Is the GOP kaput?

Yes and no.

Looking at it from just this year's election perspective, we can see two seemingly contradictory trends. One is in the presidential race, where McCain has a moderate but distinctive advantage, even against Hillary Clinton, the stronger of the two remaining Democratic contenders. The other is in the Congressional elections, where the Republicans are still in real trouble, as much trouble as they were in back in 2006.

The root of the trouble remains what is was then: no political party has so swiftly abandoned what it purported to represent after achieving such dominance. This development certainly alienated the conservative base, a trend already visible as far back as the 1998 elections. But the party's fecklessness with regard to spending and reorientation towards big guvmint has also alienated right-leaning independent voters and conservative Democrats. Even without being conservative purists, they find less and less reason to vote Republican. It's hard to find a comparable example of a party squandering its natural advantages so completely, so quickly.

It may be past time for what remains of the conservative movement to abandon the baggage of traditional conservatism. It once had a reason and a role. But it's becoming clearer every day that the rhetoric of traditional Anglo-American conservatism - appealing to traditional moral and political authority, patriotism, and religion, while opposing the growth of government - is incoherent, at least under modern conditions.

It leads to weird paradoxes, like the revival of respect for governmental and presidential authority under Reagan, who was opposed to the ambitions and pretensions of modern government; or the abuse of governmental authority by Bush, even while he still uses the rhetoric of conservatism. The ultimate upshot is that such a contradiction has to be solved and has been, by moving in a Nixonian direction - traditional authority, patriotism, and morality tied to massive growth of government. The parallel move of conservative and moderate Democrats to the Republican party means the party has a whole new constituency to serve and a new type of right-leaning populist politician. The most striking sign is the rise of Mike Huckabee, the Christian minister and nanny-statist, who came in second overall in the Republican primaries. Such a politician would have been unthinkable in the GOP even as recently as 15 years ago.

A new sort of coalition is needed, perhaps taking a page from "liberal" parties in other countries, using "liberal" for once in its real meaning: smaller government, market-oriented, and individualist - without the traditionalist, moralistic, and populist baggage. The pieces of such a coalition are at hand. But we don't yet have politicians to lead it. Voters thinking that Obama fits the bill are deluding themselves. He's the most left-leaning presidential candidate in American history, although he lacks much political definition. His politics are a throwback. Even Hillary Clinton, as left as she is, is not such an antique. From the present wreckage of the GOP, such a beginning can be made by liberal Republicans and center-right independents. But it will take a lot more to regroup and reassert the limited government message. (May 29)

POSTSCRIPT: Kimberley Strassel has made a similar argument over at the Wall Street Journal: McCain needs to run against Congress. It's not just that it's controlled right now by the Democrats and has the lowest poll ratings ever recorded. The Congressional Republicans need the wake-up call as well. McCain has contributed in his own way to the present debacle, above all with the ridiculous and unconstitutional McCain-Feingold political speech and finance restrictions.* But he does have significant credibility on spending and not falling into the braindead partisan lockstep that led to the Republican losses in 2006. (May 30)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Jon Henke of the fascinating Web site, The Next Right, concludes about the Republicans in a way very similar to my distinction among liberal, conservative, and big-government-populist (miracles not math!) Republicans. He correctly points to the rise and fall of the third group, the marginalization of the second, and the surprise resurgence of the first. Henke's been guest-blogging over at Megan McArdle's joint. Maybe someone out there is paying attention to me, and I'm not just bloviating into the silence of cyberspace :) (June 1)
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* Ironically, McCain himself has opted out of public campaign financing, because of its onerous restrictions.

The New Deal reconsidered: Reforming the welfare state

A few postings ago, I alluded to the approaching crisis of the welfare state. If it is to survive in some form and not bankrupt the federal government and create the largest economic and political crisis since the Great Depression, we need to start now to negotiate the critical choices. The Republicans had their chance to get the ball rolling in the 1990s, but (welfare reform apart) threw away their opportunity, then headed off in a very different direction after 1998. The result was a strange parody of liberalism, the Republicans' attempt to create their own version of vote-buying on a national scale with two new middle-class entitlements, in education and health care. A latter-day version of Nixonism, it worked for a few years, but has now lost credibility and heightened the federal government's burden.

