Compassionate Conservatism

Two generations ago, conservatives denounced the growth of government and called for a revolution to roll back the Leviathan State created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. In 1994, conservatives, with their Republican Revolution, rode into power on just such a platform of limited government. Yet today, the conservative intellectual movement and the Bush administration are engaged in a very different kind of revolution—a revolution for big-government conservatism.

What happened to the idea of limited-government conservatism? Have the conservatives been corrupted by power, or is there something in their basic philosophy that has led them to embrace big government? Why have conservatives moved to the port-side of liberalism?

To answer these questions and to understand the split personality of the conservative movement, we must examine the various ideologies that now dominate it. To set some context, however, let us first recall the basic ideals that have traditionally been regarded as the gold standard of true conservatism: the ideals associated with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, which, in turn, point to the principles of America’s Founding Fathers.

In The Conscience of a Conservative, regarded by many as the political Talmud of conservatism, Goldwater explicated the principles of conservative government. He wrote that the “ancient and tested truths that guided our Republic through its early days will do equally well for us.” The challenge of conservatism, he continued, is “to demonstrate the bearing of a proven philosophy on the problems of our own time.” He defined the Founders’ “proven philosophy” in the following terms: “The legitimate functions of government are actually conducive to freedom. Maintaining internal order, keeping foreign foes at bay, administering justice, removing obstacles to the free interchange of goods—the exercise of these powers makes it possible for men to follow their chosen pursuits with maximum freedom.”8

Enabling men “to follow their chosen pursuits with maximum freedom”—this is the proper purpose of government; this is the ideal that American conservatives have long claimed to be conserving or restoring; and this is the ideal that animated the American Founding. As Thomas Jefferson eloquently summarized in his First Inaugural address: “A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.”

The Founding Fathers created a free society grounded on the moral sovereignty of the individual. They recognized that the only legitimate function of government is to protect each individual’s right to act on his own judgment—so long as he does not violate the rights of others. Accordingly, the Founders established a government limited to the protection of individual rights—that is: limited to making and enforcing objective (i.e., rights-respecting) laws, to resolving civil disputes, to protecting private property, and to enforcing contracts.

While this is the ideal that defined the American Founding—and the ideal to which Goldwater conservatives have long claimed allegiance—it is not the ideal to which today’s conservatives subscribe.

To what ideals do today’s conservatives subscribe? What are their political goals?

In recent years, the conservative intellectual and political movement has become strained and divided. Political analysts now speak of the great conservative “crack-up.” At the heart of the ideological wars now engulfing the movement are two putatively conflicting philosophies: a moral philosophy called “compassionate conservatism” and a philosophy of governance known as “neoconservatism.” To understand the state of the conservative movement and where it is headed, one must understand the nature of these two conservatisms, what they have in common, and how they shape today’s Republican Party. Compassionate Conservatism

Compassionate conservatism came to prominence during the 1999 Republican primaries and the 2000 Presidential campaign when George W. Bush ran as a compassionate conservative. At the time, most traditional conservatives cynically assumed that Bush was using the moniker as a catchy electioneering phrase, a clever rhetorical strategy to capture the vote of America’s so-called “soccer moms,” the marginally liberal, college-educated, suburban women who twice helped to elect Bill Clinton. What few traditional conservatives understood at the time was that candidate Bush actually meant what he said, that this new creed gave expression to his previously unarticulated core philosophy—one shared by many other politicians and voters.

Compassionate conservatism, rather than simply being a slick vote-getting slogan, is a political philosophy—one that George Bush genuinely embraces and that has formed the policies of his administration. Although some conservatives in 1999 openly mocked the idea of compassionate conservatism, eventually most came around to supporting it—in part because they saw that it helped to elect Bush in 2000 and then reelect him in 2004—but, more importantly, because compassionate conservatism brought to the surface principles that traditional conservatives had silently followed for decades.

