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The Future of the GOPWhat Michael Gerson's Heroic Conservatism gets wrong.

By Ross Douthat
Posted Monday, Nov. 26, 2007, at 1:11 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Particularly since Gerson's central argument is basically correct: American conservatism needs to stand for something besides government-cutting if it hopes to regain the majority that George W. Bush won (and quickly lost). At its best, Heroic Conservatism is a necessary corrective to the right's mythologizing of its own past, which cultivates the pretense that small-government purity has always been the key to Republican success. By way of rebuttal, Gerson points out that conservatives tend to win elections only when they convince voters that they mean to reform the welfare state, rather than do away with it entirely. This was true of 1990s success stories like Rudy Giuliani in New York and Tommy Thompson in Wisconsin; it was true of the Contract With America, a far less ideological document than right-wing nostalgists make it out to be; and it was true of Ronald Reagan himself, who slowed the growth of government but hardly cut it to the bone. The insight isn't unique to Gerson; it dates back to the original, '70s-vintage neoconservatives. But it seems to be slipping away from the contemporary GOP, whose primary contenders—save perhaps for Mike Huckabee—are falling over one another to prove their small-government bona fides, and whose activists have persuaded themselves that tax cuts and pork-busting will be their tickets back to power.

If Gerson's diagnosis is largely correct, however, his proposed remedy—the "heroic conservatism" of the title—seems more likely to kill the patient than to save it. Standing amid the rubble of an administration that promised (often in his own flowery prose) far more than it delivered, Gerson summons the GOP to a still-more-ambitious set of foreign and domestic crusades. For a "heroic conservative," transforming the Middle East is only the beginning: In place of the cramped anti-government vision of a Dick Armey or a Phil Gramm, a Gersonized GOP would set the federal government to work lifting up all the wretched of the earth, whether they're death-penalty defendants and teenage runaways at home or Darfuri refugees and Chinese dissidents abroad.

It's a stirring vision in its way, but there's little that's conservative about it. What Gerson proposes is an imitation of Great Society liberalism, in which noble, high-minded elites like himself use the levers of government on behalf of "the poor, the addicted, and children at risk." He employs the phrase limited government here and there, but never suggests any concrete limits on what government should do. Whether he's writing about poverty or foreign policy, immigration, or health care, his prescription for the right is all heroism and no conservatism; indeed, save for its pro-life sympathies, his vision seems indistinguishable from the liberalism of an LBJ—or a Jimmy Carter.

In a telling passage, Gerson boasts that in the 2000 race the Bush campaign "talked more consistently and passionately about poverty and hopelessness" than Al Gore, while Gore focused "almost exclusively on 'working families' and the middle class." He takes it as a given that making this rhetorical shift permanent would be a good thing for the GOP. But both politically and philosophically it represents a betrayal of conservatism's proper role in a welfare-state society. From the 1970s onward, the Republican Party built its majority by running against a politics that seemed to privilege the interests of the poor over those of working- and middle-class taxpayers. This is not a legacy that should be lightly abandoned, not least because America already has a party that envisions the federal bureaucracy as alternatively compassionate and heroic. In the long run, you can't out-liberal liberalism; the Democratic Party will always offer voters the higher bid.

To last, and matter, conservatism needs an agenda that partakes less of Gerson's evangelical moralism and more of the realism that defined the original neoconservatives. It needs a foreign policy whose idealism is leavened with a greater sense of limits than this administration has displayed; and a domestic policy that seeks to draw contrasts with liberalism, not to imitate it, by emphasizing responsibility rather than charity and respect rather than compassion. Above all, it needs to think as much about meeting the concerns of working- and middle-class Americans, the constituents that first Nixon and then Reagan won for the GOP, as it does about the dissidents and addicts that a "heroic conservatism" would set out to save.

Michael Gerson is right that a return to the conservatism of the late 1990s, with its reflexive anti-government spirit and its parochial streak, means a return to the political wilderness. But just because the Republican Party can't go back doesn't mean it has to keep going down the path that he and George W. Bush carved out for it.

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Ross Douthat is an associate editor for the Atlantic and the author of Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class.
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Remarks from the Fray

I am tired of idealism being trumpeted about as any kind of leadership quality. We need more pragmatists in government. Doesn't anyone read Machiavelli? Committed idealists on both sides and in the middle are scary in person and dangerous in public office. These people ignore information that does not fit their preconceived notions about society.

I want a pragmatic individual with human values but not blindsiders in the Oval Office. Consider the issue of democracy in Iraq. A leader with a brain would used a series of open-minded questions in this order: Can we do it? What are the costs (human and monetary)? If we decide to go in, how can we best achieve our goals? Should we do it?...Add to any issue in place: Is it working, why or why not? Apply same questions to universal health care, gay marriage, tax cuts etc. We [need] leaders with more questions not more answers.

--stinkymonkey

(To reply click here)

Conservatism is about caution, and moral cowardice. Neoconservatism is the bluster of the bully who is a frightened baby inside. I've seldom heard a sillier notion than "heroic" conservatism. "Quick, Cuthbert and Muffy, let us form a human chain about this water fountain lest the negroes drink from it and forever sully its alabaster purity!" Oh, yeah, I have visions of brave Republicans holding the line against temptations of compassion and wisdom that might upset the delicate balance of intolerance and privilege this nation was founded upon…Where can I find this book? In the humor section?

--Telemachus

(To reply, click here)

(11/27)

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