Why Conservatives Can't Govern

By Alan Wolfe

Search hard enough and you might find a pundit who believes what George W. Bush believes, which is that history will redeem his administration. But from just about everyone else, on the right as vehemently as on the left, the verdict has been rolling in: This administration, if not the worst in American history, will soon find itself in the final four. Even those who appeal to history's ultimate judgment halfheartedly acknowledge as much. One seeks tomorrow's vindication only in the context of today's dismal performance

If leaders consistently depart in disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology, there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming the leaders and start questioning the ideology.

One thought, and one thought only, guided Bush and his Republican allies since they assumed power in the wake of Bush vs. Gore: taxes must be cut, and the more they are cut--especially in ways benefiting the rich--the better.

The United States, as the political scientist Louis Hartz argued in the 1950s, was born liberal. We fought for our independence against Great Britain and the conservatism that flourished there. In Europe, a conservative was someone who defended the traditions of the monarchy, justified the privileges of the nobility, and welcomed the intervention of a state-affiliated clergy in politics. But all those things would be tossed out by the revolutionaries who led the war for independence and then wrote the Constitution. We chose to have an elected president, not an anointed monarch. Our Constitution prohibited the granting of titles of nobility. We separated church and state.

conservative political philosophy may not come naturally to Americans, but a fear of centralized power and an unwillingness to pay heavy taxes does.

Beneath the broad political liberalism embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution was a frequently unexamined conservatism that questioned the very idea of the vibrant, expansive society that America promised to be.

Odd men out in America's liberal political culture, America's conservatives were never very unified. Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall wanted to see a strong national government created to improve America's economic prospects, even if they retained an aristocratic sense that only social superiors should control that government. (John Adams outdid them on behalf of a strong executive; he thought our first president should be addressed as a monarch). But this kind of New England Federalism would go into abeyance once America's democratizing forces were unleashed.

Once the advocate of a strong national government, Calhoun, putting the rights of slaveholders first, viewed this country as a compact among states, not as a unified society. His ideas would live on in the voices of those thinkers, primarily Southern, who objected to relying on national power to promote equal rights for all.

In this entrepreneurial, mobile, innovative, and individualistic country, conservatism was constantly on the defensive, aiming to preserve things--deference, reverence, and diffidence, t

All the conservatives that played any role in America's history since the age of Jackson chose political relevance over ideological purity. The Whigs abandoned aristocracy to nominate a popular military leader in the 1840s, hoping thereby to out-democratize the Jacksonians. An emerging business elite defended the free market--an 18th-century liberal innovation detested by agrarian-oriented conservatives--to protect the very kind of privileges that Adam Smith hoped the free market would curtail. Isolationists abandoned the cosmopolitanism of Hamilton, perhaps America's greatest conservative, for a populistic nativism suspicious of worldly grandeur. Clergy from evangelical churches played down such depressing doctrines as original sin and predestination in favor of the wonders of salvation for all. European conservatism had defended authority against liberty and social standing against equality. American conservatives used the language of liberty to justify inequality and promoted democracy to stand against change.

The failure of the Bush administration to plan for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion was just one more, albeit the most serious, consequence of the conservative ambivalence toward government. Neoconservatives were all for ambitious adventures abroad, and, in the aftermath of September 11, they won the president's support. But they never captured his pocketbook, which was tenaciously guarded by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

In Continetti's telling, once upon a time--let's make it 1994--conservatives were idealistic revolutionaries. Gingrich and his cohorts were "optimistic, progressive, and overwhelmingly confident in the idea that you could run the federal government like a large corporation." Alas, however, Gingrich was unable to persuade his Republican colleagues to vote for Robert Walker of Pennsylvania as majority whip

DeLay, is a counterrevolutionary, Stalin to Gingrich's Trotsky. (Yes, Continetti makes that comparison.)

The 1994 whip election, Continetti argues, became a struggle "between  those who viewed power as a means to the end of limiting government and those who viewed power as an end in itself." DeLay's victory was therefore the beginning of Gingrich's downfall.

Transforming the Republican Party into a highly disciplined organization determined to get its way without cooperation from the Democrats was an another objective shared by Gingrich and DeLay. Indeed, the former, not the latter, deserves the credit for substituting British-style party discipline and ideological extremism for bipartisan cooperation and moderation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

But the partisan zealotry of the current U. S. House of Representatives has shocked such fair-minded, long-term observers of Congress as Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann; their book, The Broken Branch

Partisanship this vindictive is part and parcel of what it means to be a conservative today.

Whether through the ideas of James Madison, Immanuel Kant, or John Stuart Mill, liberals have viewed violent conflict as regrettable and the use of political institutions as the best way to contain it.