It's not as if the problem is new. A spate of books published in the 90s (books by Jonathan Rauch, David Frum, Robert Samuelson, and Alice Rivlin) and, more recently, histories (like those of Goldberg and Shlaes) and policy briefs (like Bruce Bartlett, George Shultz, Charles Murray, and Cass Sunstein's) have mapped out the problem from different points of view. Previous crisis points, in the late 30s and late 70s, have periodically reminded Americans of the question: what to do about this behemoth born in the 1930s and periodically threatening to devour us with its ravenous demands for money and authority?

But the political context is different now. The imperial presidency is a greatly shrunken institution. Keynesian theories of inadequate demand, the business cycle, and "fine-tuning" have been discredited and replaced by newer versions of classical, neoclassical, and monetarist theories. We live today with a government that is fat but weak, unable to say no, tied down by an army of pressure groups jockeying to grab a piece of government power and impose narrow agendas at the expense of everyone else, proliferating and inconsistent laws, and politically-driven litigation. We lack powerful parties or executive leaders who can decisively steer or shape it. The last president to try was Reagan, with only modest success. Equilibrium, as in Clinton's second term, is only the accidental product of partisan stalemate.

Too much of the politics of the West, especially in Europe, but here as well, takes this behemoth for granted as an eternal presence that has always been with us. But it is not so. The welfare state in Europe dates from the 1880s; in the US, at the federal level, from the 1930s, although its seeds were planted earlier. From the start, observers could see the contradiction between claiming to represent the public good, while in actuality helping self-serving interest groups at the larger public expense. After the totalitarian era passed, the war ended, and the New Deal coalition broke down, the danger of greedy interest groups became all the stronger. Added to this were new, long-term dangers, especially the demographic danger, as the postwar Baby Boom gave way to bust, of not being able to afford the extravagant promises. Something less all-encompassing, yet still noxious, the fantasy of "fine-tuning" the economy through a mix of taxation, monetary policy, and subsidy led to stagflation - and later, in the 1990s and '00s, to a surge of asset bubbles and exploding public sector costs, especially in health care and education.

Reforming the welfare state to the degree that will be necessary in the next 10 to 15 years will require leaders nearly as powerful as those who originally created it. The once-powerful parties and presidency have lost their authority, but the large, intrusive, and expensive government they created is still with us. Every governmental transfer program creates a class of beneficiaries and intermediaries who immediately become vested interest groups. Without strong political parties or presidents to keep them in check, these groups become the real controllers (or at least veto powers) of politics. And these veto powers in turn have made it almost impossible for liberals to later change the programs or conservatives to later dismantle them. Our politics needs serious reform as well, to free our electoral system from its current nightmare of suppressed free speech and media tyranny.

It's all about you and me. The welfare state is sometimes confused with "helping the poor," but at the federal level, this is not its main role. For that, I'll direct you over here instead. Briefly, the negative income tax for the working and able-bodied poor would be better than the current system. While the 1996 welfare reform was a remarkable success, more could be done in that direction. But the federal spending on the poor is a fraction of federal spending on the middle and working classes. That's what "welfare state" means here.

The middle class welfare state consists of four functions. The first two are mainly "entitlements," meaning that citizens can receive their benefits by meeting certain eligibility requirements and nothing else. The original programs were passed earlier, but their present form (with automatic spending and without discretionary choices by Congress) dates to the Nixon years.

Social insurance - that is, Social Security and Medicare. The former will need reform by the end of the next decade to avoid bankruptcy; the latter is in even more dire shape and will need it sooner. The minimal reforms needed are not drastic: they include a mix of changing eligibility requirements and means testing (concentrating full benefits on beneficiaries with lower incomes). To go beyond that is less a necessity and more ideological preference, but larger redesigns are worth discussing. The main favor we can do for future generations is, to the extent possible, make these programs self-financing through forced saving, rather than transferring from present taxpayers to present retirees, which is what they do now. These programs are an incredibly bad deal for younger workers and immigrants.

