Yes, Conservatives can govern: Provided that they are conservatives

Alan Wolfe, who is a political science professor at Boston College, provided a very interesting cover article for the July edition of the Washington Monthly, the most interesting liberal opinion publication around.

Entitled “Why Conservatives Can’t Govern” it’s a piece that I urge readers of this website to read for its provocative and thought-provoking views of political conservatives inability to govern (in the sense of making the trains run on time) in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster and the botched aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. You can read it at www.washingtonmonthly.com

I am attempting to write a friendly rebuttal on difficult ground, because I agree with much of what the author writes and I’m sure many paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians will as well. I know Mr. Wolfe will bring up the pathetic communist battle cry about not trying “real communism" in comparison to real conservatism. But I will argue that we have not seen a “real” conservative government since the early days of both the Reagan presidency in 1981 and the first few months of the House Republican Revolution in 1995. In both such instances, politics killed the revolutionary impulses then eventually the revolutionary rhetoric for two important factors the author does not touch upon in the article. I will also argue that conservative governance, true conservative governance, is possible (albeit past many difficulties) if there’s a wholesale change in the way conservatives approach governing along with a wholesale change in the culture, without which the politics cannot change in any shape, fashion or form.

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Conservatives and Republicans have done their level best to prove the P.J. O’Rourke joke that “Republicans tell everyone government doesn’t work and then get elected to prove it.”

Except it’s not funny anymore.

Even the most harden of libertarians have to be appalled at the incompetence shown in both the Katrina disaster (at all levels of government) and the war in Iraq. Yes, this maybe a “I told you so" moment in that regard, but what satisfaction can anyone take with shred of humanity out being proven right when ordinary people suffer so and even die at the hands of sheer idiocy?

Is it a cynical ploy by Republican and conservative political hacks to make such a mess of things in order to prove themselves right in order to get elected and re-elected on same conservative mantras spoken by Taft, Goldwater and Reagan so many years before? Who can say without probing their thoughts with a scanner or a golden lasso? But nevertheless, let us say you are an honest conservative activist who’s been rewarded for your years of hard work in the political trenches with an appointment to the federal bureaucracy. Like any conservative idealist, you want to cut the waste out of the agency, save the taxpayer some money and see if the states or local governments can handle the duties of the Feds better or, if you have libertarian inclinations, maybe farm out the duties to the private sector. When it hits you that in the culture of Washington D.C. that you can do none of these things after being fought at every turn by your department employees and by members of Congress, and are stuck trying to run the bureaucracy that you don’t believe in in the first place, you enter an ideological Twilight Zone that requires you to either try makes things work the best they can or not give a damn, which has happened in many cases during the Reagan, Bush I and Bush II administrations. You can also try to steal for yourself and your friends too, which has also happened as well both in the executive and legislative branches (Remember the HUD scandal? The Savings and Loan scandal? Jack Abrahamoff?).

Perhaps it’s not such a cynical ploy. After all, if such people start doing their jobs, government might actually work which would undercut the conservative’s main argument, which would….

Actually conservatives don't have to worry about their ideology being proved wrong in this regard because even liberals would admit that the nature of human beings and the nature of bureaucracies as well allow for plenty of corruption and screw-ups to take place regardless of ideology or party control. It does not matter which.
Naturally the conservative idealist is disillusioned by all this and when that happens the ideology begins its metamorphism. If the New Left criticized the Old for turning into Corporate Liberals 30 years after the New Deal was first launched, “outsider” conservatives (meaning those who don’t work for the conservative establishment or the GOP in the halls of power, academia or the media which pretty much includes all conservatives who don't make Washington D.C. , New York or Los Angeles or any state capital or big metropolitan area their home) criticize “insider” conservatives for becoming social democrats of the right-wing kind, the last step before fascism, years after the revolutions that brought them to power. There are two reasons for this transformation that Wolfe did not mention in his article:

1). Conservatives adopting the Republican Party as their political vehicle
2). Republicans gathering in certain Democratic constituencies in order to obtain political power.

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University of South Carolina history professor Clyde Wilson described the Republican Party as the party of “state capitalism.” It may have been founded by sincere anti-slavery activists, but its funding by Northeast business interests, especially industrial interests, made it possible for the new party to grow and prosper. Since that time, Republicans have always been friendly to big business and have done what’s necessary to make business prosper whether by bribe or honest intent. Thus the K Street Project is the logical extension of that relationship. Tom DeLay was simply following in the footsteps of Republicans past by proposing a system where businesses do well with the help of Republican crafted legislation or government rulings or activism whereby in turn business contributes to GOP coffers as a reward. Such cash allows the GOP to hold onto power against their rivals.
This ideology however, runs smack into the libertarian and anti-centralist ethos of the early conservative movement. Their charge was to get government out of businesses’ hair as much as possible and stop their unqualified support of unions. Thus, much of the early conservative movement was funded by independent businessmen, like Texas wildcat oilmen, or small to medium-sized manufacturing plants in the Midwest. Barry Goldwater was a perfect candidate of such a movement because he was a small businessman, owner of Phoenix department store. He did not get involved in politics so he could give government goodies to GM or U.S. Steel.

