to further in successive generations of American college youth a better understanding of the economic, political and spiritual values that sustain a free and virtuous society.”

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Teens Stay True to Parents’ Political Perspectives (Gallup, 050104)

Are the great generation-splitting debates that were characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s — about everything from politics and religion to drugs and hair — splitting today’s generations? Not if the results of a new Gallup Youth Survey*, which asked teens to compare their social and political views with those of their parents, are any indication. While a fifth of U.S. teens (21%) say they are “more liberal” than their parents and 7% say “more conservative,” 7 in 10 teens (71%) say their social and political ideology is about the same as mom and dad’s.

The finding doesn’t surprise Phillip Longman, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of books and articles dealing with demographics and public policy.

“…Today’s young people are exceptionally bonded to their parents,” he says. “At the same time, the notion that society is ever seriously torn by generational conflict is probably overblown. I, too, am a child of the 1960s and 70s, and so the harmony that exists today between parents and their children does seem a bit strange compared to my own rebellious youth. But even among baby boomers, those who wound up having children have turned out to be remarkably similar to their parents in their attitudes about ‘family’ values.”

There are few differences among demographic groups on this question; boys and girls are equally likely to say that they share the same political and social views as their parents, as are white and nonwhite teens. One area in which differences do emerge among teens is along the lines of political party identification. Only 9% of teens who say they will align with the Republican Party when they are old enough to vote indicate that their views are more conservative than their parents (77% of future Republicans say their views are similar to their parents). But 25% of future Democrats and 28% of future independents tell Gallup they are more liberal than their parents.

Teen Political Ideology

According to a Gallup Youth Survey from early 2004**, the majority of teens, 56%, identified themselves as political moderates, while 25% said they were “very conservative” (7%) or “conservative”(18%) and 16% describe themselves as “very liberal” (6%) or “liberal” (10%). [Moderate 56%]

Boys were about twice as likely to say they are politically conservative (33%) as were girls (17%). 14% of boys said they are politically liberal, as did 20% of girls, while all the rest — 61% of teen girls and 51% of teen boys — described their views as moderate.

A slight difference appeared by race — 29% of white teens said their views are conservative, compared with 18% of nonwhites. Similar percentages of white teens (16%) and nonwhite (18%) teens called their views liberal. The rest — a small majority (52%) of whites and a more substantial majority of nonwhites (62%) — told Gallup they are political moderates.

Comparison of Teen and Adult Political Ideology

How do teens differ from adults in their self-identified political ideologies? The main difference is in the percentages identifying as moderates: 38% of adults describe their political views as moderate***, while a majority of teens (56%) do so. Similar proportions of adults (19%) and teens (16%) say they are political liberals, but significantly more adults than teens subscribe to the “conservative” label — 40% vs. 25%. It is unclear whether the higher proportion of teens identifying as moderates results from a crystallizing of political views as people age or whether it could partly reflect the ways which the surveys were administered (adult interviews conducted by telephone, teen by Internet).

Bottom Line

By describing their political views as “moderate,” many teens may be taking a wait-and-see attitude as they continue to develop their own political consciousness. But given that 7 in 10 currently say they’re sticking close to their parents’ positions on the ideological spectrum, many will possibly continue the voting tradition of at least one older family member.

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Déjà vu all over again (townhall.com, 050315)

Chuck Colson

As Yogi Berra once famously said after his teammates, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, hit back-to-back homeruns in consecutive games: “It’s déjà vu all over again.” I’m getting the same feeling about something less awe-inspiring: that is, the way political pros and media types consistently get culturally motivated voters wrong.

Since the elections, there have been many attempts to understand the so-called “values voter.” Some people, like the editors of Time magazine, created a “Who’s Who” of influential evangelicals. The unspoken assumption is that millions of Christian voters take their marching orders from these leaders.

Others, especially abortion and gay rights activists, deny that there’s anything worth understanding. Arguing, as lawyers put it, “in the alternative,” they say that these voters didn’t help re-elect the president, and if they did, you wouldn’t listen to them anyway, much less bargain with them, because they are bigots.

One “explanation” getting a lot of attention these days is Thomas Frank’s recent book What’s the Matter with Kansas? The title dates back to an 1896 essay with the same title. Then as now, the success of a populist movement, which included many Christians, horrified polite opinion. And like today, some of the establishment couldn’t be bothered with trying to understand it. Instead, the famous journalist William Allen White insulted his readers in an essay “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

To his credit, Thomas Frank treats his subjects with more respect. Still, he ends up insulting them because he doesn’t understand what motivates them.

Frank correctly notes that many conservative Christians don’t personally benefit from Republican economic policies. So why do they do vote the way they do?

His answer is essentially that they fall for a con job. Republicans and their allies portray conservatism “as a revolt of the little people against a high and mighty liberal elite.” They employ the “hallucinatory appeal” of cultural issues, like abortion, to stir up the “inexhaustible right-wing outrage.” In their anger at liberal elites in media, law, and politics, Christians don’t see that they’re being had.

See what I mean? When wealthy liberals support candidates who might raise their taxes, they’re called “principled” and “idealistic.” When Christians disregard their own economic interests, they’re called “angry” and “suspicious.”

Frank does write that “somewhere in the last four decades liberalism ceased to be relevant to huge portions of its traditional constituency,” but he doesn’t have a clue as to why. That is not surprising for someone who refers to the “hallucinatory appeal” of cultural issues.

