Conservatism That Can Win Again
by David Frum
Doubleday, 2008, 213 pp $24.95
The Conservative Ascendancy:
How the GOP Right Made
Political History
by Donald T. Critchlow
Harvard University Press, 2007, 359 pp $27.95
They Knew They Were Right:
The Rise of the Neocons
by Jacob Heilbrunn
Doubleday, 2008, 320 pp $26
CONSERVATIVES ARE are soul-searching. As they watch the presidency of George W. Bush tank, they are singing like a chorus in a Greek tragedy: This is not our creation, this is a monster, a head cut off from the conservative body spinning out of control. We did not want a bloated budget, a deficit, a disastrous war, an imperial presidency, a crony style of governance. David Frum has joined this litany of dissatisfaction and dissociation. Once a speechwriter to Bush—he coined the famous words “axis of evil”—Frum now shakes his head and performs intellectual acrobatics to explain why the last seven years of Bush’s reign shouldn’t confuse people about what conservatism really is.
We start with a classic statement of declension. “Our conservative movement,” he writes, “had begun as an intellectual movement. . . . Goodbye to all that” now that conservatives flack for the president rather than reassess their own situation and come up with new ideas. Frum wants conservatives to do the impossible: “To vindicate our claim to be the party of the nation, we must make clear that we value public service as much as private wealth creation; that we appreciate the duties of government fully as much as we defend the rights of the marketplace. We cherish our principles, but our first principle is the public good.” When you have to state something like that so explicitly, you’ve pretty much lost the battle. After all, the reason Frum needs to claim he’s on the side of “public service” and the “public good” is because so many conservatives and other citizens have concluded the opposite.
Frum’s act of reinvention and rethinking leads to some bizarre historical revisionism. George W. Bush, whom Frum inexplicably compares to Bill Clinton, ranks as a “middle of the road” president, “far less radical than, say, Ronald Reagan.” But Bush took on Social Security—something Reagan never would have thought of doing. Reagan invaded Grenada to show toughness; he didn’t go into one of the most unstable areas of the world and attempt to create a democracy out of a balkanized society held together through years of brutal dictatorship.
Frum’s rethinking of policy is no better than his historical assessments. Consider his take on tax policy: “To accelerate America’s rate of growth, we should adopt as our Republican goals a capital gains tax rate of zero, an inheritance tax of zero, a dividend tax rate of zero, and a maximum corporate tax rate of zero.” He explains: “Obviously, this is not a populist tax agenda.” It’s also, he admits, “not an inexpensive agenda.” Frum’s solution to the deficit is to tax consumption. And although this is very much in the Republican tradition of screwing the poor, is it really a comeback idea?
Then there are those culture wars. Frum would like Christian conservatives to go away but not bolt the party. He’s correct that the right has helped change broader cultural attitudes about abortion and marriage. He documents “national trends toward fewer abortions, less divorce, and less promiscuity… at the top of society, among the best-educated Americans.” And who could deny the rise of some high-profile, pro-life Democrats? But then there’s this admission, difficult for a conservative hoping that culture warriors will tone things down: “Pro-choice Americans outnumber pro-life Americans. But pro-lifers care about abortion a lot more than pro-choicers do.” A statement like this makes it hard to imagine they’ll be mollified by statistics about declining abortion rates among the wealthy; they want Roe v. Wade to be overturned, not some cultural shifts in attitudes.
FOLLOWING THIS, it’s hard to take Frum seriously when he says that the anti-gay-marriage initiatives, especially in 2004, didn’t help his cause. Here I can speak from experience, for Frum focuses on Ohio, the state where I live and that handed Bush a victory at the same time that it voted to ban gay marriage. “The claim that the same-sex-marriage issue tipped Ohio to Bush seems almost certainly wrong. Ohio was one of the states where Bush’s vote increased the very least between 2000 and 2004.” I worked rural Ohio polling stations for the Kerry campaign in 2004, and I can tell you that over and over I heard voters explain they came out for two reasons only: To vote for Bush (“Boosh,” in their words) and Issue One, the anti-gay marriage proposal. You can say that Bush barely increased his vote in Ohio from 2000 to 2004, but it’s fatuous to say that the issue didn’t matter in some voters’ minds.
Frum’s intellectual acrobatics turn into contortions when it comes to Iraq. He places the onus on Democrats rather than his own side. “Liberals and Democrats keep rerunning Iraq through the Vietnam projector: Either it’s a total success or else we have to cry uncle and withdraw.” His alternative? “As Republicans and conservatives, we should say: We will not accept defeat. We need a strategy of ‘second best’ for Iraq—a strategy that says that even if we cannot achieve everything we wanted in Iraq, we can achieve enough to enhance our security and advance the fight against terrorism.”
Where to begin with a statement like this? That Iraq didn’t provide a threat to our national security before the war? Or that big promises were made about this war, all now deflated? Or with how troubling it would be to ask soldiers to risk their lives for “Second Best”? Now there’s a winning slogan for Republicans in 2008. “Second Best! Second Best!” I can hear the chants emanating from the convention in St. Paul.
Critchlow’s The Conservative Ascendancy. Critchlow tells a story of fierce determination, of infrastructure growing around that fierce determination, and of conservatives consistently engaging in a project of purifying the Republican Party and pushing it to the right. This doesn’t describe a party prone to rethinking or self-scrutiny.
