We Blew It
A look back in remorse on the conservative opportunity that was squandered.
by P.J. O'Rourke
11/17/2008, Volume 014, Issue 09
http://www.weeklyst
Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative
opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is
gone--gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that's
headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.
An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its
own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised
these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom
and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor,
truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at
church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it
might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust
and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in
the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.
Mind you, they won't live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be
reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism--
Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the
Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent
citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said,
around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical,
ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.
The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the
Democratic administration and filibuster-resistan
have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal
and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business
oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the
"rich," and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do
all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again
in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and
shipped to the polling booths.
None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th
century--national socialism, international socialism, inter-species
socialism from Earth First--anyone who is still on the left is obviously
insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right
did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is
only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued
from the hindquarters of our movement. We've had nearly three decades to
educate the electorate about freedom, responsibility, and the evils of
collectivism, and we responded by creating a
big-city-public-
Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great
Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered
in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public
parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed
it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger. Liberalism
wasn't zapped and rolled away on a gurney and confined somewhere until
it expired from natural causes such as natural law or natural rights.
In our preaching and our practice we neglected to convey the organic and
universal nature of freedom. Thus we ensured our loss before we even
began our winning streak. Barry Goldwater was an admirable and
principled man. He took an admirably principled stand on states' rights.
But he was dead wrong. Separate isn't equal. Ask a kid whose parents are
divorced.
Since then modern conservatism has been plagued by the wrong friends and
the wrong foes. The "Southern Strategy" was bequeathed to the Republican
party by Richard Nixon--not a bad friend of conservatism but no friend
at all. The Southern Strategy wasn't needed. Southern whites were
on--begging the pardon of the Scopes trial jury--an evolutionary course
toward becoming Republican. There's a joke in Arkansas about a candidate
hustling votes in the country. The candidate asks a farmer how many
children he has.
"I've got six sons," the farmer says.
"Are they all good little Democrats?" the candidate asks.
"Well," the farmer says, "five of 'em are. But my oldest boy, he got to
readin'..."
There was no need to piss off the entire black population of America to
get Dixie's electoral votes. And despising cracker trash who have a
laundry hamper full of bedsheets with eye-holes cut in them does not
make a man a liberal.
Blacks used to poll Republican. They did so right up until Mrs.
Roosevelt made some sympathetic noises in 1932. And her husband didn't
even deliver on Eleanor's promises.
It's not hard to move a voting bloc. And it should be especially easy to
move voters to the right. Sensible adults are conservative in most
aspects of their private lives. If this weren't so, imagine driving on
I-95: The majority of drivers are drunk, stoned, making out, or watching
TV, while the rest are trying to calculate the size of their carbon
footprints on the backs of Whole Foods receipts while negotiating lane
changes.
People are even more conservative if they have children. Nobody with
kids is a liberal, except maybe one pothead in Marin County. Everybody
wants his or her children to respect freedom, exercise responsibility,
be honest, get educated, have opportunities, and own a bunch of guns.
(The last is optional and includes, but is not limited to, me, my
friends in New Hampshire, and Sarah Palin.)
Reagan managed to reach out to blue collar whites. But there his reach
stopped, leaving many people on our side, but barely knowing it. There
are enough yarmulkes among the neocons to show that Jews are not immune
to conservatism. Few practicing Catholics vote Democratic anymore except
in Massachusetts where they put something in the communion wafers. When
it comes to a full-on, hemp-wearing, kelp-eating, mandala-tatted,
fool-coifed liberal with socks in sandals, I have never met a Muslim
like that or a Chinese and very few Hispanics. No U.S. immigrants from
the Indian subcontinent fill that bill (the odd charlatan yogi
excepted), nor do immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe, or East Asia.
And Japanese tourists may go so far as socks in sandals, but their
liberal nonsense stops at the ankles.
We have all of this going for us, worldwide. And yet we chose to deliver
our sermons only to the faithful or the already converted. Of course the
trailer park Protestants yell "Amen." If you were handling rattlesnakes
and keeping dinosaurs for pets, would you vote for the party that gets
money from PETA?
In how many ways did we fail conservatism? And who can count that high?
Take just one example of our unconserved tendency to poke our noses into
other people's business: abortion. Democracy--be it howsoever
conservative-
with the people as a man may argue with his wife, but in the end we must
submit to the fact of being married. Get a pro-life friend drunk to the
truth-telling stage and ask him what happens if his 14-year-old gets
knocked up. What if it's rape? Some people truly have the courage of
their convictions. I don't know if I'm one of them. I might kill the
baby. I will kill the boy.
The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in
favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--
be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always
needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to
pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their
self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for
more government resources.
