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Rethinking Republicanism
Mixing a new message for the GOP.
By Daniel Casse
DECEMBER 15, 1997:
Congress has closed up shop for the year. Fred Thompson's campaign
-finance hearing wound down weeks ago. The mutiny against Newt fizzled.
Janet Reno nixed the idea of an independent counsel. Campaign-finance
reform never got off the ground. A balanced budget agreement was reached
six months ago. The president himself is a lame duck, reduced to moderating
town meetings where the subject is race and dissenting views are kept to a
minimum.
It would be fair to say that, for some time, our nation's capital has
failed to generate a single interesting, provocative, or even sustained
debate about politics and the future of the country. Even the possibility
of another showdown with Sadaam Hussein evaporated into a polite,
negotiated settlement. Diplomatic conflict resolution--zzzzz--triumphed
again.
American politics seems exhausted. Political brawls, accusations of
faithlessness, angry fights over principle, rumbles left and right, heated
class warfare--all of these conflicts that were once the essence of
political debate have been swept aside by the spirit of nonpartisan
cooperation. Both Democratic and Republican pollsters have discovered in
their focus groups that voters don't like "conflict." Americans, the
pollsters assure us, hate to see politicians "bickering." As a result,
elected officials studiously avoid any controversy or unfamiliar ideas that
will cause a focus group to disapprove.
In the age of Dick Morris and Bill Clinton, this is what politics has
become. Winning a strong "favorable" rating with a focus group has become
the highest aspiration of a modern politician. Going against the grain is a
political no-no.
Yet suddenly in the midst of this era of bipartisan bliss, an
old-fashioned political feud has broken out over the notion of "national
greatness." What makes this particular fight both interesting and
unexpected is the fact that it does not cross party lines. It is restricted
to the tiny but influential factions of the intellectual conservative
Republicans.
The debate began inadvertently when the journalist David Brooks
published "The Case for National Greatness" last summer in the iconoclastic
conservative magazine, the Weekly Standard, where he is a senior
editor. In it, Brooks presented a vision of politics that sounded not at
all like the Republican boilerplate of balanced budgets, smaller
government, and more prisons. Instead, he argued for restoring a sense of
grand purpose to politics, including great national projects such as the
Library of Congress, public parks, and other cultural monuments that would
enhance American civic life.
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Party guys David Brooks (left) and William Kristol envision a
Republican agenda that sounds more like Teddy Roosevelt than Pat
Buchanan
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For the remainder of the summer, Brooks' article was politely dismissed
as an intellectual curiosity piece. No campaign manager called to talk
about it. No senator entered it into the Congressional Record. No
one mentioned it on This Week, Meet the Press, or the
Capital Gang.
But in September, the case for national greatness took on a harder,
political edge. In an incendiary Wall Street Journal piece
co-authored by Brooks and William Kristol, the editor and publisher of the
Weekly Standard, the pair advocated a new agenda for conservative
governance. They called for a leader who would break up the Social Security
monopoly, voucherize the public school system, promote national scientific
research, and champion a more ambitious and interventionist foreign policy.
Most notably, they encouraged an energetic chief executive who would not
shy away from using the strength of government to enhance the culture and
civility of modern life.
The new neo-conservatives
What gave the article its greatest punch was that it was less a thought
experiment and more an assault on the prevailing wisdom of Republican
politics. In a direct critique of their erstwhile political allies, Kristol
and Brooks wrote: "By bringing together all the groups that shared this
aversion [to liberal government], Republicans built a winning electoral
coalition. But a government movement is more than an electoral coalition.
Wishing to be left alone isn't a governing doctrine. And an American
political movement's highest goal can't be protecting citizens from their
own government. Indeed, in recent years, the conservatives' sensible
contempt for the nanny state has at times spilled over into a foolish, and
politically suicidal, contempt for the American state. A conservatism that
organizes citizens' resentments rather than informing their hopes will
always fall short of fundamental victory."