The guiding moral principle of compassionate conservatism is the idea that we, by way of our government, have a “duty” to serve the needs of the poor, the homeless, the sick, and the aged—hence “compassionate,” which means desiring to relieve the pain and suffering of others. Its advocates seek to uphold this moral principle through “free-market mechanisms”—hence “conservatism.”

Myron Magnet, a leading theorist of compassionate conservatism, describes it as representing an “epochal paradigm shift” in American political thinking. It amounts, he writes, “to a sweeping rejection of liberal orthodoxy about how to help the poor.”9 Why reject the liberal orthodoxy on this count? Because, says Magnet, “liberal prescriptions, good intentions notwithstanding, have in fact made the lot of the poor worse over the last 35 years.”10 As such statements reveal, compassionate conservatism fully accepts the liberal notion that we have a “duty” to help the poor—compassionate conservatives simply disagree with liberals as to how to help them.

Compassionate conservatives decry the liberal welfare state for causing the “worst-off” to be “more mired in dependency, illegitimacy, drug use, school failure and crime than they were when the experiment began.”11 The problem, according to the Bush Administration, is that government bureaucrats are incapable of promoting the long-term success of the poor, that “lasting and profound change in a human life comes most often when care is offered on a personal level by families and by those with a stake in the community, who are motivated by a burden of the heart to improve the lives of those around them.”12

The compassionate conservative solution, however, is not for the Federal government to abolish welfare and leave it to “those with a stake in the community” to help those about whom they care. Instead, their solution, as described by Bush advisor Stephen Goldsmith, is for the Federal government to outsource the administration of welfare:

Although [compassionate conservatives] acknowledge the role of government in helping those who need assistance, they do not believe that government itself needs to deliver those services. Small, local civic associations and religious organizations have the detailed knowledge and flexibility necessary to administer the proper combination of loving compassion and rigorous discipline appropriate for each citizen.

Such a policy serves only to redirect taxpayer dollars from government welfare agencies to private religious and civic organizations. The net effect is the same: The wealth of Americans is forcibly taken and redistributed to serve “compassionate” purposes.

Lest you think compassionate conservatives feel any sense of shame about trampling the traditional Goldwater conservative belief that wealth redistribution is a violation of rights, think again. At compassionate conservatism’s core, says Myron Magnet, “is concern for the poor—not a traditional Republican preoccupation—and an explicit belief that government has a responsibility for poor Americans.”14

During the 2000 election campaign, candidate Bush occasionally mouthed support for a market economy, but he saved his true enthusiasm for the notion that the poor and downtrodden deserve not only our compassion but our “love” and “charity,” as well. Michael Knox Beran, another leading theorist of compassionate conservatism, praises George W. Bush for his “unashamed use of the ‘L’ word” and for being driven “by a belief in the redemptive power of love.”15 Compassionate conservatism substitutes, at least superficially, Christian love for liberal pity as the motive for expanding and perpetuating the welfare state.

Stephen Goldsmith, writing for The Wall Street Journal’s series “American Conservatism,” further explains the political meaning of compassionate conservatism. It “takes us back to the future by acknowledging the huge growth of the state while articulating a better way for government to help those whom prosperity has left behind”; it “endorses government help for seniors who need prescription drugs and for parents of needy school children”; and it “provide[s] people with a wide variety of choices as to how they can best put government assistance to use.”16

The foregoing is a sample of the theory behind this movement as articulated by its contemporary theorists. But who is ultimately responsible for this trend among conservatives? What are compassionate conservatism’s deepest philosophic roots?

The new politics of compassion, though designed rhetorically to rely on and appeal to traditional Christian virtues (e.g., mercy, love, and charity), was most inspired by the moral writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau—the Prophet of Compassion. It was this Frenchman’s glorification of compassion first in his Discourse on Inequality, and then in Emile, that first elevated a minor sentiment into a major virtue.17

For Rousseau and his intellectual descendents, compassion—the desire to relieve the pain and suffering of others—is a pre- or sub- rational sentiment that serves man as an automatic, immediate, and infallible moral guide. It is a strictly perceptual-level phenomenon of seeing and feeling the pain and suffering of others, of being overwhelmed by a catastrophic sense of shame and guilt, and of then reacting on one’s range-of-the-moment feelings. According to this sentimental ideology, needs-as-claims are the fundamental human reality; “intuitions” or “feelings” are the way to know, evaluate, and judge such facts; and compassion is the virtue of feeling and acting accordingly.

