The Conservative Mess

Jonah Goldberg writes today in the Washington Post about the GOP presidential field and the mess that is today's conservatism:

Well, this wasn't the plan.

As pretty much everyone has noticed, the Republican race hasn't exactly followed any of the scripts laid out for it. Mitt Romney has been hacked apart like the Black Knight in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." John McCain's fortunes -- which had been bouncing up and down like a printout of Dick Cheney's EKG -- have suddenly spiked northward after his victory in New Hampshire. Fred Thompson ran a brilliant "testing the waters" campaign from his front porch, but when he tried to walk on the water, he sank like a basset hound trying to swim. Pushing the poor beast under the waves was Mike Huckabee, whose down-home folksiness makes Thompson look like David Niven.

Huckabee's surprise surge in Iowa has made him this season's pitchfork populist, albeit a much nicer one -- sort of a Disneyland Pat Buchanan. Then there's Ron Paul. He started out as the designated wack job, then became so successful that the Des Moines Register had to cast Alan Keyes in the role of hopeless firebrand wingnut for a brief campaign cameo. And it's a sign of how poorly Rudy Giuliani -- once the indisputable front-runner -- has done that I'm now mentioning him only after Paul.

Of course, this could all change with the next contest.

Much of this chaos is attributable to the fact that this is a very flawed field, or at least one ill-suited for the times we're in. If a camel is a horse designed by committee, then this year's Republican field looks downright dromedarian. This slate of candidates has everything a conservative designer could want -- foreign policy oomph, business acumen, Southern charm, Big Apple chutzpah, religious conviction, outsider zeal, even libertarian ardor -- but all so poorly distributed. As National Review put it in its editorial endorsement of Romney (I am undecided, for the record): "Each of the men running for the Republican nomination has strengths, and none has everything -- all the traits, all the positions -- we are looking for."

But conservatives should contemplate the possibility that the fault lies less in the stars -- or the candidates -- than in ourselves. Conservatism, quite simply, is a mess these days. Conservative attitudes are changing. Or, more accurately, the attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives are changing.

If we start defining conservatism by what we "think" it is, we're in big trouble. Conservatism is what it is and it's not subject to interpretation. It's not a "living" concept subject to the vagaries of public opinion. It's small government, low taxes and muscular foreign policy in its simplest form. Anyone promoting the opposite of any of those items is not a conservative...period...regardless of what they call themselves or how they want to be perceived. Once we start defining conservatism according to what a certain candidate wants it to be, we're done.

Jonah goes on to deal with two candidates who are claiming the mantle of "conservative":

The most revealing development of the campaign so far has to be Huckabee's success at displacing Thompson as the candidate of the socially conservative South. Thompson's failure to translate the immense excitement about his pre-candidacy into anything better than also-ran status is largely attributable to a lackluster campaign effort. But there's at least something symbolic about the fact that Huckabee has become, in the words of Commentary's John Podhoretz, "the socially conservative Southern pro-life candidate with a silver tongue and a pleasingly low-key affect."

Thompson is a solid, traditional, mainstream conservative. He'd be equally comfortable at an American Enterprise Institute conference, a Federalist Society luncheon or a county fair. Taken at his word, Thompson is a card-carrying Reaganite, favoring low taxes, a strong defense and a shrunken role for the federal government.

Huckabee, meanwhile, is nearly the philosophical opposite. He would even use his power as president to push for a national ban on public smoking. "I'm one of the few Republicans," Huckabee insists, "who talk very clearly about the environment, health care, infrastructure, energy independence. I don't cede any of those to the Democrats."

When Huckabee says that, he means it in the same way that Bush promised not to surrender health care and education (another Huckabee issue) to his opponents when he ran as a "compassionate conservative." As a result, we got the biggest federal government expansion into education in history and the largest spike in entitlement spending since the Great Society.

Unfortunately, the battle over entitlement spending is probably lost. Given the huge percentage of our population that receives some sort of government entitlement check, or pays little or no federal income taxes, what's the likelihood that those people will ever vote for a candidate who would take federal dollars out of their pocket by trimming those wasteful programs or instituting a fairer tax plan?

The younger generations coming up have no idea of how this is going to dramatically reduce their standard of living. They're going to have the pay the bills the current crop of politicians will leave for them, and there's nothing conservative about that.