As anyone within a few miles of a news source now knows, John McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee. Though Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee remain in the race, and some 27 states are yet to vote, the media - typical of its tendency to create, rather than report, news - has, with the 'suspension' of the Romney campaign, coronated King McCain. Many conservatives, of course, are outraged. The likes of Limbaughs One and Two, and Ann Coulter have issued virulent bromides against McCain, reminiscent of the 2000 primary prior to South Carolina. Predominant among the sundry items on the roll-call of objections are of course, his positions on illegal immigration, the Bush tax cuts, and campaign finance reform. Amazing.
No, not amazing that many iconic conservatives have singled him out for these issues because they herald a milk-toast Republican, to use Coulter's term. To one who takes a step back and examines the convulsions and convolutions of conservatism in the last, oh, say, 13 years, it is amazing that they are calling McCain too liberal because of his stance on these, of all issues. It's like indignantly accusing a murderer of assault.
It makes one wonder: what has conservatism become? This race has furnished a wealth of nourishment for this consideration. For instance, in what would be laughable scenario, were it not so depressing, Mitt Romney was considered the the conservative candidate until he recently suspended his campaign. This is the same Romney, mind you, who, in order to ensure that everyone in Massachusetts had health coverage, signed a state-wide mandate. And he was the most conservative candidate? Wow.
But isn't conservatism about individual rights and small government? And since when did conservatives even advocate the use of government coercion to acheive the goal of social betterment? Isn't such a use of government precisely that against which conservatives have traditionally stood? Since when did conservatives even advocate socialized health care? Perhaps Romney's plan isn't socialist because it doesn't really redistribute money so much as requires individuals use their money a certain way. To those to whom the redistribution of wealth is anathema, but the use of government coercion for the 'common good' is fine, this may sound much better. But it seems there was a time when conservatives would have taken up arms against just this. For, conservative has traditionally indicated a dedication to the preservation of the preeminent founding principle: government should properly be dedicated to protecting the freedom of the individual. The establishment of mandates regulating the most intimate affairs of an individual life, then, should be the very antithesis of the conservative vision of government. How has conservatism succumbed to many of the essential tenets of its ideological nemesis?
No, not amazing that many iconic conservatives have singled him out for these issues because they herald a milk-toast Republican, to use Coulter's term. To one who takes a step back and examines the convulsions and convolutions of conservatism in the last, oh, say, 13 years, it is amazing that they are calling McCain too liberal because of his stance on these, of all issues. It's like indignantly accusing a murderer of assault.
It makes one wonder: what has conservatism become? This race has furnished a wealth of nourishment for this consideration. For instance, in what would be laughable scenario, were it not so depressing, Mitt Romney was considered the the conservative candidate until he recently suspended his campaign. This is the same Romney, mind you, who, in order to ensure that everyone in Massachusetts had health coverage, signed a state-wide mandate. And he was the most conservative candidate? Wow.
But isn't conservatism about individual rights and small government? And since when did conservatives even advocate the use of government coercion to acheive the goal of social betterment? Isn't such a use of government precisely that against which conservatives have traditionally stood? Since when did conservatives even advocate socialized health care? Perhaps Romney's plan isn't socialist because it doesn't really redistribute money so much as requires individuals use their money a certain way. To those to whom the redistribution of wealth is anathema, but the use of government coercion for the 'common good' is fine, this may sound much better. But it seems there was a time when conservatives would have taken up arms against just this. For, conservative has traditionally indicated a dedication to the preservation of the preeminent founding principle: government should properly be dedicated to protecting the freedom of the individual. The establishment of mandates regulating the most intimate affairs of an individual life, then, should be the very antithesis of the conservative vision of government. How has conservatism succumbed to many of the essential tenets of its ideological nemesis?
Or take another angle. Nothing better indicates the descent of genuine conservatism within the current political environment than for President Bush to be the considered the 'Real Conservative.' The reason for this, of course, is that he cut taxes and went to war. Leaving the war aside, one cannot help but marvel that the hallmark of conservatism is the determination to cut taxes, no matter what. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for tax cuts, but the assertion that someone who cuts taxes is conservative when the size of the federal debt nearly doubles under their administration, and when the federal deficit runs at around a half trillion a year, is simply insane. One is hard pressed to conceive of less conservative budget management. No wonder he was a poor CEO.
If you cut taxes without cutting spending, you're not really cutting taxes. You are simply delaying them. Putting it on the card, so to speak. What President Bush has done, in one of the most unconservative moves imaginable, has been to shift the taxes to future generations. Our debt is currently collecting interest to the tune of more than a billion dollars a day. The current 9 trillion or so works out to about $30,000 a person, assuming there are 300 million Americans. That's not considering that, at best 2/3 of those pay taxes. So does conservativism now entail that current generations cut taxes even if doing so means that their children are born into debt-slavery?