Rousseau’s elevation of compassion to the center of ethical discourse launched a moral revolution in the West that has slowly percolated into the manners and mores of American life.18 Thanks to Rousseau, compassion is the moral leitmotif of American culture.

The delivery method adopted by today’s pushers of compassion is to harp day and night on those who fail and suffer; the goal is to induce in Americans en masse an arrested, perceptual-level mentality, a mentality that processes all moral and political matters emotionally and then acts accordingly. Americans are inundated on a daily basis—whether via the Oprah Winfrey Show, CNN, Fox News, or the New York Times—with maudlin scenes and stories of human misery. They are encouraged to put their failures on display and to exercise compassion at every turn.

Rousseau’s ghost now oversees a nation of social workers. The moral ideal to which our culture aspires is the moist eyes of the wet nurse. To lack compassion in this new world is to be morally deprived if not morally depraved. The Oprahization of American culture has made compassion the standard by which we judge whether men are good or bad, and so Americans today feel compelled to constantly display their sensitivity and to show that their “heart is in the right place.”

The so-called “love” advocated by the proponents of compassion is not directed toward human virtue but toward human vice. It is not for their achievements that the weak are admired but for their failures. On the one hand, this is an utter inversion of morality; on the other hand, it is the annihilation of morality.

To treat compassion as a virtue promotes a kind of moral relativism—a non-judgmental, no-fault morality that takes people just as they are. “Don’t judge people,” its proponents say, “just accept their plight and help them.” Fundamentally speaking, this is an attempt to negate the law of causality—to sever consequences from their causes. Forget about what caused a jobless person to be jobless; just give him a job. Forget about why a person has saved nothing for retirement; just give him some money. Forget about why a person failed to insure his Gulf-coast dwelling; just give him an apartment or a house. Personal responsibility or lack thereof (the cause) is irrelevant to the compassionate.

A moral code that upholds compassion as a virtue is the antipode of a morality of justice. It paralyzes one’s ability to evaluate and judge the ideas and actions of individuals; it demands that one suspend moral judgment—that one not discriminate between the suffering caused by elements beyond one’s control and that caused by irrationality, sloth, evasion.

The moral relativism promoted by this weepy sentiment naturally leads to political egalitarianism. Rousseau believed that politics—particularly democratic politics—is intimately connected to the people’s moeurs or manners, and that the formation of moeurs likewise turns on the training of the sentiments. By heralding sensitivity to the suffering of others as the height of virtue, Rousseau sought to overcome what he saw as the rational self-interest, the radical individualism, and the economic inequality unleashed by Lockean liberalism. Rousseau’s goal was to ennoble the sentiment of compassion in the hopes of transforming Western man from self-regarding to other-regarding, thereby ushering in a new social-political order.

Rousseau’s ideas took hold, and today we have a new politics of compassion that comes in both liberal and conservative forms. In the world of Rousseau and Clinton and Bush, suffering and need represent man’s essential metaphysical condition, and those who suffer less should be sacrificed for the sake of those who suffer more. The redistribution of wealth is, therefore, a central tenet of the politics of compassion.

At the heart of compassionate conservatism is the altruist-collectivist code, which holds that man must live in selfless service to the needs of others—which means that rational, productive men must sacrifice (or be sacrificed) for the sake of irrational, unproductive men. Compassionate conservatism accepts the collectivist premise that solving the problems of the poor is the “duty” of society as a whole. Thus neoconservative writer David Brooks, speaking in language that would have warmed Rousseau’s heart, describes compassionate conservatism as: “an across-the-board effort to revive responsible citizenship,” which Brooks defines as “sacrifice for the greater good.”19

Compassion is now regarded as the cardinal virtue in American politics. Political “wisdom” is measured by, and attributed to, those who feel and satisfy the needs of the greatest number of people. “He who feels the most pain, wins,” as it were, and America is suffering because of it.