Apparently, Frank finds it hard to imagine that people might genuinely believe that the sanctity of life and preserving the traditional family take precedence over their pocketbooks. They may wish that they didn’t have to choose between the two, but their votes reflect sincere priorities, not gullibility.

In the end, for Frank and others, the “matter” with Kansas and places like it is that, like a century ago, people aren’t voting the way “polite opinion” thinks they ought to. And now, as then, it’s the people’s, not the elite’s, fault. It’s the kind of “reasoning” that makes every post-election cycle a case of “déjà vu all over again.” Once again, they just don’t get it.

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Loudmouth leaders (Townhall.com, 050331)

Marvin Olasky

You know who they are, and they know who they are: Christian or conservative camera hogs beloved by media liberals pleased to broadcast the threatening image of right-wing would-be dictators.

The good news is that they care enough to show up at demonstrations. The bad news is that their belligerence alienates millions.

Fifteen years ago, while I was temporarily chairing meetings of pro-life leaders, I pleaded with the angry males to say no to interviews, and instead let beautiful pro-life women become the face for the movement. I didn’t get much cooperation from those who wanted to build their mailing lists.

We’ve had the same problem recently in Schiavo news coverage. One cheer for those who are in the arena rather than sitting in the stands. As Dwight L. Moody said over a century ago, after listening to a barrage of criticism from a man who didn’t like the famed evangelist’s methods, “The way I’m doing it is better than the way you’re not doing it.”

And yet, those who speak loudly and call anyone who disagrees with them a wimp often do a disservice to the cause they are promoting. That’s because they are disregarding what Paul the Apostle told the Corinthians: “Be strong. Let all that you do be done in love.”

“Strength” in the Bible is a nuanced concept. “Be strong and courageous,” Moses tells all of Israel. “Be strong and courageous,” God thrice tells Joshua. Later, King David gives Solomon that same exhortation. Overall, the phrase appears eight times in the Old Testament: Clearly, this is important stuff. But to understand what it means to be strong and courageous, Christians should look to the person of Christ.

Jesus sometimes spoke against those who were supposed to be good shepherds, the judges and clerics of his time, and could do so with authority because He knew their hearts in a way that we cannot. But Jesus stayed clear of bombast and emphasized showing love even to enemies. He said, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.” He went to the cross instead of appearing on “Crossfire.”

The Apostle Paul reflected Christ’s attitude by writing to the Corinthians, “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Paul advised followers such as Titus “to speak evil of no one, avoid quarreling, be gentle and show perfect courtesy toward all people.”

Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer have acted badly in this situation, but it’s more important to pray for them than to denounce them. It’s also more biblical (and more effective) to reason with liberal journalists than to harangue them. Corinthian Christians could have protested 24-7 the abuse and decadence around them, but Paul pleaded with them to show love, which he defined as “not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful.”

Christians and conservatives do best with liberal journalists when we show them one or two of the thousands of examples of those who exemplify strength through love by sacrificially helping the poor or needy. For example, every city has parents who have adopted numerous children no one else wants — they are the best examples of being strong and courageous not just for an hour, but year after year. Activists should direct the cameras away from themselves and toward examples of compassionate conservatism.

For Joshua in early Old Testament times, strength and courage had an obvious military meaning — march into hostile territory and don’t look back — as well as a spiritual one. The mandate changed, though, when the center of attention became not one Holy Land, but the spreading of truth through many lands. Today, we should concentrate on building, not destroying.

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What Is a “Conservative”? We’re comfortable with contradiction. (National Review Online, 050512)

Jonah Goldberg

Everyone seems to be coming up with their own variants of conservatism these days. Two friends of mine have come out with two of the more famous examples: “South Park conservatism” and “crunchy conservatism.” There’s also “big-government conservatism” which, until recently, would have seemed like more of an epithet than adjective. And, of course, there’s the ideology allegedly held by those perfidious bagel-snarfing rasputins, the neocons. And there are the “theocons” — which has the benefit of rhyming with neocons but presumably implies less bagel-snarfing and more polite eating of noodle salad on paper plates. I recently got into a debate about economic conservatives with Jonathan Chait, though he suffered from the delusion that all conservatives fell into this category. I’d call them eco-cons but that might imply environmental conservatives, another constituency feeling its oats these days. Andrew Sullivan recently unleashed upon the earth an essay about conservatives of faith and conservatives of doubt. He normally calls faith-cons theocons (especially if they oppose gay marriage) but, to date, he hasn’t called the other camp the skepti-cons, perhaps because that sounds too much like a new camp of villains among the Transformers.

And of course there are the more traditional factions in the Great Hall of the Right (I imagine a crowd of generals and aides-de-camp in different uniforms crowded around a giant map of liberalism barking at each other over strategy): libertarians, Burkeans, Hayekians, and so on. Some camps are so small they must wait outside in the foyer, beseeching the brass to let them into the strategy sessions, like partisans who wish to be treated like full-blown allies. Other camps are of such dubious vintage that they have to be kicked out from time to time because it’s not clear where their true loyalties lie. The merits of the case notwithstanding, this is what happened to the happy warriors battling under the flag of Randianism.

So What is a Conservative?