Neither did Tom DeLay when he first started in politics. Once upon a time, DeLay was an exterminator. He did a brisk business in the Houston suburbs, in places once containing cotton fields or desolate wastelands burned by the humid sun with plenty of insects to go around. His business, along with the invention of central air conditioning, made it possible to create such suburbs in the first place which led to the rise of the GOP in the South as their new base of power. However, in early in 1970s, the federal government banned the use of DeLay’s favorite pesticide, DDT. DeLay didn’t like that. Nor did he like any of the other regulations and paperwork he had to fill out for his business courtesy of the new Environmental Protection Agency. But DeLay didn’t blame the Nixon administration that created the EPA or its director William Ruckelshaus, an old GOP politico from Indiana, for banning DDT. He blamed the New Class environmentalists that were quickly taking over the Democratic Party and forcing the Nixon Administration to adopt such policies. Thus, like Goldwater, DeLay got into politics and was successful because he was seen as reformer taking on big government which many conservatives and libertarians believed was honestly inhibiting business growth and development which led, in one respect, to the stagflation of the 1970s.

Like many reformers after being in power for a time, staying in power to try to enact one’s agenda becomes all important. This leads that reformer to become corrupted and compromised by the political process as DeLay eventually was. Thus, DeLay’s House Republicans began to do some very unconservative things like shower their districts with political pork, increase welfare payments to a key Republican business constituency, farmers, help pass the No Child Left Behind Act and allow the creation of a new health care entitlement with prescription drugs after a three-hour vote featuring enough arm-twisting and vote buying to make even the most seasoned of politicos blush.

DeLay, like many Southerners, grew up as Democrat, especially from a working class background (his father was an oil field engineer.) But by 1972, he simply had no place in a party that lurched towards the social-democratic left, towards cultural Marxism, towards the professional and administrative classes, towards the secular or liberal Protestant and Catholic churches, and towards the upper rim of the country geographically and away from the things that he was: working class, fundamentalist Protestant, and Southern. So by the mid-1970s he became a Republican and helped lead the rest of both Texas and the South to become Republican strongholds. This allowed the Republican Party and subsequently the conservative movement to grab a hold of the reigns of power, first with Reagan’s victory in 1980 and the House Republican victory of 1994, and finally, after 2002, complete control of two branches of government.

However, in doing this, then conservative movement once again compromised itself into right-wing social democracy. The two most prominent groups to make the move from the Democrats to the Republicans were neoconservative Catholic and Jewish intellectuals for the Northeast and Protestant fundamentalists from the South. However, once a Democrat, always a Democrat. These groups did not repudiate the New Deal or Franklin Roosevelt (even Reagan, the original Reagan Democrat, said “I didn’t want to do away with the New Deal. I voted for Roosevelt four times. I just wanted to get rid of the Great Society.”). So such groups had no problems with size and scope of the federal government as it was and in fact, wished to use Big Government for their own ends. They joined the Republicans for different reasons, neocons to more vigorously engage in the Cold War and in revulsion to the New Left on campus and Southerners because of the culture wars, from the 1960s civil rights movement, to the 1970s campaign against abortion, to the 1980s campaign to restore school prayer to the 1990s fights over the Ten Commandments in public buildings to the 2000s fights over homosexual marriage. The “Religious Right,” as its known, may have started as quasi-libertarian movement to restore local rights to communities engaged in constant court cases with the ACLU, but it was not led by libertarians of any sort. And pretty soon it was demanding government get involved to regulate social behavior of U.S. citizens to now demanding handouts from the Feds to conduct their ministries, you know, “faith-based” programs. The Republican Party of today looks a lot like the Democratic Party of 1940s, militaristic, authoritarian, strong supporter of Israel, filled with Catholics and Protestant fundamentalists, not afraid to hand out political largess to its constituent groups and backed a political machine (The K Street Project) that rivals Tammany Hall and the Cook County, Ill. Democratic Party. (Today's Democrats are a combination of Norman Thomas Socialists, William Foster Communists, and Progressive Republicans of the Upper Midwest along with ethnic minorities.)

