Two of the leading lights of this "reform conservative" business are Pete Wehner, who holds forth at Commentary, and Ramesh Ponnuru, who is a senior editor at National Review.
Hayward launches his observation by looking at what William Vogeli has to say in a piece about it all at the Claremont Review of Books.
I'll cut to the chase and say that I am solidly with Vogeli and think Wehner and Ponnuru are all wet. Especially Wehner, who makes my teeth grind with most of what he has to say on anything. He has a bad case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, as far as I'm concerned.
Vogeli says that a conservatism based on the selling point that "our five-point proposals for dealing with this or that social need and concern are bounded, decentralized, and nimble, while liberals’ eight-point proposals are bloated, intrusive, and ineffective" is no actual conservatism at all."
Both Wehner and Ponnuru respond, as Hayward reports.
Ponnuru merely stresses a need he perceives for conservatism to sell itself based on pragmatic solutions to contemporary societal problems. I gather that he thinks that thereby, people will detect the outlines of the body of principles conservatives champion.
But it's Wehner's response to Vogeli that is downright hurl-worthy.
Okay, I'm going to offer the same Wehner excerpt that Hayward does, because it is so poisonously off-base:
If Voegeli believes that the New Deal and the Great Society are inherently illegitimate and conservatives ought to wage a full-scale, fundamental assault on them—that conservatives should proudly promise to uproot every last vestige of them—then he will destroy conservatism as a viable political movement. The eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson summarized this political reality when he said, “Telling people who want clean air, a safe environment, fewer drug dealers, a decent retirement, and protection against catastrophic medical bills that the government ought not to do these things is wishful or suicidal politics.” There is plenty of evidence that Americans are unhappy with the performance of modern government; there is little evidence to suggest that they are unhappy with the aims of modern government. It is not as though the New Deal was snuck through by a crafty Franklin Roosevelt and has been resented by the American people ever since. Whether conservatives like it or not, the pillars of the New Deal and most of the Great Society have been strongly and consistently reaffirmed in election after election, both congressional and presidential. Since the New Deal, in fact, no national politician has been elected promising to undo it, including the conservative icon Ronald Reagan.
Damn it, principles are immutable or they're not principles, Pete.
If the central questions are the relationship between the state and the individual and the need for free individuals to choose timeless virtues, then we have no truck with anything - anything - that presumes any proper degree of dependence on government for that which free, robust, viruous individuals ought to be providing for themselves.
This line of "reasoning" sounds a great deal like a point I've heard George Will make a few times. I paraphrase a bit, but he says that Americans since the early 20th century have broadly decided that government ought to address two basic aspects of the human condition: sickness and old age.
Tell it to the Framers, George.
Listen up, Pete: These New Deal programs you take as givens were cooked up by rabid statists such as Rex Tugwell and Frances Perkins. Their intent was to shift the publics entire set of assumptions to the point at which they saw these programs as permanent and the benefits accruing thereunto as "rights."
No. Just no.
If real conservatism is a difficult sell, then the task before us is to come up with an effective way to sell it.
Voegli is right, and you, Pete, deserve contempt.
And thanks to Hayward for putting the two sides of this crucial debate before us.
No comments:
Post a Comment