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Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
George W. Bush nearly ruined it for conservatives. I will explain how presently, but first, allow me to digress into some history of the conservative movement.
Since the late 1950s, conservatism had slowly but surely been on the march, gathering steam as a reaction against the excesses of the New Deal state. Since the institution of the New Deal under Roosevelt, it seemed that the United States was destined to join much of the rest of the free world in operating under a quasi-command economy. Indeed, though we tend today to look back upon the late 1940s and the 1950s as being “conservative” in the sense that law, order, and tradition still reigned, in contrast to the wild social excesses of the New Left beginning in the middle part of the 1960s, this era in American history was thoroughly saturated with the progressive mentality that “bigger is better,” even in government. Let us not forget that the same era that gave us superhighways and the Ford Fairlaine 500 Skyliner was also the one that gave us NASA - with its hugely expensive and bureaucratic approach to space exploration - and which provided the seedbed for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The intellectual and governing classes in America thoroughly accepted the premise that government had to be big if anything worthwhile was going to get done.
It was against this assumption – and the necessary wastefulness and the infringements upon personal and economic liberty that came with it – that a new class of conservative thinkers began to rearticulate the ideological bases that would drive the conservative movement. Emblematic of this drive and true to conservative form, Russell Kirk, in his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, reminded conservatives of the foundations of their philosophy in tradition (relying heavily upon Burke), over and against the wild political innovation that was the spirit of his age. Kirk reasserted the primacy of the concept of “transcendent order,” arguing that “natural law” and divine revelation served to order man’s existence, apart from the transient dictates of man’s whims. Likewise, Kirk is to be valued for re-emphasizing the connection between property and freedom. Both of these, of course, are antithetical to the underpinnings of big government, resting as it does on the utilitarian basis of the “good of society” (meaning the government can, among other things, take what it needs from you when it needs it) and the replacement of God with government-as-savior.
Kirk, however, also proved to be unwilling to work with the rising libertarian movement, which was more centered upon ideas of intrinsic personal liberty and free market doctrines. Indeed, at one point, Kirk referred to libertarians as “chirping sectaries,” and included them into the category of those “utilitarians admitting no transcendent sanctions for conduct,” believing that a nearly insurmountable division existed between them and those, such as conservatives, who believed in a superintending moral order. Because of this attitude, Kirk was unfriendly towards the developing idea of “fusionism” – the joining of conservative traditionalists and free-market libertarians for political action – that was to eventually drive the conservative movement to victory with Ronald Reagan.
Fusionism is, in a sense, a natural state of affairs for conservatives and libertarians. While differing on many specifics, both camps hold to the the same general beliefs that government should not infringe upon individual liberties, and should be reduced in scope and size. In that sense, there is a large amount of crossover between the two. Most conservatives, except for some on the populist wing of the movement, tend to be very supportive of economic liberty. Indeed, lower taxes and smaller government are popularly known to be “conservative issues,” though libertarians, of course, also share them. To a lesser extent, many libertarians support hallmark conservative social stances, at least to the extent that these are cast in the mold of being liberty issues. One example would be the large pro-life contingent in libertarianism, which justifies itself through the argument that the unborn have the same innate right to human liberties as do the born. To the extent that both conservatives and libertarians went along with the fundamental premises of fusionism, the overall movement on the American Right met with success.
Granted, with the decisive defeat of Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, the advance of conservatism certainly did not seem to be apparent. Yet, it proved not to be as disastrous as many thought at that moment. It is only natural that the Democrats - who if we will remember, were the party of a recently assassinated President who was fondly and nostalgically still fresh in the minds of most Americans – should earn a lot of sympathy points in 1964. Still, one of Goldwater’s failings as a candidate was that he did not exploit the potential for fusionism the way that he could, and should, have. By focusing largely on the Vietnam War and the ethical problems within the Johnson administration, Goldwater reduced his appeal both to rank and file conservatives of the Kirkean mold, who felt that traditional morality should play its part as a guiding force in society, and to free-market oriented libertarians. Mind you, I am not saying that they were unsympathetic to him – far from it – but there was a gap there that could be filled, and later was by the growing influence of Ronald Reagan in the Republican Party.
