What Price Victory?
Joe Klein sums up very well the current political scene. Politically, the Bush administration has outsmarted the Democrats at every turn. But the price has been abandonment of what used to be considered conservative principles. The administration's pork-laden energy bill and the about-to-be-passed Medicare expansion likely signal the end, for the foreseeable future, of small-government conservatism as a potent political force. Klein writes:
"The week's events illuminate a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans on domestic policy. The Democrats are boxed into complicated and unpopular positions because they tend to stand on principle—although the principles involved are often antiquated, peripheral and, arguably, foolish. The Republicans, by contrast, have abandoned traditional conservativism to gain political advantage (with the elderly, for instance) or to pay off their stable of corporate-welfare recipients. The Medicare bill contains large gifts to pharmaceutical manufacturers; the energy bill is a $23.5 billion bequest to traditional-energy producers, with additional billions worth of free-range pork tossed in. 'This is classic machine politics, the sort of thing we used to do,' said a prominent Democrat. Hence the Wall Street Journal's opposition to both bills."
The root of the problem, I think, is that the Democratic Party has drifted so far to the left that it is too easy to be a "conservative." During the last stages of the Cold War, the essence of liberalism was anti-anti-Communism. Liberals would never quite come out and say they supported Communism, but fervent opposition to everything the anti-Communists wanted to to do was the core of their political philosophy. Today, the essence of conservatism could be said to be anti-anti-Americanism. Resisting those who are overtly hostile to our nation and its culture is now considered enough to qualify a politician as a conservative. This is a regrettably low standard. Inevitably, Republican politicians have taken the easy way out by accepting the political benefits of being non-leftists, while forgoing the difficult work of fighting for true conservative principles.
In my view, the current profligacy of the Republicans is one of the prices we are paying for the intellectual disintegration of the Democratic Party.
UPDATE: This Fox News report is chilling: "Bush is eager to sign the [Medicare] bill into law, his largest domestic priority of the year, and senior Republican sources told Fox News that the president warned conservative lawmakers during a teleconference in the middle of the night that if the bill fails then he would support a more liberal version that Democrats propose."