After telling about the John Birch Society (an organization that believed President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist stooge), the campaign that propelled Barry Goldwater to the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, and other tales of conservative activism, Critchlow turns to Ronald Reagan. Reagan has assumed mythic and heroic status, especially as conservatives look for a leader to counterpose to Bush. Critchlow reminds readers of Reagan’s attempt to depose Gerald Ford in 1976 and seize the candidacy from a sitting president perceived as too centrist and moderate. Ford’s wife, Betty, was the first and last first lady who supported not only abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment but the legalization of marijuana. Against Gerald Ford’s moderation and his wife’s cultural liberalism the New Right coalesced around a “groundswell of grassroots activism.” This included struggles against the ERA, bans on prayer in schools, purportedly obscene materials in textbooks, détente (seen as caving into Soviet communism), and abortion. The struggle against the ERA especially united “evangelical Protestants” with “Roman Catholics” and “Mormons,” and “taught conservatives that they could win when they mobilized around the right causes.” The New Right pioneered direct-mail tactics to get its message out to comrades and raise money. Its followers thought of themselves less as reformers than as revolutionaries. In the words of New Right leader Paul Weyrich, “We are radicals who want to change the existing power structure.”
Reagan’s support from the New Right is important to keep in mind. The only thing that slowed his momentum in 1976 was when he picked U.S. Senator Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania as his vice-presidential running mate, a man who received an “89 percent… voting rating” from the ultraliberal Americans for Democratic Action, “the same as George McGovern’s.” This took the New Right wind out of Reagan’s sails and promised him defeat.
Critchlow sees direct continuity between the New Right and Bush. “The Bush coalition,” he explains, “was in large part an alliance among white Christians, led by observant evangelical Protestants and Roman Catholics.” On-the-ground activism helped Bush, of the sort that Frum seems leery of now. “Thousands of campaign workers were sent to Catholic churches to win support for the president” in 2004, Critchlow documents. “Among born-again and evangelical Christians, who made up 23 percent of the vote in 2004, 78 percent voted for Bush and his support of the ‘right-to-life’ position and marriage for heterosexuals only.” Contrary to Frum’s wishes, the culture warriors are too important to go away anytime soon.
ANOTHER PART of the right’s history serves us well in this context. Consider the saga of the neoconservatives who form the basis of Jacob Heilbrunn’s recent book, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons.
Heilbrunn starts with two key features of the neoconservative world: its Jewishness and its fascination with Trotskyism. He suggests that these make the neoconservative mind prophetic and absolutist in turn, rather than empirical or pragmatic. Neoconservatives have always occupied, in Heilbrunn’s words, a “claustrophobic mental world.” This isn’t marginal to how they present or argue their beliefs. There is a “sense of embattlement and loneliness, of foes and enemies everywhere, that helps to account for the stridency and militancy of the neoconservatives.”
His thesis becomes especially fruitful as he documents the lesser-told story of how neocons drifted away from Ronald Reagan during his second term. Neocons could not shed their rigid adherence to anticommunism. Following Irving Kristol’s bizarre statement that “there is no ‘after the Cold War’ for me,” Heilbrunn shows how the neoconservative psyche held on to the permanent-war state of mind, even as there was clear evidence that the Soviet Union was undergoing a process of disintegration and liberalization. The neocons turned their guns on Reagan this time, not the left. Indeed, older neocons like Irving Kristol—despite his own Jewishness—went so far as to accept bizarre alliances with the “Christian right” in order to do so. Meanwhile, younger neocons started their longish march to Iraq. The arena for war changed from Western and Eastern Europe to the Middle East, but what remained was the “insular nature” of the neoconservative mind-set. Heilbrunn even suggests that the failures in Iraq might pose as a conservative Vietnam. “The neoconservatives have quite possibly not only destroyed conservatism as a political force for years to come but also created an Iraq syndrome that tarnishes the idea of intervention for several decades.”
And yet: Heilbrunn warns his readers that just because ideas might crash and burn on the fields of war doesn’t mean they’ll go away. After all, with the infrastructures they have in place, neoconservatives have a remarkable way of finding generational successors. Heilbrunn points out a central conundrum in American politics and intellectual life: Just because an idea is stupid, just because it’s been tested against reality and failed, just because it grows unpopular, doesn’t mean it won’t live on.
What makes conservatism so unpalatable today is its inability of its adherents to accept responsibility for the results of their own ideas and the consequences of their political theories. The conservative mind dreads having the historical tables turned on it. Since 1968, conservatives have blamed liberals for a failed track record—arguing, for example, that the Great Society didn’t tackle the problem of poverty and sometimes exacerbated it. Now with the track record of George W. Bush plain to see, conservative intellectuals fear liberals can return the favor. “Comeback” is the contemporary conservative circumvention. It is the call to ignore the historical record, to wipe the slate clean, as if ignoring the past can be squared with the conservative project of appreciating tradition. So we have the neoconservatives with their “what if” argument about Iraq or the conservatives who dissociate from—while simultaneously relying upon—the Christian right’s activist base. This is the most manifest form of a contemporary politics of irresponsibility.
The politics of any future alternative to conservatism must embrace responsibility and realism. It should start with attention to consequences, an idea indebted to the American pragmatic tradition. We need not examine anything as fancy as “unintended consequences” when we can simply analyze pretty easily foreseen consequences. We can make this programmatic list our beginning: Cutting the taxes of the wealthy will create deficits that are bad for everyone and will reduce our ability to use government to improve our lives collectively; making big, utopian promises about future wars and not preparing Americans for the realities of international engagement will lead to disillusionment; believing political victory at whatever cost is the only thing that matters leads to bitterness and division; and a philosophy that degrades public service and government will result in lousy political leadership. That’s not a bad list of talking points for November 2008. This, too, should be added to the list: we don’t have to settle for “Second Best.”
Photo: R.D. Ward (Department of Defense).
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