Posted on 01/06/2009 5:58:06 PM PST by HokieMom
President Bush will leave office with an approval rating of under 30 percent, and the Republican Party is not faring much better. In the past two elections, it has shed more than 50 House seats and more than a dozen Senate seats.
The conservative label, though, does not appear to have taken much of a beating. On Election Day 2008, exit polls showed that more voters still identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals.
Conservatives can thus spare themselves the kind of re-branding liberals felt compelled to attempt earlier in the decade when they dubbed themselves “progressives.” Precisely what is progressive about protecting the regime of Saddam Hussein, protecting public schools from meaningful competition, and refusing seriously to consider entitlement reform was never clear.
Conservatives will not absorb much blame for the Bush administration for the excellent reason that this administration was not particularly conservative. It was Bush, after all, who created a drug entitlement program, worked with Ted Kennedy to create a more nationalized education policy, declined for years to veto any spending programs, and doled out hundreds of billions in bailouts.
But with the nation mired in an economic slump and still engaged in two wars, some ideology must take the fall. Accordingly, a scapegoat has been lined up: Neo-conservatism.
Neo-conservatives make convenient fall guys. They have long been despised by the left for having defected from their ranks, albeit decades ago, and even more unforgivably, for being right about the Cold War. And as former leftists, neo-cons have never been viewed warmly by certain elements of the right. Meanwhile, mainstream conservatives are just relieved to see the finger being pointed away from them.
But is it fair to blame neo-conservatives for what went wrong in the Bush administration? The question turns on whether neo-cons were responsible for the policies that caused the administration to go astray.
This was not the case domestically. Rightly or wrongly, the Bush administration will be blamed for the recent economic downturn. But no neo-conservative policy contributed to our current economic woes.
Neo-conservatism was born in part as a reaction against the social experimentation associated with the Great Society and the cultural turmoil associated with the 1960s. It was hardly neo-conservative, then, to promote home ownership for low income families by inducing lending institutions to make unsound loans. Neo-conservatives have never favored lowering standards to benefit a particular group.
Some attribute the current crisis to lax regulation or de-regulation. Whatever the merit of this view, it has nothing much to do with neo-conservatism. Neo-cons tend to focus on social and cultural issues, avoiding the intricacies of regulatory matters.
Even before the current economic crisis, Bush had encountered harsh criticism from traditional conservatives for, among other reasons, creating a prescription drug entitlement, supporting eventual citizenship for illegal aliens, and failing to control federal spending. None of these policies or practices was part of the neo-conservative agenda.
Bush’s domestic policy was dominated not by neo-conservatism but by “compassionate conservatism.” Compassionate conservatives believe, in Bush’s words, that “when somebody hurts, the government has got to move,” but that the government should act less through its bureaucracies than through alternative private mechanism.
By contrast, neo-conservatives perceive no general imperative for government remedial activity. For them, the best reforms are usually ones that limit the government’s capacity to do harm. Welfare reform (implemented with the help of Bill Clinton) and the end of governmental race preference programs (opposed by George W. Bush) come to mind.
But perhaps neo-conservatives led Bush astray in the realm of foreign policy. Neo-cons certainly favored the invasion of Iraq. But so did 77 U.S. Senators among whom only Joe Lieberman might answer to the description of neo-conservative (and only as to foreign policy).
The primary advocates of invading Iraq were Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, neither of whom had ever been considered a neo-conservative. And the primary reasons behind the decision to topple Saddam Hussein were not neo-conservative ones.
The most commonly articulated reason – the threat posed by the WMD nearly everyone believed Saddam possessed – did not stem from neo-conservatism, but rather from the more general concept of self-protection, coupled with faulty intelligence.
Vice President Cheney reportedly was motivated by the desire to demonstrate the price of supporting or harboring terrorists. This desire is not distinctively neo-conservative. Rather, it is rooted in old-fashioned militaristic American nationalism.
The neo-conservative moment occurred after the invasion, when the U.S. decided to promote democracy in Iraq. The sentiment in favor of this approach was hardly unique to neo-conservatives. The liberal pundit Thomas Friedman favored essentially the same approach under the “we broke it, we own it” theory. Even the more radical Paul Krugman warned against simply imposing a strong man in Iraq and washing our hands of the situation.
Nonetheless, a democratic post-war Iraq can fairly be viewed as a neo-conservative (and a compassionate conservative) project. But was this project a mistake?
The answer depends in large part on how the alternatives would have worked out. One alternative was to leave. But in this scenario, key parts of Iraq might well have fallen under Iranian domination, while other portions could easily have disintegrated into something resembling Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
Another alternative was to back a strong-man. But given the Sunni-Shiite divide, this course might have produced an all-out civil war.
The “democracy project” came pretty close to producing a civil war, too. But in hindsight, this seems to have been due to mistaken decisions about troop levels and anti-insurgency strategy. These flawed decisions were not neo-conservative ones. In fact, prominent neo-cons were among the early advocates of the “surge” that seems finally to have brought us success.
