Why Conservatives Can’t Govern

His premise is that the Republicans were always best-off playing the role of “loyal opposition,” but that their core ideology – anti-federal government – makes them unsuited to run “big government.” How can you run properly, something you never believed in to begin with?

To quote some of the juicier portions of the article:

If government is necessary, bad government, at least for conservatives, is inevitable, and conservatives have been exceptionally good at showing just how bad it can be. Hence the truth revealed by the Bush years: Bad government–indeed, bloated, inefficient, corrupt, and unfair government–is the only kind of conservative government there is. Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well.

On Katrina and FEMA:

Long before Katrina destroyed New Orleans, Allbaugh and Brown were busy destroying FEMA: privatizing many of the agency’s programs, shifting attention away from disaster management, and shedding no tears as scores of agency staff left in dismay. Human beings cannot prevent natural disasters, but they can prevent man-made ones. Not the Bush administration. Its ideological hostility toward government all but guaranteed that the physical damage inflicted by a hurricane would be exacerbated by the human damage caused by incompetence.

On Iraq:

So long as conservatives denigrate government while relying on government to achieve their objectives, Rumsfeld’s vision of how to fight wars is the only kind of conservative foreign policy one can have. His low-balling of troop estimates in Iraq was the foreign policy equivalent of libertarian economics: relying on government while refusing to pay for it. His hostility toward Iraqi reconstruction resonated with those skeptical of rebuilding New Orleans. His disdain for Colin Powell’s State Department mirrored Joe McCarthy’s for Dean Acheson’s. Only a tried-and-true conservative could ever have come up with the idea of turning the management of Iraqi police forces over to private firms to the extent that Rumsfeld did, with catastrophic results for the Iraqis themselves. While it is difficult to label someone who plans a war an isolationist, Rumsfeld’s hostility toward America’s historic allies represented a contemporary version of unilateralism, which has always been isolationism’s first cousin. The neoconservatives wanted to draft hugely expensive undertakings onto a party with an isolationist past. The Secretary of Defense wanted to draft on to the same political party a distant war, but with the promise of being cheap and avoiding the loss of American lives. It is not difficult to conclude which one would win in today’s conservative environment.

The basic problem with Conservativism:

There are ways out of the conservative dilemma. American conservatives could, for example, take away from the Bush years the lesson that they must change their ideology if they are ever again to make the Republican Party a serious party of governance. This is not beyond the realm of possibility. Conservatives in the American past–not only Hamilton and Marshall, but Daniel Webster and Henry Clay–were in favor of a strong government capable of meeting national objectives. There exists, moreover, a modernizing version of conservatism in contemporary Europe, where conservatives recognize the inevitability of government but try to tailor its objectives and improve its competence. Call this “big government conservatism” if you wish, but it would have little in common with that term as President Bush’s critics use it to attack him and his administration. This would not be a conservatism that used government to pay off friends and punish enemies but one that sought to use government to stabilize society and avoid periodic crises.

Admittedly, not much evidence exists in America today that conservatives are prepared to move in such a direction. If anything, they seem to have reinforced and strengthened their determination to govern as incompetently and unfairly as they can. The fact that they will leave behind a public sector in roughly the same condition that strip miners leave hillsides would cause nothing but pain to yesterday’s patricians, for whom ideals such as responsibility and soundness were watchwords. But today’s conservatives have no problem passing on the costs of their present madness to future generations. Governing well would require them to use the bully-pulpit of office to educate and uplift their base. But since contemporary conservatives get their political energy from angry voices of rage and revenge, they will always blame others for the failures built into their ideology. That is why conservatism so rarely makes for a good governance party. As far as conservatives are concerned, it is always someone else’s government, one reason they can be so indifferent to their own mismanagement.

I don’t really oppose a Republican President as a healthy check on government (just not our current Republican President). Neither am I particularly concerned about a some of our states becoming proving grounds for new Republican ideas under powerful conservative oversight. But I absolutely do not want the Republicans in control of our national Congress. Time to vote them out and let them be the “party of opposition” they were always meant to be.

Economists as fight club might actually be a really good way to look at it.

Kaimi,

I actually thought I put something like your comment in one of my comments, but I guess I deleted it when I was editing. So I’m glad you made the point clear. I brought up the Supreme Court in the discussion to show:

1. Jason an example of why ideology of both Parties matters for this election, not just the party in power.

2. To point out to Jeremy that his “Bush Administration=all that is evil” analysis was missing something.

I certainly am not under the impression that SC nominees have to go through the House!

I never said “inherently.” Just, as of late, empirically.

It really gets back to JNS’s original post: the party in power has been corrupted by that power, and voting against them will not only counter that corruption, but (at least for a time) discourage or at the very least delay subsequent corruption. In other words, rewarding either party with reelection after a period of widespread corruption rewards not just that party, but corrupt politics in general. It so happens that right now, the GOP is in power and is crippled by corruption–and the scrutiny that corruption has brought would put the dems on notice if they gain power in November.