Further, Goldwater’s seeming distance from the incipient moral traditionalist movement is explained by his own personal social libertarianism – a libertarianism that was to come to the fore later in his life. Towards the end of his political career, Goldwater had revealed himself to be pro-choice on abortion, and turned up his rhetoric against “the religious Right,” whom he accused of trying to take over the Republican Party and “turn it into a religious organization.” At one point in 1989, he even opined that the Republican Party “had been taken over by kooks,” by which he was referring to the traditionalist conservatives who had helped to hand Ronald Reagan two consecutive landslides, and had just delivered a third to George Bush (who was widely believed at the time to be Reagan’s third term). As such, it would seem that Goldwater, whose flinty libertarianism was an enduring factor in his political character even in the early years of his career, would have been as cool towards fusionism as Russell Kirk was, though for different reasons.
Both, in the end, were hobbling themselves and their movements. Kirk did so by his unwillingness to work with libertarians, and Goldwater by his unwillingness to accept the validity of the moral conservatives who were becoming increasingly vocal in American politics.
In the long run, however, the election of 1964 proved merely to be a pothole in the road to the conservative ascendancy that was to come later. This is because fusionism came to be an accepted doctrine among political thinkers and candidates on the Right, despite truculence from some quarters. Nixon’s famous (or infamous, depending on your perspective) “Southern strategy” provided a vehicle for fusionism. Though this strategy is often (unfairly) associated with “racism” by critics of conservatism, much of Nixon’s landslide-generating electoral capabilities came as a result of his opposition to the radical social changes being forced upon the country by the New Left.
In 1964, Barry Goldwater won six states – Arizona, and the five Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. He won these because it was widely perceived in these states that he was opposed to civil rights for African-Americans, due to his vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Hence, these states seem to have been truly attracted to what they (incorrectly) thought was racism on his part. In 1968, Nixon lost four of these five states to George Wallace, and barely won South Carolina with a plurality of 38%, versus Wallace’s 32%. Clearly, Nixon’s appeal was not built around racism, or a desire to “scare white voters” over civil rights for blacks. Instead, Nixon’s appeal was that he ostensibly stood in general for social conservatism, and was perceived as the only rational alternative to the hyper-expansive government desired by the New Left (though Nixon himself was hardly a laissez faire capitalist). In essence, while not being an active fusionist, his candidacies in 1968 and 1972 provided the core about which conservative and libertarian fusionist strategists rallied.
One conservative who fully grasped the power and possibility of fusionism was Ronald Reagan. After 1965, Reagan more or less took the mantle of conservative political leadership over from Goldwater, and seriously worked to articulate to the masses of the American people the virtues of conservative philosophy. As early as 1964, he was a strong supporter of Goldwater, giving a rousing speech for him at the 1964 Republican national convention. He was elected as California’s governor in 1966, and re-elected in 1970. Reagan was committed to working within the Republican Party to root out the Rockefeller Republicans, party leaders, mostly from Northeastern states, who had largely reconciled themselves to and were supportive of the big government ideas held by the progressive intellectual and political “mainstream.” Goldwater’s primary victory against noted Northeastern Republicans like William Scranton and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. had been the first strike in the war for the GOP’s soul. Reagan would continue the war. Despite losing bids for the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1968 and 1976, his efforts within the party would reinvigorate it, and eventually bring him to the White House in a landslide in 1980.
There were three basic aspects to Reaganism – and they are the same three legs upon which successful conservatism has stood since: economic liberty, social conservatism, and a strong national defense. In other words, his victory was the triumph of fusionism.
