It does not matter whether the faction is left, right, center or lunatic fringe, these dynamics are always at play and history is replete with depictions of the passionate drama of this frenzied dance.
Conservatives in America are no different, although because of the complexity of the evolution of conservative thought in the United States, the number and overlap of factions within the conservative wing sometimes obscure the shifting dynamics of intra-factional disputes. For purposes of discussion we can think of American conservatives as being roughly divided into four major factions – libertarian/constitutionalists, religious social conservatives, conservative capitalists (the group most readily identified with the conservative movement in the United States) and that group that has become known as neo-conservative.
The libertarian/constitutionalists are the right wing of the right wing and frequently engage in anti-federalist rhetoric, if they are not outright anti-government. They have adopted as gospel the aphorism (attributed variously to Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Henry David Thoreau) that “that government is best which governs least.” Within this group are those who believe that the 10th and 11th amendments to the Constitution leave to the states, or even to localities, the right to be self governing in all things save those areas specifically mentioned in the constitution.
Religious social conservatives decry the “moral” decline in the country and assert that bringing society into line with religious doctrine would solve most, if not all our problems. Of course a determination of precisely which religious doctrine should hold sway is a source of controversy, as indeed it has been since human’s first decided that the worship of some deity would be a useful remedy to the mundane problems of daily life.
Conservative capitalists are those who believe that free market economics and democratic freedoms attend to and harness human’s natural desire to achieve and be secure, and in so doing provide a structure for regulating society. Neoconservatism represents an interesting mixture of much of the above and is discussed in greater detail below.
These divisions are arbitrary of course, their definitions are simplistic and the differences between them are often more apparent than real. They are presented as a rhetorical device only, since the most practical delineation of conservative (or liberal) thought would be best represented by the two dimensional grid used in some political “tests” and such as that used by the Advocates for Self Government (http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html).
A third dimension exists for this grid, which graphs the individual differences within each unit of the grid based on the strength with which one held the beliefs represented by that unit. However, the statement that all things are relative to the specific beliefs of the individual renders any potential discussion of faction impossible; it would be confounded by the classic solipsistic error. We will therefore, proceed with this discussion on the premise that people tend to associate based on broad agreements, even when there may be variances in the degree to which individuals express personal commitment to those agreements.
It is clear to even the dullest of observers that there is a both a mainstream and fringe to the conservative party. In fact, there is a great deal of diversity in conservative thought in America, but there is a presumptive tendency to make a distinction between those who are in power and those whose issues and concerns seem less important, mainly because they lack proximity to the halls of power. However, though the “lunatic fringe” – the libertarian conservative, the radical Christian conservative or the “states rightser” – are easy to laugh at, they represent a meaningful and important aspect of conservatism today. And if not attended to they will move the mainstream out of power altogether.
Sleeping with the Enemy
The premise that defines most conservative thought in the United States today is that government is the problem. Whatever the question, the answer of the conservative will in some way implicate government; its size, complexity, intrusiveness or lack of moral fiber.Given that commonality, it is little wonder that there is discontent with the power elite. This administration has seen the development of an entirely new cabinet level department of government (the Dept of Homeland Security), a unprecedented expansion of government intrusion into state’s rights (the “No Child Left Behind Act,”) tremendous an augmentation of entitlements (Medicare prescription benefits) and an explosion in Federal spending that makes Reagan look like a penny pincher.
And so the natives are getting a little restless.
Disenchantment among conservatives is clear as one journeys to the hinterlands of political discourse. Here we find, among the disenchanted, some of the traditional constituencies of the current administration. The irony is that this disenchantment arises from having the conservatives having won the game. Actually being in power means that that the people who put you there expect some movement on their pet issues. When this does not happen, those constituencies may abandon those in power or worse, turn on them.
During the 2004 Presidential election the divisions within the conservative ranks became apparent. Professor Mark Rozell, of the Catholic University of America in Washington, made the precarious position of the administration clear in an article in the Chicago Tribune prior to the 2004: "The principal goal of the religious right is keeping Bush in the White House. But the Christian right is facing a crisis. The movement feels disappointed. On the one hand it has influence, but its ability to change policy in areas it cares about is limited."
Bush’s stand on the issue of Gay Marriage was an attempt to address this problem. However, for many Christians, his position did not take them anywhere near where they wanted to go. The Washington Times quoted one fundamentalist leader: “I am just furious over what's going on in California and over what the president is not doing in California… He says he's 'troubled' -- he should be outraged.”
Gallup aggregate polling numbers indicate that 1 in 10 Americans identify their religious preference as Christian, while 6 in 10 Americans say that religion is very important in their personal lives. Around 4 in 10 Americans say they have attended church or synagogue in the past seven day, and about 6 in 10 say that religion can answer all of today’s problems. But the number of Americans who believe religion is "increasing its influence on American life" has dropped from almost half to less than a third of Americans, while just two-thirds of Americans are "very" or "somewhat" dissatisfied with the country's moral and ethical climate.
