Neo-conservatives beware!

[EnragedSephiroth]

The following is an article. You're in for a long-but-quick read if you skim and take the most-important points with you. Consider yourselves warned.

Why Conservatives Can't Govern
By Alan Wolfe
The Washington Monthly, Volume 38, no7.

I.
Search hard enough and you might find a pundit
who believes what George W. Bush believes,
which is that history will redeem his administration.
But from just about everyone else, on the right as
vehemently as on the left, the verdict has been rolling
in: This administration, if not the worst in American
history, will soon find itself in the final four. Even
those who appeal to history's ultimate judgment halfheartedly
acknowledge as much. One seeks tomorrow's
vindication only in the context of today's dismal
performance.
About the only failure more pronounced than the
president's has been the graft-filled plunder of GOP
lawmakers--at least according to opinion polls, which
in May gave the GOP-controlled Congress favorability
ratings in the low 20s, about 10 points lower than the
president's. This does not necessarily translate into
electoral Armageddon; redistricting and other incumbency-
protection devices help protect against that. But
even if many commentators think that Republicans may
retain control over Congress, very few think they
should.
Eager to salvage conservatism from the wreckage of
conservative rule, right-wing pundits are furiously
blaming right-wing politicians for failing to adhere to
right-wing convictions. Libertarians such as Bruce
Bartlett fret that under Republican control, government
has not shrunk, as conservatives prescribe, but has
grown. Insiders like Peggy Noonan complain that
Republicans have become-well, insiders; they are too
focused on retaining power and too disconnected from
the base whose anger pushed them into power.
Idealistic younger conservatives bewail the care and
feeding of the K Street beast. Paleocons Pat Buchanan
and Robert Novak blame neocons William Kristol and
Charles Krauthammer for the debacle that is Iraq.
Through all these laments there pulsates a sense of desperation:
A conservative president and an even more
conservative Congress must be repudiated to enable
genuine conservatism to survive. Sure, the Bush administration
has failed, all these voices proclaim. But that is
because Bush and his Republican allies in Congress borrowed
big government and foreign-policy idealism
from the left. The ideas of Woodrow Wilson and John
Maynard Keynes, from their point of view, have always
been flawed. George W. Bush and Tom DeLay just
prove it one more time.
Conservative dissidents seem to have done an
admirable job of persuading each other of the truth of
their claims. Of course, many of these dissidents
extolled the president's conservative leadership when he
was riding high in the polls. But the real flaw in their
argument is akin to that of Trotskyites who, when confronted
with the failures of communism in Cuba, China
and the Soviet Union, would claim that real communism
had never been tried. If leaders consistently depart in
disastrous ways from their underlying political ideology,
there comes a point where one has to stop just blaming
the leaders and start questioning the ideology.
The collapse of the Bush presidency, in other words,
is not just due to Bush's incompetence (although his
administration has been incompetent beyond belief).
Nor is it a response to the president's principled lack of
intellectual curiosity and pitbull refusal to admit mis-
takes (although those character flaws are certainly real
enough). And the orgy of bribery and special-interest
dispensation in Congress is not the result of Tom
DeLay's ruthlessness, as impressive a bully as he was.
This conservative presidency and Congress imploded,
not despite their conservatism, but because of it.
Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost
about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government.
This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological
one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to
solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing
deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements
built into the structure of federal legislation. It stems,
rather, from the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly
by George W. Bush, that the money government
collects in order to carry out its business properly
belongs to the people themselves. One thought,
and one thought only, guided Bush and his
Republican allies since they assumed power in the
wake of Bush vs. Gore: taxes must be cut, and the more
they are cut-especially in ways benefiting the richthe
better.
But like all politicians, conservatives, once in office,
find themselves under constant pressure from constituents
to use government to improve their lives. This
puts conservatives in the awkward position of managing
government agencies whose missions-indeed, whose
very existence-they believe to be illegitimate.
Contemporary conservatism is a walking contradiction.
Unable to shrink government but unwilling to improve
it, conservatives attempt to split the difference, expanding
government for political gain, but always in ways that
validate their disregard for the very thing they are
expanding. The end result is not just bigger government,
but more incompetent government.
"Ideas," a distinguished conservative named Richard
Weaver once wrote, "have consequences." Americans
have learned something about the consequences of conservative
ideas during the Bush years that they never
had to confront in the more amiable Reagan period. As
a way of governing, conservatism is another name for
disaster. And the disasters will continue, year after year,
as long as conservatives, whose political tactics are frequently
as brilliant as their policy-making is inept, find
ways to perpetuate their power.

[EnragedSephiroth]

II.
The United States, as the political scientist Louis
Hartz argued in the 1950s, was born liberal. We
fought for our independence against Great Britain and
the conservatism that flourished there. In Europe, a
conservative was someone who defended the traditions
of the monarchy, justified the privileges of the nobility,
and welcomed the intervention of a state-affiliated clergy
in politics. But all those things would be tossed out
by the revolutionaries who led the war for independence
and then wrote the Constitution. We chose to
have an elected president, not an anointed monarch.
Our Constitution prohibited the granting of titles of
nobility. We separated church and state.

