It was my father who first pointed out to me that George W. Bush governed not as a conservative, but as an old-style liberal, like Kennedy or Johnson. That is the essence of neoconservatism: “big-government conservatism,” as The Weekly Standard might put it. Neocons believe in a strong national defense (much like JFK) as well as an activist government at home.
The “neocon moment” was 9/11. An attack on the homeland was an excellent justification for W to change his governing style. Instead of flaccid “compassionate conservatism” at home, he pushed for the activist Department of Homeland of Security. Instead of a Clintonian hope for “the end of history,” W opted for transforming the Middle East, to in effect bring democracy to the Islamic world, either through encouragement (Egypt, Saudi Arabia), infiltration (Iran), or the point of a sword (Iraq).
And so now we’ve had nearly 8 years of “neoconservatism,” and the public is all confused. Both parties spend big domestically. Will a change really matter? One party wants to keep our troops in Iraq, which makes sense as long as we’re winning; the other party wants to pull out, even if we’re winning. Regardless of who’s in charge, the American public now embraces the welfare state wholeheartedly and “asks not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you.” No one thinks twice about government intervention to fix the mortgage crisis (brought on by greedy bankers and inadequate borrowers), “global warming” (which becomes “global climate change” as soon as there’s a cold day in New York or L.A. after May 1), or high gas prices (when the easiest fix would be for government to get out of the way and let the private sector drill for more oil off Alaska, California, and Florida). Which is to say, George W. Bush is almost as bad for the true believers of the Republican Party as Bill Clinton was for the true believers of the Democrat Party. This wasn’t terribly hard to see if one read about Bush’s policies as Texas governor–he got elected, then re-elected by passing the Democrats’ program!
So given that the nation has gotten used to liberal governance, conservatives should hardly be surprised that the top three choices for president are now liberals, with John McCain being merely the least objectionable. Republicans drank at the neocon trough for eight years–spending money on constiutents, getting a taste of imperial power–and then they wondered why, when actual conservatives came into the game (Fred Thompson, maybe Ron Paul), they found them boring and unambitious. It’s really simple: we all got suckered by the grand powers that the supposed new philosophy was giving us, and we got greedy. But it wasn’t a new philosophy, it was an old philosophy, started under Woodrow Wilson, and transplanted into a new party.
So now we have no conservatives running for president, and a Republican who saves his best jabs for attacking conservatives, and we wonder why. It’s because we tasted blood, and learned to enjoy it. What are our options now? My best hope: McCain (a liberal) as president and a bunch of conservatives (a la the class of 1994) in the Congress. That is merely a hope, I fear, but it is still within the realm of possibility.