I’ve been wrestling with this for a long time and I don’t pretend to have a perfect or definitive answer. William F. Buckley Jr., employing a richer experience with the subject and a far, far better mind, tried this in his brilliant essay “Notes Toward an Empirical Definition of Conservatism.” I don’t intend to revisit all of the points he made there, but if you haven’t read it hie thee to a bookstore.*

From the beginning, American conservatives have been trying to answer this question definitively to almost no one’s satisfaction (which is why Buckley said he was offering mere “notes toward” a definition). Part of the problem is that the more obvious the answer the less satisfactory it is for the purposes of discussing contemporary politics (which is why Buckley put the word “empirical” in his title). To say a conservative is someone who wishes to conserve is technically correct but practically useless. “Liberals” these days are in many respects more conservative than “conservatives.” American conservatives want to change all sorts of things, while liberals are keen on keeping the status quo (at least until they get into power). The most doctrinaire Communists in the Soviet Politburo were routinely called “conservatives” by Kremlinologists.

As I’ve written many times here, part of the problem is that a conservative in America is a liberal in the classical sense — because the institutions conservatives seek to preserve are liberal institutions. This is why Hayek explicitly exempted American conservatism from his essay “Why I am Not a Conservative.” The conservatives he disliked were mostly continental thinkers who liked the marriage of Church and State, hereditary aristocracies, overly clever cheese, and the rest. The conservatives he liked were Burke, the American founders, Locke et al.

This is a point critics of so-called “theocons” like to make, even if they don’t always fully realize they’re making it. They think the rise of politically conservative religious activists is anti-conservative because it smells anti-liberal. Two conservatives of British descent who’ve been making that case lately are Andrew Sullivan and our own John Derbyshire. I think the fact that they’re British is an important factor. British conservatives, God love ‘em, are typically opponents of all enthusiasms, particularly of the religious and political variety. Personally, I’m very sympathetic to this outlook (Some may recall my Inactivist Manifesto). And it seems to me patently obvious that religion and conservatism aren’t necessarily partners. Put it this way, Jesus was no conservative — and there endeth the lesson.

What isn’t Conservative?

But that spins us back to the same point Hayek was making. Conservatism in its most naked form is amoral. It all depends on what you’re conserving. A true revolutionary in a truly decent and humane society is almost surely going to be a fool, an ass, a tyrant, or, most likely, all three. A conservative in a truly evil regime is even more likely to be the same. Hence, it seems to me, that no person can call himself a Christian if he isn’t in at least some tiny way a conservative because to be a Christian is to conserve some part of the lessons or teachings of that revolutionary from 2,000 years ago.

It also needs to be said that you don’t really have to be a free-marketer or capitalist to be a conservative. There are vast swaths of life that one may wish to conserve that are constantly being uprooted, paved over, or dismantled by the market. As a practical matter, there are serious problems with trying to protect things from market forces. Protecting horse-and-buggy society from the automobile may be a conservative instinct, but in order to translate your instinct into practice you may have to do some pretty un-conservative (and tyrannical) things. But, in principle, if conservatism implies a resistance to change than it seems to me opposing the profound changes free enterprise imposes on society is a conservative impulse.

So all of this is preamble to a humble, not entirely original, suggestion about what defines a conservative. I don’t pretend to think that it is definitive, but the more I think about it, I think any definitive definition would have to take the notion into account:

Comfort with contradiction

I mean this in the broadest metaphysical sense and the narrowest practical way. Think of any leftish ideology and at its core you will find a faith that circles can be closed, conflicts resolved. Marxism held that in a truly socialist society, contradictions would be destroyed. Freudianism led the Left to the idea that the conflicts between the inner and outer self were the cause of unnecessary repressions. Dewey believed that society could be made whole if we jettisoned dogma and embraced a natural, organic understanding of the society where everyone worked together. This was an Americanized version of a Germany idea, where concepts of the Volkgeist — spirit of the people — had been elevated to the point where society was seen to have its own separate spirit. All of this comes in big bunches from Hegel who, after all, had his conflicting thesis and antithesis merging into a glorious thesis. (It’s worth noting that Whittaker Chambers said he could not qualify as a conservative — he called himself a “man of the right” — because he could never jettison his faith in the dialectical nature of history.)

But move away from philosophy and down to earth. Liberals and leftists are constantly denouncing “false choices” of one kind or another. In our debate, Jonathan Chait kept hinting, hoping, and haranguing that — one day — we could have a socialized healthcare system without any tradeoffs of any kind. Environmentalists loathe the introduction of free-market principles into the policy-making debate because, as Steven Landsburg puts it, economics is the science of competing preferences. Pursuing some good things might cost us other good things. But environmentalists reject the very idea. They believe that all good things can go together and that anything suggesting otherwise is a false choice.

Listen to Democratic politicians when they wax righteous about social policy. Invariably it goes something like this: “I simply reject the notion that in a good society X should have to come at the expense of Y.” X can be security and Y can be civil liberties. Or X can be food safety and Y can be the cost to the pocketbook of poor people. Whatever X and Y are, the underlying premise is that in a healthy society we do not have tradeoffs between good things. In healthy societies all good things join hands and walk up the hillside singing I’d like to buy the world a coke.

Think about why the Left is obsessed with hypocrisy and authenticity. The former is the great evil, the latter the closest we can get to saintliness. Hypocrisy implies a contradiction between the inner and outer selves. That’s a Freudian no-no in and of itself. But even worse, hypocrisy suggests that others are wrong for behaving the way they do. Hypocrites act one way and behave another. Whenever a conservative is exposed as a “hypocrite” the behavior — Limbaugh’s drug use, Bennett’s gambling, whatever — never offends the Left as much as the fact that they were telling other people how to live. This, I think, is in part because of the general hostility the Left has to the idea that we should live in any way that doesn’t “feel” natural. We must all listen to our inner children.