Of course, we had more than our share of thinkers
who distrusted national authority; conservative political
philosophy may not come naturally to Americans, but a
fear of centralized power and an unwillingness to pay
heavy taxes does. Beneath the broad political liberalism
embodied in the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution was a frequently unexamined conservatism
that questioned the very idea of the vibrant,
expansive society that America promised to be.
Odd men out in America's liberal political culture,
America's conservatives were never very unified.

Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall wanted to see
a strong national government created to improve
America's economic prospects, even if they retained an
aristocratic sense that only social superiors should control
that government. (John Adams outdid them on
behalf of a strong executive; he thought our first president
should be addressed as a monarch). But this kind
of New England Federalism would go into abeyance
once America's democratizing forces were unleashed.
Others insisted that this country should embody timeless
Christian principles; they, however, soon ran up
against the skepticism of the Founding Fathers and
conceptions of religious liberty associated with dissenting
Protestantism. With the decline of both, the only
significant conservatism left would come from defenders
of slavery such as John C. Calhoun. Once the
advocate of a strong national government, Calhoun,
putting the rights of slaveholders first, viewed this
country as a compact among states, not as a unified
society. His ideas would live on in the voices of those
thinkers, primarily Southern, who objected to relying
on national power to promote equal rights for all.

As this litany of lost causes suggests, our conservatives,
while representing different regions and economic
interests, were united by their irrelevance in
the face of history. If the term reactionary is too
pejorative, let's call them reactive. In this entrepreneurial,
mobile, innovative, and individualistic country,
conservatism was constantly on the defensive,
aiming to preserve things-deference, reverence, and
diffidence, to name three-that most Americans were
anxious to shed. Deprived of both a church and state
to defend, American conservatives became advocates
for privileges determined by birth, suffrage restricted
to an elite, and rural virtues over urban realities.

And so conservatives faced a dilemma from the
moment the first shots were heard around the world.
They could be true to their ideals and stand on the sidelines
of political power. Or they could adjust their principles
in the interests of political realism and thus negate
the essential conservative teaching that principles are
meant to be timeless.

All the conservatives that played
any role in America's history
since the age of Jackson chose
political relevance over ideologi-
cal purity. The Whigs abandoned
aristocracy to nominate a
popular military leader in the
1840s, hoping thereby to out-
democratize the Jacksonians.
An emerging business elite
defended the free market-an
18th-century liberal innovation
detested by agrarian-oriented
conservatives-to protect the
very kind of privileges that
Adam Smith hoped the free CLAI market would curtail.

Isolationists abandoned the cos-
mopolitanism of Hamilton, perhaps
America's greatest conservative,
for a populistic nativism
suspicious of worldly grandeur. Clergy from evangelical
churches played down such depressing doctrines as
original sin and predestination in favor of the wonders
of salvation for all. European conservatism had defended
authority against liberty and social standing against
equality. American conservatives used the language of
liberty to justify inequality and promoted democracy to
stand against change.

A conservative in America, in short, is someone who
advocates ends that cannot be realized through means
that can never be justified, at least not on the terrain of
conservatism itself. In the past, the ends sought were the
preservation of hierarchy, even if the means included
appeals to democratic sentiment. In more recent times,
conservatives promised order and stability through
means dependent upon the uncertainties and insecurities
of the market. Unwilling to accept the fact that government
was here to stay, conservatives stood on the sidelines
as conditions kept arising that demanded bigger
and more effective national authority. Westward expansion
required Washington to settle the issue of slavery,
and the recalcitrant South ultimately lost.

Industrialization forced the country to deal with trusts
and workplace oppression, and the Gilded Age leaders
ultimately lost to the Progressives. The Depression
demanded stronger government action even more
urgently, even as the advocates of laissez faire opposed
the New Deal. Similarly, the rise of fascism necessitated
a vast expansion of federal power; and again, the conservative
impulse, in the form of isolationism, lost.
By the 1950s, anti-federal-government conservatism
was somewhat in retreat. Conservatives in the
Republican Party still pushed for spending restraint
while Southern conservatives in the Democratic Party
resisted a greater role for the federal government in
entrenching civil rights for blacks. But in general, leaders
of both political parties, reflecting public sentiment,

[EnragedSephiroth]

basically accepted big government as legitimate. The
liberal propensities within both parties led to a federal
government that continued to take on new challenges
as they arose, from providing healthcare to seniors and
the poor to regulating product safety and pollution.