Unlike Goldwater, who seemed to be distant toward moral traditionalists and who, in later life, seemed to enjoy trying to antagonize them, Reagan embraced the growing power of the “religious Right.” The overtly political movement of religious conservatives had been growing steadily since the middle of the 1970s, as activists like Robert Grant, Terry Dolan, Paul Weyrich, Richard Viguerie, Howard Phillips, Jerry Falwell, and others began to represent, and synergistically encourage, the increasing participation of conservative Christians as a bloc group in American politics. Because these groups tended to be disproportionately located in the South, the Midwest, and the mountain West, this alliance was largely responsible for delivering these areas – with their large chunk of electoral votes – solidly into the hands of Republican presidential candidates. It was this group – which shares many of the same conservative ideas on economic and military/foreign policy issues that are held by more secular conservatives and moderate libertarians – that helped to take the GOP from being an echo chamber filled with Rockefeller Republicans to being a nationally competitive political power again. These groups provided one of the cores that aided Republicans to win nationally as far back as the Nixon era, when Nixon first captured the South from the Democrats.
There is little actual evidence to suggest that Ronald Reagan himself was a member of the “religious Right.” He was socially conservative – his interest in protecting the life of the unborn was genuine, and there is no doubt that he was greatly disturbed by the continuing trend towards social libertinism that accompanied the prosperity of the 1980s. Likewise, we know that he was no secularist. He was religious, but in a way more subdued than the overt activist manner of a Falwell or a Pat Robertson. What Reagan was not, however, was antagonistic towards his partners in the fusionist movement. As a result, he successfully held that movement together, emphasizing to all involved that, in the words of Ben Franklin, it is better “to hang together, than to hang separately.” By standing evenly on all three legs of the conservative tripod, he drove an electoral steamroller over his leftist Democrat opponents.
Even after Reagan, the victory of fusionism, which we may also call “movement conservatism,” was to be further seen in the astounding victories of the Republican Party in the 1994 midterm elections. Between Reagan and Gingrich, the GOP appeared to be in danger of apostatizing back to its former Rockefellerian ways. This seemed especially the case with George Bush, who proved to be a tremendous disappointment to conservatives all around – not only did he break his “no new taxes” pledge and ruin his credibility as the inheritor of Reagan’s supply-side mantle, he also grew increasingly distrusted by social conservatives, who got the distinct impression that he wasn’t one of them. So, when Clinton, playing to the middle, came onto the scene in 1992, he swept Bush out of office.
In turn, after two years of Clinton radicalism, voters did something that had been unprecedented for a generation – they handed the GOP control of both houses of Congress. Despite the success of fusionism at the national level – the GOP since Nixon had become pretty adept at electing Presidents - the GOP still struggled to make its case at the local level required to be successful in House, and even Senate, elections. The Republican Party had not held the majority in the House of Representatives since a having it briefly for the 83rd Congress (1953-1955), and had not controlled the Senate since 1987. Newt Gingrich changed that when he formulated the Contract with America, a very conservative set of policy positions that were presented directly to the American people. The people responded and rejected the social and economic radicalism of Bill Clinton, giving the GOP resounding majorities.
Unfortunately, in subsequent years the GOP lost its nerve. Starting with the showdown over the “government shutdown” in 1995, Bill Clinton was able to both cow the GOP into submission while also stealing much of their thunder by moving to the center, even signing onto such conservative ideas as welfare reform. The GOP, so bold and innovative in 1994, had become entrenched with a “survive at all costs” mentality by 2000.
And it was in 2000 that the attempted murder of the conservative movement began.
Many conservatives were elated by the election of George W. Bush that year. Indeed, it can surely be said that Al Gore would have been a much worse choice than Bush, in many ways. However, George Bush proved to be one of the worst things to happen to the conservative movement in America, as he systematically worked from the inside to break apart the winning coalition that had been advancing the conservative cause for decades.