Observe how compassionate conservatism’s moral message empowers the Christian Left. Jim Wallis, editor of the leftist Christian magazine, Sojourners, agrees with President Bush that the purpose of government is to feel people’s pain and satisfy their needs. But Wallis excoriates President Bush’s unprecedentedly high levels of social-welfare spending as niggardly and immoral.20 If compassion is a virtue, Wallis is right. He is also more “moral” than Bush, because he feels more suffering, has more compassion, and demands more sacrifice, greater spending.

Wallis and other leaders of the Christian Left have publicly challenged the President to live up to his own values and to show greater compassion. And how have the president and other compassionate conservatives responded to such charges? They have responded in the only way their moral code permits them to respond: by calling for more spending.

Once we peel away the sentimental rhetoric and cut through the doublespeak, compassionate conservatism’s moral and political teaching boils down to this: first, that needs—the needs of others—constitute a moral claim on your life; second, that you—you the taxpayer, you the private individual—have a “duty” to support—nay, to love and support—the poor; and finally, that the federal government must coerce your love and compassion by taking your wealth and giving it to “private” organizations that will use it to serve “those whom prosperity has left behind.”

At the heart of compassionate conservatism’s policy agenda is President Bush’s plan to “revolutionize” the welfare state through his “faith-based initiative.” On the day that the President unveiled his new program to earmark billions of dollars in federal welfare spending for faith-based charities, he described the goal and moral meaning of his proposal: “Government will never be replaced by charities and community groups. Yet when we see social needs in America, my administration will look first to faith-based programs.”21 “We have a responsibility,” Bush later emphasized, “that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”22

In the president’s faith-based initiatives, we see compassionate conservatism’s two distinctive features: the use of “free-market mechanisms” to achieve welfare-state goals; and the redirection of the welfare state toward conservative, especially religious, goals.

Compassionate conservatism’s proponents tout President Bush’s faith-based initiative as an application of free-market principles to welfare. Government-funded welfare is distributed by sub-contracting and out-sourcing the “politics of love” to private middlemen—namely, churches and faith-based charitable organizations. The Bush administration’s program aims to make “funds more accessible to neighborhood and faith-based organizations that administer a mix of love and discipline,” writes Stephen Goldsmith.23 Such “privatization” of the welfare system does give rise to a certain kind of “competition”: Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, the Unification Church, Rastafarians, Scientologists, and various other California-style churches compete to offer the most love and the best soup—and with your money.

This political competition between churches for taxpayer money is the beau idéal of compassionate conservatism. Churches and charities compete with one another for government funding, and the recipients of this “charity” have the freedom to choose between various government-sponsored and government-regulated denominational soup kitchens. This is what compassionate conservatives mean when they advocate combining “free market” policies with religious programs for the poor. But this is an Orwellian perversion and an utter corruption of free-market principles. There is no such thing as “market competition” between semi-private charities for the favors of government bureaucrats who have the power to arbitrarily give away money that is forcibly taken from other Americans. This is sheer government coercion and forced redistribution of wealth. Worse yet, it is a violation of the separation of church and state.

Compassionate conservatism places government in the business of propagating religion. Under Bush’s faith-based initiative, the federal government has been enlisted to do the “Lord’s work.” Liberal and conservative Christians will, henceforth, grab for and use this billion-dollar giveaway to support and spread their particular faith. When Democrats are in power, federal money will go to churches and organizations run by Marxist-orientated (so-called “liberationist”) Christians in order to promote liberal-socialist values; when Republicans are in power, federal money will go to the likes of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority to promote conservative-socialist values—and both parties will give money to Muslim “charities” in order to demonstrate their religious tolerance.