But as we know now, the conservative anti-federal
government impulse did not go away. Barry
Goldwater, the last conservative purist in America, paid
a huge political price for his frank disdain of government;
abolishing mandatory Social Security and the
Tennessee Valley Authority was not the way to win
votes among the elderly in the South. In the 1970s, the
conservative impulse went underground, incubating in
a string of new think tanks funded by conservative philanthropists
and sympathetic corporations. Although
some of those who followed in Goldwater's footsteps-
Nixon, Reagan, Bush, and then Bush-professed to
share his distaste for government, none stood in the way
of its growth. When given the opportunity, they shied
away from enacting the think-tank talk of washing government
down the bathroom drain. Although Ronald
Reagan, a convert to anti-federal-government conservatism,
won the White House in 1980 by feeding on
public disgust with the excesses of liberalism, whatever
plans he may have had to roll back the federal government
were blocked by a Democratic Congress and public
opinion. (Remember, for instance, the drubbing the
GOP took in 1982 when it tried to axe Social Security
benefits). Newt Gingrich and his revolutionaries rode a
similar wave in 1994, but their plans were at least partially
stymied by Bill Clinton's control of the White
House and, again, by public opinion (the GOP lost seats
in 1998).

With the election of George W. Bush in 2000,
anti-government conservatism won control of both
elected branches. This was something new.
Conservatives hadn't held both Congress and the
White House for a full term since 1932, before the
creation of big government as we know it. For the
first time in U.S history, conservatives had total control
of the agencies of superpower government.

III.
If government is necessary, bad government, at least
for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have
been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can
be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad
government-indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and
unfair government-is the only kind of conservative
government there is. Conservatives cannot govern
well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare
a world-class boeufbourguignon: If you believe that
what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not
likely to do it very well.

Three examples-FEMA, Medicare, and Iraqshould
be sufficient to make this point. Because liberals
have historically welcomed government while
conservatives have resisted it, it should come as no
surprise that the Federal Emergency Management
Agency worked so well under Bill Clinton and so
poorly under Bush I and II. True to a long tradition of
disinterested public management, Clinton, in the wake
of Hurricane Andrew, appointed James Lee Witt to
head FEMA. Witt refocused FEMA away from civildefense
efforts to increasingly predictable national disasters,
fought for greater federal funding, achieved cabinet
status for his agency, and worked closely with state
and local officials. For all the efforts by Republicans to
attack their enemies, no one has ever put a dent in
Witt's reputation. Government under him was as
good as government gets.

Upon assuming office, George W. Bush turned to
former Texas campaign aide Joe Allbaugh to run
FEMA and then shifted it into the new Department of
Homeland Security (whose creation he had opposed).
Allbaugh, and his hand-picked successor Michael
Brown, like so many Bush appointees, were afflicted
with what we might call "learned incompetence."
They did not fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience.
Their ineptness, rather, was active rather than
passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to
prove that the federal government simply should not
be in the business of disaster management. "Many are
concerned that federal disaster assistance may have
evolved into both an oversized entitlement program
and a disincentive to effective state and local risk management,"
Allbaugh had testified before a Senate
appropriations subcommittee in May, 2001.

"Expectations of when the federal government should
be involved and the degree of involvement may have
ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." There
was the conservative dilemma in a nutshell: a man put
in charge of a mission in which he did not believe.
Long before Katrina destroyed New Orleans,
Allbaugh and Brown were busy destroying FEMA: privatizing
many of the agency's programs, shifting attention
away from disaster management, and shedding no
tears as scores of agency staff left in dismay. Human
beings cannot prevent natural disasters, but they can
prevent man-made ones. Not the Bush administration.
Its ideological hostility toward government all
but guaranteed that the physical damage inflicted by a
hurricane would be exacerbated by the human damage
caused by incompetence.

The question of whether Medicare reform will
prove politically fruitful for Republicans is still open.
But the question of whether it has proven to be an
administrative nightmare is not. There were two paths
open to Republicans if they had been interested in creating
an administratively coherent system of paying for
the prescription drugs of the elderly. One was to give
the elderly nothing and insist that every person assume
the full cost of his or her medication. The other was to
have government assume responsibility for the costs of
those drugs.

It is significant that in America's recent debates over
prescription drugs, no one, not even the Cato Institute,
argued that government should simply not be in the
business at all. As a society, we accept-indeed, we celebrate-
the fact that older people can live longer and
better lives thanks to radically improved medical technology
as well as awe-inspiring advances in pharmacology.
A political party which consigned to death anyone
who could not afford to participate in this medical
revolution would die an early death itself.

[EnragedSephiroth]

But Republicans were just as unwilling to design a
sensible program as they were unable to eliminate the
existing one. To prove their faith in the market, they
gave people choices, when what they wanted was predictability.

To pay off the pharmaceutical industry,
they refused to allow government to negotiate drug
prices downward, thereby vastly inflating the program's
costs. To make sure government agencies
didn't administer the benefit, they lured in insurance
companies with massive subsidies and imposed almost
no rules on what benefits they could and could not
offer. The lack of rules led to a frustrating chaos of
choices. And the extra costs had to be made up by
carving out a so-called "doughnut hole" in which the
elderly, after having their drug purchases subsidized
up to a certain point, would suddenly find themselves
without federal assistance at all, only to have their
drugs subsidized once again at a later point. Caught
between the market and the state, Republicans picked
the worst features of each. No single human being
could have designed a program as unwieldy as this
one. It took the combined efforts of every faction in
today's conservative movement to produce a public
policy so removed from common sense.