Now look at the arguments of conservatives. They are almost invariably arguments about trade-offs, costs, “the downside” of a measure. As I’ve written before, the first obligation of the conservative is to explain why nine out of ten new ideas are probably bad ones. When feminists pound the table with the heels of their sensible shoes that it is unfair that there are any conflicts between motherhood and career, the inevitable response from conservatives boils down to “You’re right, but life isn’t fair.” Some conservatives may be more eager than others to lessen the unfairness somewhat. But conservatives understand the simple logic that motherhood is more than a fulltime job and that makes holding a second fulltime job very difficult. Feminist liberals understand this logic too, they just don’t want to accept it because they believe that in a just society there would be no such trade-offs.

The Conservative Faith

In Tuesday’s column, Derbyshire listed six tenets of Anglo-American conservatism (I prefer Russell Kirk’s but these will do):

1. a deep suspicion of the power of the state.

2. a preference for liberty over equality.

3. patriotism.

4. a belief in established institutions and hierarchies.

5. skepticism about the idea of progress.

6. elitism.

You’ll note that points 2, 4, 5, and 6 run obviously counter to the idea that things can ever be perfectly harmonious. Preferring liberty over equality means preferring inequalities in some circumstances. Acceptance of established institutions and hierarchies is obviously anathema to those seeking an organic balance where everyone fulfills their destiny equally and happily. Ditto acceptance of elitism, which is simply the belief that at the end of the day there are some people who are going to be better at a given thing than other people and education, welfare, and other “interventions” by the state won’t change that. In other words, point 1. As for point 5, this runs against the grain of Hegel-based worldviews that assume that merely ripping pages off a calendar gets us closer to the eschatological kewpie doll at the End of Days.

All that leaves is point 3, patriotism. Now, patriotism and nationalism are very different things and there are many people on the right and left who think nationalism is definitionally conservative or right-wing. This is nonsense on very tall stilts, but I’m writing a book about that. Patriotism, however is merely the devotion to a set of ideals, rooted in history, and attached to a specific place. And once again we are spun back to Hayek. To a certain extent patriotism is conservatism, in the same way that being a Christian involves some level of conservatism. It is a devotion to a set of principles set forth in the past and carried forward to today and, hopefully, tomorrow. (I wish it weren’t necessary to point out that this is a non-partisan point: Patriotic liberals are holding dear some aspects of our past as well.) What we call patriotism is often merely the content we use to fill-up the amoral conservatism discussed above. Axiomatically, if you are unwilling to conserve any of the institutions, customs, traditions, or principles inherent to this country you simply aren’t patriotic (and, as a side note, the more you think the U.N. is the savior of the world, the less patriotic you are — see my General Rule on Patriotism).

The belief that all good things move together and there need be no conflicts between them is, ultimately, a religious one. And — by definition — a totalitarian one. Mussolini coined that word not to describe a tyrannical society, but a humane society where everyone is taken care of and contributes equally. Mussolini didn’t want to leave any children behind either.

The attempt to bring such utopianism to the here and now is the sin of trying to immanentize the eschaton. I have a piece on how liberalism operates like an immanentist religion in the print NR (subscribe!) and I’m running long here. So I’ll leave much of that for another day. But not all religions are alike. Which gets me to the rub of my disagreement with Derbyshire (and another Brit, Andrew Stuttaford) and others who are touting the supposed incompatibility of conservative Christianity and political conservatism. Christianity, as I understand it, holds that the perfect world is the next one, not this one. We can do what we can where we can here, but we’re never going to change the fact that we’re fallen, imperfect creatures. There’s also the whole render-unto-Caesar bit. And, of course, the Judeo-Christian tradition assumes we are born in sin, not born perfect before bourgeoisie culture corrupts us into drones for the capitalist state.

In other words, while Christianity may be a complete philosophy of life, it is only at best a partial philosophy of government. When it attempts to be otherwise, it has leapt the rails into an enormous vat of category error. This is one reason why I did not like it when President Bush said his favorite political philosopher was Jesus Christ. I don’t mind at all a president who has a personal relationship with Jesus. It’s just that I don’t think Jesus is going to have useful advice about how to fix Social Security.

Any ideology or outlook that tries to explain what government should do at all times and in all circumstances is un-conservative. Any ideology that sees itself as the answer to any question is un-conservative. Any ideology that promises that if it were fully realized there would be no more problems, no more trade-offs, no more elites, and no more inequality of one kind or another is un-conservative. That’s why some libertarians seem like glassy-eyed religious zealots and others do not. The libertarians who understand that libertarianism is a “partial philosophy” of life understand that politics and economics alike cannot give us the sort of meaning the more totalitarian thinkers seek. I’m not calling the opponents on the right or left Stalinists or Nazis when I say they are totalitarians. A good many hippies who’d never hurt a fly are more completely totalitarian in their thinking than most members of the Soviet politburo ever were. They merely say they’re “holistic” as they wipe away the bong resin from their chins. Ayn Rand was a totalitarian in this sense as well, which is why she was famously “read-out” of the conservative movement.

Contrary to all the bloviating jackassery about how conservatives are more dogmatic than liberals we hear these days, the simple fact is that conservatives don’t have a settled dogma. How could they when each faction has a different partial philosophy of life? The beauty of the conservative movement — as Buckley noted in that original essay — is that we all get along with each other pretty well. The chief reason for this is that we all understand and accept the permanence of contradiction and conflict in life. Christians and Jews understand it because that’s how God set things up. Libertarians understand it because the market is, by definition, a mechanism for amicably reconciling competing preferences. Agnostic, rain-sodden British pessimists understand it because they’ve learned that’s always the way to bet. Conservatism isn’t inherently pessimistic, it is merely pessimistic about the possibility of changing the permanent things and downright melancholy about those who try.