Despite the President’s occasional protestations to the contrary, the faith-based initiative is, in the end, about promoting religion. As the President himself said in support of the initiative: “[W]elfare policy will not solve the deepest problems of the spirit. . . . No government policy can put hope in people’s hearts or a sense of purpose in people’s lives. That is done when someone, some good soul puts an arm around a neighbor and says, ‘God loves you, and I love, and you can count on us both.’”24

The goal of the Bush administration’s faith-based initiative is clearly transformative: to change hearts. The White House has recently produced video agitprop that features people discussing how various faith-based charity programs have changed their lives. As a representative example of the content of these videos, one woman testifies, “I’ve learned that God comes first.”25

The purpose of President Bush’s faith-based initiative is to create a religious welfare state—that is: to go beyond the secular welfare state by feeding both the body and the soul—filling the body with soup and filling the soul with religious dogma, faith, otherworldliness, and the morality of self-sacrifice. If secular welfare is bad for the poor, how much worse is welfare that aims to convince them that their reasoning minds are incapable of understanding the important truths; that, all things considered, life and happiness on earth are not important; and that the key to “eternal” prosperity is to sacrifice their values in the name of the Lord?

Observe the gargantuan hypocrisy of conservatives who posture as defenders of property rights and helpers of the poor while advocating the violation of property rights to fund programs that poison the poor. If this is compassion, let us have none of it.

Compassionate conservatism’s principles and policies are inimical to a free society. It is also worth mentioning that they are inimical to the very Christian “virtue” they purport to uphold: charity.

While charity is not, objectively speaking, a virtue, it can be a rational endeavor so long as self-sacrifice is not involved. But genuine charity withers when faux charity is forced. Charity is, by definition, something freely chosen and benevolently given. Charity, properly understood, is what one does voluntarily with one’s own money to help others about whom one cares; it is not what someone else chooses to do with one’s money for others on one’s “behalf.” Charity is not a “duty” to give up the fruits of one’s labor to those whom one would not support of one’s own free will. Charity is the act of reaching into one’s own pocket and giving a dollar to someone of one’s own choosing; it is not the phenomenon of other people or the government reaching into one’s pocket and giving one’s money to someone of their choosing. (The latter is what children properly call stealing.)

Forced charity is an oxymoron that destroys the good will and generosity associated with genuine charity. By effectively nationalizing charity, conservatives have damaged the very idea of charity and curtailed the benevolence that makes it possible. Further, as a result of being forced by the government to be “charitable,” taxpaying citizens give less to genuine charities because they recognize that they are paying twice.

What are the consequences of compassionate conservatism when applied to the question of foreign aid? In logic, if the labor and wealth of individual Americans should be sacrificed to the “needy,” it follows that the labor and wealth of a prosperous nation like America should be sacrificed to the “needs” and misfortunes of poor nations. On the premises of compassionate conservatism, is it not immoral to neglect the misfortune and suffering of others no matter who or where they are? Where can one draw the line? What would Jesus or Rousseau say? One cannot draw a line—which is why compassionate conservatism also seeks to internationalize American “charity.”

Republican senator Rick Santorum, generally regarded as a “right-wing” conservative, puts it plainly: Compassionate conservatism “targets the poor and hurting for help, whether they are across the street or across an ocean.”26 In other words, compassionate conservatism imposes “duties” on individuals and nations that are limitless and without borders. If one child suffers—if there is one person in need anywhere in the world—then you and your fellow countrymen have a moral “duty” to do something about it.

This explains the spectacle of President Bush’s former Treasury Secretary, Paul O’Neill, who—after traipsing around rural Africa in a business suit, led by U2 rock star Bono, and receiving daily lectures from African politicians on the moral obligation owed by America to feed the poor of that destitute continent—returned from Africa and lectured America on the “moral imperative” that we give billions of dollars in aid to the poor around the world.27 America, under the tutelage of the compassionate conservatism, does precisely that.