Bush rose into office on a wave of conservative euphoria that Clinton’s man had been beaten, and this in a time of economic prosperity and international calm that should have heavily favored Gore as the pseudo-incumbent. One of Bush’s consistent themes was that of “compassionate conservatism.” At the time, most of us didn’t really know exactly what he meant by that term. It – much like our current President - was something that could be invested with whatever meaning the hearer chose. However, as Bush’s administration wore on, it became apparent what the President meant by it – which was a Democrat-like willingness to use massive social spending as a hook to try to buy votes. Unfortunately, the Republicans in Congress went along with it, instead of “doing a Goldwater” and standing up to a President from their own party who was doing wrong. As such, America was saddled with large budgetary increases for social spending programs already in place, and saw additional programs such as the massive prescription drug benefit package added on for good measure.
Further, while Bush did pay lip service to the idea of tax cuts, they were small, and absurdly given a pre-set expiration date (which the Democrats are now exploiting, while being able to avoid the repercussions of having to vote to raise taxes). They were nothing near to what conservatives would like to have seen, and probably would have seen had we had a Reaganite in office with a Republican-controlled Congress. As such, Bush demonstrated that he didn’t really have any commitment to the economically conservative ideology of fusionist, movement conservatism. The last act in Bush’s administration highlighted this magnificently, whereby he (not Obama) used the power of his office to work with a willing Democrat Congress to ram through TARP (the first “stimulus” package), and started the ball rolling for the massive bailout-induced debt and government intrusion into the private sector that we see continuing to unfold before our eyes.
Likewise, while Bush was personally a social conservative, it remains to be seen that he did much more than throw some bones to social conservatives to placate them. While he can be credited with signing the ban on partial-birth abortion (though this wasn’t just a “religious right” issue) and putting two quite acceptable Justices onto the Supreme Court, there still remains the fact that social conservatives and their leaders were more or less treated like pariahs within the administration. Indeed, we would do well to remember that social conservatives only got their first Justice (John Roberts) after everybody and his brother screamed bloody murder over Bush's initial choice of Harriet Miers, an inexperienced crony of his who was…ambiguous…at best on issues of concern to social conservatives. As Bush became more heavily influenced by neo-conservatives, who tend to be neutral at best towards socially conservative ideals, he became less friendly towards the “religious Right.” As such, he helped to alienate yet another wing of the conservative fusion movement.
Perhaps most galling of all to conservatives of all stripes was Bush’s use of the term “compassionate conservatism.” Not that the term, in and of itself, is necessarily that offensive, but the implicit connotation that Bush applied to it was an effrontery to conservatives. By using it, Bush was essentially saying that conservatives hithertofore hadn’t been “compassionate.” As his actions showed, Bush’s idea of “compassion” was practically identical to that of the leftist Democrats – spend more hard-earned taxpayer money on those who are unwilling to pay for themselves. His use of the term mimicked, therefore, the same charges that our enemies on the Left routinely had thrown our way. Conservatives don’t “care” about people. Conservatives are mean, greedy, selfish people. Cutting taxes hurts people, but massive social spending is what will help them. Fiscal conservatives want your grandmother to die in the street so their rich buddies can buy another yacht, while social conservatives want your daughter to die in a back alley getting an illegal abortion. Perhaps Bush did not believe all of this, at least not the social aspect of it, but his advisors seem to have, and many of them continue to plague us to this day.
It is especially sad that this redefinition of the terms “compassionate” and “conservative” was allowed to happen because the fundamental truth is that conservatism, as it was originally conceived from Kirk to Reagan, is compassionate. Fiscally, conservatism understands the principle that to give a man everything he needs without effort on his part is to dehumanize and enslave him. It is to render him unfit for full participation in a mature, adult society. It is to infantilize him, and make him a dependent. The principle is as old as Lao Tzu, who said,
“Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Conservatives want to teach, leftists want to enslave. Conservatives are interested in each man reaching the full potential of the humanity that his Creator gave to him, while leftists wish to entrap him into a feudalism of welfare dependency that ties him to the interests and desires of another, instead of his own.