Although a November Gallup survey indicated that the percentage of people who said that religion would be extremely or very important to their vote had increased from 37% in 2000 to 48% prior to the 2004 election, "What is more important than the increases in evangelical population is the degree to which this group has become aligned with the Republican Party and become more active in electoral politics," said Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center in an article published in the Chicago Tribune.
"I'm not blaming the president, but religious conservatives have been doing politics for 25 years and, on every front, are worse off on things they care about," said Gary Bauer, president of American Values. "The gay rights movement is more powerful, the culture is more decadent, the life of not one baby has been saved, porn is in the living room, and you can't watch the Super Bowl without your hand on the off switch."[*]The major issues on which the conservatives are misaligned are the exact same issues on which the politically uninitiated person would think that they are in lock-step: The size of the Federal government, Federal Spending, state’s rights and social issues such as gay marriage and abortion.
There are darker and deeper levels of disagreement among conservatives. The premier libertarian thinktank, The Cato Institute, has taken aim at the social programs of the federal government again and again, and even the Heritage Foundation, the thinktank most closely associated with the Republican power grab, expresses deep dissatisfaction with the federal budget and the deficit.
For most conservatives – particularly social and fiscal conservatives, the person and party they have put into office are not the person or party that they thought they were. The major contributor to much that is seen by conservatives as digressive in the current direction is the result of the influence of neo-conservatism on administration policy. This is because it is precisely the issue of the role of government on which the neo-conservative is at war with the rest of the conservative constituency. The neoconservative core of the current administration is both less committed to the gut level social issues of conservatives and more committed to a political evangelism that depends upon big government.
To understand this, one needs to understand the roots of neo-conservatism. Which is to say that one must understand that neo-conservatives are recovering liberals.
A Brief History of…
The roots of liberalism are apparent in the biographies of any number of the mover and shakers inside the Beltway. Take for instance Paul Wolfowitz, the architect and progenitor of the Iraq war. As a young man, Wolfowitz was a supporter of both civil rights and women’s liberation and participated in the 1963 march on Washington that culminated in M.L. King’s historic “I have a dream” speech. It was only after Wolfowitz came under the sway of preeminent cold warrior Albert Wolhstetter at the University of Chicago that his move to the right began. In his core however, he maintains a worldview that is far more liberal activist than it is conservative traditionalist.
In the November, 2003 issue of Vanity Fair. Wolfowitz talked about his outrage at the elaborate excesses of the Marcos government, in the presence of the grinding poverty of the Philippine people. He recounted how his outrage led him to successfully lobby for a withdrawal of the Reagan administration’s formerly strong support for Marcos, which resulted in the Philippine despot’s removal.
It was the alloying of Wolfowitz’s liberal social urges with the cold war penchant – in policies articulated for numerous presidents by Wohlstetter – for the use of the military to address social and political problems, in particular the problem of totalitarianism that was embodied by the Soviet Union, that made Wolfowitz what he is today.
And that, in the end, is what neo-conservatism is, a reaction to and then a splitting from liberals, whose blind advocacy of communism, perceived or real, was noxious to the intellectuals who laid the foundation of the movement. In “The Neoconservative Vision” Mark Gerson states that neo-conservatism has it roots in the “liberal anti-communism” of post war America. What Gerson refers to as anti-communism was actually anti-Stalinism, as it was comprised of a logical conclusion, that, despite any sympathetic support these intellectuals may have had for socialism, Stalin was indistinguishable from Hitler.
In the crucible of give and take in political journals such as Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New Leader these liberal anti-communists found that they had more and more in common with conservatives, than the liberals that were their progenitors. Obviously, in the perspective of this discourse, if Communism was bad, then Democracy was good. If Democracy was good it must be preserved. Once this premise was approached, the move toward the conservative was cemented, for the essence of conservatism is its focus on the preservation of what is valued. The prime policy of conservatism – regardless of county – amounts to a fight for the protection of that which is valued from the encroachment of “progress” or “progressives.”
Despite this tacit conservative drift, there were lonely times for the liberal communists. Despite their dawning alignment with conservative principles, this was a group whose roots were firmly planted in the progressive ideals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, ideas that came to fruition during the New Deal.
And then there is this: to say that that the liberal anti-communists developed tenets consistent with conservatism is not to say that American conservatism had a specific body of philosophy at that time. While the flora and fauna of American conservatism looked much the same as it does today – comprised then as now by libertarians, states rights advocates, and social traditionalists – there was no real organizing influence on American conservative thought until Russell Kirk, building on an spark generated by Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, published The Conservative Mind in 1953. This comprehensive text, which traced conservative thought through history, was followed in short order by the establishment of William F. Buckley’s The National Review in 1955.
