On the Contrary

I watched a wonderful interview by Bill Moyers on his Journal last week where Bill interviewed Mickey Edwards, an old school conservative from the Goldwater days and author of “Reclaiming Conservatism:  “How a Great American Political Movement got Lost And How It Can Find Its Way Back”, and Ross Douthat who is a new young up and coming Republican whose book, “Grand New Party:  How Republicans Can Win The Working Class and Save the American Dream” which David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times considered the political book of the year.  The interview was a lesson in how the Republican Party is coming apart and that old conservatives don’t agree with young conservatives.  It was also a lesson in reinventing history, at least from Mr. Douthat, in why the Republicans have failed this country so miserably.  And finally it was a lesson that conservatives don’t have any answers to the problems facing us, but tired out programs and ideas that haven’t worked for years now.

Mr. Edwards spoke of original conservative beliefs and basic principles about divided powers, limited government, civil liberties that have been thrown overboard in the attempt to buy and stay in power.  I actually agreed with him but what was revealing is that almost all Democrats holds those beliefs and it is their core belief.  Okay, you say, I buy all the rest, but Democrats are for big government.  But Mr. Edwards distinguished himself from Mr. Douthat by not calling for small government, but limited government.  He drew the distinction saying that Government by necessity is going to be large (we have big problems), but it should be limited in that there are certain areas it has no business in, and some of those are right to die issues, abortion issues, and gay issues.  Of course Mr. Douthat, Brooks’ salvation for the Republican’s bankruptcy of ideas, just couldn’t let that go.  He was not about to distance himself from the radical right religious groups as Mr. Edwards was basically calling for.  In regard to the end of life question in Oregon and the Republican foray into the state to try to change their assisted suicide law, Bill Moyers asked Mr. Douthat what the conservatives were doing with their power:

ROSS DOUTHAT: “They were using it well, they were using it to promote, I guess you could say, conservative ideas about legislation about the end of life in actually in both cases.”

BILL MOYERS: Coming from the religious right or from political right?

ROSS DOUTHAT: “Well, coming from I mean, I don’t think you can completely separate the two. And I, but I think that, you know, American politics and this isn’t just true of the right. Religion has been a force in American politics going back to the 19th century, going back to William Jennings Bryant, going back to the civil rights movement. I think there is an idea among liberals and some conservatives that, you know, religious participation in politics, using religious arguments is somehow illegitimate, you know, that the separation of church and state means that you can’t invoke religious arguments in public.”

Mr. Douthat is the new republican voice and he can’t see that there is a basic conflict between conservatism as many Americans understand it and forcing religious beliefs on others.  Then of course he bailed out by saying that it should be left to the states and that was their big error.   You know, State’s Rights, which is how they denied blacks the votes for so many years.  Mr. Edwards reasserted himself at that juncture to point out that the Republican National Convention platform from Goldwater until the last couple of decades, was to insist upon separation of church and state.  Now this is where Mr Douthat let us really see where these “new Republicans” are going:

“And I think this separates me from Mickey and makes me more of a social conservative than he is in the sense that I think government does have a role to play in conserving those morays and institutions, that America is a nation of, you know, one of the reasons we don’t need the kind of government, strong central governments you have in Europe, is precisely because we’ve always been a nation of strong communities, of strong families, of, you know, churches play a much more enormous role in the social fabric of American life than they do in Europe. Voluntary organizations, the same way. Charitable giving is much higher in the United States than in Europe. And I think all of these tendencies, this is what American conservatism exists in an ideal form to defend.”

Read this as we will define for you what a moral life is.  He is just the old conservative right in new cloths.  Worse he has no real experience with the European system and redefines history to fit his view of why it shouldn’t work.  I bet they would be surprise to know they don’t have strong families in Europe.

When Mr. Douthat was questioned on how his Republicans, who want small government, could grow the government so fast and be so bad at managing it, he blamed it on liberals.

“But the challenge for conservatism, though as a governing philosophy, is that it’s precisely that is a theory of limited government that’s operating in a society and in a framework that was built by liberals.”

See, the liberals are at fault for their failures.  On other issues he was equally myopic.  Whereas Mr. Edwards was unforgiving of the trashing of the Constitution by the Republicans, Mr. Douthat’s view was:

“And if you look at what George W. Bush has done on this front, whether it’s, you know, the detainee policy as it relates to prisoners in Guantanamo Bay or wire tapping citizens and so on, some of it is an overreach.”
An overreach?  It gets worse.  Here is Mr. Douthat’s view of the workingman that Ronald Reagan successfully wooed into the party:

“I think there are a lot of ways in which the working class is better off than they were in that era (Reagan years).  I think if just looking at wages is misleading because one of the things that happened thanks to free trade, thanks to policies that Republicans have championed, is prices, the cost of living, has fallen dramatically acroos the board for Americans.”

So there you have it.  He is so out of touch with reality in American and so strongly wedded to his beliefs that he lets his beliefs create his reality.  I think Mr. Edwards and Mr. Douthat really had little in common on a very basic level.  The only thing that did ring true is that they were both afraid of “liberals”.  The word was used like it was a profanity.  The problem is that the liberal they are so afraid of doesn’t exist and hasn’t for 30 years.

So what you have is this split in the Republican Party.  The real conservatives that want to go back to separation of church and state, restoring our Constitution and the role of Congress in the balance of power, and limiting government to stay out of people’s private lives , that would be Mr. Edwards. Note that most progressives today share his views.  We would have some interesting debates about the right solution for our problems, but we wouldn’t be fighting the values wars anymore.  Mr. Edwards’ conservatism is about personnel freedom and with a government that empowers that freedom.

Then you have Mr. Douthat’s conservatism that will prescribe for us what the appropriate “American morays” are and is totally out of touch with the real problems of America who reinvents history (“I think the Bush Administration came into power with an idea that they were going to be a  center right party that reformed the welfare state rather than abolishing it and sort of steered a middle course between, you know, the small government purists on the right and liberals”).   Mr. Douthats’ conservatism is about authority. The leader (whether is it George Bush or the market) is the source of authority and you should trust it and it will make the important decisions for you and you need to be a good rule follower of the revealed truth.

These two systems of thought are mutually exclusive and the Republican Party is cracking into pieces that can’t be put together anymore.  The party of Mr. Douthat would be one I would be truly fearful of because it really is not a party of small government, but intrusive government.  Fortunately since they can’t get a fix on reality because reality keeps denying the utility of their dogma, I don’t think they have a chance of gaining power unless we enter a fear phase like we did after 9/11.  If this is the guy David Brooks sees as starting a real debate to get the Republican Party to reinvigorate themselves, then David has either been smoking something or his conservative dogma no longer is relevant and he is grasping at straws.