Even success in Iraq would probably not rescue neo-conservatism’s good name, however. The movement has made too many influential enemies, and the hostile narrative is already in place. Would anyone like to join the neo-progressive movement?
Sunday Reflection contributor Paul Mirengoff is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and a principal author of Powerline.com.
I wrote this in response to another article, and part of it is quite fitting here:
What is interesting is that the term “neo-conservative” was coined by a socialist named Michael Harrington who criticized former leftists for moving to the right because they believed that liberalism had failed and no longer had a clue. A conservative thinker then noted that a neo-conservative was “a liberal mugged by reality.”
I have never heard a conservative describe him or herself as a “neo-con.” For that matter, I have never heard other prefixes (such as ‘paleo-con’) self-applied either. I have always and will always identify myself as a conservative - and then be willing to define my views as necessary.
As a conservative, I believe in 3 basic things:
1) a belief in traditional moral values, and a fierce opposition to any form of moral relativism;
2) a belief in individual liberty, balanced by duty to others and personal responsibility for one’s own actions;
3) a belief in a strong national and individual defense as a bulwark against tyranny from within and totalitarianism from without.
If that makes me a “neo-con” in someone’s eyes, fine. But I’ll bet ya it will be a liberal doing the labeling.
We need normal conservatism. Limited government, low taxes, and normal, traditional family values.
This article talks quite a bit about all the things neo-conservatives aren’t, leaving one scratching one’s head wondering what in the world they actually are. But the whole point is silly, in modern parlance ‘neo-con’ has come to mean anyone from either side of the article who supported the Iraq war, period.
It’s well past time we started blaming the liberals, progressives, socialists and DEMOCRATS for our problems. They after all are the cause of them.
What is your stand on the size of government.
?
Surely the left embraces socialist policies bordering on Communism. Let's start calling them "neo-coms" and confuse everyone.
neo-coms sounds good. how about neo-commies which spells it out a bit more?
That's good for you, except many or even most neo-cons will part ways with you on these issues and support abortion, gay "rights", big government (as long as it's done their way), gun control, illegal immigration, military adventurism, "separation of church and state," acceptance of hedonism, environmentalism etc. etc. etc.
There's no such animal as a "new conservatism." Conservatism is what it is - which basically holds that our providence and properity is derived from traditional biblical thought (God), respect for property rights and that the secular state should be kept to the absolute barest minimum.
Our ancestors learned these lessons the hard way. Too many neocons believe they've outsmarted histroy.
Not wishing an argument here, just stating my position and not liking the "liberal" label.
Well stated!
This guy is a complete failure and disaster. His moving to those that hurt by throwing billions and trillions of borrowed $$$ at them with little planning or thought earned him a well deserved 20% approval rating and two lost elections we have to live with now.
Let's not fool ourselves. Americans may call themselves conservative but most want a mommy and a daddy to take care of them. They want loads of benefits and bailouts paid for by "the rich." They want to be shielded from the consequences of their bad decisions, like buying a huge dream home they can't afford. They want it all without working for it. We have become infantized as a nation. The rugged individual who doesn't want help is dying. Its a sad, depressing state of affairs.
You just stole the words right out of my mouth!
Properly speaking, “neo-conservative” is a Jewish center-lefty intellectual of the Democratic party of the 60’s left who left the Democrats over how they responded to the aftermath of Vietnam (ie, isolationism).
The core of policy-wonk neo-cons are not moral, or fiscal conservatives at all. They’re agnostics on those issues at best, apostates at worst. All they care about are foreign policy questions, and they’re perfectly OK with increased government spending, waste, fraud, grift, etc. They’re disposed to be hostile to the social conservative issues like right to life, gun rights, hard-core property rights, etc.
The GOP should give the neo-cons a hearty drop-kick out of an unopened window. Many of them are what we call “RINO’s.”
Most so-called "neo-cons" are really just effete urbanites who latched onto the Republican Party because they saw the GOP as a place to pursue their big-government globalist agenda.
I dare say you'd be hard-pressed to find any cases in which a "neo-conservative" actually comes out in favor of self-defense as a mechanism for protecting personal liberty. The protection of the right to keep and bear arms is largely absent from any neo-conservative platform.
Crusading for “democracy” worldwide is a Wilsonian heresy that must be purged from the conservative movement. The West End Avenue Mafia (aka the Podhoretz crime family) and their disciples are largely to blame for the debacle that was the early war in Iraq.
I keep hearing this “well, he kept us safe for 7 years” meme. Okay... sure. But at what cost?
This man had the highest approval rating of any sitting president. Now piss-poor communication with the media and the people, a limp-wristed initial approach to Iraq, total disregard for the free-market and across-the-aisle-reach(arounds) have wrecked the Republican party for years to come and ushered in a g-damn MARXIST holding the reigns of power.
Well done, Compassionate Conservatives... the “author” of our 7 year safety-net also scribed it’s inevitable end
Thanks.
Did you like the new word I invented? "Properity."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.