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September 9, 2005

The Big Government Conseratives Find Their Ambassador

National Journal has an article entitled America's Anti-Reagan Isn't Hillary Clinton. It's Rick Santorum, which compares Santorum's new book to that of Barry Goldwater's work in 1964.

In 1960, a Republican senator named Barry Goldwater published a little book called The Conscience of a Conservative. The first printing of 10,000 copies led to a second of the same size, then a third of 50,000, until ultimately it sold more than 3 million copies. Goldwater's presidential candidacy crashed in 1964, but his ideas did not: For decades, Goldwater's hostility to Big Government ruled the American Right. Until, approximately, now . . .

As a policy book, It Takes a Family is temperate. It serves up a healthy reminder that society needs not just good government but strong civil and social institutions, and that the traditional family serves all kinds of essential social functions. Government policies, therefore, should respect and support family and civil society instead of undermining or supplanting them. Parents should make quality time at home a high priority. Popular culture should comport itself with some sense of responsibility and taste.

Few outside the hard cultural Left -- certainly not Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who makes several cameos as Santorum's bete noir -- would disagree with much of that. Not in 2005, anyway. Moreover, Santorum's policy proposals sit comfortably within the conservative mainstream. But It Takes a Family is more than a policy book. Its theory of "conservatism and the common good" seeks to rechannel the mainstream . . .

The article notes that Santorum claims that the founders thought one goal of republican government was to jumpstart virtue within the populace. But the Journal notes the dissension on this point among the founders:
Other Founders -- notably James Madison, the father of the Constitution -- were more concerned with power than with virtue. They certainly distinguished between liberty and license, and they agreed that republican government requires republican virtues. But they believed that government's foremost calling was not to inculcate virtue but to prevent tyranny. Madison thus argued for a checked, limited government that would lack the power to impose any one faction's view of virtue on all others.
How does Santorum's philosophy manifest itself in policy?
A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, "individual development accounts," publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in "every school in America" (his italics), and more. Lots more.
Now I have to admit that I would probably be pleased as punch with the outcomes, or at least the intended outcomes, of these programs. Moreover, I'm in complete agreement with Santorum that the family -- extended, nuclear, or otherwise -- serves all manner of critical social functions. But I have some serious misgivings about establishing bureaucracies to enforce these functions. As we've most recently seen, government bureaucracies breed inaction, and the brief journey from their gold-plated, flag-waving inceptions, to their ultimate sclerotic entropy is not a theory -- it's a fact. Witness the boldest reorganization of the Federal government in the past five years, the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Events of the recent past have shown how useless it has been at centralizing the command and control of anything. Thank God for individual initiative, without which many more would have died in Louisiana. (Significantly, the model that should have been adopted was the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, but that's another story).

Not only have large federal bureaucracies lost their legitimacy since 1964 or so, but who is to say that every single one of the institutions necessary to carry out Santorum's program won't be commandeered or shanghai'ed into carrying out other agendas by successive armies of do-gooders -- more than likely in but a few years' time, agendas far different than what Santorum has in mind. This would be a nightmare we don't need.

These are simple critiques, precisely because it is not some minor point of the conservative orthodoxy in question, but the very basis of that orthodoxy itself. Men like Reagan and Goldwater would likely agree that government's first role is to prevent tyranny -- but would then personified Santorum's program themselves through personal example, not through the expansion of the public sector. The National Journal believes that Santorum's work represents a significant challenge to the Right. I agree.

What do you think, loyal readers?


UPDATE: All of this, and many of the other issues of the day, are part and parcel of one central fact. The United States is a nation-state no longer. It is now a market-state, as elucidated by Philip Bobbitt in The Shield of Achilles. But that is another, longer story . . . Click on his title in the sidebar for illumination.

Posted by Chester at September 9, 2005 12:00 AM

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Comments

I too would probably like the results described, but I fear yet more of life being handed over to a government bureaucracy. I'll read the Shield book, but Market State/Smarket State, what we're becoming, if not already, is an Empire. Eventually our inability to run it and pay for it, much less agree among ourselves how it is going to be done, is going to throw up a Caesar to solve these problems, just as the Roman Republic did.

Posted by: El Jefe Maximo at September 9, 2005 10:05 AM

Briefly, Reagan was not a libertarian. He supported a huge defense build up. He opposed abortion, increased the vigor of the war on drugs, decried moral decline, and somehow bridged the social conservatives and more libertarian conservatives becuase he supported both traditions vigorously. But he supported them because to his mind markets were good because they increased the virtue and self-respect of their participants and because they respected the dignity of individuals involved in them.

The only reason a Santorum would be the anti-Reagan if first Reagan is inaccurately redefined as a libertarian, which he is most certainly not. Regan, for example, famously began to prosecute non-child pornography through after the Meese Commission report.

I also think the point on the founder misunderstands their concept of government. While they--like modern conservatives--favored a limited federal governmnet, most supported far more vigorous local communities aimed at preserving and instilling "classical republican" virtues. Many of the original 13 colonies quickly established churches and various subsidies for ministry. Their libertarian rhetoric regarding the federal government should not be confused with their hopes for an "energetic" and virtue-driven local regime. Looking at one without the other would be misleading, because *most* government of that era was local.

Posted by: Roach at September 9, 2005 11:11 AM