The subsidy-loan guarantee state, which has caused growing mischief of all sorts and has few justifications in a society as wealthy as ours. It covers everything from pushing home ownership on people who can't afford it to exploding higher education costs to destructive ethanol subsidies. The federal government's role as lender of last resort and backer of otherwise private-sector loans opens it up to dangerous vulnerabilities, as well as encouraging what economists call "moral hazard" - beneficiaries taking excessive risks because they know someone will bail them out.

The regulatory-litigation state, which was originally more modest and with strong justification, for example, in the financial sector.* This federal function has become more and more twisted over the years by judicial passivity in the face of an aggressive trial bar. Tort reform is one answer here, including requiring judges to take a more active role and not defer to the lawyers. The role of Congress and regulatory agencies has been twisted in a different way, by the formation of the "iron triangle" of interest groups, the media, and politicians. Only stronger political parties and presidents not in thrall to the news media can enable positive change here.

The pork barrel state, perhaps the most characteristic feature of the welfare state in its mature phase. This is the system of special favors, earmarks, and patronage pioneered mainly by Democrats, but recently imitated and taken to new levels by Republicans. This development is often misunderstood as a result of private parties (interest groups, corporations, etc.) "buying" politicians. In fact, it's the politicians who typically take the initiative in creating these relationships in the first place. Remember: each such special favor granted to this group or that, makes a vested interest out of that group. Subsequent politicians are only occasionally able to buck these groups, once they're created.**

The tragedy of modern America is that the ideas and tools needed for this reform are not missing. Voters are in many ways well ahead of the politicians, their obnoxious handlers and advisors, and the news media complex they've enslaved themselves to (our age's equivalent of court scribblers and flunkies). Voters have seen through - very through - the politicians' empty promises. We lack education and wisdom, even as we drown in a torrent of often irrelevant or twisted "information." Real history and real intellectuals are what's needed to bring out Americans' latent skepticism about government and politicians and turn it into real understanding and real change. Not only do we need to abandon false ideals like equality of condition, but even half-truths like equality of opportunity. While it's an improvement, no modern society can guarantee the latter (much less the former) and remain modern. What is reasonable to expect is freedom of opportunity, and it is here that modern liberalism has left a positive mark, in lifting inherited and often arbitrary prejudices about what people in stigmatized groups are capable of. Traditionally, what such people suffered from was not exploitation, but barriers to full participation in society, and we should be grateful for what liberalism, in its heyday, was able to accomplish here. If the much-abused phrase "social justice" means anything, it means that.

Some final thoughts. The federal budget today is largely entitlements (more than two-thirds), which continue to grow in absolute terms and in proportion to the whole. There's still a lot of confusion about this, as well as mythology about the size of the military budget, which is smaller as a proportional of national income than it has been since 1940.

The main damage done by Bush is this: while early on, it was recession and tax cuts that led to renewed deficits, and the deficit situation improved once the economy started to expand again in 2002, the problem has more recently morphed into a structural spending-driven condition and will become steadily worse in the coming decade. Apart from Reagan and the Fed's singular achievement of taming inflation, the most important achievement of the 20-year period from 1979 to 1999 was what did not happen: no major new domestic spending commitments; a large step up in military spending, followed by an even larger drop after 1986; and very favorable conditions from 1994 to 2000, with a conservative Congress and a president unable and ultimately unwilling to push for more. The real disaster after 2000 was the almost total disappearance of influential conservatives at the national level, and partisan lock-step between Congress and the White House on spending. Even now, not many people have really absorbed the enormity of what went wrong under Bush - Republicans often don't get it, and everyone else is still talking about Bush as "right-wing" or "conservative." This mind-set has to end if we are to see clearly what went wrong and why, where we're headed, and what needs to be done.

