Now We Know

Today, we know the substantive problems with compassionate conservatism. It involved blending church and state in ways that made people on both sides uncomfortable. It was too small an agenda to build an entire domestic policy around. ~David Brooks

Now some of us sensed the problems with “compassionate conservatism” right away.  It wasn’t that it blended church and state, but that it wrapped up the same old welfarism in quasi-religious language and sought to centralise things that were best left local.  It wasn’t that the agenda was too small or too large–the agenda was wrong, because it had the government trying to do things “compassionately” that conservatives theoretically didn’t want government doing in the first place.  If Mr. Bush “saved” the GOP from big government conservatism, he had a funny way of doing it, since one might have called “compassionate conservatism” a kinder, gentler form of neoconservative social policy.   

Going back over the 22 July 1999 speech, I was reminded of many of the catchphrases from his camaign (“armies of compassion” was one that always rubbed me the wrong way for some reason).  I also remember that later that same year he complained that Congress was “balancing the budget on the backs of the poor.”  At that moment, I knew that there was something seriously amiss with Mr. Bush’s candidacy.  Later he complained about conservatives who spoke of America “slouching toward Gomorrah” in a clear shot at Robert Bork.  How sad and also strangely amusing that Mr. Bush should now be regarded by some as some sort of obsessive religious conservative and an incipient theocrat, when he made his start in the national campaign often running against the voices of moral reproach.  He was the obnoxiously self-satisfied John McCain lecturing his fellow Republicans from a position of righteous “moderation”–at least, that’s what he was before he discovered that he had to compete with the real McCoy, er, McCain.  That was what “compassionate conservatism” seemed to be: a Third Way for Republicans; rhetorical distancing from actual conservative positions to show that he wasn’t really one of “them”; a sort of neoliberalism on the right.  In practice, that is more or less what it was.  It wasn’t anything really new, but presented a new face: it was moderate Republicanism that had a friend in Jesus.  Of it a cynic might have said, “It’s not your daddy’s Rockefeller Republicanism anymore.”