New Right Meets New Left - And Nanny State Approves

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Nov 24, 2003 | by C. Bradley Thompson

Byline: C. Bradley Thompson, SPECIAL TO INSIGHT

What is the state of the American political right in 2003? Judging by political appearances, things couldn't be better. For the first time since Reconstruction, the Republican Party controls all three branches of the federal government. There is a Republican in the White House, the GOP controls the House of Representatives and the Senate and seven out of nine justices on the Supreme Court were appointed by Republican presidents.

Better yet, as conservative columnist William Rusher said recently, the "conservative movement has come to dominate the Republican Party totally."

So, what exactly is the conservative philosophy that now dominates the Republican Party? In recent years, the GOP has adopted two complementary philosophies: a moral philosophy called "compassionate conservatism" and a philosophy of governance known as "neoconservatism."

Compassionate conservatism claims to combine free-market policies with programs for the poor. During the election campaign, then-candidate

George W. Bush occasionally expressed his support for a market economy, but he saved his true enthusiasm for the notion that the downtrodden are deserving not only of our compassion but of our "love" and "charity" as well.

Compassionate conservatism's moral code teaches that the federal government has an "obligation" to nationalize almsgiving. At the heart of President Bush's compassionate conservatism is his plan to save the welfare state through his "faith-based initiative."

Republicans tout the president's faith-based initiative as an application of welfare to free-market principles. Government-funded welfare will be distributed by outsourcing federal money to private middlemen i.e., churches and charitable organizations.

Presumably this "privatization" of the welfare system will inspire competition and choice. Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and various California-style religions will compete to offer the most love and the best soup.

Practically speaking, what this means is that when Democrats are in power federal money will go to churches and organizations run by so-called Marxist "liberationist" Christians to promote socialist values; when Republicans are in power, federal money will go to Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority to promote conservative values. Both parties will give money to Muslim "charities" to demonstrate their religious tolerance.

But it goes much further. What compassionate conservatism really means is this: Need someone else's need, anyone's need is a legitimate moral claim on your life, and you have a moral obligation an obligation that will be enforced by the government if necessary to support that need. But such duties are limitless. If one child suffers, if there is one person in need somewhere, anywhere, in the world then you and your fellow countrymen have a moral duty to do something about it.

Observe how this works in practice. Last year European leaders called for a world tax to help fight poverty in "developing" nations. Bush rejected the idea as a violation of U.S. sovereignty but publicly sanctioned the moral purpose of the tax. He said that we Americans are duty-bound to "share our wealth" with poor nations, and then he promised to tax the American people to increase U.S. aid to poor nations from $10 billion to $15 billion within three years.

And what of neoconservatism? Traditionally, neoconservatives have viewed Republicans as "the stupid party," but now they aim to fix that. This is how Irving Kristol puts it: Their aim, he said, is to "convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy."

The distinguishing characteristic of the neoconservatives is their pragmatism. They wax dyspeptic at moral arguments either supporting capitalism or against the welfare state. They cynically declare that the "age of ideology" is over, by which they mean that the pious moralism of the Old Right and the New Left must be abandoned so that they can get on with the business of managing more efficiently the practical and inevitable realities of the modern welfare state.

"Neocons" prefer capitalism to all other social systems, but only begrudgingly, because it works, because it delivers the goods and because the alternatives are worse. They also accept (less begrudgingly) the idea of a limited welfare state as morally proper, historically inevitable and politically necessary, but they think it can be tamed, controlled and directed toward conservative purposes.

The neocons urge Republicans to be more "practical." What the party needs, they argue, is a new generation of political entrepreneurs a new managerial class that knows how simultaneously to use the rhetoric of liberty and the rhetoric of altruism, and knows how to create the illusion that they can achieve conservative ends by liberal means. (Or was that liberal ends by conservative means?)

By controlling and tinkering with the levers and processes of government, the neocons think they can "relimit" government simply by restructuring what they call the incentive mechanisms of America's political institutions. Thus they favor gimmicks such as a balanced-budget amendment, term limits, federalism, charter schools, school-voucher programs and the privatization of certain government programs.