The failure of the Bush administration to plan for
the aftermath of the Iraq invasion
was just one more, albeit
the most serious, consequence
of the conservative ambivalence
toward government.
Neoconservatives were all for
ambitious adventures abroad,
and, in the aftermath of
September 11, they won the
president's support. But they
never captured his pocketbook,
which was tenaciously guarded
by Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld. Neocons wanted the
Republican Party to live in the
shadow of Henry "Scoop"
Jackson. Rumsfeld insisted that
military adventures be funded in
the spirit of Robert A. Taft.
So long as conservatives den-
igrate government while relying
on government to achieve their
objectives, Rumsfeld's vision of
how to fight wars is the only kind of conservative foreign
policy one can have. His low-balling of troop
estimates in Iraq was the foreign policy equivalent of
libertarian economics: relying on government while
refusing to pay for it. His hostility toward Iraqi reconstruction
resonated with those skeptical of rebuilding
New Orleans. His disdain for Colin Powell's State
Department mirrored Joe McCarthy's for Dean
Acheson's. Only a tried-and-true conservative could
ever have come up with the idea of turning the management
of Iraqi police forces over to private firms to
the extent that Rumsfeld did, with catastrophic results
for the Iraqis themselves. While it is difficult to label
someone who plans a war an isolationist, Rumsfeld's
hostility toward America's historic allies represented a
contemporary version of unilateralism, which has
always been isolationism's first cousin. The neoconservatives
wanted to draft hugely expensive undertakings
onto a party with an isolationist past. The
Secretary of Defense wanted to draft on to the same
political party a distant war, but with the promise of
being cheap and avoiding the loss of American lives. It
is not difficult to conclude which one would win in
today's conservative environment.

For Pat Buchanan to blame the neocons for the failure
in Iraq ignores the fact that the man most responsible
for the failure, Donald Rumsfeld, has more in common
with Buchanan than he does with Bill Kristol.
(One prominent neoconservative, however, Paul
Wolfowitz, did sign on enthusiastically to Rumsfeld's
agenda.) Iraq failed for the same reasons that all conservative
public policy efforts fail. Refusing to acknowledge
the importance of government while relying on it
to achieve your objectives causes the same kind of chaos
in foreign policy that it does in matters closer to home.

IV.
One of the favorite myths of contemporary conservative
dissidents is that the K Street machine,
instead of being the irreplaceable lynchpin of conservative
power, was somehow a betrayal of its ideals.
This fable is captured by Matthew Continetti, a
Weekly Standard reporter, in The K Street Gang, a
conservative "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
In Continetti's telling, once upon a time-let's
make it 1994--conservatives were idealistic revolutionaries.

Gingrich and his cohorts were "optimistic,
progressive, and overwhelmingly confident in the
idea that you could run the federal government like a
large corporation." Alas, however, Gingrich was
unable to persuade his Republican colleagues to vote
for Robert Walker of Pennsylvania as majority whip.
Texas's Tom DeLay won the post instead, and
DeLay was a man "who viewed government as a
business-one that would maximize the advantages
of business so that business would then donate to
their political war chests." In this account, Gingrich
and DeLay are not part of the same Republican revolution;
indeed, one of them, DeLay, is a counterrevolutionary,
Stalin to Gingrich's Trotsky. (Yes,
Continetti makes that comparison.) The 1994 whip
election, Continetti argues, became a struggle
"between those who viewed power as a means to the
end of limiting government and those who viewed
power as an end in itself." DeLay's victory was
therefore the beginning of Gingrich's downfall.
Continetti's tale is utterly implausible. To accept
it, you have to believe that
Gingrich was unaware of
the extent to which DeLay
was working behind his
back to undermine him.
You also have to explain
away why many of those
Republicans in Congress
who voted for Gingrich for
one position were also
quite happy to vote for
DeLay for another; surely
they believed that both
men had roughly similar
views on how their party
should conduct itself in
office. Finally, you have to
view Gingrich's attacks on
K Street in the wake of
DeLay's downfall as a con-
tinuation of his idealism,
rather than positioning for
a possible presidential race
a view that only the most
naive could hold.

[Hardhat]

Yes Bush today is looked down upon by most of his constituants 30% is not a good pole. However who is to say that things won't change in the future and that history will not look fondly upon him. Not to sound cliche but what about truman he had an approval rating of about 30% as well and history looks fondly upon him

As far as neo-cons go they are not the majority of the conservative party as many are led to believe it is just those are the members you hear about because they make the most fuss. It has been this way all throughout the history of the U.SA. the war birds of the civil war, the nationalists of alexander hamilton's time the list goes on. Yeah the people of the time look down upon them but it is not like they have valid points. This is not to say i agree with the neo-cons plan to bring religion into the state I whole heartedly oppose that idea, but they do have a point in my opinoin they have just taken it to far. Just like our fore fathers and the Articles of Confederation, people have an over tendacy to over correct the problems they face. The problems we face as neo-cons see it (that i agree with), i dont want to create a huge list so i will sum it up with too many safety net programes.