Alas, I fear that is changing. But that’s a subject for another column.

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‘South Park’ vs. Ann Coulter (townhall.com, 050811)

Marvin Olasky

A raucous red glare, bombast bursting in air ...

That’s the face and sound of media conservatism these days, as celebrated on best-seller lists, top-rated talk shows and books like Brian Anderson’s “South Park Conservatives” (Regnery, 2005). His title comes from the cable cartoon program known for its helpful ripping of political correctness, but also its harmful endorsement of rage and sarcasm.

These days, being a “South Park” conservative is in, and the working definition seems to be: Hit hard, and don’t worry about hitting below the belt, because there is no belt. If you counter the left’s sputum with your own, talk show appearances and book contracts will follow.

What big-shots endorse, little shots snort. Anderson quotes one undergraduate talking about himself and cohort members who “get drunk on weekends, have sex before marriage ... cuss like sailors — and also happen to be conservative.”

Conservative, maybe — but if “South Park” is our future, there won’t be much to conserve. Must we accept the bipolar belief that either we’re (Michael) savages or we’re wimps? Is it possible for us to regain what New Jersey pastor Matt Ristuccia calls “earnest grace, the re-association of sensibilities that we moderns have judged to be beyond association: specifically, passionate conviction and profound compassion”?

Ristuccia wisely suggests that if we understand how Christ combined justice and judgment with forgiveness and hope, our earnestness can be seasoned with grace. But show business pulls us in the opposite direction: Fighting words sell. Ann Coulter, for example, says people don’t respond to subtle reasoning and need to be bopped on the head.

She’s probably right: Rapid-fire attacks keep people awake. But the columnist has another side that a former student of mine, Amy McCullough, caught in describing a Coulter appearance at the University of Texas: “When a young, conservative woman asked how she could stand the awful things people said about her because of her stand on abortion, she hesitated, messed with her hair, and said: ‘Well, it’s the same way I don’t care about anything else: Christ died for my sins, and nothing else matters.’”

That gutsy comment suggests two big differences between “South Park” conservatives and those who profess Christianity not because of tradition but out of an awareness of God’s grace. First, an overwhelming sense of His mercy makes all other considerations minor in comparison. That sense leads people such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to offer good advice: “Have the courage to have your wisdom regarded as stupidity. Be fools for Christ. And have the courage to suffer the contempt of the sophisticated world.”

Second, Christian conservatives press toward earnest grace — that combination of passionate conviction and profound compassion — because those who reject Christ should do so because of the content of His message and not the style of a speaker. The apostles did not rant, they argued logically. In today’s media culture, conservatives need to bop people on the head sometimes, but also need to display compassion, not contempt, toward the sheep of the left.

Amy’s conclusion regarding Ann Coulter was: “I enjoyed a lot of what she had to say. It’d be nice if she was nicer.” Acquaintances say Coulter is personally nice, so some of her stage persona is an act — and probably one that is needed to break through the propaganda that suffuses so many college courses. But the trick — and it’s a difficult one — is to transition from a lion attacking lost sheep to a shepherd guiding them.

How would the apostles act in today’s culture? How, for that matter, would 18th century members of the religious right like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry? Coulter can join that distinguished host as she finds more ways to rout liberal stereotypes without fulfilling others. Her acknowledgment of the centrality of Christ is terrific. She’s too good to be “South Park.”

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Can We Live Without Tradition? Part One (Christian Post, 050803)

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

Every civilizational form assumes some role for tradition. No cultural moment emerges from a vacuum, for every generation responds in some way to the tradition it has inherited. Without an appreciation for the role of tradition and the inheritance of moral wisdom, the achievement of civilization becomes dubious if not dead.

In the current issue of Policy Review, a periodical published by the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, author Lee Harris considers these questions in “The Future of Tradition,” an essay that serves as a catalyst for considering the role of tradition in a society and its worldview.

Harris, author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History, suggests that America’s current culture war is but the most current representation of a continuing battle that has afflicted humanity throughout its history. A culture war occurs when cultural elites—given to a preoccupation with abstract thinking—begin to question and subvert a set of traditional values. “In every culture war the existing customs and traditions of a society are called to the bar of reason and ruthlessly interrogated and cross-examined by an intellectual elite asking whether they can be rationally justified or are simply the products of superstition and thus unworthy of being taken seriously by enlightened men and women,” Harris explains.

He quickly moves to point to a recent statement made by the chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. In explaining why her court decided to legalize gay marriage, the justice simply asserted that any opposition to same-sex marriage can come only from “residual personal prejudice.” Thus, all enlightened persons are called to put aside such residue of personal prejudice and embrace the new morality put forth by the elites.

Harris argues that conservatives are often tempted to respond to such attacks on traditional values by turning to reason and rationality. Nevertheless, he doubts that such an effort can be fully successful. Pointing to the 12th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, Harris questions the persuasiveness of those who would attempt to defend tradition by reason.

Instead, he suggests that an acceptance of traditional morality requires what he calls the “ethical obviousness” of the tradition. As he explains, “So taken for granted is the ethos that no one can imagine an alternative; any suggestion of change, if it did miraculously happen to occur to someone in that society, would be received by the rest of the society with disbelief and/or revulsion.”

