Friday, May 05, 2006

Oversight Indeed   [Jonah Goldberg]

Andrew Sullivan chides me for poor netiquette in not linking to Greenwald. Yes, it was an oversight and not fear which accounts for my failure to link to him before (sorry Glenn). The redesign completely changed the way we post and I simply forgot to jiggle the doohickey properly.

Anyway,  Greenwald — suddenly more sober sounding now that he has to deal with facts — has a long explanation of what he really meant .  It seems to me Greenwald is still in a bit of muddle. I have long argued (and written many times) that the problem with compassionate conservatism  is that it borrows liberal assumptions about the role of government. He now calls foul because in a very limited sense I called a duck a duck.  I remained somewhat agnostic on this point when it seemed like Bush might be less statist than he's been. For example, in 2004,  in a speech to the New York Conservative Party  I wrote:

I never liked compassionate conservatism.

I never thought conservatism needed an adjective. Maybe because I'm more of an Old Testament guy, I like conservatism filled with more smiting and wrath. Compassionate conservatism always struck me as the Republican version of Clintonism, rather than the Republican alternative to it.

Calling it "Big Government Conservatism" instead of "compassionate conservatism" hardly makes it more attractive.

 It's true, I have long criticized Bush's compassionate conservatism as a form of conservatism I don't like, rather than as a form of liberalism. Greenwald's supposed "gotchya" is that I am not calling it liberal so that I don't have to take responsibility for it. He writes:

What is new, however — and this was the point I made yesterday quite clearly — is that conservatives are no longer merely criticizing isolated policies of Bush's or claiming that his conservatism isn't the right type. They are now trying to repudiate him altogether, claiming that he is not and never was one of them, because Bush actually isn't a conservative at all. Actually, like Nixon, he is a liberal. As Goldberg put it rather unambiguously:

But there is one area where we can make somewhat useful comparisons between Nixon and Bush: their status as liberal Republicans.

Me: This is lawyerly and more than a little intellectually dishonest. First I said the comparison is "somewhat" useful, not irocnclad. If he read further into my column, he would have seen that I said Bush is to Nixon's right and that the comparison had its faults and I explained the limited sense in which Bush can be seen as a liberal president like Nixon. I wrote :

 Bush is certainly to the right of Nixon on many issues. But at the philosophical level, he shares the Nixonians' supreme confidence in the power of the state. Bush rejects limited government and many of the philosophical assumptions that underlie that position. He favors instead strong government. He believes, as he said in 2003, that when "somebody hurts, government has got to move." His compassionate conservatism shares with Nixon's moderate Republicanism a core faith that not only can the government love you, but it should spend money to prove its love. Beyond that, there seems to be no core set of principles that define Bush's approach, and therefore, much like Nixon, no clearly communicable message that explains why he does things other than political calculation and expediency.

Greenwald reads me in bad faith — as is his wont — and ducks the basic thrust of my column. Compassionate conservatism is a fundamentally liberal way of looking at government. Nixon was a liberal. He wants to ignore all of this and play games with the labels and say that Bush's allegedly failed presidency failed because it was "conservative" even as he ducks the substantive point that its approach to domestic policy is in many respects decidedly not conservative.  Perhaps he can simply expliain why I'm on wrong on the merits. For example, Was Nixon a liberal, or not?  

05/05 01:41 PMShare