Consider further how compassionate conservatism molds America’s foreign-aid policy. For the last several years, French and Mexican presidents Jacques Chirac and Vicente Fox, respectively, have been calling for a world tax to help fight poverty in “developing” nations. The new tax, to be administered by the U.N., is to be imposed on airline travel, currency transfers, and carbon emissions (among other things). Who will bear the largest burden of this world tax? The American people, of course. How has the Bush administration responded to the idea? Immediately after rejecting the idea of a U.N.-administered tax as a violation of U.S. sovereignty, President Bush publicly sanctioned the moral purpose of the tax. He said that “we” Americans are duty-bound to “share our wealth” with poor nations. Then, he promised to tax the American people himself in order to increase U.S. aid to poor nations from $10 billion to $15 billion within three years.28 “Why should Vicente Fox, Jacques Chirac, and Kofi Annan, get the credit for compassionately feeding Africa,” President Bush undoubtedly thought to himself, “when my administration is the most compassionate of all?”

Bush supports the moral premise and goals of the world tax; he disagrees only over how the money should be raised and administered. Like the U.N., he wants the American people to sacrifice their wealth to the world’s poor, but he wants his administration to be the model of “morality.”

What, in the end, distinguishes the approach of compassionate conservatism to the world’s poor from that of compassionate liberalism? The answer is, fundamentally, nothing. Both insist that another nation’s need creates a moral duty that Americans must accept and fulfill.

Like the aging hippies of the New Left, compassionate conservatives reject the idea of basing morality on reason and instead embrace a morality grounded in feelings. They reject the possibility of a morality of self-interest and individual rights, and instead embrace a morality of self-sacrifice and governmental coercion. Despite all their loose rhetoric about applying “free-market” solutions to the plight of the poor, compassionate conservatives accept the moral premise of liberal-socialism: that you have a moral duty—a moral duty that will be enforced by the state—to love and support those who have needs greater than your own.

This is the moral premise on which the Bush administration, like every Democratic administration since the New Deal, has promoted the alleged virtue of sacrifice. The ultimate goal of compassionate conservatism—like that of compassionate liberalism—is to make all Americans more compassionate and, therefore, more open to socialist redistribution. By promoting other-regarding over self-regarding virtues, the politics of compassion fosters a “caring” political community—a community that upholds selflessness as its greatest virtue.

In order to encourage ever-greater amounts of sacrifice from the American people, President Bush has challenged all Americans to devote at least two years of their lives to volunteer for community service. To that end, he has created the ironically named USA Freedom program to pay “volunteers” for their service, and he has proposed a significant expansion of existing government-service programs, such as the Peace Corps and AmeriCorp programs. Such “voluntary” service requires, of course, the involuntary expropriation of taxpayer wealth so that young Americans can learn that working in a soup kitchen or changing bedpans in a nursing home is somehow nobler than pursuing their own goals or creating wealth.

How would compassionate conservatives respond to a Hillary Clinton administration that might call for Americans to sacrifice three or four years of their lives to community service or that might demand a massive tax increase to support the poor? What could they say? What possible moral argument could they offer to oppose political programs that are simply more consistent applications of their own moral principles?

There is only one possible “free-market” solution to the problem of poverty that is consistent with individual rights: to abolish the welfare state. But given the moral code of the compassionate conservatives, no steps will be taken toward this goal on their watch.

Below are two posts which I published here a long time ago and for which I took a lot of incomming fire. Nothing which has transpired in the months since has altered my views:

The problem with George Bush is that he is not primarily a conservative, he is primarily a Christian, and he does not have a calculus that is congruent with yours or mine, even though both of us might be Christians.

George Bush sees partisan politics as petty and ultimately meaningless. We see partisanship as the indispensable stuff of freedom. At election time the Bushes will hold their nose and dip into partisanship. But it is not in their essential nature to wage war for tactical political advantage.

