Republican Reality Check

By Laurie Spivak, AlterNet. Posted September 1, 2004.

On the day that the Republican National Convention kicked off in NYC, David Brooks, Senior Editor at the conservative Weekly Standard confessed an astonishing thing. In the New York Times Magazine cover article entitled, "The Era of Small Government is Over," Brooks wrote that conservatism's great cause for the past quarter century – small government – is dead and that "American conservatism is undergoing an identity crisis."

There used to be a spirit of solidarity binding all the embattled members of the conservative movement. But with conservatism ascendant, that spirit has eroded. Should Bush lose, it will be like a pack of wolves that suddenly turns on itself. The civil war over the future of the party will be ruthless and bloody. The foreign-policy realists will battle the democracy-promoting Reaganites. The immigrant-bashing nativists will battle the free marketeers. The tax-cutting growth wing will battle the fiscally prudent deficit hawks. The social conservatives will war with the social moderates, the biotech skeptics with the biotech enthusiasts, the K Street corporatists with the tariff-loving populists, the civil libertarians with the security-minded Ashcroftians. In short, the Republican Party is unstable.

Hard to imagine that just two years after seizing power in all three branches of the federal government, as well as a majority of governorships across the nation, that Republicans are already undergoing an identity crisis. Isn't now the time to institute all of those grand schemes they've been selling to the American public for the past three decades: crushing the welfare state; abolishing the Departments of Commerce, Energy and Education; and unleashing the powers of the market to bring prosperity and bliss to all Americans?

Moreover, what Brooks is suggesting is that conservatives ditch the raison d'etre of the modern conservative movement: small government. Whatever happened to the "leave us alone" conservativism that promised to reduce government, as Grover Norquist put it, "to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub?"

What happened was that Republicans got a reality check. When conservatives became the majority in Washington, they discovered that public management is impossible without any governing principles. How does a movement that was built upon the premise that government is inept, wasteful, useless and downright evil actually govern? As we've found out over the past two years, the answer to that question is not very well.

Safe in the cocoon of minority status, never able to "fully" put their grand plans into practice, and always with someone else to blame, conservatives were free to spout their pie-in-the-sky ideology, attack their opponents as government-loving communists, and sell Americans on the conservative mythology of having it all for nothing. These miracles would all be made possible through a little something called the free-market, which would solve all of our nation's problems if government would just step aside and let the market work its magic. Mighty good salesmen, effective sales pitch, but it turns out they were selling snake oil.

The problem with modern conservatism is that while it may look pretty on paper, it doesn't work in practice. It's hardly surprising to discover that the conservative movement was started by a handful of intellectual elite. These conservative intellectuals, like Milton Friedman who prefers free-market fairytales over Keynesian economics' pragmatic approach, and Russell Kirk who advocated a kind of neo-feudal societal structure, lived almost exclusively in a world of ideas. Welcome to the real world boys.

Brooks, a pragmatist, sees the writing on the wall. In an era of globalization and fighting an international network of terrorists, small government is dead. Now, more than ever, our nation needs institution builders who believe in the transformative power of the public sector to bring about good, to protect the American people, and to ease the transition to a global economy. Brooks writes that "the old anti-statist governing philosophy exists in the airy-fairy realm of ideals," that "reducing the size of government cannot be the governing philosophy for the next generation of conservatives," and calls on conservatives to adopt "a positive vision of government."

Laurie Spivak is a regular contributor to AlterNet.

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