Charles Kessler on the Future of Conservatism

From the summer issue of the Claremont Review of Books. I have excerpted a few important parargraphs.

"Faced with this liberal blitzkrieg, how have Republicans responded? Paralyzed at first by the rapidity and sheer audacity of the Democrats' advance (and by a plummeting stock market), they hunkered down behind a Maginot Line of safe districts, remembered triumphs, and misaimed slogans, hoping that the Democrats soon would outrun their supply lines or, besotted by success, fall to feuding among themselves....

Liberalism was the first political movement in America without a clearly defined goal of reform, without a terminus ad quem: the first to offer an endless future of continual reform. Its intent was to make American government "progressive," which meant to keep it always progressing, to keep it up to date or in tune with the times. No specific reform or set of reforms could satisfy that demand, and no ultimate goal could comprehend all the changes in political forms and policies that might become necessary in the future.....

The "new order of things," to use FDR's term, would feature abundant rights, very different however from the unalienable rights invoked in the Declaration of Independence. These new rights originated not in God or nature, as the Declaration taught, but in the State. The character of the rights differed, too. According to the new social contract, government would grant to the people certain socio-economic rights or benefits, bestowed primarily on groups and on individuals only insofar as they belonged to an officially recognized group (e.g., the poor, the mortgaged-deprived). In return for these rights, the people would cede to government ever greater powers. The individual didn't completely disappear from this vision of democracy but appeared in a very different role, as a kind of long-term government project.

Today's liberals assure us, to the contrary, that political tyranny is a virtually extinct threat, save for the occasional throwback like George W. Bush. Why fear Big Government, after all, when the bigger and more powerful it gets, the more rights it can bestow on us?

The assumption that Reagan had achieved a revolution in policy and public opinion led easily to the presumption that his "new, lasting majority" could be counted on. Even when it went AWOL, for instance in Bill Clinton's victories in 1992 and 1996, or in 2006 and 2008, commentators tended to adjust the facts to fit the hypothesis. Clinton was a rogue, they said, and ordinary Americans like rogues; 2006 showed that the voters, like good conservatives, were fed up with spendthrift Republicans; last year Obama kept talking about tax cuts for the middle class, thus sounding more conservative than McCain. Though there's an element of truth to each ad hoc explanation, they overlook the obvious: that latent conservatism doesn't translate into reliable political conservatism, much less into voting Republican, without persuasive appeals, "a program of action based on political principle."

"But the worst of it for conservatives was that compassionate conservatism eviscerated the GOP's reform ambitions. By abandoning even the rhetorical case for limited government, Bush's philosophy left the administration, and especially Congress, free to plunge lustily into the Washington spending whirl. When House majority leader Tom Delay—the heartless right-winger Tom Delay!—protested that Congress could not cut another cent from the federal budget because it was already cut to the bone...you knew things were bad."

"Here, in outline, is the liberal M.O.: Take a very good thing, like quality health care. Turn it into a right, which only centralized government can claim to provide equally and affordably and—the biggest whopper—excellently to all. Refer as little as possible to the plain logic that such a right implies a corresponding duty; that the duty to pay for this new right's provision must fall on someone; and that the rich, always defined as someone with greater income than you, cannot possibly pay for it all by themselves. Ignore even more fervently that this right, held as a social entitlement, implies a duty to accept only as much and as good health care as society (i.e., government) allows or, ideally, as can be given equally to everyone. Having advertised such care as effectively free to every user, because the duty to pay is separated as much as possible from the right to enjoy the benefit, profess amazement that usage soars, thereby multiplying costs and degrading the quality of care. Blame Republicans for insufficient funding and thus for the painful necessity to increase taxes and cut benefits in order to protect the right to universal health care, which is now a program. Run against those hard-hearted Republicans, and win."