Our Divided Political Heart (18 page)

For many of today’s evangelicals, Schambra concluded, this “
would have been a bit lukewarm
.” Indeed.

It’s not surprising, then, that the last gasp of conservative communitarianism was George W. Bush’s faith-based initiative, the heart and soul of his “compassionate conservatism.” Bush, and especially his gifted chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, understood evangelicalism from the inside.
Both of them—and, again, Gerson in particular—realized that the longer American evangelical tradition had combined personal salvation with social witness. Gerson was also a close student of Catholic social thought and its emphasis on the common good. More than Bush himself, Gerson embraced the communitarian side of conservative thought.

Bush’s faith-based initiative was thus an effort to unite the “
wonder-working power
” of personal conversion with a sense of social obligation to the poor. Bush, like the liberals, would cast himself as someone concerned for the less privileged. But unlike the liberals, he would understand the limits of the government and the importance of change in “
the human heart
.” Bush’s initiative would use
public
action to promote
personal
change.

His oratory was ringing. His view (and Gerson’s) was expressed most fully and powerfully in his 1999 speech in Indianapolis entitled “The Duty of Hope.” It was to be the manifesto of compassionate conservatism. Bush’s break from pure free market conservatism was largely rhetorical, but it was still unusual rhetoric for a conservative to use. And Bush consciously set himself apart from what he called two “
narrow mindsets
.” The first (predictably enough for a conservative)

is that government provides the only real compassion
. A belief that what is done by caring people through church and charity is secondary and marginal. Some Washington politicians call these efforts “crumbs of compassion.” These aren’t “crumbs” to people whose lives are changed, they are the hope of renewal and salvation. These are not the “crumbs of compassion,” they are the bread of life. And they are the strength and soul of America.

But much less predictably, Bush pointed to a second “mindset” that he labeled “destructive”:

The idea that if government would only get out of our way
, all our problems would be solved. An approach with no higher goal, no nobler purpose, than “Leave us alone.”

Yet this is not who we are as Americans. We have always found our better selves in sympathy and generosity, both in our lives and in
our laws. Americans will never write the epitaph of idealism. It emerges from our nature as a people, with a vision of the common good beyond profit and loss. Our national character shines in our compassion.

We are a nation of rugged individuals
. But we are also the country of the second chance, tied together by bonds of friendship and community and solidarity.

At another point, Bush said: “
This will not be the failed compassion of towering, distant bureaucracies
. On the contrary, it will be government that serves those who are serving their neighbors. It will be government that directs help to the inspired and the effective. It will be government that both knows its limits, and shows its heart.” And then came the clever invocation of the old fusionist conservative settlement in two short sentences. “
The invisible hand works many miracles
,” Bush declared. “But it cannot touch the human heart.”

There was a certain genius—of a political sort, but also, to some degree, in substance—behind Bush’s initiative that should not be lost in the negative assessments of his presidency and in his failure to back up his rhetoric with sufficient resources. His approach seemed to demonstrate an understanding of the poverty of radical individualism. Indeed, it was a sophisticated attempt to embrace the duality of the American character (“We are a nation of rugged individuals. But we are also the country of the second chance”) and to put its tensions to work on behalf of conservative politics. Bush sought to embrace the idea of the “common good,” but gave this venerable community-minded idea an individualistic tilt. Bush hardly ever said a word about systemic injustice or economic inequality. Instead, he issued call after call for individuals to set their lives straight and for the country to solve social problems by converting people (behaviorally but also spiritually) one soul at a time. His approach was made clear in a single passage of his first inaugural address in 2001:

In the quiet of American conscience
, we know that deep, persistent poverty is unworthy of our nation’s promise. And whatever our views
of its cause, we can agree that children at risk are not at fault. Abandonment and abuse are not acts of God, they are failures of love. And the proliferation of prisons, however necessary, is no substitute for hope and order in our souls. Where there is suffering, there is duty. Americans in need are not strangers, they are citizens; not problems, but priorities; and all of us are diminished when any are hopeless.

The socially minded could only applaud Bush’s declaration that “children at risk are not at fault” and that those in need are “not problems, but priorities.” It seemed a very liberal sentiment, and it was certainly compassionate. Yet Bush located the problems of the poorest not in the injustices of the society or in the structural failures of the economy but in the shortcomings of individuals: “abandonment and abuse” by parents, the failure of criminal offenders to find “hope and order in their souls.” Compassionate conservatism involved a constant effort to square circles, to sand the rough edges off individualism, to build community by focusing on the reform of personal behavior.

It is impossible to know for certain whether Bush had the capacity—given the views of his party and of many within his own administration—to make compassionate conservatism into a coherent, community-minded creed for the right. In light of Bush’s heavy spending on his initiative to combat AIDS in Africa and his investment of substantial political capital in his education reform program, compassionate conservatism cannot be wholly dismissed as a political gimmick. And Gerson believes in the effort to this day.

Yet compassionate conservatism suffered from both intellectual and political contradictions. Even before 9/11, the faith-based initiative had run into trouble in Congress, partly because many on the right end of Bush’s party, including some Christian evangelicals, mistrusted it as a kind of Community Action Program in religious garb—big government carried out in God’s name. Among liberals, on the other hand, there was both fear of obliterating the line between church and state and a skepticism bred by comparisons between the size of Bush’s tax cuts and the comparatively paltry
spending on his compassion agenda (again, with the exception of his AIDS initiative abroad). The cynicism was deepened by reports that federal money for faith-based programs was used on behalf of religious groups politically friendly to the White House. When it came to his domestic priorities, Bush’s solicitude for those with tidy incomes (and for elderly voters who benefitted from his prescription drug benefit) seemed to outweigh his devotion to the armies of compassion.