Conservatives, from the days of Machiavelli to such twentieth-century figures as Germany's Carl Schmitt, have, by contrast, viewed politics as an extension of war, complete with no-holds-barred treatment of the enemy, iron-clad discipline in the ranks, cries of treason against those who do not support the effort with full-throated vigor, and total control over any spoils won. From a conservative point of view, separation of powers is divisive, tolerance a luxury, fairness another word for weakness, and cooperation unnecessary. If conservatives will not use government to tame Hobbes' state of nature, they will use it to strengthen Hobbes' state of nature. Victory is the only thing that matters, and any tactic more likely to produce victory is justified.

They exploit Washington the way farmers once exploited land and industrial firms exploited workers. Their efforts are designed to help business and to build their party, and for those tasks, Congress, and the money at its disposal, is a weapon to use, not an institution to shrink. It took conservatives, who in the 18th and early 19th century supported quasi-feudal states and distrusted the instabilities of the market, a hundred years to become advocates of laissez faire. And under the imperatives of the K Street Project, it took them just five to abandon their belief in laissez faire to support a corrupt business-government partnership bearing striking resemblance to feudalism.

A New England-based, patrician-oriented conservatism which insists on the importance of impersonal standards of high public conduct is as irrelevant in today's political economy as a Southern-style, gentlemanly conservatism that emphasizes chivalry and honor. The cavaliers and Mugwumps are long-gone from conservatism, and the Duke Cunninghams have replaced them.

Americans may have elected a Republican president and Congress, but they are unlikely to go back to a world in which one illness can devastate their last years or one storm can destroy their lives. Because government is the one institution that allows us some control over our future, conservatism, which distrusts government so much, is best viewed as a natural counter to liberalism, which, if left unchecked, tends towards wasteful bureaucracy. Indeed, as the Bush administration fully proves, conservatism remains a force of opposition even when it purports to be a governance party. And so the best that can be hoped for is that American voters will do for conservatives what they are unable to do themselves: to vote them out of office.

The World According to Grover
Grover Norquist talks to the Prospect and friends about Iraq, gay marriage, Jack Abramoff, and more.

Bush 43 has been much better at that. It answers the question of, “So why is spending a problem?” Spending’s a problem because spending’s not a primary vote-moving issue for anyone in the coalition. Everybody around the room wishes you’d spend less money. Don’t raise my taxes; please spend less. Don’t take my guns; please spend less. Leave my faith alone; please spend less. If you keep everybody happy on their primary issue and disappoint on a secondary issue, everybody grumbles … no one walks out the door

The left: trial lawyers with resources, organized labor with resources and people and votes --votes being largely retirees, money being dues. The two wings of the dependency movement -- those locked into welfare dependency and the guys who make $90,000 a year making sure they stay there and don’t get jobs and become Republicans. And then what we cheerfully call the coercive utopians who want to get the government to give them grants and then tell the rest of us you have to separate the green glass from the clear glass, and our toilets have to be too small to flush, and our cars have to be too small to have kids in, and you can’t wear leather, and you can’t date girls. The collection -- there are guys who actually list the things they want you to do and how to run your life -- is slightly longer and more tedious than Leviticus.

I would suggest the biggest trend is the number of people who own shares of stock directly. We’ve gone from 17 percent of Americans owning stock to up over 50 percent of households. According to Mark Penn, two-thirds of voters in 2002, 2004, somebody who owns at least $5,000 worth of stock is 18 percent more Republican and less Democratic.

African-American, no stock, 6 percent Republican; $5,000 worth of stock, 20 percent Republican. Every demographic group gets better with share ownership. Rich, poor, all colors, all genders, with the exception of women who earn more than $75,000 a year, who are already thoroughly Republican and don’t get any better.

That’s my sense on the two structures of the parties. What will the Republican Party do? Their answer to everything is lifetime savings accounts, personal savings accounts, retirement savings accounts, education savings accounts, health saving accounts because they view creating more shareholders creates more of us. And the Democratic answer is 100,000 more cops, 100,000 more border guards, 100,000 more teachers, 100,000 more government workers because they’re 10 percent more Democratic than Republican. More higher-paid, long-lasting government workers gives you more Democrats. It’s not a coincidence the two parties rationally figured out the direction they want their efforts to go in.

Luckily, the guys who gerrymandered the Senate seats and gave us all those lovely square seats out west with three people living in the state, two of whom are Republican senators and one of whom is a Republican congressman, are going to make it easier for us to get the 60.