Of course, something like the opposite pattern appears to be emerging in our society. Most recently, the cultural elites have been largely successful in painting traditional values themselves as the beliefs that should be met with revulsion.

At this point, Harris argues that cultural relativism is an untenable worldview. As he understands, “The cultural relativist’s position, practiced consistently, collapses into reactionary obscurantism: All cultures, including his own, are incommensurable, so it is impossible to judge any of them by higher standards than those offered by the cultures themselves.” But, if the liberal relativist undermines tradition by asserting its relativity, some conservatives can fall into a similar error by asserting the authority of a tradition as if it is beyond moral interrogation.

In truth, few persons give much conscious attention to the question of tradition and its function in society. Tradition functions, in the main, as a background belief system that frames reality and shapes the worldview. Embodied in a set of principles and practices—something like what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the habits of the heart”—the tradition functions communally as a set of shared beliefs and moral instincts.

Harris then turns to consider several defenses that have been offered in support of tradition. Some have argued that tradition functions as a “useful fiction” that operates in a functional manner, enabling the masses to trust what they have been taught. Another defense is deeply rooted in skepticism, arguing that tradition is necessary because even the most enlightened of citizens cannot be trusted to operate by the most lofty of moral instincts. Thus, tradition operates as a basic defense against revolution and dissipation. Harris also considers and critiques the defense of tradition offered by Austrian philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek. What Hayek called his “empiricist evolutionary model” suggests that tradition is necessary in order to protect the successful evolution of a society—with right conduct understood as serving the civilization’s perpetuation and wrong conduct seen as weakening a society’s chances of survival.

Turning to his own proposal, Harris suggested that traditions should be seen more as recipes. In his view, a tradition serves a society “by providing the recipe for making the kind of human beings who will viscerally feel and respond to the same habits of the heart as the community to which they belong.” He seeks to create a middle way between cultural relativism and a reactionary defense of an unquestioned tradition. As he sees it, recipes are not subject to questions of truth and falsity, but are more likely to be understood as matters of preference and taste.

This is an odd and rather superficial defense of tradition, and it hardly serves to defend the robust role for tradition that Harris apparently desires to construct. He is certainly right to avoid cultural relativism, and a simple declaration of the rightness of tradition is morally inadequate. But a description of tradition as a “recipe” for society must finally collapse into the very relativism Harris wants to avoid.

What is missing from his analysis is an understanding of a transcendent standard of judgment that stands outside the tradition itself. Such a transcendent standard of truth would judge traditions and would serve as a template for cultural analysis and moral consideration. Lacking any transcendent authority or point of reference, cultural relativism or a reactionary defense of tradition appear to be the only two alternatives.

In the end, Harris’ explicitly secular defense of tradition needs to be corrected by a Christian assertion of a transcendent truth, made accessible to us by revelation, that judges all traditions, civilizations, and societies. This is the revelatory truth claim that stands at the heart of the Christian faith, without which Christianity has no basis for offering any cultural critique or moral wisdom.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Can We Live Without Tradition? Part Two (Christian Post, 050804)

R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

In his article, “The Future of Tradition,” author Lee Harris suggests that America’s current culture war is the result of society’s existing customs and traditions being called to the bar of reason and ruthlessly interrogated and cross-examined by an intellectual elite.

Harris is at his best in describing what happens when tradition is dishonored and abandoned. He points to the necessary function of moral tradition in the formation and defense of the family as the civilizational context for nurturing human beings who will defend, rather than destroy, the civilization they have inherited. As he explains, “The ethical, as opposed to the merely biological, family is the site for the making of civilized human beings out of id-governed monsters. It turns man’s purely animalist collection of impulses and urges into a vehicle for passing on not merely accidental means, but deliberately engineered transformative customs across generations.”

Harris understands that tradition is a “multi-generational project.” Just as he asserts, civilization depends upon one generation’s concern for its grandchildren. “Civilization persists when there is a widespread sense of an ethical obligation on the part of the present generation for the well-being of the third generation—their own grandchildren. A society where this feeling is not widespread may last as a civilization for some time—indeed, for one or two generations it might thrive spectacularly. But inevitably, a society acknowledging no transgenerational commitment to the future will decay and decline from within.”

Beyond this, the family is the school for the most basic moral learning. In the family context, “no one is an ethical relativist,” Harris observes. “A consistent ethical relativist would refuse to scold her child for doing anything whatsoever. Stab the poodle to death? To each his own. Toss your favorite CDs out the window? Who is to judge? Set the house on fire and gleefully watch it burn down? It all depends on your point of view.” Helpfully, Harris explains that “Members of each generation are committed to making sure that the ethical baseline of their society does not move in a manner that their visceral code instantly tells them is wrong.” Otherwise, the civilization moves towards its own destruction.

Harris understands another truth that he helpfully explains in terms of our current cultural conflict. “In the culture war of today, the representatives of one side have systematically set out to destroy the shining examples of middle America. They seem to be doing so with an unconscious fanaticism that most closely parallels the conscious fanaticism of the various iconoclastic movements in the history of Christianity. They are doing this in a variety of ways—through the media, of course, and through the educational system. They are very thorough in their work and no less bold in the astonishingly specious pretext upon which they demand the sacrifice of yet another shining example.”

