Living in the Real World: Everyone has to do it, including conservatives

Ever since the end of the Cold War, torrents of analysis have predicted that the conservative movement was about to come unglued. Our defining rationale — anti-Communism — had vanished, and without that stanchion securely planted in terra firma the various members of the coalition would fly off in different directions, libertarians decamping for their never land, evangelicals for theirs. But the truth is that such predictions predate the end of the Cold War by a long shot. Robert Nisbet and others argued (often in these pages) that the Reagan coalition was intellectually untenable and could never last.

This perennial observation has, of late, dovetailed nicely with more conventional political punditry. Bush is a lame duck and, more important, he is very unpopular — and so Congress is running away from him on everything from port security to the budget. Free-market conservatives are feeling their oats these days, symbolized by Bruce Bartlett’s broadside against Bush as an “impostor” in his book of that name. Matthew Continetti of The Weekly Standard has an indictment of the GOP as crapulent and corrupt coming out this spring. George Will, who has been quite tart toward Bush for a while, grew downright testy over the Harriet Miers nomination (“for this we need a conservative president?”).

Bush’s plight is what social scientists might call an “over-determined” event. In other words, all sorts of things were militating toward a certain amount of exhaustion with Bush. While everyone focused on the anti-Bush motivations behind the Democrats’ selecting their worst presidential nominee since Michael Dukakis, few appreciated how much of Bush’s support in 2004 was attributable to anti-Kerry views. The ongoing slog in Iraq, Bush’s inability to get credit for a good economy, and his missteps on Miers, Katrina, and Dubai made some buyer’s remorse almost inevitable.

But in the background there was an even larger problem: compassionate conservatism.

As countless writers have noted in National Review over the last five years, most conservatives never really understood what compassionate conservatism was, beyond a convenient marketing slogan to attract swing voters. …

Quote:

The challenge for conservatives is to understand that, in the words of former NR publisher William Rusher, “politicians will always disappoint you.” It is the refusal to accept this sad truth that has caused many conservatives to conclude that, if the politicians can’t come to the mountain, the mountain must move to the politicians. This is the motivation that gave impetus to compassionate conservatism in all its forms. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Jack Kemp described himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative” — an attempt to redefine conservatism as a different kind of progressivism and to prove that he really did care about the things Good People care about. As Ramesh Ponnuru has noted, Pat Buchanan’s “conservatism of the heart” wasn’t a more authentic form of “true” (or “paleo”) conservatism, but a leftward lurch toward statism that tried to defend activist government in the name of socially conservative sentiments. Compassionate conservatism was just the latest iteration of the same impulse, so much so that Buchanan joked he would sue Bush for plagiarism.

-snip-

Many on the right notice this sort of “growth” on the part of other Republicans and conservatives and retreat into the bunker of Purity. Charges of so-and-so’s being a RINO (Republican in name only), creeping Gergenism, and general apostasy have been a staple of conservative squabbles since well before William F. Buckley nudged the Birchers off the conservative dais. Such charges need to be weighed on a case-by-case basis. Surely Kevin Phillips is no longer a conservative in good standing, no matter his ability to convince NPR producers otherwise.

The problem with a bunker mentality should be obvious. Living in a powerless ghetto with no loaf is surely not preferable to living in the real world with half of one. This tension is one that National Review has wrestled with every day since its founding. Hence we have to give at least one cheer for marketing. If politicians can’t make conservatism at least sound attractive, then conservatism becomes an otherworldly hobby, like Dungeons & Dragons. The trick, therefore, is to fight your battles where you can. But we must be ever-mindful of the danger of confusing marketing slogans for principles. …

To me, this is the money quote:

If the editors of National Review sat down and figured out what the ideal conservative society would look like, that portrait would be a very, very bad platform for a politician interested in getting elected. The average American likes a lot more government than the average conservative. This will in all likelihood never, ever change.

I believe this to be generally true. I think that we conservatives need to do two things simultaneously: (1) Continue winning elections in coalition with those centrists with whom we can form alliances based on conservative principles (e.g. strong defense of the country, right to life, school choice, etc.), and (2) Continue to educate the public about the value of conservatism generally, so as to gradually move those centrists toward our direction on the whole range of issues.

We will always need to compromise and form imperfect coalitions, and we will always be disappointed with politicians and politics, but that doesn't mean we can't also make steady progress. Those who urge conservatives to split off from the center and form a "pure" fringe movement are unwittingly counselling national suicide.

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