After today’s Judgment, an epic of retrieval?
November 5, 2008 12:35 am
 – |
WASHINGTON
We need first to recognize that conservatism did not lose political power through the elections of 2008. That is because true conservatism has not had much political power–that is, control over government institutions and political offices–during the 20 years since Ronald Reagan rode off into the sunset. Even the Age of Reagan, successful as it was, was not a time of conservative omnipotence.
Reagan was the only president in memory who attempted to scale back the power of the federal bureaucracy and its liberal spending and social engineering programs. Only Reagan invested political capital and talent in a coherent attempt to change and enforce policy direction. When President George H.W. Bush took office in 1989, he pointedly proclaimed his esteem for career government officials as part of his effort to assert that he was «kinder and gentler» than his superb predecessor.
While many career foreign service officers and civil servants deserve praise for hard work, honesty, and sometimes even productivity, BushPere’s message was still the wrong one because it undermined the conservative campaign to curtail the power of the liberal government bureaucracy. Reagan’s animus against the bureaucracy was not personal, it was business. Indeed, personnel management is not personal; it, too, is business.
MARGIN OF ERROR
If one is to have any hope of advancing conservative policies in and through a federal government whose career bureaucrats are overwhelmingly liberal, there is little margin for error. Philosophy has consequences, and, as the leading lights of the Reagan administration understood, «personnel is policy.»
Every appointment of a liberal Republican negates the already-slim chances for conservative reform in that person’s sphere of government. When «RINOs,» or Republicans In Name Only, get key posts, especially at the sub-Cabinet level where the real work gets done, the typical results are bureaucratic expansion, unchecked spending, intellectual incoherence, and left-drifting policies.
UNTRIED CONSERVATISM?
As Chesterton said of the Christian ideal, conservatism «has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.»
Now what is to be done? We conservatives need to retrieve ourselves–as Dante used the verb in the first line of the Commedia, «mi ritrovai per una selva oscura [I retrieved myself through a dark forest].» We need to recover what we lost–what some of us discarded–during our binges of pseudo-power: first principles; traditions; defense of faith and family; and, above all, realism.
It’s time to turn off the radio, the «hot» medium of demagogues. We should shut off the TV, the «cool» medium of auto-anesthesia. We should crack open some books. We would do well to re-read the fathers of what was once a lively and life-affirming intellectual movement–Bill Buckley, Russell Kirk, P.T. Bauer, Wilhelm Roepke, and Frederick Wilhelmsen, to name a few.
At the top of the reading list should be Robert H. Bork’s «Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and America’s Decline.» During the 12 years since its publication, Republicans controlled Congress for 10 years and the White House for eight. But were these years of ascendancy for conservatism properly understood? Consider that, if Bork wrote his book today, he would have to call it «Sprinting Towards Gomorrah.»
REALISM, NOT IDEOLOGY
True conservatism–reverence for the «permanent things»–is realistic. It is not an ideology. The ideologue, said Russell Kirk, «resorts to the anesthetic of social utopianism, escaping the tragedy and grandeur of true human existence by giving his adherence to a perfect dream-world of the future.»
In 1988, when the Soviet Union was in retreat, Ronald Reagan wrote in his National Security strategy that realism was the core of his international policies. «We have sought to deal with the world as it is, not as we might wish it to be. A strategy without illusions, based on observable facts, has been our goal. We attempt to deal with both friends and adversaries on a basis that recognizes that acts are more important than words, and that frankness is the foundation of productive and enduring relationships among nations.»
Conservatives are now in the first stanza of a long epic that we will not so much write as we will perform it, live it–an epic of self-retrieval. Hellish and purgatorial years are surely ahead for us. Only liberals and other utopians believe in Paradise on Earth. For conservatives, Heaven must wait. This Cold Wednesday is neither the beginning nor the end. It’s the middle of our journey.
Joseph P. Duggan was an advisor to ambassadors Jeane Kirkpatrick and Edward Rowny, and a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush.
Blog de Octavio Islas 