[EnragedSephiroth]

The fact is that
Gingrich and DeLay,
although they detested
each other, were both
products of the same aggressive conservatism that
swept the Republicans into power in the first place.
Far from representing two radically different forms
of conservatism, they are best viewed as the good
cop/bad cop dynamic of what was until recently a
remarkably unified movement-one man providing
the policy vision, the other adept at getting particular
policies enacted. The K Street Project was not
the product of DeLay's wily machinations, sure to
fall from prominence along with DeLay's fall from
power. (Now that DeLay is no longer majority
leader, Republicans are not engaged in any serious
effort to demolish the project; their current leader,
John Boehner, a former ally of Gingrich, understands
full well its importance). The seeds of the K
Street Project were planted even before Gingrich
assumed his position of majority leader, and the
result will flower so long as conservative Republicans
practice the kinds of politics they do.

Political parties expend the time and grueling
energy to control government for different reasons.
Liberals, while enjoying the perquisites of office, also
want to be in a position to use government to solve
problems. But conservatives have different motives
for wanting power. One is to prevent liberals from
doing so; if government cannot be made to disappear,
at least it can be prevented from doing any
good. The other is to build a political machine in
which business and the Republican Party can
exchange mutual favors; business will lavish cash on
politicians (called campaign contributions) while
politicians will throw the money back at business
(called public policy). Conservatism will always
attract its share of young idealists. And young idealists
will always be disillusioned by the sheer amount
of corruption that people like Gingrich and DeLay
generate. If yesterday's conservative was a liberal
mugged by reality, today's is a free-marketer fattened
by pork.

Transforming the Republican Party into a highly
disciplined organization determined to get its way
without cooperation from the Democrats was an
another objective shared by Gingrich and DeLay.
Indeed, the former, not the latter, deserves the credit
for substituting British-style party discipline and
ideological extremism for bipartisan cooperation and
moderation in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Name an innovation associated with DeLay, and one
discovers that it was previously institutionalized by
Gingrich: developing redistricting rules to favor
Republicans; encouraging House Republicans to
vote as a unified bloc; weakening seniority so as to
strengthen party leaders; freezing the opposition
party out of a role in governance. It would take a
decade after the Republican revolution of 1994 for
the U. S. House of Representatives to fully transform
itself into a body that no longer made a pretense of
valuing fairness and deliberation. But that is only
because Tom DeLay possessed a political advantage
denied Gingrich: a fellow Republican in the White
House.

It is a characteristic trope of political journalism to
blame both parties equally for any malfeasance. But
the partisan zealotry of the current U. S. House of
Representatives has shocked such fair-minded, longterm
observers of Congress as Norman Ornstein and
Thomas Mann; their book, The Broken Branch, is a
lament for a time when Congressmen put the needs
of their institution before those of their party. If
Republican conservatives are trying something new
in the world-and changing one of the two branches
of Congress into an institution more likely to be
found in a one-party state strikes me as new indeedit
is worth asking where their approach came from.
And the answer is the same place where bad governance
comes from: Partisanship this vindictive is part
and parcel of what it means to be a conservative
today.

Historically and philosophically, liberals and conservatives
have disagreed with each other, not only
over the ends political systems should serve, but over
the means chosen to serve those ends. Whether
through the ideas of James Madison, Immanuel
Kant, or John Stuart Mill, liberals have viewed violent
conflict as regrettable and the use of political
institutions as the best way to contain it.

Conservatives, from the days of Machiavelli to such
twentieth-century figures as Germany's Carl
Schmitt, have, by contrast, viewed politics as an
extension of war, complete with no-holds-barred
treatment of the enemy, iron-clad discipline in the
ranks, cries of treason against those who do not support
the effort with full-throated vigor, and total
control over any spoils won. From a conservative
point of view, separation of powers is divisive, tolerance
a luxury, fairness another word for weakness,
and cooperation unnecessary. If conservatives will
not use government to tame Hobbes' state of nature,
they will use it to strengthen Hobbes' state of nature.
Victory is the only thing that matters, and any tactic
more likely to produce victory is justified.
The K Street Project, then, did not arise spontaneously
out of the ether. When Republicans in
Congress began to inform lobbyists that in return for
influence they would have to fire all the Democrats
in their firms, they may have broken with longstanding
traditions, but they were simply carrying
forward politics-as-warfare the way conservative
political philosophers have historically understood it.
Liberals do not generally have objections to working
with conservatives; indeed, having conservatives sign
off on any expansion of government adds to the legitimacy
of that expansion. But conservatives tend to
see working with liberals as corrupting; in the
immortal words of conservative activist Grover
Norquist, "bipartisanship is another name for date
rape." K Street is to lobbying what Fox News is to
journalistic objectivity. In the world that contemporary
conservatives have brought into being, rules are
not applicable to all parties to a conflict. Rules are
part of the conflict, and whoever wins the conflict
gets to change the rules.