If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal--and, in a passive
and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so--then give the
issue a rest. Meanwhile we can, with the public's blessing, refuse to
spend taxpayers' money on killing, circumscribe the timing and method of
taking a human life, make sure parental consent is obtained when
underage girls are involved, and tar and feather teenage boys and run
them out of town on a rail. The law cannot be made identical with
morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could
be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani.
Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the
wrong political emphasis on personal matters. We impeached Clinton for
lying to the government. To our surprise the electorate gave us cold
comfort. Lying to the government: It's called April 15th. And we accused
Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing,
starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to
fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications
about things we no longer can do.
When the Monica Lewinsky news broke, my wife set me straight about the
issue. "Here," she said, "is the most powerful man in the world. And
everyone hates his wife. What's the matter with Sharon Stone? Instead,
he's hitting on an emotionally disturbed intern barely out of her
teens." But our horn rims were so fogged with detestation of Clinton
that we couldn't see how really detestable he was. If we had stayed our
hand in the House of Representatives and treated the brute with shunning
or calls for interventions to make him seek help, we might have chased
him out of the White House. (Although this probably would have required
a U.S. news media from a parallel universe.)
Such things as letting the abortion debate be turned against us and
using the gravity of the impeachment process on something that required
the fly-swat of pest control were strategic errors. Would that blame
could be put on our strategies instead of ourselves. We have lived up to
no principle of conservatism.
Government is bigger than ever. We have fattened the stalled ox and
hatred therewith rather than dined on herbs where love (and the voter)
is. Instead of flattening the Department of Education with a wrecking
ball we let it stand as a pulpit for Bill Bennett. When--to switch
metaphors yet again--such a white elephant is not discarded someone will
eventually try to ride in the howdah on its back. One of our supposed
own did. No Child Left Behind? What if they deserve to be left behind?
What if they deserve a smack on the behind? A nationwide program to test
whether kids are what? Stupid? You've got kids. Kids are stupid.
We railed at welfare and counted it a great victory when Bill Clinton
confused a few poor people by making the rules more complicated. But the
"French-bread lines" for the rich, the "terrapin soup kitchens,"
continue their charity without stint.
The sludge and dreck of political muck-funds flowing to prosperous
businesses and individuals have gotten deeper and more slippery and
stink worse than ever with conservatives minding the sewage works of
legislation.
Agriculture is a business that has been up to its bib overalls in
politics since the first Thanksgiving dinner kickback to the Indians for
subsidizing Pilgrim maize production with fish head fertilizer grants.
But never, since the Mayflower knocked the rock in Plymouth, has
anything as putrid as the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of 2008 been
spread upon the land. Just the name says it. There are no farms left.
Not like the one grampa grew up on.
A "farm" today means 100,000 chickens in a space the size of a Motel 6
shower stall. If we cared anything about "nutrition" we would--to judge
by the mountainous, jiggling flab of Americans--stop growing all food
immediately. And "bioenergy" is a fraud of John Edwards-marital-
proportions. Taxpayer money composted to produce a fuel made of alcohol
that is more expensive than oil, more polluting than oil, and almost as
bad as oil with vermouth and an olive. But this bill passed with
bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress and was happily signed
into law by President Bush. Now it's going to cost us at least $285
billion. That's about five times the gross domestic product of prewar
Iraq. For what we will spend on the Farm, Nutrition and Bioenergy Act of
2008 we could have avoided the war in Iraq and simply bought a
controlling interest in Saddam Hussein's country.
Yes, we got a few tax breaks during the regimes of Reagan and W. But the
government is still taking a third of our salary. Is the government
doing a third of our job? Is the government doing a third of our dishes?
Our laundry? Our vacuuming? When we go to Hooters is the government
tending bar making sure that one out of three margaritas is on the
house? If our spouse is feeling romantic and we're tired, does the
government come over to our house and take care of foreplay? (Actually,
during the Clinton administration.
Anyway, a low tax rate is not--never mind the rhetoric of every
conservative politician--
principle is fiscal responsibility.
Conservatives should never say to voters, "We can lower your taxes."
Conservatives should say to voters, "You can raise spending. You, the
electorate, can, if you choose, have an infinite number of elaborate and
expensive government programs. But we, the government, will have to pay
for those programs. We have three ways to pay.
"We can inflate the currency, destroying your ability to plan for the
future, wrecking the nation's culture of thrift and common sense, and
giving free rein to scallywags to borrow money for worthless scams and
pay it back 10 cents on the dollar.
"We can raise taxes. If the taxes are levied across the board, money
will be taken from everyone's pocket, the economy will stagnate, and the
poorest and least advantaged will be harmed the most. If the taxes are
levied only on the wealthy, money will be taken from wealthy people's
pockets, hampering their capacity to make loans and investments, the
economy will stagnate, and the poorest and the least advantaged will be
harmed the most.
