Good article Win. Your snip was a little out of context though as the end of the essay shows. There is a growing discomfort with the social conservatives. Andrew Sullivan is certainly not endorsing the point of view you snipped - he is rejecting it.
Paul
Thus modern conservatism, which began as a movement of personal liberation from the state and intellectual skepticism in response to ideological certainty, has become its precise opposite. Convinced that society is in mortal moral and cultural peril, the most influential conservative intellectuals have made their peace with big government, censorship and the presence of sectarian dogma in politics. The supremacy of this way of thinking among conservatives is perhaps best illustrated by David Frum, a young writer who has long supported a more economically based conservatism, one that would return the movement to its 1980's emphasis on tax cuts and smaller government. But his rationale for such a move in his recent book, ''Dead Right,'' is revealing. He wants to limit government not to expand personal freedom, but to so rob the middle class of financial security that they would have little choice but to return to the social mores of the 1950's. In order not to fall through the widening cracks of the vanishing welfare state, Americans would have no option, Frum argues, but to strengthen family ties, avoid divorce and cling more carefully to children, spouses and parents.
In other words, even those conservative thinkers who still argue for a low-tax, small-government philosophy have been unable to make headway with their peers without cloaking their case in the austerity of moral revival. The blithe optimism of Reagan, the joy that conservatives once took in the sheer unpredictability of a free people in a free society, has been replaced by a dark dread of how people could misuse such freedom, and the desperate need to coerce them back into line.
In the 1990's, as America has experienced a phenomenal burst of new wealth, as conservative values have enjoyed a revival among the young, as divorce and abortion have dropped, as welfare has been transformed and fiscal prudence restored, intellectual conservatives have responded by launching a bitter crusade to save the country from hell. No wonder that during the Lewinsky matter, Republicans consistently misread the public mood and the popular culture. No wonder they managed to let one of the most duplicitous Presidents in history seem an object of unjust persecution. No wonder they have yet no clue how to engage or inspire the vibrant, new America that their predecessors did so much to bring about.
This is not to say, of course, that morality is not an important, or an importantly conservative, issue. Conservatives have always been concerned with morality -- and rightly so. They have long understood that political order rests upon a vibrant civil society, and on the morality that such a society sustains. But conservatives have also always been aware of the dangers of excessively policing that morality, and of the evils that can occur when the morally certain gain power. Hence the apparent conservative paradox. Conservatives want morality but they don't want the big government that could effectively enforce it. For true conservatives, the evils of moral chaos are usually outweighed by the evils of a moralizing big brother.
And so conservatives have learned over the years to live with a little paradox. They have resisted the temptation either to become morally indifferent libertarians or to become morally repugnant ideologues. Although they have worried about moral and social trends, they have resisted easy pessimism and the jeremiad. And they have left the impositions of morals to the churches and preachers and mothers and fathers and teachers and friends of America to sort out. When it comes to preaching, true conservatives would much prefer to praise the examples of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa than to demonize the likes of Dennis Rodman or Marv Albert.
Above all, true conservatives have not been depressed by freedom. This, after all, is where the modern conservative movement in America started in the 1950's -- in a revolt against the creeping power of the postwar welfare state. When American conservatives lose sight of that central strain in their philosophy, when their love of freedom becomes an afterthought to their concern for morality, then they lose sight of what makes them both conservative and quintessentially American. They lose sight of what distinguishes them from the darker history of European conservatism, and what sets them apart even from the government-friendly Toryism of their English cousins.
Truly American conservatives would not recoil at the greater liberty enjoyed by women, racial minorities and homosexuals, as the truly American conservative Barry Goldwater showed. In the last decade, true American conservatives would have been heartened by the declines in divorce, crime and teen-age births, and encouraged by the move among gay people for more stable, responsible relationships. They would have been elated by the collapse of collectivism and totalitarianism abroad, and encouraged by the return of fiscal prudence and social responsibility at home. They would have seen in Bill Clinton a dangerous proclivity for dishonesty and abuse of power, but they would not have seen him as the degenerate apotheosis of an entire generation -- let alone an entire nation. And they would have seen the emergence of religious dogmatists on the far right as a threat to constitutional order and political civility, not as a boon for votes.
Above all, they would not have fatally overplayed their hand and tried to impeach a President not for illegality but for immorality, and they wouldn't have shredded the virtues of privacy and decency and common sense for the emotional release of a cultural jihad. Today's conservatives -- the intellectuals in particular -- have begun to replace skepticism with certainty, faith in ordinary people with contempt for the masses, religion with theocracy. These are fools' bargains. And unworthy of conservatism itself.
Moreover, this shift has also undoubtedly weakened, rather than strengthened, the ability of conservatives to address moral issues in a limited but compelling way. When conservative extremists accuse Bill Clinton of murder, when Republicans make a divisive, difficult issue like abortion a litmus test for moral purity, then most Americans will be reluctant to listen to them when they worry about illegitimacy, juvenile crime or Presidential law-breaking. Conservative moralizing, in other words, requires a certain temperance to be truly effective.
Of course, conservatives have now achieved a political ascendancy regardless of these mistakes. Thanks in part to the collapse of the liberal alternative, and to the self-destruction of Bill Clinton, the flaws of religious zeal and moral authoritarianism have not prevented conservatives' rise to cultural and political power. That makes the danger of hubris all the greater and the need for self-restraint all the more pressing. In the past, conservatives have rightly been praised as much for what they haven't done as for what they have. Maybe today's conservative generation, poised on the brink of unprecedented power, will heed that lesson. But maybe, God help us, they won't. |