Harris then turns to consider what has happened to marriage. Our moral tradition—shaped by Christianity—was based upon the “ethical obviousness” of marriage as a resolutely heterosexual institution. A response of revulsion and rejection in the face of proposals and demands for same-sex marriage were rejected by moral instinct. The very fact that those opposed to same-sex marriage seemed to be without moral arguments against such an idea, Harris asserts, is proof of the ethical obviousness of what marriage is and has always been. “How do you explain what you have against what had never crossed your mind as something anyone on earth would ever think of doing?” Harris asks. He adds: “To ask someone to reason calmly about something that he regards as simply beyond the pale is to ask him to concede precisely what he must not concede—the mere admissibility of the question.”

Harris’ argument concerning marriage is made all the more important by the fact that he identifies himself as a homosexual within the article. That makes the following statement even more remarkable: “The shining example of a happy marriage and its inherent ideality was something that we once could all agree on; but now it is a shining example that has been subjected to the worst fate that can befall one: It has . . . become a subject of controversy and has thereby lost its most essential protective quality: its ethical obviousness in the eyes of the community. Once the phrase ‘gay marriage’ was in the air, marriage was suddenly what it had never thought to be before: a kind of marriage, a type-traditional marriage, or that even worse monstrosity, heterosexual marriage.”

In making this point, Harris is on to something of profound importance. Once marriage had to be defended as “heterosexual marriage,” much of the battle had already been lost. Other forms of marriage had become imaginable, conceivable, and debatable. A moral tradition had been undermined, and civilization’s most essential social institution had been successfully redefined.

Furthermore, Harris also understands that the intellectual elite “have no idea of the consequences that would ensue if middle America lost its simple faith in God and its equally simple trust in its fellow men. Their plain virtues and homespun beliefs are the bedrock of decency and integrity in our nation and the world. These are the people who give their sons and daughters to defend the good and to defeat the evil. If in their eyes this clear and simple distinction is blurred through the dissemination of moral relativism and an aesthetic of ethical frivolity, where else will human decency find such willing and able defenders?”

In his conclusion, Harris argues that the sophisticates had better come to terms with the absolute necessity of allowing the moral tradition to do its work. He asserts: “Reject the theology if you wish, but respect the ethical fundamentalism by which these people live: It is not a weakness of intellect, but a strength of character.” That sentence gets right to the heart of the problem with Lee Harris’ proposal—once the theology is rejected, the tradition is inevitably subverted.

In his brilliant essay, Lee Harris eloquently describes the real challenge we now face. Without a transcendent authority and criterion of judgment, his own proposal is inadequate. It’s now up to us to provide a more substantial argument—and to insist that the right theology is absolutely essential, if the right tradition is to survive.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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The Conservative Revolt: There are six reasons why conservatives have turned on Bush. (Weekly Standard, 051020)

WHY have so many conservatives suddenly revolted against President Bush, nearly five years into his presidency? I think their split with Bush is ill advised, counterproductive, and in some ways childish. But there’s no doubt it’s happening and it’s serious. And there’s more to it than disappointment with his nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. So why exactly has this revolt broken out now? I’ve come up with six reasons, and there may be more.

One, a revolt was inevitable, sooner or later, simply because Bush is not a conventional conservative. He deviates on the role of the federal government, on domestic spending, on education, on the Medicare prescription-drug benefit, and on immigration. Given this kindling, it took only the spark of the Miers nomination to ignite a conservative backlash.

Bush, of course, is a conservative, but a different kind of conservative. His tax cuts, support for social issues, hawkish position on national security and terrorism, and rejection of the Kyoto protocols make him so. He’s also killed the ABM and Comprehensive Test Ban treaties, kept the United States out of the international criminal court, defied the United Nations, and advocated a shift in power from Washington to individuals through an “ownership society.” On some issues—partial privatization of Social Security is the best example—he is a bolder conservative than Ronald Reagan, the epitome of a conventional conservative.

Two, Bush has not courted leaders of the conservative movement. He’s left that to his adviser Karl Rove, who did an excellent job until he was distracted by the investigation of the CIA leak case. Movement conservatives feel Bush doesn’t respect them. They may be right.

Three, the White House has grown a bit arrogant and self-centered. That’s what naturally occurs after a president is reelected. The White House thinks its interests are more significant than those of members of Congress. In fact, their interests (winning a war, for instance) usually are. But senators and House members who are running for reelection, while Bush won’t have to face the electorate again, regard this White House attitude with resentment. They may be small-minded, but it’s understandable.

Four, Bush is down. His job approval is at an all-time low. He is under fire, unfairly, for his handling of the Katrina rescue and recovery. His bid this year for Social Security reform failed. All of which has provoked the classic Washington response to the plight of a political foe in trouble: kick ‘em while they’re down. Many conservatives, who rarely complained when Bush was riding high, have joined in the kicking.

Five, the press is happy to abet the revolt. For the media, the situation is the best of all worlds. Not only is a conservative president in trouble, but the media can concentrate on covering conservatives who are bashing one of their own. Two days ago, reporters covering a press conference by Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer abandoned him when Republican Senator Sam Brownback walked by. They rushed to Brownback, a skeptic on the Miers nomination, in hopes he would bash Bush or Miers or both.

Six, the Miers nomination didn’t just trigger the revolt. It provoked deep anger toward Bush as well. The feeling of conservative critics was that Bush had trivialized an enormously important Supreme Court nomination by choosing his legal counsel. Despite Bush’s assurances, they are doubtful Miers will turn out to be a judicial conservative.

