Most Republicans are essentially conservatives.
Following Aristotle’s distrust of politics as a “science,” conservatism is less an ideology with litmus test issues than a temperament. Conservatives don’t fear change, but they don’t worship it either. They are not, therefore, reactionaries and they are not goo-goo futurists.
Some change is bad and some change is good. How do they know?
Conservatives do not trust government absolutely, but they are content with the Constitution of 1789. They love their nation, but realize (unlike John McCain) that their country is not the final cause for which they should live. Most conservatives recognize a necessary and messy tension between law and liberty.
Government is not always bad (a kind of weird anarchic libertarianism that is trendy in every generation of college undergraduates), but it also not always good (the soft-core socialism of much of the rest of politically aware undergraduates). Conservatives are not Utopian . . . we don’t trust our princes, but are not willing to chop off their heads either.
Bad government harms the other basic societal institution, especially the traditional family. Good government backs up the other basic societal institutions, especially the family.
There is not a single Republican running for President, except perhaps for Rudy Giuliani, who is not obviously a conservative. All of them make mistakes, but conservatives should stop trying to develop Inquisitions to apostatize candidates. Even Rudy, if he wants to be one of us, should be given a listen.
We are a state of mind, thank God, not a cause. Conservatives are always suspicious of messianic causes, since Messiah came and was not a politician. Christian conservatives are, in the end, neither Republicans or Democrats, but monarchists under (as some of the founders puts it) no King, but King Jesus.
We are suspicious of big revolutionary changes which almost always do more harm than good. Even when we must support big change, as in the American Revolution, we are like George Washington and not Sam Adams. We worry a great deal about mob rule, which is why our “revolution” ended up with a lasting Constitution while other more ideological (and philosophically coherent) revolutions ended in mass murder and tyranny.
Give me Washington and you can keep Napoleon and Stalin.
In short, conservatives don’t expect heaven on earth or any politician do better than get most of the muddle of human affairs right. That’s why we liked Reagan. He knew he had to beat communism, didn’t trust government, but didn’t try to do the impossible and whack it away (which most people didn’t want) while he was in office.
Reagan did what he could, not what ideologues wished him to do.
Fundamentally conservatives are supportive of other institutions as being more important than government, but especially the family. While they generally favor fairly limited government as being best for most families , they recognize that at present most Americans do not.
Conservative leaders, including favorites such as Rush, often forget that we are not a church or a pure ideology. Let’s leave that to the “-isms” we had to defeat in the twentieth-century.
Conservatives can disagree about the direction that is needed at the moment. Is this a moment where smaller government is needed and achieving it is desirable and possible? Or is this a moment where radical cuts in the central government would be too revolutionary and where “trimming” and using what people wish to buttress other institutions is the best we can do?
To use an analogy: conservatives (unlike reactionaries) are willing to give the masses some of what they want to head off worse.
Let me give an example.
Some modern day conservatives are getting such an ideological edge (see the semi-libertarians) that they are willing to kill anyone who is opposed to cutting the federal department of education . . . or who does not pretend they are going to do it.
I am personally opposed to any federal involvement in education, but bluntly running on that platform now is quixotic and revolutionary. My kids are not in public schools, but most Americans want them for their kids. They also strongly want the Feds involved in education.
A good conservative would rather Bill Bennett ran the Department, doing the good he can, then be “pure” and have a socialist running it. Too many conservatives act as if any present candidate will actually cut the Department of Education.
Two good conservative Presidents of the twentieth century demonstrate the two sides of conservatism: Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Roosevelt is often misunderstood as a “progressive” in the modern sense and Reagan as a pure libertarian. Both were deeply conservative men, who lived in very different times.
A Bull Moose Republican, who is conservative, lives in an age of possible revolution and cuts it off by adopting as much of it as he can while saving what he can.
A Reagan Republican, who is a conservative, lives in an age where shrinking government is possible and does so as much as he can.
TRex lived in an age when socialist revolution was possible. Socialists got hundreds of thousands of votes for president in vastly smaller population. Extremist talk was everywhere. Big business (one social institution) was also harming the family and other social institutions, including government.