They went on to call for a new American nationalism. What they have in
mind is neither the chest-pounding nationalism of Pat Buchanan nor the
xenophobic nationalism of Big Labor and the protectionist Democrats. They
envision conservative politics that embrace the aggressive, interventionist
foreign policy of Reagan with the national institution building of
Alexander Hamilton and Teddy Roosevelt, undergirded by the moral suasion of
Lincoln. The greatest danger to America, they argued, is the "complacent
mediocrity and petty meddling of government." Yet unlike their fellow
conservatives, Kristol and Brooks insist that a true conservative agenda
cannot be based on despising government. "How," they asked rhetorically,
"can Americans love their nation if they hate its government?"
The answer, unsolicited, came in the form of a Niagara of attacks from
fellow conservatives and libertarians. "Big Government conservatism,"
sniffed Robert Novak in his syndicated column. "These conservatives view
America's very creativity and exuberance as a cause for dismay," wrote
Virginia L. Postrel and James K. Glassman in a Wall Street Journal
article responding to Kristol and Brooks. New York magazine mocked
the new agenda as "a kind of schizophrenic nanny politics that allows you
to hate government and like it too." In the most inflammatory denunciation,
Joseph Sobran, a firebrand of the Old Right paleo-conservatives, drummed
Kristol and Brooks out of the conservative movement, arguing that the only
difference between them and the Clinton status quo was "a little less
welfare and a lot more warfare."
Clearly a nerve had been struck. At a large conservative policy
conference in Washington in late September, Kristol found himself under
attack from John O'Sullivan, the editor of National Review, the
standard bearer of conservative journalism. After the debate, a reporter
from The New Republic overheard a member of the audience muttering,
"We've got to get rid of that midget Kristol."
Fighting words
At this point, all the fuss about the national greatness agenda may be
more of a tremor than an earthquake in American politics. After all, the
conservative movement has seemed to exist in a constant state of crisis
since Reagan left office. One faction is always feuding with another. But
this battle of ideas is precisely what has made Republican politics lively
while Democrats have grown stale. Still, a few feisty opinion articles are
not sufficient to make a political movement.
On the other hand, the exchanges over the proper role and scope of
government breathed life into GOP politics, which has been moribund since
the novelty of a Republican Congress wore off early in 1995. Indeed, the
questions raised by the Kristol-Brooks thesis go far beyond the shopworn
political dialogue offered by Clinton, Gingrich, Lott, and Gephardt. At the
very moment when Democrats and Republicans are trying to push every
government function out to the state capitals, these "national greatness"
advocates are suggesting the federal government's responsibilities deserve
closer scrutiny and reform.
And when most political pundits crudely lump every Republican politician
into either a "moderate" or "conservative" camp, the pursuit of a national
greatness agenda portends a new political cosmology. What is emerging is a
political theory that links the urban renewal strategies of New York's
mayor Rudolph Giuliani to the confident militarism of Margaret Thatcher and
to the bully pulpit moralism of William Bennett.
Perhaps the most encouraging thing about this national greatness debate
is that we may be finally emerging from the era of national bean-counting,
in which every political argument is reduced to a budget argument. Today,
the federal deficit--the "crisis" we talked incessantly about during the
late '80s and early '90s--barely exists. Most budget experts predict the
federal government will be running a budget surplus as we enter the
next century.
The question for politicians becomes what to do now that our fiscal
house is in order. Some will argue for a more slimmed-down government and
tax cuts; others will argue for more social spending; still others will
make the case for a top-to-bottom reform of the role and scope of
government.
For his part, President Clinton seems content to pursue low-cost and
low-risk solutions to address a variety of public anxieties: town meetings
on race, crackdowns on deadbeat dads, a national program to put trigger
locks on handguns, and so on. Whatever one may think of Bill Clinton's
performance in office, it would be hard to argue that during his five years
in office as president he has given Americans a great sense of national
purpose.
In any case, he has left the field open for a more compelling national
political debate. That is why, three years before the next presidential
election, a handful of journalists and think-tank types arguing about
"national greatness" in magazines and newspapers should be greeted as a
sign of the country's political health. The only question is whether our
political leaders will have the nerve to ignore their pollsters and jump
into this raucous debate.
Daniel Casse, a policy advisor to the Lamar Alexander and Bob Dole
presidential campaigns, is a senior director of the White House Writers
Group, a Washington-based public policy communications firm. He lives in
Nashville.
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