Politically, it means that, while few conservatives are available, we will have to make do with liberal Republicans and conservative and moderate Democrats. They're the few at the national level who might see what's gone wrong and galvanize the public's skepticism about government. Obama and Clinton have little credibility here. McCain does have some personal credibility - but his party, no longer.
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* A benefit of the New Deal was the creation of a truly national banking and financial regulatory system, as Hamilton foresaw would be needed and Jefferson resisted.

** To get a sense of the pretense and folly of "progressive" politics these days, here's an example of what it really means. And let's not forget Massachusetts, which long ago moved from nuts-and-bolts government to bloated "big thinking" (or "big digging").

The Kennedy assassination and the liberal breakdown

James Piereson has just written a short and penetrating book on the aftereffects of the Kennedy years and Kennedy's assassination on American liberalism, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism. Liberals and liberalism clearly suffered a nervous breakdown in the years after 1965. Piereson argues persuasively that the Kennedy administration and especially his death had a decisive negative effect on liberalism, which has never really recovered from that period.

The factual core of his argument is accepting, as all educated persons open to reason do, that the assassin Oswald acted alone, motivated by his far-left political beliefs. Piereson marshalls the evidence to this effect and notes the lack of counterevidence, especially to support the wide range of conspiracy theories that substitute for simply accepting the facts. But while Oswald acted alone, he did not think alone. He was a convinced Marxist, of the emerging "new" Left type, incensed by the Kennedy administrations attempts to eliminate Castro and his regime. He had defected to Russia in 1959, returned with his Russian wife in 1962, then attempted to meet Cuban diplomats and agents in Mexico City a couple months prior to the assassination. There's no evidence that Oswald was a "sleeper agent" programmed by the Soviets, and little evidence in that direction in connection with the Cubans. But there's also little question about his motives. The available evidence runs to thousands of pages of police and FBI files, scraps of declassified KGB files, plus Oswald's writings and publicly-stated beliefs. Part of the reason for the lack of a wider-ranging official investigation was simple embarrassment over the FBI and Secret Service's having missed such an obvious danger.

At the time of Kennedy's death, liberals were obsessed with a vague entity called the "radical right" and starting their long mental night of disconnection from reality. As Piereson goes to great pains to explain, especially to readers under 50 who were not present or old enough to understand the events first-hand, liberals continued to be obsessed with the "radical right" even after Kennedy's assassination. Little could be done to persuade the liberal elite, the media, academics and clerics, et al., to pay attention to the facts. Here was the origin of all the conspiracy theories about the assassination: a refusal to accept the obvious and a replacement of facts by preconceived "narrative." It was a failure of the respectable establishment itself; the wackos then cashed in on the establishment's own abandonment of reason and capitulation to fantasy. This is the moment when the media began to float free of facts and liberalism started to come unhinged. "Narrative" buried plain truth. Conservatives, on the other hand, had little difficulty accepting the bare facts and, as a matter of disposition, did not have the naive belief in automatic upward progress that most liberals shared at that time. They were shocked, but not surprised, by the assassination.

While Johnson was able to turn Kennedy's memory into a remarkable legislative accomplishments in 1964 and 1965 (the Civil Rights Bill, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Voting Rights Bill), liberals had by that point become dissatisfied with the old-style liberalism of the Progressive and New Deal eras and its programmatic basis. Kennedy had inadvertently awakened a yearning for something else entirely: a liberalism of style and ultimately a cultural radicalism, converting politics from bread and butter self-interest into obsessions about identity: the personal as political. Some even saw it at the time: Kennedy's own aristocratic air; the wealth and glamor of Jackie and their children; and America's burgeoning culture of celebrity, about to become pervasive with the rise of television, which itself made Kennedy's election in 1960 possible. Johnson won what was at that time the largest landslide in American history in 1964, but this victory proved ephemeral. Within a few years, liberalism was under fatal assault, not from without, but from within, as radical children rebelled against liberal parents.