Giving it unrestricted liberty at that moment was bad a idea, because it encouraged the possibility of a dreadful rise in more tyrannical movements (socialism, nativism, and fascism). For a conservative, like the elite Roosevelt, to bring changes at the edges and reforms where moderate and conservative heartland Americans demanded them headed off worse. He brought slow change which avoided big change.
TRex saved fairly free markets by making them slightly less free.
Reagan, on the other hand, lived in a golden moment of history when people were willing to consider the idea that government had gone too far. As Clinton said “the era of big government” was over . . . Clinton acting (as Grover Cleveland did) as to imitate successful Republicans. . . because government was stifling business. Reagan introduced important and permanent changes in the tax code which led to a great boom in prosperity which has continued with sputters to this day.
No Republican, including Rudy, now running wants to chain business again with the regressive tax policy of the Carter years. Reagan also (rightly) saw that other areas of government were too big (like education), but that the people were not for his reforms. He took half a loaf instead of none.
Both TRex (who in older life became too progressive) and Reagan (who when he failed was too ideological) were successful leaders of the conservative movement, because they do great good to families and killed off the biggest threats to freedom in their time. TRex ended most chances of a vibrant socialist party by giving Christians and heartland folk (in places like Ohio) a place to go other than secular socialism.
In that sense, Bryanism (the ideas of William Jennings Bryan) was just a slightly (very slightly) more developed form of conservatism with a leader who was not temperamentally suited to be president. Bryan was no liberal in the modern sense, but a conservative who thought more changes were needed even than TRex. Most of these changes, like votes for women and even more robust food and drug laws, were actually implemented and are now so popular that only an extremist opposes them.
When the choice between the parties was between a Bryan or a TRex, despite the rhetoric of the day, it was really a choice between two conservatives who wanted to preserve by changing. Like Disreali in England, they loved the old ways so much that both wanted to kill those that could not be saved (to give them a loving burial) while preserving everything that could be preserved.
They brought on small changes to avoid disastrous revolutions. Reagan did the same. He saved the conservative movement from impotence by accepting the possible and doing what many deemed impossible. He helped save us (with conservatives like Truman) from communism by allowing for a social safety net. He did not touch Social Security, because the political will did not exist to do it.
I believe the Huckabee campaign is a revival of the Bull Moose Republicanism of Teddy Roosevelt (TRex).
Candidates like Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson represent the Reagan wing of the party.
To non-ideologues outside conservatism it is easy to see how similar Huckabee and Thompson are. Thompson will talk about cutting the Department of Education, Huckabee will not. Neither will do so, because there is no political will to do so.
The question is this: are we in a TRex moment where we need a Huckabee to save us from bigger government . . . because the people want international business reigned in . . . and Huck will do it just a bit? Or are we in a Reagan moment where people will allow for further trimming in the size of government?
When he ran for president George W. Bush recognized that we were at a TRex moment. Compassionate conservatism was just a revival of Edwardian (or late Victorian) Bull Moose politics. Bush, a patrician, would save us from worse by doing the least that could be done in the best possible way.
The War and his perceived failure (by most Americans but not by me) has clouded all these issues in most people’s minds. Bush, unlike TRex or Reagan, has not seemed competent.
Republicans must ask which direction is best for now . . . or risk losing everything. It is easy to say, “We will put up with Clinton, wait for people to get sick of her, then sweep in with a pure candidate.” but as Reagan demonstrates it is very, very hard to actually cut government programs.
If we allow bigger changes, it will take a bigger change to fix them. Since the bigger the change the worse conditions have to be to motivate people to want them, no conservative can root for such huge American social failure.
I, for one, refuse to count of a depression during the Clinton years wiping us all out so we can win a 2012 race. That is ideological, unpatriotic, and not conservative.
I am, on the whole, convinced we can still win with a Reagan moment, but if Huck gets the nomination it will (I think) prove this wrong. We are in a TRex moment and I will vote for the Bull Moose over the socialist.
Let me give a large hat tip to Joe Carter at Evangelical Outpost for his great series on being conservative which starts here. Much thanks to a thoughtful email writer who also provoked this post.