Once again, Jonah Goldberg pens a particularly gracious response to one of my columns (title: “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me”), while addressing all of my major points.
I’m not sure what it is that so sets off Jonah about my columns, but it seems sometimes that he skims them and then fills in the blanks in his head with some sort of agglomeration of every single whiny, politically self-destructive, utopian-anarcho-capitalist thing he’s ever heard a Libertarian (that’s capital L) say. It hasn’t the faintest connection to anything I’ve ever said or written, but it serves as a useful caricature.
So, where to start…
First off, nothing I’ve ever written has been on the theme of “poor libertarians.” I’m not sure how arguing that Bush has been a disastrous president for conservatives who care about small-government as a principle is either whining or saying “poor me.” It is, as best I can tell, a simple statement of fact that not many, even at National Review, would dispute.
What’s more, my real argument has less to do (virtually nothing to do) with indicting Bush’s record on Big Government Conservatism (I don’t think anyone needs me to point out the obvious) than with asking what his record and legacy will mean for the future of the Republican Party and the conservative movement. If a Republican president can have Bush’s record on the size of government and still be beloved of conservatives, then does conservatism any longer have any meaning? There was a time when National Review senior editor Frank Meyer argued that libertarianism and traditionalism were complementary and that both sides of the conservative movement could agree on the need for small government and the fight against Communism.
Well, Communism (at least the kind we were worried about) is gone, so that leaves us with small government. If we don’t agree on that, then it’s hard to imagine conservatism isn’t facing some major problems.
And, oddly enough, for all my shrill, shrill anarcho-capitalist-poor-me-libertine whining, I don’t seem to be alone in my concerns. Just to take two high-profile souls:
* David Keene, speaking on behalf of the board of the American Conservative Union, issued a statement last week declaring: “The Republican Party has abandoned its traditional belief that the individual has supremacy over the state. Big government, in the hands of any party, threatens the rights and privacy of that individual. In the hands of the GOP, the federal government has grown bigger and faster in the last five years than during any previous five year period since The New Deal, and the GOP’s current leadership has forgotten the populist legacy of Ronald Reagan.” What a whiner.
* Peggy Noonan, writing on OpinionJournal.com, had this to say: “I never understood compassionate conservatism to mean, and I don’t know anyone who understood it to mean, a return to the pork-laden legislation of the 1970s. We did not understand it to mean never vetoing a spending bill. We did not understand it to mean a historic level of spending. We did not understand it to be a step back toward old ways that were bad ways. I for one feel we need to go back to conservatism 101.” Another damn malcontent libertarian complainer.
So, though I wish I could claim some special status as a seer (it would certainly be a nice way to sell books, John Edward seems to get a lot of mileage out of it), I really don’t think I’m the only one who sees some major problems with the status quo.
Make no mistake. I supported Bush in 2000 (though unenthusiastically) and I voted to reelect him (with even more apprehension) in 2004. I wouldn’t change either vote — for various reasons, mostly related to the War on Terror — and I admit that. In fact, I do more than admit it: I state it proudly.
But the now-standard defense of Bush, “Gee, he’s still better than Gore or Kerry,” just isn’t an answer anymore to the questions being asked. The conservative movement didn’t used to say, “Gee, Eisenhower is better than Adlai Stevenson, he never promised us a rose garden, guess everything’s hunky dory.” They got angry. They looked to the future. They prepared for a fight.
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