In any event, compassionate conservatism receded into the shadows created by the attacks of September 11, 2001. It was replaced by the active martial conservatism of the broader “war on terror” and the specific wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The growing unpopularity of both conflicts, the federal government’s failures after Hurricane Katrina—an occasion that might have provided a true test of compassionate conservatism—the economic collapse of 2008, and the heavy spending on the subsequent financial bailout all sent Bush’s popularity plummeting. Within Republican circles, these events gave new life to the party’s libertarian wing and helped unleash the Tea Party. And the obituaries for Bush’s idea poured in from the right. The most succinct came from the hard-right columnist Michelle Malkin. “‘
Compassionate conservatism’ and fiscal conservatism
were never compatible,” she wrote. “Never will be.” And that is what the Tea Party came to believe—devoutly.

In many ways, Gerson (whom, I should acknowledge here, I both like and respect, despite our political disagreements) became the last torch-bearer for compassionate conservatism. His 2007 book,
Heroic Conservatism
, was an effort to keep the disposition alive and to insist that of all the brands of conservatism on offer, it had the greatest chance of political success.

“
Traditional conservatism has a piece missing
—a piece that is shaped like conscience,” Gerson wrote. For too many conservatives, he said, “
any idea of the common good
is viewed as a dangerous myth.” Seeking to revive the alliance between evangelicalism and social justice so prominent in the American past, Gerson asked: “
Where does someone belong who is pro-life
and
pro-poor?
Someone who supports the traditional family
and
increased spending to fight AIDS? Someone who is passionate about the rights of handicapped children in America
and
the lives of displaced children
in Darfur? I know that I have often felt homeless in the traditional camps of American politics.”

And he was unrelenting in warning conservatives about the implications of pure individualism. “
If Republicans run in future elections
with a simplistic anti-government message, ignoring the poor, the addicted, and children at risk, they will lose, and they will deserve to lose,” Gerson wrote. The heroic conservatism Gerson championed, by contrast, “
can appeal to the conscience
, inspire the nation, and change the world.”

Yet the response of many conservatives to Gerson’s effort demonstrated just how far the Republican Party was straying from the creed he was preaching. That
National Review
magazine, the arbiter of conservative orthodoxy, chose David Frum to review the book was itself significant. Frum, who served in the Bush White House with Gerson, was known to have had deep personal differences with his former colleague, and he began his review challenging Gerson on both his facts and his self-presentation.

But more significant for our purposes was Frum’s critique of Gerson’s core claims. Coming from a Republican who later became a sharp and brave critic of Tea Party conservatism, Frum’s observations were especially revealing. Writing while Bush was still in office and before the financial meltdown, Frum asked:

If heroic conservatism really can rally the nation
, why has seven years of it left the nation so very conspicuously unrallied? If present trends continue, George W. Bush will exit the White House as the most continuously unpopular president since Harry Truman. The Bush-led GOP is widely condemned as corrupt, arrogant, and incompetent. In generic polls, voters prefer Democrats over Republicans on almost every issue.

The troubles go beyond polls. Although America has prospered under George W. Bush, many of the social indicators that ought to concern a heroic conservatism have trended in the wrong direction. Poverty has increased, and in many American cities crime is worsening. As best we can tell, there has been no sustained increase in volunteering. The international democracy agenda that opened with
such promise has lost its momentum. Gerson himself has to admit that the trends are against him, or (as he puts it) “the darker impulses of conservatism have become more assertive, more public, and more pronounced.”

What went wrong?

Frum answered that while “
Americans are deeply compassionate people
. . . they are also deeply pragmatic people. They want results, not a politics of moral gestures. And all too often, moral gestures are all that the Bush administration has offered.” Again, it needs to be emphasized that by conventional measures, Frum found himself well to the left of conservatism in the Obama years. Nonetheless, his sense that the Bush administration had failed on the most basic levels of performance matched not only the views of many liberals but also the conclusions reached by a great many Tea Party supporters, who put a more ideological spin on Bush’s shortcomings. They decided that Bush foundered not because he had moved too far to the right—and not because his compassion involved mostly moral gestures—but, on the contrary, because he had strayed too far from the individualistic and anti-government core of their brand of conservatism.

Another conservative critic, more sympathetically inclined to Gerson personally and more drawn to his overarching hopes, nonetheless captured the right’s central objection to his ideas with precision. Writing in
Slate
, Ross Douthat, later a
New York Times
columnist, observed:

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.

Douthat added that Gerson’s view “both politically and philosophically” represented “a betrayal of conservatism’s proper role in a welfare-state society.” He explained:

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.

In truth, of course, few liberals ever saw Bush’s agenda as remotely close to liberalism or progressivism as they understood it. And Gerson had entirely legitimate ground on which to stand. He was not trying to destroy conservatism. His purpose was to reconnect the contemporary right to earlier forms of conservatism that
did
encompass an idea of the common good and
did
stress community obligations as well as protections for individual rights. But in part because the Bush administration
did
fail, in part because Gerson was a more enthusiastic promoter of his version of conservatism than many of his colleagues, and in part because the right had steadily moved away from anything resembling communitarian conservatism, Gerson increasingly found himself a believer without a congregation—even as he also discovered that many who shared some of his strongest convictions were now making their political home on the moderate left.