Can the broken relationship between Bush and conservatives be repaired? Certainly. It’s probably just a political phase anyway. And if Miers makes a strong case for herself as a judicial conservative during her confirmation hearings, the conservative anger will begin to fade. But there’s bound to be a residue of ill will, which means the rapport between Bush and many conservatives will never be quite the same again.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

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Principled conservatism (Washington Times, 051102)

By Tony Blankley

Last week, the conservative movement had its Rosa Parks moment: We refused to give up our seat on the bus even for a Republican president. Regarding that event, liberals, mainstream mediacrities as well as conservative movementistas all shared a common impression: Something important happened last week for conservatism — and thus for the broader political scene.

The successful opposition to Harriet Miers was not a triumph for just some faction of the conservative movement. If it used to be said that the Church of England was the Tory Party at prayer, then it also could be said that the conservative opposition to Miss Miers was the entire conservative movement on the hunt — at full regimental strength.

From the market-oriented Wall Street Journal, to my own Washington Times’ classic Reaganite conservatism, to the social conservative opposition of Phyllis Schlafly and so many others on the social and Christian right, to the neoconservative opposition of the Weekly Standard and Charles Krauthammer, to the paleo-conservatism of Pat Buchanan, to the high Toryism of George Will, to the popular talk-radio titans Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and their legions of regional voices, to the lawyer turned hip radioist Laura Ingraham, to the iconoclastics: Michael Savage and Ann Coulter, to most of the conservative blogdom (with the prominent exception of the always magnificent Hugh Hewitt, who rode heroically and almost alone with the fox, rather than us hounds) — this was a never-before-seen moment of comprehensive conservative opposition to a Republican initiative.

Of course, conservatism has often stood almost equally united in support of a Republican or conservative issue (e.g. Reagan, anti-abortion) or in opposition to a Democratic or liberal issue (e.g. Clinton, raising taxes).

But such broad, shoulder-to-shoulder conspicuous conservative opposition to a Republican president advocating a not liberal nomination or position is, I think, without precedent.

Of course, elements of conservatism have often been disgruntled with the actions of conservative presidents. When Ronald Reagan first reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev, national-security conservatives muttered deep concern. When George H.W. Bush raised taxes, the House conservatives rebelled and beat his proposal on the floor, initially. But those were responses of only factions within the conservative firmament. Other factions may not have liked such initiatives, but they didn’t move into loud, direct, public opposition.

Whenever a seminal political event such as this happens, politicians and activists rush in to try to publicly explain and exploit it in a manner useful to their political objectives.

The first to arrive at the scene of the fire with cans of gasoline were the ever-politically-resourceful (if substantively barren) Democrats and their dutiful echoes in the mainstream media.

From the unctuous, faux-humble, faux-everyman Sen. Harry Reid, to the ever clever, ever-striving Sen. Charles Schumer, to their automaton stenographers in the MSM, this event was characterized as the triumph of the hard right, extreme, radical, fundamentalist Christian, anti-abortion, doctrinaire, out of the mainstream right-wingers.

Now, I will concede that they may well be sincere in making such characterizations. These days, the Democratic Party spokesmen and spokeswomen tend to see anyone much to the right of Sen. Joe Biden as falling into the category of out-of-the-mainstream right-wingers, if not actual lumpen proto-fascists.

Poor old Sen. Joe Lieberman — a classic moderate from the un-conservative state of Connecticut — could barely get 7% of the Democratic Party vote for president.

But in fact, the conservative coalition that defeated Miss Miers’ nomination last week is the same broad-based movement that has elected its candidate president in five of the last seven elections, elected 28 currently sitting governors and a Republican Congress for the last decade.

Today, 34% of Americans are self-described conservatives, while only 19% are self-described liberals. When one adds only the most conservative third of the remaining 47% of self-identified moderates to the self-proclaimed conservatives, one has a voting majority in an American election.

So when they say we are out of the mainstream, they are using words in a manner inconsistent with reality.

If there was a uniting theme to the conservative opposition, it wasn’t anti-abortion or any particular substantive issue.

Rather, conservatives respect the law. We have deeply resented its misuse for the last 70 years by clever and willful liberals who would usurp the law for their own policy purposes. We want its rectification, so the true Constitution can return from its exile (somewhere in the Wyoming Rockies, along with John Galt, I think).

This was a revolt for excellence. It was a revolt for a faithful scholar of the law. It was a moment of high faith in reason, and in the blessings that will flow from a fair and wise reading of our founding document.

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The Conservative Future: Compassion (townhall.com, 051117)

by Sen. Rick Santorum

We live in a time of unprecedented conservative power in the United States. For the last decade, Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress. For 17 of the past 25 years we have controlled the White House. And for the last four-and-a-half years we have controlled both the legislative and executive branches of government.

It has been a period marked by achievements, at home and abroad. Welfare has been reformed and millions of families have found the freedom of work and home ownership. Taxes have been reduced, and despite the recession, 9/11, intense global competition and nature’s fury, the economy is growing. And democracy is spreading throughout the world as free peoples are turning once-outlaw regimes into new allies.

Yet after a decade of Republican control in Washington, we have not reduced the size of government, there is no balanced budget amendment, and pork-barrel and self-interest politics have grown. Special interest groups haven’t been defeated or tamed, they are thriving.

Now is the time for midcourse corrections to ensure the success of the conservative movement, as well as the American experiment. With that mission in mind, I would like to make a few suggestions of my own.

Intellectual conservatism was once defined by two clear goals - the defeat of communism and the reduction in the size, scope and sweep of government. There are three obse