To use the DeLay example once again, even by the time he was young, backbench Congressman in the mid-1980s, he was already forgetting his anti-government roots. The district he was elected to outside of Houston in 1984 was held by one Ron Paul, the former Libertarian Party candidate for president in 1988. While on the House Appropriations Committee, he managed to secure $64 million to build a busway on the Southwest Freeway outside of Houston, secured $15 million for harbor development in the Gulf Coast town of Freeport and helped get Rice University a $1.6 million federal grant to conduct a stud in how to improve mass transit. As the Almanac of American Politics 1988 put it, contrasting Paul with DeLay, "Libertarianism may be fine as a general principle, but he (DeLay) is ready to use government to, in his phrase, 'conquer traffic problems.'" In other words, the next time you write your check to the IRS to pay your taxes or look upon your paycheck to see the Federal withholding, pat yourself on the back for making Houston and 22nd District a better place to live at your expense even if you wanted to or not. In this way, DeLay is no different than Texas politicians that have come before him. If, as the old adage went "New Yorkers gave to the federal government. Texans took," then DeLay is simply following in the footsteps of Democrats like Olin Teague, Jack Garner, Wright Patman, Jim Wright, Lloyd Bentsen, Tom Connally, Ralph Yarborough, Henry Gonzalez, Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn who viewed Federal largess as their way to drag what was once a rural, frontier state into the freeway age. DeLay simply changed the letter after his last name from "D" to "R" because of the cultural changes in both parties that started in the 1960s. But he's no different in his thinking in obtaining federal funds for his home state than the most liberal Texas Democrat. Only Ron Paul remained true to his ideology and how is he treated by his fellow Republicans? They think he's an oddball. Indeed, one could make the argument that the failure of the GOP revolution in Congress in 1995 rests squarely on the shoulders of Southern Republicans because these ex-Democrats refused to part ways with, cut, privatize or eliminate the legacies their Democratic forefathers bequeathed to them like the TVA, NASA, farm subsidies and price supports, water projects, transportation projects, housing subsidies and military contracts and bases.

Since American political parties are not ideological vessels by themselves alone and rely in large part on coalitions of different groups of voters, the GOP was more than happy to accept such Democrats into their fold after nearly being at the point of death in the mid-1970s. And since the GOP is in the business of winning elections, it’s not going to care if the beliefs of the conservative movement are violated in order to win such elections. Conservative intellectuals for years tried to get all the conservatives into one tent politically in order to advance their beliefs, but when they accomplished their objective, they had to take a backseat to the politicos in whose job it is to win elections by whatever means necessary. Pretty soon the intellectuals began to take a back seat period, seduced into allowing the ideology to be warped and transformed by circumstance: The rise of the conservative establishment, 9-11, and the general culture of entitlement.

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Through these examples I have shown that those who call themselves "conservative" or labeled such by the media, are nothing of the sort. At least not the conservatism that is drawn around the writings and philosophies extending back to Aristotle, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Edmund Burke, Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver or the Southern Agrarians. The idea that Daniel Webster or Henry Clay or Alexander Hamilton, as the author states, represent modern conservatism that such aforementioned writers, statesmen and philosophers created is wrong because all three men supported the idea of using government to benefit private commerce whether through "internal improvements," or a centralized Bank of the United States. And George Bush II hardly campaigned in 2000 or even in 2004 on a platform to get rid of the National Endowment of the Arts, the Department of Education or the Commerce Department. Such language rarely comes out of Republicans anymore.

You can smear, as the author does, John C. Calhoun, for defending slaveholders in his views on nullification and state's rights, but it should be pointed out that Calhoun's dispute with slaveholder president Andrew Jackson had nothing to do with slavery. It was all about economics and how the Tariff of Abominations in 1831 threatened to ruin South Carolina's economy. For Calhoun, nullification was a mechanism to protect a state or local communities against federal government action that runs counter to its interests. This is why conservative philosophy exists and still exists to this day. Conservatism doesn't stand opposed to natural social change, it stands opposed to government influenced, directed or enforced social change. Slavery would have eventually ended naturally, not just because it was inhumane because it was economically and socially unfeasible. But did we need to see Columbia, South Carolina burned to the ground to make that point? Segregation, defacto or dejure, would have ended as well through natural social change and economic and demographic forces. Did we need to have the Boston busing crisis to make it happen faster? Many states developed labor laws, environmental laws, welfare programs and such. Did we need to make them federalized? This is the heart of the debate and the heart of conservative philosophy, not trying to stick up for history's losers.