Liberalism proved more fragile than expected, in contrast with standard liberal beliefs at the time. In less than 15 years, it went from an optimistic, hopeful, and forward-looking movement to a guilt-ridden and backward-looking movement of punishment and decline. I might discreetly add that the "new" punitive liberalism serves the class interests of the cultural elite. But the public at large are its designated victims, which is why it can't be directly sold to them. Instead, it has to be imposed by the courts and screamed in everyone's ears by the media and academia. This explains why the Boomers, radical children of the Greatest Generation, didn't look to conventional politics as their vehicle, unlike their parents and grandparents. Instead, they fomented the rise of "para-politics": the media, activist groups, and the courts. With these, they could reshape politics, not by voting or running for office, but by seizing the cultural megaphone and beating the drum of fake crisis as a front for the real agenda. As the Obama candidacy suggests, "punitive" liberalism is still with us, although since the 80s, it has had to adopt a wide range of cloaking strategies to hide itself - otherwise, voters would simply reject it.

The events of the decade-and-a-half starting in 1965 revealed that American liberals had become a panicked mandarin class, projecting their decline outward, and obsessed with exaggerated or invented problems, constantly trying to bully voters into accepting their dark vision. Whatever prospect the "new" liberalism of the 60s and 70s had of achieving legitimate electoral success was dashed in 1980 by Reagan's election. The Clinton years of the 90s proved frustrating for left-liberals. While Clinton was fairly popular (even though not a majority president) and his later policies more so, the left of the Democratic party found little way to force its agenda into American politics, in spite of its disproportionate influence in liberal institutions (universities, media, mainstream churches).

The Kennedy assassination itself, as Piereson explains in some detail, was the central event in this change. Waves of nostalgia and myth-making engulfed the liberal classes, distorting who Kennedy was and why he was killed. A sense of irreplaceable loss overcame much of the nation, giving rise in some quarters to despair, which is typically the root of political rage and radicalism. JFK's assassination was the first of a series of assassinations in the 60s and 70s encouraged by the rise of television, much as an earlier wave of assassinations in the late 19th century was encouraged by the rise of the telegraph and the penny press. The killing of Malcolm X in 1964 and Sirhan Sirhan's 1968 assassination of Robert Kennedy (motivated by RFK's support of Israel - Sirhan was a Jordanian-Palestinian) did not fit the template of the liberal obsession with the "radical right" either. Only Martin Luther King's 1968 death at the hands of James Earl Ray, a self-confessed loser acting out notions of white supremacy shared by parts of white society in those days, fit anything like what the liberal "narrative" required, although King's death, like the movement he led, is best viewed as a follow-on to the Civil War and Lincoln's assassination.

Pre-1965 liberalism is now a lost world to us. It's hard to remember that modern liberalism, from the 1890s until the early 1960s was the main party of ideas and reform in American life. Kennedy's own policies, while containing a liberal strain (such as the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and a belated recognition of the civil rights movement), were also exceptionally aggressive in opposition to communism as it spread into the Third World and newly decolonized countries. The Kennedy assassination started the disintegration of this older "reform" liberalism and accelerated its replacement by the new punitive liberalism. The mid-century liberal movement itself became split into radicalized and neoconservative wings. These events showed that, contrary to what many of its spokesmen believed, modern liberalism was not as rational a movement as it imagined itself to be. It had strong latent reserves of denial, selective misuse of facts, and wishful thinking. It took a series of unexpected and inexplicable disasters, starting with the Kennedy assassination, to bring that potential out. Often it's not events themselves, but people's reactions to them, that prove decisive.