[EnragedSephiroth]

Once upon a time, conservatism may have
appealed to history's losers, the agrarian interests displaced
by industry or the small-business owners
being bought out by multinational corporations.
Not any longer. The most dynamic House
Republicans, Gingrich and DeLay among them, did
not arrive on Capitol Hill from rural byways and
once-thriving but now depressed industrial towns;
they came from booming sunbelt communities in the
forefront of global transformation. They exploit
Washington the way farmers once exploited land and
industrial firms exploited workers. Their efforts are
designed to help business and to build their party,
and for those tasks, Congress, and the money at its
disposal, is a weapon to use, not an institution to
shrink. It took conservatives, who in the 18th and
early 19th century supported quasi-feudal states and
distrusted the instabilities of the market, a hundred
years to become advocates of laissez faire. And under
the imperatives of the K Street Project, it took them
just five to abandon their belief in laissezfaire to support
a corrupt business-government partnership
bearing striking resemblance to feudalism.

For a disillusioned idealist such as Matthew
Continetti, Washington, D.C. is now filled with
"people who mouth conservative principles while getting
rich off conservative power." But what good are
conservatives principles without conservative power?
And what chance was there that conservatives could
gain and hold political power without their joined-atthe-
hip connection to K Street? Nearly every electoral
and legislative success conservatives have
enjoyed over the past six years has been crucially
aided by the organizational and financial contributions
of corporate lobbyists. The conservative vision
of the world, because it is so hostile to government
when government is so essential to the way we live
now, remains unattractive to most Americans, which
is why Republicans must rely on money to substitute
for the large popular majorities they are unable to
build and sustain. The idea that it could have been,
or can be, different is a fantasy. A New Englandbased,
patrician-oriented conservatism which insists
on the importance of impersonal standards of high
public conduct is as irrelevant in today's political
economy as a Southern-style, gentlemanly conservatism
that emphasizes chivalry and honor. The cavaliers
and Mugwumps are long-gone from conser-
vatism, and the Duke Cunninghams have replaced
them.

V.
Behind the surge in right-wing criticism of the
Bush presidency is the hope that apr?s le deluge,
Americans will give conservatism another chance.
But even if Americans were inclined to do so, what
kind of conservatism could be offered to them? If it
somehow defied all laws of political gravity and carried
through on its promise to shrink government, conservatism
would add considerably to the level of misery at
home and abroad-and lose whatever majorities it
may have had in the process. If it managed to return
to its roots in a South that no longer exists or a New
England losing population to the rest of the country,
conservatism would return to the marginalization that
characterized its history. If it retreated behind its borders,
it would lack the means to protect itself against
threats emanating from overseas. The conservative
dilemma, omnipresent in the past, looms over conservatism's
future. It can reveal its true face and consign
itself to oblivion or it can govern without conviction
and produce unending incompetence.

There are ways out of the conservative dilemma.
American conservatives could, for example, take
away from the Bush years the lesson that they must
change their ideology if they are ever again to make
the Republican Party a serious party of governance.
This is not beyond the realm of possibility.
Conservatives in the American past-not only
Hamilton and Marshall, but Daniel Webster and
Henry Clay-were in favor of a strong government
capable of meeting national objectives. There
exists, moreover, a modernizing version of conservatism
in contemporary Europe, where conservatives
recognize the inevitability of government but
try to tailor its objectives and improve its competence.
Call this "big government conservatism" if
you wish, but it would have little in common with
that term as President Bush's critics use it to attack
him and his administration. This would not be a
conservatism that used government to pay off
friends and punish enemies but one that sought to
use government to stabilize society and avoid periodic
crises.

Admittedly, not much evidence exists in America
today that conservatives are prepared to move in such
a direction. If anything, they seem to have reinforced
and strengthened their determination to govern as
incompetently and unfairly as they can. The fact that
they will leave behind a public sector in roughly the
same condition that strip miners leave hillsides would
cause nothing but pain to yesterday's patricians, for
whom ideals such as responsibility and soundness were
watchwords. But today's conservatives have no problem
passing on the costs of their present madness to
future generations. Governing well would require
them to use the bully-pulpit of office to educate and
uplift their base. But since contemporary conservatives
get their political energy from angry voices of rage and
revenge, they will always blame others for the failures
built into their ideology. That is why conservatism so
rarely makes for a good governance party. As far as
conservatives are concerned, it is always someone
else's government, one reason they can be so indifferent
to their own mismanagement.

Americans may have elected a Republican president
and Congress, but they are unlikely to go back to a
world in which one illness can devastate their last years
or one storm can destroy their lives. Because government
is the one institution that allows us some control
over our future, conservatism, which distrusts government
so much, is best viewed as a natural counter to
liberalism, which, if left unchecked, tends towards
wasteful bureaucracy.

[cellardoor6]

Engraged, you just get dumber and dumber as the days go by.

[EnragedSephiroth]

Indeed, as the Bush administration
fully proves, conservatism remains a force of
opposition even when it purports to be a governance
party. And so the best that can be hoped for is that
American voters will do for conservatives what they
are unable to do themselves: to vote them out of office
so that they can take their place as the party of opposition
they were meant to be.
-END-

There you have it. The basic message to take away from this is: the idealism behind the neo-conservatives currently running the show is flawed.

