HOW CAN YOU NOT HATE THE MAN WHO'S STRANGLING YOU (via Tom Morin):

Hatred or Hope?: America should not let loathing chart their political destiny. (Michael Novak, 7/23/04, National Review)

When one looks at Bush, and then at the hatred nurtured for him, it is very hard to grasp the connection. Why? Why do they hate him so?

There is something so innocent, direct, fresh-faced, open, Tom Sawyerish in George Bush's manner — something so western, Christian, decent, even kind. And there is such candor in his eyes and behavior that the ferocity of the hatred aimed at him seems completely out of proportion. The hatred is a suit that ill fits him.

Nevertheless, George W. Bush has been re-conceived and re-wrought into everything that the sophisticated Leftist absolutely hates about Americana: Its innocence. Its boyishness. Its Christianity. Its unpretentiousness. Its heedlessness of all the shibboleths the Left most highly values.

And, in addition, the president exercises unsuspected political skills. The man has actually won most of the political fights he's taken on. And he has turned the country in a far more Reaganite direction than anyone ever imagined under that anodyne term, "compassionate conservatism."

Personalizing Social Security? Cutting the teachers' unions out of total control of the schools? Supplanting the governmental plantation with private charitable initiatives, which actually show better success rates than the welfare state? The handwriting is on the wall, piercing through the dreams of the big-government Left, foretelling the end of the social-democratic illusion.

How did this hick have the nerve to be so radical in government — he who so barely won the election of 2000? (Stole it, the most bitter partisans still say, despite all the studies disproving it.) How did he have the nerve?

The important recognition here is that George Bush should be hated by the Left (and the far and libertarian Rights) for exactly the same reason that FDR--another third rate intellect of elite background--was by the old Right: he's a revolutionary.

For some sense of just how revolutionary, check out this one, No Angels: Justifying the welfare state by demand is a sure way to keep it around forever. (Jonah Goldberg, 7/23/04, National Review)

Wade Horn, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, responded to an item I posted in the Corner a few weeks ago. I wrote:

YUCK, YUCK, YUCK George W. Bush once again says absurd things about the role of government (nod to Andrew Sullivan):

"[T]he role of government is to stand there and say, 'We're going to help you.' The job of the federal government is to fund the providers who are actually making a difference."

He was talking about giving federal aid to couples with marriage counseling and the like. I know I've said this before, but if Bill Clinton had proposed spending piles of money on marriage counseling — other than for himself — conservatives would have screamed bloody murder about liberal social engineering and whatnot. Now, this might be a good policy compared to others, but it isn't a policy someone who believes in limited government would advocate. And beyond the specifics of the policy itself, it is not the role of the government to say "we're going to help you" — unless, say, the Chinese Red Army is encircling your town.

Horn's full response is here but the important part is this:

All good conservatives want smaller government. To achieve that end, we need a plan. Merely wishing it were so is not a plan. The fact is that children (and adults) living in healthy and stable marriages are less in need of government services. By offering marriage-education services — on a purely voluntary basis — to interested couples whereby they can develop the knowledge and skills necessary to form and sustain healthy marriages, we will help reduce the need for more intrusive government interventions later on.

Granted, this is new work. Nobody knows for sure whether it will succeed. But one thing is certain: Unless we can reverse the decline of marriage, demand for an ever-expanding welfare state will continue. The president's Healthy Marriage Initiative is no panacea, but it's a step in the right direction. [...]

[T]his is pretty much the first time I've heard this argument from the administration, never mind from a rank-and-file conservative. What I have heard are statements like the one above from President Bush in which he talks about how the government must leap when people are hurting and so forth.

And in a sense, Horn is making the exact same case as Bush. In his letter he says that without remedying the declining state of marriage, the "need" and the "demand" for an "ever-expanding welfare state" will increase or continue. According to this formulation — combined with the president's — the role of the government is to provide whatever services are "demanded" of it. And these services need not be demanded by a majority of voters but merely by that fraction of the whole that feels the "need" for them. After all, it was President Bush who said last Labor Day, "We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move."

I understand that Horn is on the side of the angels, but I hope he can see how radical a reformulation of conservative dogma this really is. The doctrine of limited government holds that government is, well, limited — that governmental neglect at the federal level is in fact benign. Conservative dogma holds that the people cannot develop the habits of the heart necessary to take care of themselves if they are being taken care of by the government. Moreover, a government that provides services simply because they are demanded is a government that reserves the right to take as much of my property and wealth as it deems necessary to meet the demands of somebody else.

I generally dislike arguments that warn of socialism these days. But if government is obliged to meet the demands of every needy person, what countervailing principle is there to protect the "un-needy" from a government in search of evermore resources to "help" the needy? Surely this limitation is more than pragmatic. Surely there's a principle that says there are some things the government can't do even if those things would be good and would help people. Or is the only limitation on government the boundaries of what it can get away with at a given moment?

In a sense, Horn has turned the "if men were angels" formulation on its head. We used to believe that since men are not angels, limited government is necessary. Now it seems to be that until men are made into angels — and by our own hand — unlimited government is required. After all, flawed men will make demands on the government when they are hurting and until those flaws and those pains are remedied, their demands must stir the government "to move."

Now, if that truly is the first Mr. Goldberg has heard of the argument then he hasn't been paying any attention to George W. Bush, Tony Blair or Bill Clinton (as campaigner, not as president). Mr. Goldberg is apparently a libertarian utopian--in his belief that the roll back of government he envisions is even remotely possible as well as in the belief that people will develop good habits if only no one helps them. The peoples of every democracy on Earth have rejected the first possibility--the great mass of people, unsurprisingly, are rather enamored of the notion of transferring money from the wealthier to themselves--and the second is rejected by both human nature and history. The absence of government assistance did not render the peoples of the past ideal citizens.

Compassionate conservatism, like The Third Way or New Democratism, proceeds from a certain assumption that seems nearly undeniable in rational terms, though far Right and far Left must deny it for emotional reasons: the fact that the people demand a social safety net is not going away, however, the statist experiments of the 20th century rather conclusively demonstrate that unless market forces are brought to bear to the greatest extent possible that net can not survive not does it ultimately benefit people. The radical goal of the Left/Right synthesis then is essentially to trick people into providing for their own social security. This will demand something unacceptable to the Right: that government mandate to everyone that they participate in a wide variety of personal savings programs and that basic services be provided in order to prepare them for suufficiently productive lives that they can fund their own futures. It demands something equally unacceptable of the Left: that government welfare programs change from redistrubutionist to predominantly self-funded.

This does leave conservatism as Mr. Goldberg conceives it in tatters, but it is conservative in the most profound way: if successful it will giove every citizen, or the great bulk, a fiercely vested interest in the stability and productivity of his own society. Traditional conservatism has a reverence for property, but its greast flaw is that there are too few property holders for a democratic society to be much interested in protecting them. Make everyone a property holder and you make everyone conservative.

MORE:

It is far easier, as Burke and every other conservative has known, to instill a sense of the value of order in each citizen, and to encourage his sense of the true values of liberty when he has an overriding sense of holding a 'stake in society'.

-Robert Nisbet, Conservatism: Dream and Reality

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 25, 2004 2:58 PM