It was the founding of Buckley’s journal that began what eventually became a full break between the liberal anti-communists and their socialist liberal brethren, in that Buckley and his cadre of youthful conservatives, successfully established the idea that to be liberal was to be communist, or a communist sympathizer. Driven finally from the liberal ranks, but unable to reconcile themselves with Buckley’s radical rejection of their progressive impulse (Irving Kristol has described The National Review as “brash, even vulgar… sophomoric, to be blunt…”), it was not until the establishment of “The Great Society” that neoconservative thought coalesced into something tangible, aided mainly by the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal and the founding of Public Interest in 1965.
Uncomfortable with the socialist tendencies of the “war on poverty” – whose structure derived in large part from the writings of socialist philosopher Michael Harrington and was sparked in large part by his book The Other America – people like Irving Kristol, James Q. Wilson and Gertrude Himmelfarb finally found their voice. In the end they found that it was voice more at home in a Republican choir than a Democratic one. (Harrington, by the way, was the man who invented the term neoconservative as a pejorative to describe those whom he had referred to as “socialists for Nixon” until then.)
But Kristol, and others responding to the neoconservative impulse, were hybrids – not truly conservative and clearly not liberal. Kristol himself expresses it best:
Though a liberal, I had never been enamored with those beliefs that constituted an orthodox liberal outlook. Thus, I had always been in favor of capital punishment. I never believed that criminality could be "cured" by therapeutic treatment. I never doubted that school prayer was a perfectly sensible idea. I was convinced that the "basics rote learning and memorization" offered the young the best opportunity for learning. I thought that "sexual permissiveness," in all its guises, was an absurd idea. I regarded the ideal of a "world without war" as utopian, and "making the world safe for democracy" a futile enterpriseIn the end what was different about the neocons – and what, today spurs the battles within the conservative wing – was their holding on to the progressive ideal of an “activist” government. That ideal is the root onto which their conservatism is grafted. The neo-conservatives do not reject the concept of the welfare state, and in foreign policy, hold strongly to the idea that American capitalist democracy can – and should – be exported via a strong military presence and a reliance on free-market economics.
It is the neocons who have brought us to the Pax Americana and there are many in the conservative wing who are none to happy about it.
Factions and Fractions – The Long Division of Human Enterprise
Mark Gerson notes that William F. Buckley made concerted efforts to rid the Republican Party of what he considered to be the lunatic fringe – the Ayn Ryan libertarians and the John Birch Society states rights folks, among others. However, the conservative preoccupation with traditional morality has flung the door wide open to those groups once again, for it is the current merger of neoconservative ideology with religious social conservatism and rabid constitutionalism that puts the conservative wing – in particular the power brokers of the Republican party – on this cutting edge of political transition.
As has been mentioned in an article in Newtopia Magazine article by this author (http://www.newtopiamagazine.net/content/issue15/features/evangelism.shtml) the religious conservatives’ emergence into the political mainstream was funded and driven by many of the same factions that Buckley sought to purge in the 50’s. Indeed, it was that very sense of isolation that led to the concerted effort of religious conservatives to recapture the political process and move it according to their agenda. It was the merging of the religious conservative agenda and the neo-conservative agenda that empowered the Republican Party to assume its current dominant role.
That that role is now at risk is ironic, but inevitable, as this was a marriage of convenience. In the end all factional marriages are marriages of convenience. It is this type of factional coalition building, followed by the inevitable and subsequent deterioration of those coalitions, that makes European politics seem so colorful and varied in comparison to America’s staid two party system. In reality however, there is little difference between the variety of the European political landscape and that in the US; America’s is simply pressed below the surface of the Republican/Democrat dialogue.
In their struggles to meet the demands of their various factions, the Republican Party is in danger of ripping apart that which has brought it together. To the free-marketers they offer deregulation and tax cuts that result in record deficits. To the neo-cons they offer war in service of political ideology, “No Child Left Behind” and Medicare prescription coverage, thus upsetting the fiscal conservatives and establishing intrusive governmental policies that anger the libertarians. To the religious right they throw the occasional bone of “Faith Based Initiatives” and the Federal Marriage Amendment, alienating those who are suspicious of NGO (non-government organizations) and again violating the principles of the states rights folks. In trying to please them all, none are pleased. Some are leaving the table altogether.
The founding fathers, John Adams in particular, sought to avoid the factionalism that he saw as so destructive to the social fabric. Sadly, avoiding factionalism is similar to avoiding aging: it is possible to hide the truth for some time, but eventually reality intrudes. Humans will never be in full agreement; even when there is broad agreement on policy, there will be disagreements about implementation. As a result of this, we will always see the coming together and breaking apart of parties and political and social movements. Like the tide rolling inexorably in and out, these cycles both control us and define us.
There is a joke about the weather in England that is applicable here: It is said that “If you don’t like the weather, wait a minute.” The minute of the Republican Party’s sunshine may soon be obscured by clouds. If that is so, it will be no remarkable thing, and those who cobble together the coalitions that defeat them would do well to take notice: that which must be accomplished in the sunshine, had better be done quickly.
[*] February 20, 2004 by The Washington Times “Evangelicals Frustrated by Bush”, Ralph Z. Hallow
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