All of which doesn't even begin to touch on the potential economic consequences for such idiocy. I need not expound the ways in which this is economically detrimental, but merely point to the news. The point is well grasped by analogy with an individual: at some point, your debt begins to threaten your credit. This is not, I think, the kind of economic management with which conservatives like to align themselves. But it gets better.
Romney, the putative conservative in the race, repeatedly embraced Bush during the course of the campaign, hoping that by rubbing up against the prez the conservative mantle might fall to him. When we consider Romney's behavior as described above, its easy to see the ways in which he and Bush are of the same ilk. Bush, after all, in what provides a close contest with his debt-spending for the least conservative move imaginable (and is, of course, part in parcel), expanded the size of the Department of Education TWOFOLD. Wait, did I say the Pentagon budget, or the Department of Homeland Security budget? No, no my friends. Bush's implementation of the assinine No Child Left Behind wholeheartedly embraced the kind of centralization and hegemonic dictation by the federal government of Big-Government Liberalism which conservatives detest!
I suppose, to be fair, there are among Bush's actions valid third, fourth and fifth contenders for the honorific of the least conservative thing imaginable: the prescription drug benefit and the Patriot Act, and the Military Commisions Act. The first comprises one of the largest ever expansion of federal spending on socialized medicine, the second and third arrant abadonments of the conservative defence of small government, personal privacy, and constitutional liberties in general. I mean, the Military Commisions Act, providing for the suspension of the right of habeus corpus, the right free from detainment without charge? Sheesh. Habeus Corpus is the cornerstone of an open, democratic, judiciary. In fact, the right of a sovereign, which in the United States means you, to demand the authority by which they are detained, precedes the U.S. Constitution, in which it was specifically enshrined, by about 500 years.
I scarcely have the heart to go into it, but suffice it to say that increasing federal spending on socialist programs and the unfettered evisceration of basic civil rights like the freedom from search without a warrant and from detainment without charge ought to be utterly abhorrent to a conservative.
We could compound examples, but it would serve little purpose. Simply put, what parades as conservatism these days, whether under the guise of a McCain, Romney, who calls himself conservative in contrast, or Bush, a "Real Conservative," is not conservatism. Allegiance, in anything more than name, to the principles of small government, individual liberties and autonomy, and financial responsibility, those things which define conservatism, has been replaced with the patently socialist belief that the federal government has the right to control and obligation to take care of everyone.
Sadly put, most Republicans loyalty seems to be more to the party than to the principles which once informed it. More sadly, as a result, as Republicans fight the Democrats ever more vociferously and fiercely, they have adopted vast swaths of their beliefs. Rather than defining their opposition by their beliefs, they have come unmoored from their principles and continue to fight against Democrats while becoming more like them.
How did Republicans abandon conservatism and become a party of big social programs, big government, debt spending, massively centralized and secretive power, all traditionally liberal positions?
How indeed. Initially, it seems that conservatives lost the ideological battle. And, in a sense, that's true. But not because they've been defeated, but because they stopped fighting. Upon great victory, taking the house and senate in 1994, they promptly abandoned the principles which got them there. Maybe it was 2000, having the executive too, which was too much for them. Either way, the Democrats, and consequently their socialist ideology, have won because their opponents joined them. And woe to America for it.
The how and why of this sad abrogation of principles requires more reflection than would fit here, but a few tentative thoughts: first, we conservatives have lost the propaghanda war. The very ascent of "compassionate conservatism," for instance, belies the impression that conservatism is not inherently compassionate, as, by implication, is liberalism. It's hard to compete with the message of: I'm going to give you everything and take care of you. The true and effective retort, of course, is that government is never a benign, beneficent provider because of its inevitable tendency toward the accumulation of more power. And where the government has authority, you have none.
One can succesfully make this objection to statist thinking, but only if one tries. Why then, has conservativism capitulated?
I don't know. Perhaps it was the ascent of the so-called 'religious right.' Seeking to take advantage of the vehement secularism of the left, conservatives sought what they thought would be a natural ally in social conservatives. Embracing this agenda, however, turned from protecting family and religious values against the government's infringements, into protecting these values by use of the government: government as an agency for "protecting values," as though a government can do that without the dressings of tyranny; government as a means of preserving and improving society morally. But a true conservative can have no ally in one who seeks to use the government as a means of fixing society, or dictating values.
Perhaps it is simply in the nature of all powerful institutions and interests to seek expansion.
Regardless, this shift toward a view of government which embraces it as a tool for fixing society, for advancing the "common good," for preserving "family values," is fundamentally at odds with the traditional conservative position that all of these ends are best attained by restraining and decreasing the power of government. Paradoxically, as evidence that socialism fails mounts, resistance to it wanes, so that Republicans now have accepted the belief that "government" is a tool for regulating and forming, as opposed to simply protecting, society.
Yet nowhere, in the current philosophical debate about the proper role of government, do we hear a defense of the individual, of individual rights, as the sole legitimate purpose of government. It is as though, hypotized or intoxicated by the promise of power, Republicans have forgotten that their right purpose is to give it back to the people.