The 1930s rhetoric was bash business -- only a handful of bankers thought that meant them. Now if you say we’re going to smash the big corporations, 60-plus percent of voters say "That’s my retirement you’re messing with. I don’t appreciate that". And the Democrats have spent 50 years explaining that Republicans will pollute the earth and kill baby seals to get market caps higher. And in 2002, voters said, “We’re sorry about the seals and everything but we really got to get the stock market up.”

But I would argue it’s the alternative -- what’s the Democratic alternative, the progressive alternative to what Bush is doing and do people think that would work?

Scaife can be eaten for lunch by Carnegie, Rockefeller, any number of the left-of-center foundations. You’ve got Scaife, Olin on the right … there’s another one … Smith-Richardson … Bradley, Bradley Foundation -- that’s actually the largest of the conservative foundations. I think it’s like, $400 million? But compared to left-of-center foundations they’re teeny. So it’s an odd one in … why not go back and recapture or refocus the larger existing institutions?

Another one I presented to the folks at the White House and that is, the President should announce, “These budget numbers we’ve all agreed to. When you send me a bill, HHS or Defense, if you meet my budget numbers and not above, I will honor all of the earmarks in it, the earmarks in the Committee Report that are non-binding. But you spend a dollar more than what we agreed to and all the earmarks are off the table.” What did you just do? You just turned the appropriators into your watchdogs for total numbers, total numbers. They’ll go and they’ll steal money for rich kids to have swimming pools and stuff, but they won’t do more than $10 billion.

conservatives are always very good at saying nobody votes on aggregate numbers. Nobody votes on total taxes or total spending. They vote on marginal taxes on them, on marginal spending on them.

The challenge for McCain is that he lost in 2000 because he was ten paces off dead-center -- campaign finance reform. He was generally a Reagan Republican except for campaign finance reform,

People said he’s not with us on this stuff. So his challenge is, having been 10 paces off, he’s now switched his positions on taxes, on guns, on judges, on Kyoto, and he’s got to run as the guy who flip-flopped on central issues.

Alan Wolfe teaches political science at Boston College and is the author of Does American Democracy Still Work? (Yale University Press).

CRITIC AT LARGE

Get Me Revision! Remembering Richard Hofstadter

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By CARLIN ROMANO

As Richard Rorty once remarked, most of us have cartoon versions of history and philosophy in our heads, though their hold on us differs.

Eventually, most wised-up readers of history come to agree with the advice of E.H. Carr, cited and honored by David S. Brown, that "Before you study the history, study the historian." The payoff of Brown's effort comes in Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago, 2006), an incisive interpretive profile

Hofstadter made clear to readers of American history that the mid-20th-century discipline was up for grabs. The miracle of Protestant liberalism announced by George Bancroft and Francis Parkman, the "Jeffersonian liberal" vs. "Hamiltonian conservative" grudge match offered by Vernon Louis Parrington, and Charles Beard's trust in economic causes all stood ripe for rethinking. Hofstadter, writes Brown, proved "a thoughtful agent of change in a nation rapidly moving away from its Protestant moorings" as he became "a leading interpreter of American liberalism." Where Frederick Jackson Turner had famously proffered American democracy as the upshot of frontier individualism, Hofstadter insisted on giving urban America its due.

In Social Darwinism, Hofstadter "argued that deeply internalized beliefs moved people, for ultimately whoever controlled the prevailing value system — defining God, morality, politics, and patriotism — won the right to apportion rewards."

even the Populists" were "loyal to the twin principles of property and progress." Hofstadter's stinging revisionist view of Jefferson's agrarian vision, faulting it as obsolete for a nation turning, in Brown's words, "urban, industrial, and ethnic," similarly amounted to a sharp attack on received truth.

His books show that America's history not only can but must be rewritten by each generation because the nation keeps changing. Who we are today permits us to devalue some facts, elevate others, and even shift the plot line.

The Brotherhood

How far will Egypt’s Islamists go?

Victory in Egypt would complete the Brotherhood’s journey from a fringe group founded in the 1930s and dedicated to recreating the Muslim caliphate to one of the most important and subversive transnational political movements of the last century.

To be fair, the Muslim Brotherhood renounced violence in the 1970s. But by fatally misreading Soviet intentions in the Middle East and undercutting Nasser, the West destroyed a pro-West Arab leader who was secular, uncorrupted, and strong enough to contain the rising tide of Islamism without resorting to civil war—in short, everything the current crop of Arab leaders is not.

These are two different things. The former would appeal to the moderate sensibilities of most Egyptians. To follow this path would be to swap orthodoxy for legitimacy, an exchange familiar to all radicals who have traveled from the tributaries of politics to its main currents. The latter would alienate all but a small host of Egyptian radicals. To embrace it would be to strangle political Islam in its crib, as just another failed conceit of Arab self-government. <