Note: the article was taken from a PDF format so bare with the funky alignment of word columns :/ thank you for your patience. I hope this was at least some mildly-entertaining light-reading.

[EnragedSephiroth]

At 10/20/06 06:07 AM, cellardoor6 wrote: Engraged, you just get dumber and dumber as the days go by.

And your ability to sound more and more like you have one of your "many guns" shoved up your ass is admirable because it appears you have not taken notice :) now please post a noteworthy comment rather than a personal insult or gtfo.

[cellardoor6]

I will say this: There are currently no Neo-Conservatives on the Republican ticket, encumbents or challengers.

The use of the word "neo-con" isn't really an academic description, its a pejorative used by political opponents of conservatives in order to give them a bad image. When really, neo-conservativism is pretty rare by the actual interpretation of that outlook.

Beside that, the exerpt you provided is a ridiculously biased piece of propaganda by a prejudicially anti-Republican author, it just makes you look like a fool for using such a thing to start a thread on.

The nonsense that you created this thread with on quite ridiculous. It would be comparable to me using an article or exerpt from a book written by Ann Coulter and using it as a reference to attack liberals. You're not creating an academic source for a discussion, you just created a destined-to-be flame-war over a nonsensical piece of liberal propaganda all while expecting conservatives to retaliate.

You really just want attention don't you?

[EnragedSephiroth]

At 10/20/06 07:04 AM, cellardoor6 wrote: It would be comparable to me using an article or exerpt from a book written by Ann Coulter and using it as a reference to attack liberals.

Ew, you're right, I feel dirty now, lol.

You really just want attention don't you?

No, I knew this article was biased, but that's not the point. What I want is to see if people can cut through the bias and see the article does carry some truths. It's obviously spun in a very liberal manner but what I found interesting on it is the ideology behind conservatism. It creates a paradox when the people in office are people who are against their own jobs... I mean... doesn't that defeat the purpose of them being in office in the first place? It's cool for people to be independent and to be able to responsibly govern themselves, I can live with that. But in times of economic, environmental and/or social catastrophe it would be nice for them to know they have a fully-functional, cohesive and agreeable government to lean on.

[cellardoor6]

At 10/20/06 07:19 AM, EnragedSephiroth wrote:

At 10/20/06 07:04 AM, cellardoor6 wrote: It would be comparable to me using an article or exerpt from a book written by Ann Coulter and using it as a reference to attack liberals.

Ew, you're right, I feel dirty now, lol.

You really just want attention don't you?

No, I knew this article was biased, but that's not the point. What I want is to see if people can cut through the bias and see the article does carry some truths. It's obviously spun in a very liberal manner but what I found interesting on it is the ideology behind conservatism. It creates a paradox when the people in office are people who are against their own jobs...

Do you want me to point out the hundreds of ways how liberals are self-contradictory? I'm sure I'd fill 10 posts with a list.

Besides, if you believe there are 'some truths' where is your point of reference? When there is a message filled with half truths, and partial truths, that doesn't mean the message really has any truth at all. Its all opinion. You can't come to a conclusion that broad and general based on the opinionated rants of an incredibly biased, uncredible source of propaganda. You're not trying to weed throught he bias and find the truth, you're allowing yourself to be manipulated by the clever distortion of truth.

If things like that are where you get your information from and are where you get your political views...well then you have no credibility. I guess I should start a thread on how Liberals are traitors and how its "THE TRUTH" because "ANN COULTER SAYS SO"

[Camarohusky]

I have to say it...

TLDR!!!! Shit, could you have picked a longer article to put on here?

I'm not wasting my time with political fluff. What was 10 posts could have easily been said in 1, maybe 2. Why do you think the government isn't liked? Maybe it's because of fluff and waste...

[Peter-II]

Are any of you actually going to refute the article, or there a "tl;dr" mentality here?

[Peter-II]

At 10/20/06 11:55 AM, Grammer wrote:

At 10/20/06 11:38 AM, Peter-II wrote: Are any of you actually going to refute the article, or there a "tl;dr" mentality here?

I can't refute his opinion, it's his opinion. If he wants to believe conservatives can't govern, then fine. He's wrong, but hey it's just an opinion.

I will admit that refute was a bad way of putting it. However, you are still capable of responding. This forum is dedicated to debate after all.

de'bate [di-beyt]
noun
1. a discussion, as of a public question in an assembly, involving opposing viewpoints

[MortifiedPenguins]

Uh, Cliff notes.

[JakeHero]

The ironic thing is Enraged condemns Fox for being conservatively biased and asserts nothing truthful comes from the, yet presents this article written by an obvious communist sympathizer as legitimate criticisms.

[texicomexico]

Dude, Do not copy-paste an essay! Make up your own!

At 10/20/06 06:18 PM, texicomexico wrote: Dude, Do not copy-paste an essay! Make up your own!

Essay? More like a damn novel!

