Conscience of a conservative

There aren’t many of us who remember the Barry Goldwater of the 1950’s who challenged many of the safe, consensual policies of the Eisenhower administration as prudent to the point of ineffectual, just tightening a bit the liberal orthodoxy, and excessively reticent to confront the Soviet threat. There aren’t many of us who remember Barry Goldwater’s challenge to the excessively liberal common wisdom of the 1960’s, his conscience of a conservative trumpeting the creed that put the individual first and launched the modern conservative movement said to dominate the Republican Party, which in turn is said to dominate American politics.

But, that creed has morphed into a political machine in which the purism of Goldwater’s beliefs are peripheral to obtaining, keeping, and using power, as often for self-enrichment and glorification as any statist. There aren’t many of us who remember Barry Goldwater’s libertarian core in the 1970’s running contrary to some of the social conservatism that much of the Republican alliance rested upon. Most Republican leaders paid him as much false homage as to Lincoln, but treated him mostly like a loved but aged and quirky uncle. Today, I can’t even remember the last time I heard his name, not to mention his views, mentioned by a Republican.

There are faint echoes today of the debates over the fundamental meaning of conservatism and of liberalism that dominated discourse in the 1960’s and 1970’s. But, that’s all they are, faint echoes heard in the halls and media of power, largely treated as trivial to the business at hand. And, that’s what is at hand, the business of power, not the power of ideas, including the powerful idea of individual responsibility and morality.

Public morality, or poses of it, often hides private amorality and immorality. From the left, Lance Mannion offers a blistering diatribe against conservative hypocrisy that for all its one-sidedness still rings at least half-true. Big-government conservatives, like most liberals, make the common error of substituting emphasis on government solutions for the building of, exercise of, accountability for individual character. Whether conservative or liberal, when daily life becomes about wielding huge, centralized power, the individual often becomes a blur or abstraction instead of a tangible reality.

Some liberals are waking up to their abdication of the field of ideas, now that they’ve been relegated to sideline carping. Michael Tomasky, executive editor of The American Prospect, is worth quoting at length:

“Democrats in Congress hate to talk about ideology, and in some ways I can’t say that I blame them. For most of them, there is absolutely no profit in it. For 25 years, the essential dynamic of Washington politics has been that the Republicans advance an idea and the Democrats develop a rearguard response, a response that says, “Yes, we, too (believe in a strong defense, are troubled by Hollywood values, want to reduce taxes, etc.), we just think the approach has to be tempered with this or that.” We debate the pros and cons of conservative ideology. But only rarely are liberal principles even on the table.
“There may never again be a chance quite like this to draw a crystal-clear line from the A of conservative ideology to the B of the administration’s Katrina failures to the C of the broader lessons about American society. The right, we can be sure, will fight to ensure that its syllogism -- the A of bloated bureaucracy to the B of government failure to the C of replacing government action with private relief -- is the one that takes hold of the public consciousness. Now is the time to make the kinds of arguments Democrats haven’t made for a generation.
“Against the three conservative assumptions that worsened the disaster, we liberals must counterpose our beliefs. We cherish individual liberty, but we also believe in a community in which each of us has equal worth. We believe in robust government to do what the corporations refuse to do, or are not constituted to do well. Finally, we believe in reason and evidence, and we believe that it is a core responsibility of government to respond to them.”

Unfortunately, however, these liberal beliefs, nice generalities, do not translate into any new programs different than the old, and just add burdensome regulations, stifling bureaucracy, and crippling taxes to the fetid mix. Instead of corporatism, as the liberals accuse the right, the left prefers statism. Corporatism may be more responsive to the needs of its customers and the needs to be flexible, but just by dint of size and the dynamics of groups does not either fill all our needs. Both political parties are beholden to their core constituencies and, moreso, organized interest groups purporting to speak for them but more concerned with their leaders’ own pelf.

Both liberals and conservatives who look to government as their conscience ultimately reduce individual responsibility and conscience. Both are ultimately disappointing if one expects any organization to foresee all possible adversities, agree upon their priority, plan how to ameliorate, fund the plans, and execute the programs well. As Arnold King points out, there is “the impossibility of ‘planned improvisation’.” There is also the impossibility of collective morality detached from individual morality.

Out of their loss of power, like conservatives in the 1950’s, liberals are at last realizing they need new thinking. It may be comfortable to see their state of thinking epitomized by their equivalent of conspiratorial Birchers whose insanities we highlight, but below that surface there are some saner thinkers stumbling toward a newer more attractive vision that may resonate over the coming decades. Meanwhile, the primary contrary thinking from the right is more concerned with cutting spending, but of the other guy’s programs, or the same programs but at a state instead of federal level, but not much new that recognizes the fallibility of relying on government programs to the relative exclusion of individual initiative and acceptance of the limitations of group programs.

Both liberals and conservatives have reached virtual bankruptcy of ideas. Both are rummaging around their vaults of oldie goldie slogans, and polls show most Americans except the few most partisan see through both’s emperorial clothes. Both need to really rethink their core assumptions, and take on their vested interests. If conservatives don’t get a new Barry Goldwater soon, the liberals may find theirs first.

UPDATE: Peggy Noonan's column in today's Wall Street Journal Opinion Journal Online, subtitled "A Bridge to Nowhere", is a must read by someone who does remember, and sees through today's sham.