The difference between conservatives and libertarians is that libertarians do not see the value of authority whatsoever at any level of society. Theirs is a philosophy of constant anarchy and unlimited individualism which combined together has shown to be a very unattractive political philosophy. Somebody had asked former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura why, if he held so many libertarian views, he wasn't a member of the Libertarian Party. He responded "Well, I thought I was a Libertarian too, then I saw their platform. Those guys are a bunch of anarchists." Conservatives at least, see the value of local authority to help preserve and protect local communities. What they are against is the unchecked power of large central authorities and bureaucracies that try to ride over social forces like the culture, the economy or society to bend it to its will. You can't get much better insight into true conservatism than Burke's essays against the utopianism of the French Revolution, because the differences were so stark. So as long central governments wish to organize and control human activity there will be conservatism, always.

So where can one find real conservatives today? Intellectually they would be among those who are labeled as "paleoconservatives." Politically, one can find such people in rural areas and small town professionals and academics labeled as "Crunchy Cons," by writer Rod Dreher. That's not a large group of people, but it's not an isolated group either. One can imagine a political coalition of "Crunchy Cons" and paleocons joining together with "Power to the People"-type liberals who have control over local governments who would be willing to reign in expansive Federal power. But such a coalition shows that if real conservatives wanted to take political power, it would face real opposition both from the GOP and right-wing social democratic establishment (i.e. think tanks, most talk radio hosts, publications and anything else connected with Rupert Murdoch) that was once known as the "conservative movement." Such groups would not take kindly to a reduction in the federal government's power, for it would reduce their influence and their power as a result. Not to mention the fact that in the aftermath of 9-11 and the so-called War on Terror, government expansion becomes inevitability. Any attempt to try and stop it or contain it, whether its wire-tapping citizens' phone calls or monitoring bank transactions without judicial oversight, are seen as treasonous by the right-wing social democrats. On top of that, there is culture of entitlement in the country that believes that because it pays taxes, it is entitled to get that money back, literally. Taxes no longer just pay for our defense or maintain roads or ports. They now come back to the taxpayers in direct handouts whether its social security, farm subsidies to people who don't farm, student loans, housing loans, prescription drugs, grants from the Homeland Security Department and so forth. When you have commercials on late-night TV promoting books that tell you how to pick your share from the Federal money tree, you know that the old conservative values of frugality, hard work, patience, perseverance, self-control and making one's own way in the world without an SBA loan, are all out the window. We're all welfare queens now, more so than ever before. That culture has to change if any serious conservative wishes to govern effectively otherwise it will run into the same breakwater the Regan Republicans and the House Republicans did. Not only that, but any serious conservative can only govern for so long, lest they be captured and co-opted and morphed by the same forces. Term limits were once a part of the Republican/conservative lexicon. Not so anymore.

Of course to govern one has to be elected, which is very difficult for a conservative to do within the current culture and politics. One possible beachhead is through returning to the concept of federalism which we haven't seen seriously discussed since mid -1990s. One of the failures of the House Republican revolutionaries of 1995 is that they couched their rhetoric in the most libertarian of terms. This turned off a lot of would-be supporters. You can get rid of the federal welfare state but then what replaces it? This is what people wanted to know and where the GOP had no answers. Had they talked seriously about transferring much of that welfare state and regulation state down to state and local governments and figured out a way to properly fund it, they might have succeeded. It's been a long time since the U.S. had serious discussion about the proper responsibilities between federal, state and local governments. In fact, is it strange when you consider that Canada is considered a socialist country and yet is one of the most decentralized places on earth? Where debates on federalism are constant and politically viable secessionist movements in Quebec and the western prairies exist? Yet, the U.S., which is considered a "conservative" country, is highly centralized and where secession is still relegated to the political fringes.

The author brings up a statement that Joe Allbaugh, the former head of FEMA gave during his confirmation hearings back in 2001 which supposedly shows that the incompetents and the political hacks (which a Republican administration is largely filled with since no self-respecting entrepreneur or middle manager or CEO from the private sector would ever give-up their jobs, salaries and perks for civil service employment unless they ran a full cabinet department. Without the business class, who else does the GOP have to turn to fill the ranks of the bureaucracy other than political people like Mike Brown who was unable to even run horse show, let alone FEMA?) were in charge again and ruined the agency. Yet it was not unreasonable to ask if state and local governments had not become so dependent on FEMA handouts and FEMA action and FEMA control that they did not have solid disaster plans of their own as well? New Orleans was not a shining hour for state or local government either let alone the Feds. The real failure was not that this question was asked, but that nothing done by either Allbaugh or Brown to coordinate between the levels of government for effective disaster relief. Right-wing social democrats view government as a means to satisfy political ends. Outcomes are not considered in equation. That is hardly conservative governance and no way to judge whether conservatives can govern at all. Only when true conservatives can get elected and run government without selling themselves out or changing in the process can one ask the question: "Why Conservatives Can't Govern." And if conservatives ever did take office and enacted such a conservative agenda, the question need not be asked at all.

--Sean Scallon