George Bush wants what Bill Clinton wanted: To fashion a legacy. He does not want to be remembered as the man who cut a few percentage points from an appropriation bill but as the man who reshaped Social Security. I've come to the conclusion that the Bushes see politics as squirmy, fetid. It must be indulged in if one is to practice statesmanship but it is statesmanship alone that that is worthy as a calling.

They are honest, they are loyal, they are patrician. There would've been admired and respected if had lived among the founding fathers. But it is Laura Bush and Momma Bush who really and truly speak for the family and who tell us what they are thinking and who they are. There's not a Bush woman who does not believe in abortion. They believe in family, they live in loyalty, they believe in the tribe, but they do not believe in partisan politics.

I believe it is time for us to decide no longer to be used by the Bush family as useful idiots and instead to begin to use the Bushes as our useful idiots . I say this with the utmost admiration and respect for everything the Bushes stand for. Who would not be proud beyond description to have a father or an uncle who was among the first and youngest of naval aviators to fight in the Pacific and to be twice shot down. Not a stain or blemish of corruption or personal peccadillo has touched the family(except for the brother whom I believe was cleared of bank charges). They are the living embodiment of all that is good and noble in the American tradition.

But they are not conservative.

...........................................................

Politics are not about doing good, it is about gaining and exercising power over our fellow citizens. Politics is a polite word for exploiting the physical power of the state to take money from our neighbors at the point of a gun if necessary and to spend it for our own purposes. Politics is about the exercising of power over our fellow citizens to coerce their most intimate sexual, familial, and spiritual affairs. Politics is about how we use the police power of this state to tell our neighbor how he may or may not use his property, rear his children, and bury his dead.

Mostly, but not always, politics is a zero sum game. We elect our paladins and send them into this fray to get our neighbors money and spend it for our purposes. We employ euphemisms to disguise all this. We like to deceive ourselves that our politicians are elected and reelected because they do good for humanity. There is no such thing as a bad politician (apart from those who are blatant criminals, and liars) only selfish voters. We have unbalanced budgets because we want them that way.

Equally, there is no such thing as a good politician, only faithful servants. They either do what they contracted with us to do or they betray us. If they do what we want they are doing something contrary to what our neighbor wants. Politics is the art of deciding who gets what, where, and when. It is about power.

As a conservative, I believe that my politics are morally right and that they are right for the whole of the country. But I do not deceive myself that I or my elected representatives are anointed by God. We are trying to get power to inflict our view of good on a bunch of damn liberals who do not share it. As the fellow said, this is not beanbag, but a death struggle. If we lose this struggle, as we surely will if we do not engage, if we pretend there is no struggle, if we withdraw from the fray, if we say a pox on both your houses, if we take a holiday and go fishing, if we declare ourselves to be superior to dirty politicians, if we go the opposite way and place our faith in the man on horseback, then we will bequeath to our children a nasty and brutish existence.

As a conservative, I place my faith in principles not in personalities. I never vote for the man I always vote for the philosophy. Do not be seduced by the Ross Perot's of this world. Do not be awed by the man on horseback.

Succumb not to relativism, fight the corner. And as Bull Halsey said, "Attack... Repeat... Attack."

I didn't take the time to read it all but; Compassionate Conservative was a book written by I believe Marvin Olasky. It very simply and elegantly described the way it used to be and the way conservatives should compassionately return it to.

It used to be churches, families Etc that reformed the man.

Entry and acceptance of the help was tied to one, remaining sober and two, working.

The book describes how Gubmint took the reins and made it a monthly check instead.

I believe W meant well with the phrase and truly believed that the goal should be to return to these past methods. He worked to allow moneys to be given to churchs and foundations without Gubmint interference.

However, you included carreer politicians into any scenario, and its motivations will change. It will be pork, pork, pork and the tax payer be dammed.

It amazes me that heart felt caring, can be so drastically corrupted by the process.

The situation doesn't lend itself to optimism.

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