Our Divided Political Heart (19 page)

Gerson certainly understood the direction of the political winds. In a
Washington Post
column headlined “
Why the Tea Party Is Toxic for the GOP
,” he challenged the Tea Party’s view of the Constitution and embraced a Republican and conservative past that the Tea Party was largely disowning. Many in the Tea Party, he said, believed “the federal government has only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution—which doesn’t mention retirement insurance or health care.” This assertion, he acknowledged, “was logically consistent.” It was also “historically uninformed, morally irresponsible and politically disastrous.”

“
The Constitution,” Gerson insisted, “in contrast to
the Articles of Confederation, granted broad power to the federal government to impose taxes and spend funds to ‘provide for . . . the general welfare’—at least if Alexander Hamilton and a number of Supreme Court rulings are to be believed. In practice, Social Security abolition would push perhaps 13 million elderly Americans into destitution, blurring the line between conservative idealism and Social Darwinism.” Gerson’s conclusion:

Most Americans who identify with the tea party movement
are understandably concerned about the size and reach of government. Their enthusiasm is a clear Republican advantage. But tea party populism is just as clearly incompatible with some conservative and Republican beliefs. It is at odds with Abraham Lincoln’s inclusive tone and his conviction that government policies could empower individuals. It is inconsistent with religious teaching on government’s responsibility to seek the common good and to care for the weak. It does not reflect a Burkean suspicion of radical social change.

He was right: it didn’t—and doesn’t.

Gerson’s agony was based in realism. Individualistic, small-government conservatism was in the saddle. The Tea Party became the loudest voice on the right. More and more, conservatism became a creed devoted to low taxes and less business regulation—and little else. Conservatives of a traditionalist, communitarian, and small-
r
republican leanings were scattered and defeated. Community building was to be a task of the left and of Barack Obama. All this has had some very peculiar effects on American politics.

It goes without saying, but perhaps a progressive should say it: every nation needs an intelligent and constructive form of conservatism. At its best, conservatism challenges the progressive worldview in at least three indispensable ways.

First, conservatives are suspicious of innovation and therefore subject
all grand plans to merciless interrogation. Their core inquiry goes something like this: Maybe this new health (or education or environmental) plan is a great idea, but will it really work? What are its unintended consequences? Can our governmental institutions carry it off? Not all progressive ideas pass the test. In the debate over Obama’s health care proposal, conservatives were at their best when they shelved demagoguery and ideology and asked practical, focused questions.

Second, conservatives respect old things and old habits. They are not always right in this. Racial segregation and discrimination are good examples of old ways that were morally wrong. But Russell Kirk’s admiration for
custom and convention
speaks to something deep in the human heart. Our habits are the product of time, based on the slowly accumulated wisdom of our ancestors. That’s why tradition should not be discarded lightly. Many who are not in the least conservative can acknowledge, with Kirk, that custom and convention “
are checks both upon man’s anarchic impulse
and upon the innovator’s lust for power.” It’s worth remembering that Hitler’s staunch opponents included not only the German left, but also, as the historian John Lukacs has insisted, conservative traditionalists horrified by the ways in which the Nazis were ripping apart German society—and slaughtering fellow human beings.

Related to this is the third great contribution of conservatism: a suspicion of human nature and a belief that people cannot be remolded like plastic. Conservatives see a fallen side of human nature, often described as “original sin.” When utopians propose to create New Men or New Women, the conservative will cry:
Stop!
From generation to generation, human nature doesn’t change radically—even in a world of technologies that were unimaginable just a decade or two earlier. Efforts to alter human nature, the conservative is right to insist, can risk descent into totalitarian catastrophe. A society that fails to keep these conservative warnings in mind is likely to run into trouble.

But in its current incarnation, conservatism has taken on an angry crankiness. It finds itself in the grips of a pseudo-populism that true conservatism instinctively mistrusts. What on earth would William F. Buckley Jr. have made of “death panels”?

Conservatives of the Edmund Burke stripe always understood the
necessity of reform, yet the creed is now caught up in a suspicion of all reform. Conservatives who once asked if a particular proposal was practical are now inclined to look at
all
proposals involving
any
expansion of government’s responsibility as unconstitutional. Our current forms of conservatism seem thoroughly unconservative or, to use dissident conservative Peter Viereck’s term from the 1950s, “
pseudo-conservative
,” which is a close cousin to “pseudo-populist.” The mob that gathered outside the Capitol in the winter of 2010 to shout epithets at Democratic lawmakers before they voted on the health care bill was disrespectful of the very norms that conservatism preaches. Utopianism, typically a danger on the left, now runs rampant on the right.

Many who call themselves conservative propose to cast aside even government programs that have stood the test of time. They seem to imagine a world in which government “withers away”—a phrase that comes from Friedrich Engels, not Buckley or Burke. Or else conservative politicians trying to hang on to the votes of the elderly tie themselves up in unruly contradictions, declaring—for the purposes of the 2010 election—that they are simultaneously opponents of government-run health care and passionate defenders of Medicare against the cuts contained in “Obamacare.” Their case on Medicare became more problematic after the House of Representatives passed Representative Paul Ryan’s 2011 budget, which included deep Medicare cuts and a plan to turn the program into a kind of voucher system. Ryan’s plan was consistent with the underlying position of the new conservatism, but in utter contradiction to the campaigns that had just been run by many of those who voted for it.

Modern conservatism has usually supported the market against the state. But its oldest and most durable strains insisted that the market was an imperfect instrument. True conservatives may give “
two cheers for capitalism
,” as Irving Kristol put it in the title of one of his books, but never three.

