Tucson, Arizona Wednesday, 24 April 2002
Right's rift is trifling
By George F. Will
Reports of tensions between George W. Bush and conservatives are appearing in media that are often uncomprehending of, unsympathetic to and fond of finding conflicts among conservatives.
The reports concern something real, but by focusing on conservative activists in Washington, the reports ignore Jonathan Swift's warning that it is folly "to mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse for the voice of the kingdom."
Some conservatives are caught in a time warp. Bush is, second only to Ronald Reagan and not second by much, the most conservative president in living memory. And he's lucky.
Lucky? Three Bush decisions, all contradicting long-standing Bush positions, dismayed conservatives who care deeply about free speech (he signed campaign finance reform legislation), free trade (he imposed steel tariffs that will be ineffectual without being innocuous) and Israel's freedom (he began speaking the way the State Department thinks). Then Al Gore gave a speech.
At a Democratic confabulation in Florida, Gore reprised his paint-by-numbers populism of 2000 ("we stand with the little guy") and said nothing about today's largest issue, Israel's peril. Suddenly, conservatives remembered.
They remembered what Bush never forgets: that the country is tied, politically. That in 2000 half the country favored Gore. That three consecutive elections have produced merely plurality presidents and that at the end of the 19th century five consecutive elections did that. The conservatism that defined itself in reaction against the New Deal - minimal government conservatism - is dead.
But Bush has positioned his party as "pro-choice" where it will matter most to most Americans in coming years - regarding education (freedom to choose among public and private schools), Social Security (freedom to invest a portion of Social Security taxes in private retirement plans) and medicine (government assistance that fosters freedom to shop for care).
But some conservatives, addicted to disgruntlement, still have the oppositional mentality that characterized conservatism between the coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the departure of Jimmy Carter.
Many older conservatives retain this oppositional mentality because they are older: Habits, especially intellectual ones, die hard. Many younger conservatives have an oppositional mentality for two reasons.
It is fun - it feels heroic - being an embattled church-militant in an unconverted world. And the conspicuous culture - the media and campuses - is hostile.
Of the three Bush decisions that conservatives rightly abhorred, two - imposing tariffs and refusing to veto the campaign finance legislation (he has vetoed nothing in 15 months) - are not likely to establish patterns.
Campaign finance reform is finished for now, and Bush cannot have enjoyed the reaction, here or abroad, to his protectionism.
The most important of his three mistakes - his "evenhandedness" regarding Israel and the terrorist Yasser Arafat - probably is self-correcting:
He knows which delusional advisers mistakenly assured him that if he issued commands to all parties in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he would be obeyed.
And regarding his first 15 months: His tax cuts will do more than Republican congressional majorities would do to limit government activism.
His education bill deeply disappointed only those conservatives who mistakenly want education reform driven by Washington.
And concerning the most momentous policy problem, conservatives cannot fault the substance of Bush's decisions on biomedical matters (cloning, stem cells).
Which is why conservatives in the capital should be more like conservatives across the country: on balance, quite pleased.
* George F. Will is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group. |
