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October 29, 2008
Exclusive: Conservatism on the Rocks? How Factionalism Put Power before Principle
On the eve of his retirement, George Washington warned his countrymen against the politics of faction. It was his view that the rise of factions would undermine reasoned judgment on the part of the people’s representatives; that they would put party advantage above the good of the country. He believed that decisions would be made, rather, for the accretion of party power. He was smart enough to know factionalism was destructive. He was practical enough to believe it was likely inevitable. He was optimistic enough to hope he could make a difference. His worst fears have been realized.
During the Reagan Administration, the ever unscrupulous Sen. George Mitchell proved himself the least principled majority leader in Senate history until the advent of Harry Reid. Had Reagan found the cure for bad weather, Mitchell would have opposed it in the most vicious and dishonest of terms. The good of the country never factored into his thinking as he demonstrated time and again his willingness to sacrifice the nation’s interests for political advantage.
It is that same impulse that has seen the Democrat Party march in lock step in the hope that the United States would lose the war in Iraq, even asserting our defeat in spite of all evidence to the contrary. he always predictable New York Times never refers to that war without describing it as “George Bush’s disastrous war of choice in Iraq.” Some disaster. Iraq is now a nation in healing with a lower murder rate than Chicago. It is an incipient, if messy, democracy. The greatest destabilizing force in the region has been removed and a belligerent nation neutralized. Unless a President Obama manages to find a way to lose it, we may be treated to the spectacle of his seizing credit for victory when the troops, as surely they will, come marching home in triumph and honor.
Until the war in Vietnam, party loyalty and political advantage seldom got in the way of unity in the face of foreign adventure. Now, in a grim confirmation of Washington’s great fear, the Democrat Party unites in opposition when Republican (but not Democrat) presidents resort to military action. At the same time as they criticized the war in Iraq as being ungrounded in vital American interests, they applauded Clinton’s military intervention in the Balkans in which America had no interests. But there was political advantage to be seized for Democrats in opposing the Iraq war and they rode it to new majorities in the House and Senate.
The politics of faction pollutes not only legislative deliberation, but it degrades political discourse and lends itself to the destruction of principle as an animating force in civic affairs. As George Washington warned it would, it has “distracted public councils and enfeebled public administration.” Politics has become the enemy of principle and it has subverted representative government. The Republican Party, no less than the Democrats, has fallen ill under its regime.
Most damaged by this destructive factionalism is that political philosophy that has most recently stood for contemplative principle and excited overwhelming public support: conservatism. It is, at root, a philosophy; a connected and cohesive set of ideas the application of which will yield predictable results. It is a philosophy with roots in the most primordial yearnings of our nation. It is a philosophy based on the very thing that defines us as a nation: individual freedom. It has been a civic movement that has prompted public optimism and forward thinking and an application of first principles to the problems of today. It is a philosophy so powerful that every Republican candidate claims its mantle. It is the result of contemplation, thought and an analysis of historical experience. It is a philosophy with such public support that even Democrat candidates have operated according to its principles. It was not long ago that the last Democrat to occupy the White House declared the era of big government over. Sadly, that declaration was premature. But it is a philosophy that has now been discredited by the politics of faction.
Whatever the results of the current election season, conservatives must engage in deep soul searching. Ironically, it will be much more complicated if Sen. McCain is elected because the attraction of power will lead conservatives, as they have under President Bush, to support an administration that does not serve their principles. If they are ever again to see conservatism as a vital part of American public life they must not be seduced by the power of faction over the promise of principle.
The seeds of conservative destruction were sewn in its success. So popular has been conservative philosophy, so resonant with American impulse, that all Republicans identify themselves as “conservative” and conservatives have allowed them to get away with it. On the heels of Reagan’s tremendous success, Newt Gingrich consolidated those gains with an articulation of conservative policy based on conservative thought. The result was Republican majorities in the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years.
The public trusted that self-described “conservatives” would keep their promise of reducing government and, in so doing, enhancing American freedom and individual self-reliance. But the politics of faction began immediately to erode the conservative triumph. Rather than busying themselves with the promised overhaul of government, Republicans decided to seize what they saw as political advantage in the tawdry swamp of Bill Clinton’s soul. They surrendered the philosophical high ground by spending more time on Clinton’s sex life than on governance. The Republican Party became the party of Cotton Mather rather than of Ronald Reagan.
Still, they delivered balanced budgets and paper surpluses and the promise of responsible governmental budgeting appeared to become a reality with the help of a wounded, compliant president and an inspired Secretary of the Treasury. Democrats finally accepted what had been a fundamental animating principle of conservatism since its emergence in the ‘50s: that deficits are bad and a large national debt ultimately dangerous. The people rewarded Republicans with the ultimate prize: a Republican Congress and a Republican president.
The problem was that President Bush was not a conservative, despite his claim to the contrary. He is a Wall Street Republican which explains his many deviations from conservative principles. It is clear enough that Bush has no governing philosophy. With a Congress that supported him out of party loyalty – because of faction – rather than out of principle, Mr. Bush initiated the greatest increase in the size and scope of government since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The Republican Congress geometrically increased spending on domestic programs. When the budget was balanced during the Clinton years there was a palpable feeling of national relief. Under Bush, the people saw the surplus of which they were so justly proud vanish in a year. We were treated to the odd spectacle of Republicans defending the new deficit as if they had not, for 50 years of Democrat governance, condemned it as irresponsible. The people can be forgiven, then, for wondering if they can trust anything office holders say.
Conservatives of all stripes, now so closely identified with the Republican Party, not only let Bush get away with it, they were his willing accomplices. Conservative pundits, out of factional loyalty, defended the indefensible. Believing that whatever possibility they had to make a difference in policy depended upon the vitality of the Republican Party, they rationalized philosophical compromise allowing conservatism to be discredited along with the party. None of it was lost on the people who saw in Republican factionalism the same hypocrisy they had condemned in Democrats. Conservatism not only lost its vitality, it lost its credibility.
None of this was unpredictable. Political parties do not exist to advance philosophies. They exist to elect people and gather power. Political movements, let alone political philosophies exist to provide a theoretical framework for governance. When they become too identified with a political party, they lose their force as the compromise required by factionalism waters down their ideological purity.
Perhaps conservatives should be content to remain identified with a philosophy rather than a party lest its very purpose be lost in the fog of factional infighting. Whatever the outcome in November, conservatives must return to first principles and start on the long project of convincing the American people that their philosophy can be trusted to deliver on its promise of freedom and prosperity. And, when it is necessary, they must have the courage to withhold support from office holders, irrespective of party, who betray the principles that brought conservatives together in the first place.
The politics of faction neither enhanced conservative influence nor resulted in the implementation of conservative principles. It provided only the warming illusion of hope. As Washington observed: “A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume.” History has borne him out.
Family Security Matters Contributing Editor John W. Howard is a lawyer, specializing in corporate and business litigation who also founded a non-profit, public interest law firm specializing in First, Second and Tenth Amendment issues. Feedback: editorialdirector@familysecuritymatters.org.
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