Conservatism has always made its greatest contribution as a corrective force that seeks to preserve the best of what we have. It has always understood that weaving the fabric of community and instilling a respect for the commons both involve painstaking work over time.

But post-Bush conservatism, as the 2012 Republican primary campaign made clear, has abandoned its communitarian sympathies for a
defense of a pure and radical individualism. It has constricted its programmatic imagination to cuts in taxes, regulation, and government. It has thus broken with its own long tradition of respect for government’s contribution to a free and prosperous society. It has placed much rhetorical emphasis on a robust patriotism, yet it treats our national government as an interloper, echoing extreme states’ rights and even secessionist doctrines discredited long ago in the fires of the Civil War and in the peaceful revolution of the civil rights movement. In so doing, it has relegated Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln to second-class status in the conservative pantheon.

As Gerson suggested in his pained response to the Tea Party, this new conservatism claims the mandate of American history, but it can do so only by rewriting the American story to the point where it ceases to be recognizable. The true American trajectory is defined by balance—by a belief in the importance of both the local and the national, and by an understanding of the indispensability of both the individual and the community.

Because our current political debate is over fundamentals—about who we have been, who we are, and who we should be—it’s natural that it includes a robust argument over the meaning of American history. For this very reason, it’s important to get our national story right, even while acknowledging, as the debate over the meaning of Reconstruction suggests, that many aspects of our history have always been contested. We have spent more than two centuries working to build a government that is at once energetic and limited, effective but not overpowering, mindful of both our rights and our obligations in a republic that has grown steadily more democratic. Many of these arguments—sometimes tragically, sometimes triumphantly—touched on the question of race. Our Constitution begins with the words “We, the people,” and so it’s natural that we have argued over the meaning of Populism. We have been, from the beginning, a racially and culturally diverse nation, and have grown only more diverse since our Founding. So we have argued about how a nation of nations, a community of communities, could create “out of many, one.”

In the midst of all the contention, no issues have been as vexing or as important as the meaning of the Constitution and what our Founders had in mind for the republic they created.

The federal government was created by the states
to be an agent for the states, not the other way around,” Rick Perry, the Republican governor of Texas, told his party’s leaders at a meeting in the spring of 2011, before he mounted his unsuccessful presidential campaign.

That would have come as a great surprise to a rather important Republican president named Abraham Lincoln. “
The Union is older than any of the States
; and, in fact, it created them as States,” Lincoln declared in his July 4, 1861, message to Congress. “Having never been States, either in substance or in name, outside of the Union, whence this magical omnipotence of ‘State rights’ . . . Much is said about the ‘sovereignty’ of the States; but the word, even, is not in the national Constitution.”

Indeed, those first words of the Constitution are not “We the states,” but “We the people.” And the Constitution’s Preamble speaks of promoting “a more perfect union,” “Justice,” “tranquility,” “the common defense,” “the General Welfare,” and, of course, “the Blessings of Liberty.” These are national goals. True, the Constitution required ratification by the states. But when the word “states” appears in the document, it is usually in a compound word, “United States,” or in reference to how the states (and the people of the states) will be represented in the national government. It’s a civics-book notion now often forgotten, but the Constitution was written with the express purpose of replacing the Articles of Confederation with a framework for a much stronger national government. We are the “United States,” not the “Confederate States,” the latter having entered history in
an act of
rebellion
—as Lincoln pointed out in that July 4 oration—against the government designed by the Founders. Yet those most inclined to speak of their devotion to the Constitution are far more likely to quote the vague language of the brief Tenth Amendment (“
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution
, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”) than to cite the rest of the document. Rarely do they quote the Preamble, which is presumably the best summary of the Constitution’s purposes.

It is a peculiarity of the United States, and one particularly powerful at this moment, that our Constitution is not just honored but venerated. And one could fairly ask: Why not? It’s worthy of admiration as the most enduring constitution in the world. Yet that very point of agreement provokes immediate discord. Did it endure because we have chosen to live by every word, strictly interpreted, or did it work because its language was elastic enough to accommodate the great transformations that have occurred since 1787? Was its meaning altered and reinterpreted at regular intervals—with the Civil War amendments, the Progressive Era amendments, and the interpretative revolutions of the New Deal and the Warren Court? Or are we required, in light of the document’s greatness, to discern the “original” meanings and purposes of the Founders? This, of course, presumes that these are fully knowable and that the Founders spoke with one voice.

Such questions do not deter today’s Tea Party constitutionalists, who are quite certain that the Constitution clearly points down the political path they have already decided to take. At the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, speaker after speaker explained how the Constitution—especially as originally written, and as they interpreted it—provided an infallible guide to contemporary politics.

“
If we remove the foundations for our principles and our policies
, America will fall,” declared Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. “Those principles were written into a contract with the American people that promised to limit the federal government’s power. We call that contract the Constitution and when it [was] signed it didn’t even allow a federal income tax and that sounds like a good way to limit the size of the federal government to me.”

Referring to a brief declaration of conservative principles signed by a
group of longtime leaders on the right, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty sought to rally the convention by turning the Constitution into a mandate for every item on the conservative wish list for that year’s midterm elections. The signers, he said, were

recommitting themselves and their organizations
to the constitutional framework, the constitutional principles and the constitutional values that made this nation great. They are the values of limited government. They are the values of the rule of law. They are the values of limited, excuse me, individual responsibility. They are the values of free markets. They are the values of respect for the sanctity of life. They are the values of respecting traditional marriages and families and down the list. Those are the kinds of principles that this nation was founded on. Those are the principles that made this nation great. Those are the principles that will lead us forward as a conservative movement.