In the realm of tradition and social issues, conservatives again, are the ones who are compassionate – and really, these dovetail with the compassion of fiscal conservatism. Social conservatives decry the destruction of the nuclear family in our society – an institution that helps to stave off the subjugation of the individual to the almighty state. Social conservatives understand that when a man and a woman raise a child, this child is much more likely to be able to function as a successful member of society – much more so than when one parent raises them, or when two people of the same gender do so. Social conservatives know that you don’t get much more compassionate than in the act of saving somebody else’s very life – which is what pro-life laws and pro-life activism work to do. Whichever way you cut it, conservatism is already compassionate – it doesn’t need to be redefined and twisted out of shape to become so.
The damage, however, was done when Bush successfully suborned the Republicans in Congress to go along with his spending agenda. In doing so, they accepted the validity of a set of policy positions, and the underlying big-government philosophy that came with them, that were exactly the opposite of everything the conservative movement had so successfully built up to that point. In a few short years, the Republican Party took its good name – the name that had won Congress, the name that was broadly known to be about tax cuts, smaller government, and traditional values – and sullied it. That the President was also in the middle of fighting a war against Islamic terrorism is quite beside the point – Congress has the power of the purse, and the Republicans should have done their duty diligently in protecting the pocketbooks of their constituents. That they didn’t, as we have seen, contributed to their electoral demise in 2006 and 2008, as their base abandoned them. This has brought us to where we are today. In a sense, George W. Bush enabled Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid to have the power today to completely change the social, fiscal, and governmental structure of this nation.
At the beginning of this essay, I said that George W. Bush nearly ruined it for conservatives. Perhaps I am a starry-eyed optimist, but I do believe that success can, even now, still be preserved for the conservative movement. But it will require us all to get back onto the same page. We have a tremendous opportunity to repeat in 2010 what was done in 1994, if we will exert the pressure upon Republican candidates and officeholders to regain their moral compass and return to the conservatism of their predecessors.
As my readers know, I have often been a critic of libertarianism. This being the case, however, does not mean that I will not work together with our libertarian colleagues to advance the many parts of our agendas that coincide. We all, ultimately, want smaller government, less intrusion into our lives, greater personal and economic freedom, and so forth, even if sometimes we have a bit different ideas about what constitute these things. The similarities are still greater than the differences. I would urge my fellow movement conservatives who are socially conservative (and that, I believe, would be the majority) to be willing to work with our libertarian fellow travelers, whether big-L or little-l.
Conversely, I expect, however, that fiscal conservatives and libertarians be willing to do the same for social conservatives. While fiscal conservatism is an integral part of the conservative tripod, it is not the only integral part. Fiscal conservatives can’t win without social conservatives, at least in more than a handful of demographically declining districts. The elections of 2008 and 2009, with their numerous socially conservative ballot initiatives that won clear victories, ought to be enough to make that case. If that doesn’t do it, then the multitude of polls in recent years showing the strength of opposition to gay marriage, showing the swing towards the pro-life position, and so forth ought to. Don’t listen to the David Frums and Kathleen Parkers out there who are urging the GOP to pull the plug on itself completely by driving off social conservatives.
Lovers of liberty stand at a very favorable point right now. Because of the arrogance and ineptitude of our enemies, many, many Americans are becoming much more disposed towards forgiving conservatives, and especially Republicans, of their past transgressions. The people no longer think that Obama is better on taxes, and that the Democrats are more trustworthy on a host of economic issues, as were believed even one short year ago. Though we look at what is going on in Washington with trepidation – and rightly we should, since we are seeing take place sea-changes in our nation’s fundamental character that are only matched by 1865, the 1930s, and the late 1960s – there is opportunity there, as well. If we would reach up and grab the ring, and induce those public officials who purport to represent us to do so as well, we can return ourselves to the place where we can work to preserve and return this country back to where it ought to be. The time is ripe for movement, fusionist conservatism to make the case for itself once again. We already are compassionate. We are the fusion of compassion and common sense, as much as we are of political movements. We need to present this case to the people of this country, just as Reagan did, just as the GOP did in 1994, and we will see our efforts rewarded.