[Demosthenez]

This conservative presidency and Congress imploded,
not despite their conservatism, but because of it.
Contemporary conservatism is first and foremost
about shrinking the size and reach of the federal government.
This mission, let us be clear, is an ideological
one. It does not emerge out of an attempt to
solve real-world problems, such as managing increasing
deficits or finding revenue to pay for entitlements
built into the structure of federal legislation. It stems,
rather, from the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly
by George W. Bush, that the money government
collects in order to carry out its business properly
belongs to the people themselves.

I stopped reading after this. That is the biggest load of shit ever. It "does not emerge out of an attempt to solve real-world problems?" What a load of horseshit. Yeah, the small governments of America before 1900's, the small governments before Wilson and FDR sure didnt work for shit. Those damn conservatives have no foundation in history to believe a government that governs least governs best. I mean, they only have from 1787 to the early-mid 1900's to show as success.

What a load of horseshit, this isnt an attack on neo-cons, it is an attack on all conservatives. To strawman the conservative position as a position that wants, for no reason at all, to shrink the government is inane. It is irresponsible, it is not scholarly and it is not worth my time to read.

This was a laughable essay. It looks all nice and reads well but it is laughable. The parts I read were riddled with fallasies, contradictions, and untruths. To highlight how every conservative is jumping ship from the Republican party because they arent conservatives and then say the problem with the Bush administration is their conservativism is FUCKING STUPID.

the libertarian conviction, repeated endlessly
by George W. Bush, that the money government
collects in order to carry out its business properly
belongs to the people themselves.

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?!? Letting people keep their own money? NOOO ITS THE GOVERNMENTS MONEY, BITCH. HAND IT OVER. BECAUSE WE ARE LIBERALS WE ARE RIGHT. MUHAHAHA.

[dySWN]

EnragedSepiroth, I usually don't resort to angry words, but being forced to scroll through about ten pages of utterly biased meaningless shit is really not the way I wanted to end my day. In fact, I'd go so far as to demand that you give me the last several minutes of my life back.

[EnragedSephiroth]

At 10/20/06 07:19 PM, FAB0L0US wrote: This was a laughable essay. It looks all nice and reads well but it is laughable. The parts I read were riddled with fallasies, contradictions, and untruths. To highlight how every conservative is jumping ship from the Republican party because they arent conservatives and then say the problem with the Bush administration is their conservativism is FUCKING STUPID.

Hey I didn't write it. I agree with you it is fallible and worst of all, it has zero citations >:/ that just plain pissed me off. I just wanted to put it up to see how people would react to it. I'm glad you took something out of the essay, whether it be destructive or constructive criticism. I say that with no sarcasm.

The medicare system, FEMA and the situation in Iraq are in the current state they are in because of the administration's politics. That's probably one of the few statements I find truthful in this article. We'd not be in Iraq if this administration were not in power, the medicare system had less issues under clinton and FEMA never had problems assessing a disaster. I'm sure someone's going to argue somehow FEMA could not respond properly to the New Orleans Katrina disaster because of the magnitude of it. Even then, there was a huge lag of days in getting people out of the area, but that's a whole other can of worms so I'll stop there with FEMA and Katrina.

[EnragedSephiroth]

At 10/21/06 03:33 AM, dySWN wrote: EnragedSepiroth, I usually don't resort to angry words, but being forced to scroll through about ten pages of utterly biased meaningless shit is really not the way I wanted to end my day. In fact, I'd go so far as to demand that you give me the last several minutes of my life back.

Dude I said in the beginning before the article even began "it's a long read... skim through" and the fact you read through it acts as a disclaimer that you knew you were in for a long read because it said so in the beginning. I know it's a long-ass read if you're one of those readers who sits down and soaks up every word, so I apologize for posting such a long ass article. Never again.

[dySWN]

At 10/21/06 03:42 AM, EnragedSephiroth wrote: I'm sure someone's going to argue somehow FEMA could not respond properly to the
New Orleans Katrina disaster because of the magnitude of it. Even then, there was a
huge lag of days in getting people out of the area, but that's a whole other can of
worms so I'll stop there with FEMA and Katrina.

No, Katrina was more the fault of poorly-trained civil engineers than anyone else. Why the frank would anyone consider NOT making the levees bigger and stronger once it became apparent that the state is sitting in a place where tornadoes, tropical storms, etc are frequent? As an engineering student, I demand a good wrench-slapping of those who lacked the foresight to do their static homework well enough.

[EnragedSephiroth]

At 10/21/06 03:49 AM, dySWN wrote: No, Katrina was more the fault of poorly-trained civil engineers than anyone else. Why the frank would anyone consider NOT making the levees bigger and stronger once it became apparent that the state is sitting in a place where tornadoes, tropical storms, etc are frequent? As an engineering student, I demand a good wrench-slapping of those who lacked the foresight to do their static homework well enough.

That's true, however, didn't the city of New Orleans, namely the mayor request help from the government to fix the levys before they broke? I distinctly remember talk about this all over the news... or was I wrong :\