DOES CONSERVATISM HAVE A FUTURE?
by Samuel Francis
With all the chest-thumping and flag-waving the Republican Convention contributed to
Western civilization last month, President Bush finally got the bounce in the polls
that may well keep him in the White House for the next four years. If so, what will he
and his party do and where will they move?
In the New York Times Magazine of Aug. 29, just before the convention gathered,
columnist David Brooks tells us what he and his neo-conservative colleagues have in
mind. If you think it's what most conservatives want, take a closer look.
"Should Bush lose," Brooks warns, the party "will be like a pack of wolves that suddenly turns on itself. The civil war over the future of
the party will be ruthless and bloody," with civil wars between foreign policy realists and "democracy-promoting Reaganites" (apparently not
the "foreign policy realist Reaganites), "the immigrant-bashing nativists" vs. the "free marketeers," (apparently not the
"immigration-controlling free marketeers), etc. You begin to get the picture. Every dog would get to bark except those Brooks wants to muzzle, and
those just happen to beâwellâthe conservatives.
That's because Brooks believes that "conservatism" in the sense the term has been used for the last
several decades is defunct, and in this he and Pat Buchanan, who says the same thing in his new book, "Where
the Right Went Wrong," are in agreement. Buchanan, however, believes the rightâand with it the
GOPâshould resurrect something like old conservatism. Brooks doesn't.
The great virtue of Brooks' article is that it pretty much settles once and for all
whether the neo-conservatism he represents is really conservatism in the traditional
sense or not. Many neo-cons, especially when attacking real conservatives or claiming
the conservative mantle for themselves, say it is. But it isn't, as Brooks is honest
enough to make clear.
What, then, should the Republican Party do? In Brooks' view, it should announce, as the front cover of the magazine proclaims
in displaying his article, "The Era of Small Government Is Over." The future of the Republican Party, Brooks tells
us, lies in "progressive conservatism," which gets us back to the "Republican tradition" of "strong
government."
"Long before it was the party of Tom DeLay," he writes, using DeLay as a kind of metaphor for "small
government conservatism," "the G.O.P. was a strong government/progressive conservative party. It was the
party of Lincoln, and thus of Hamilton. Today, in other words, the Republican Party doesn't need another revolution.
It just needs a revival. It needs to learn from the ideas that shaped the party when it was born."
Well, actually, it wasn't DeLay who made the GOP "small government." It was people like Barry
Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and the conservatism to which they adhered. The reason they did and the
reason they succeeded is that there was a large constituency in the country for resisting the leviathan
state that liberalism created and championed. What Brooks and his "progressive conservatism" are
proposing is to dump that kind of conservatism and those who favored it.
Among the "tasks that strong government conservatism will champion" are fighting the "war on Islamic
extremism" and promoting "social mobility." We know what the former meansâperpetual war with the
Muslim world. Brooks is a bit vague as to exactly what the latter means, but you can figure it out.
"Progressive conservatives understand that while culture matters most, government can alter
culture. It has done it in bad ways, and it can do it in good ways."
Maybe so, but unprogressive conservatives believe government has no business altering culture at all. The cultureâthe way of
life of a peopleâis what creates and disciplines government, not the other way around. Brooks has a small raft of nifty ideas
about how the leviathan state can change the culture in "good ways"â"design programs to encourage and
strengthen marriages," "wage subsidies," federal education policy, etc.
"More and more conservatives understand that local control (of schools) means local
monopolies and local mediocrity. Most Republicans, happily or not, have embraced a significant
federal role in education." So they have, oblivious, as perhaps is Brooks, that a larger
federal role will mean federal monopolies and federal mediocrity.
Brooks, like Buchanan, is probably right that the old conservatism is defunct, and maybe he's right it can't be brought back to life. But there's another term for the sort of "progressive conservatism" he's proposing, and that is just plain old vanilla liberalism. In more recent years, it's been called "neo-conservatism," which is where we came in. If anyone still in the Republican Party wants something different, I couldn't tell you who it is.