"And we can borrow, building up a massive national debt. This will cause
all of the above things to happen plus it will fund Red Chinese nuclear
submarines that will be popping up in San Francisco Bay to get some
decent Szechwan take-out."
Yes, this would make for longer and less pithy stump speeches. But we'd
be showing ourselves to be men and women of principle. It might cost us,
short-term. We might get knocked down for not whoring after bioenergy
votes in the Iowa caucuses. But at least we wouldn't land on our
scruples. And we could get up again with dignity intact, dust ourselves
off, and take another punch at the liberal bully-boys who want to snatch
the citizenry's freedom and tuck that freedom, like a trophy feather,
into the hatbands of their greasy political bowlers.
But are we men and women of principle? And I don't mean in the matter of
tricky and private concerns like gay marriage. Civil marriage is an
issue of contract law. A constitutional amendment against gay marriage?
I don't get it. How about a constitutional amendment against first
marriages? Now we're talking. No, I speak, once again, of the geological
foundations of conservatism.
Where was the meum and the tuum in our shakedown of Washington
lobbyists? It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives
40 years--from 1954 to 1994--to get that corrupt and arrogant. And we
managed it in just 12. (Who says Republicans don't have much on the ball?)
Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life?
Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren't after
attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are
as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give
a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on
the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and
yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal
immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay
taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn't meet
two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather
eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter,
are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to
have a smoke at the latter establishment.
To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which
we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them.
What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?
We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it's been with us all
along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up
the government of a country that didn't have one? In 1984, I visited the
site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac
overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You'd
urge your daughter to date Rosie O'Donnell before you'd put troops
ashore in such a place.
Since the early 1980s I've been present at the conception (to use the
polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was
about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to
anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I
had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura
in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather
have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of
the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus?
Being there was not so fun.
The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat,
greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell
with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.
Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we
expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in
Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed
that we'd forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed
or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and
water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing
dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.
Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political
philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world's rich people make and
keep their money? (And a fine job we've been doing of that lately.)
If we do have morals, where were they while Bosnians were slaughtered?
And where were we while Clinton dithered over the massacres in Kosovo
and decided, at last, to send the Serbs a message: Mess with the United
States and we'll wait six months, then bomb the country next to you. Of
Rwanda, I cannot bear to think, let alone jest.
And now, to glue and screw the lid on our coffin, comes this financial
crisis. For almost three decades we've been trying to teach average
Americans to act like "stakeholders" in their economy. They learned.
They're crying and whining for government bailouts just like the
billionaire stakeholders in banks and investment houses. Aid, I can
assure you, will be forthcoming from President Obama.
Then average Americans will learn the wisdom of Ronald Reagan's
statement: "The ten most dangerous words in the English language are,
'I'm from the federal government, and I'm here to help.'" Ask a Katrina
survivor.
The left has no idea what's going on in the financial crisis. And I
honor their confusion. Jim Jerk down the road from me, with all the cars
up on blocks in his front yard, falls behind in his mortgage payments,
and the economy of Iceland implodes. I'm missing a few pieces of this
puzzle myself.
Under constant political pressure, which went almost unresisted by
conservatives, a lot of lousy mortgages that would never be repaid were
handed out to Jim Jerk and his drinking buddies and all the ex-wives and
single mothers with whom Jim and his pals have littered the nation.
Wall Street looked at the worthless paper and thought, "How can we make
a buck off this?" The answer was to wrap it in a bow. Take a wide enough
variety of lousy mortgages--some from the East, some from the West, some
from the cities, some from the suburbs, some from shacks, some from
McMansions--
agencies to do fancy risk management math, and you get a "collateralized
debt obligation" with a triple-A rating. Good as cash. Until it wasn't.
Or, put another way, Wall Street was pulling the "room full of horse
s--" trick. Brokerages were saying, "We're going to sell you a room full
of horse s--. And with that much horse s--, you just know there's a pony
in there somewhere."
Anyway, it's no use blaming Wall Street. Blaming Wall Street for being
greedy is like scolding defensive linemen for being big and aggressive.
The people on Wall Street never claimed to be public servants. They took
no oath of office. They're in it for the money. We pay them to be in it
for the money. We don't want our retirement accounts to get a 2 percent
return. (Although that sounds pretty good at the moment.)
What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the
fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult,
which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not
what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device
to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any
given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you
see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass
a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all
the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman
Sachs--think so too.
We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the
responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a
measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a
nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference,
and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law.
We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the
transparency? It's one more job we botched.
Although I must say we're doing good work on our final task--attaching
the garden hose to our car's exhaust pipe and running it in through a
vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some
subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.
P.J. O'Rourke is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
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