In the years since, nothing has replaced the centrality of liberalism as America's guiding political philosophy, not Reagan-Goldwater-style conservatism, not neoliberalism, nor the flash-in-the-pan of neoconservatism. Its absence has opened a void in American life not yet filled.** Instead, the leftover fragments of the once-ascendant liberalism fight it out in a deepening twilight. It is worth remarking on the striking fact that, 40-plus years later, liberals and liberal institutions (especially the media) are still acting out and upon many of the themes of that era of disintegration. The era of FDR came to an end between 1968 and 1980. The era of Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon - including its misunderstood events, trends, and traumas - is, strangely, still with us.
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* The terminology reflects the vague anxieties of liberals who, by the late 1940s, were establishment, although they often had a hard time admitting this, even to themselves. (That's why Senator McCarthy could make them such an effective target for populist-style attacks, especially while the Korean war was still on.) While various portentous theories about the "radical right" were floated to "explain" who "they" were, the concept was never defined. If they were the pre-war isolationists, they had been discredited and marginalized. If they were the American fellow-travelers of fascism, they were never large in number and in precipitous decline by the 1960s. If they were the new post-war conservatives, there was never any danger of political violence - the problem here is that liberals had weak answers to attacks from the free-market, individualist right, whose anticommunism and opposition to collectivism were always more consistent and better thought-out. The real problem was that liberals continued to have a "no enemies on the left" mentality that served them poorly during the cultural revolution of the later 60s and 70s.

By then, as Piereson points out, it was clear that the main threat to liberal democracy in America was from this violent and anti-American "new" left. That movement's toxic residue remains in our major liberal institutions (academia and the media), which have been powerfully corrupted by it. Unfortunately, today's remnant of liberals still have a hard time seeing this - and thus, are slow to accept the free-market revival of the 80s, the end of the Cold War, and threat that political Islam poses to Western and non-Western nations. In the first two instances, they fundamentally misinterpreted the course of modern history. In the last, many cannot process something so alien to Western sensibilities.

** Just one fact alone demonstrates the enormity of the change. In 1964, almost 55 percent of registered voters were Democrats. Today it's slightly less than a third.

William F. Buckley, Jr.: An appreciation

Where to start? A giant of the postwar world, one of the founders of modern conservatism, and a leading light who remade American politics, died just over a month ago. Many tributes have appeared, and his positive influence is everywhere you look.

When World War Two ended, American conservatism seemed to be finished. Although opposition to the increasingly statist bent of liberalism came from many and often conflicting points of view (individualism, religion, nativism, etc.), the two large forms of opposition were isolationism (opposition to American entry into the war - although that was not in any way purely a cause of the Right) and hostility to the dramatic expansion and pretensions of the federal government. Both oppositions appeared discredited, although disillusionment with the New Deal and federal intervention in general was widespread by the time of the 1940 election. And a significant part of the Republican party - its East Coast, Anglophile wing, led by Wendell Wilkie - did support intervention, in fact preventing foreign policy from becoming a major partisan issue in the 1940 and 1944 elections and marginalizing isolationism to a great degree. Nonetheless, while much of the New Deal had been repudiated after the 1938 midterm elections, everyone in 1940 knew what the great question was: to intervene or not, how fast and how deep. Of course, the Germans' undeclared submarine war of 1940-41 and the attack on Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 rendered that debate moot. The US did intervene in World War Two, on the Allied side, and few regretted it afterwards, in spite of the immense cost and the dubiousness of having the Soviet Union as an ally.

Other factors were at work in the fragmented state of the American right in 1945. It had some of the same components familiar today. There were conservatives, people who deferred to tradition because it was tradition. The fact that the American political tradition was largely a liberal one (with one major exception) created something of a paradox.* That tradition was one of limited government, one overturned by the socialist-tinged "new" or "reform" liberalism of the Progressive and New Deal eras. (The change was large enough that it is questionable whether the adjective "liberal" should be used at all.) Classical liberals (later called libertarians) never bought into tradition-for-tradition's-sake and based their views on straightforward, historically informed ideas (abundantly confirmed by recent experience in the world wars and totalitarian dictatorships) about the negative effect on human liberty and prosperity by too-large and too-powerful a government. Some went further and re-developed the familiar 18th-century theories of natural rights and consensual government in terms understandable to a 20th century audience. To that they added a more modern and deeper appreciation of the limits of social knowledge and the impossibility of social planning.

A striking fact astute readers might notice is that I make no mention of the "religious right" in this potted history. That's because, after the liberal-fundamentalist battles of the late 19th and early 20s centuries, the fundamentalists retreated to their own, anti-political, subculture. To the extend that they were political, they largely voted Democratic, because they were largely southern or urban-ethnic Catholic - and in those days, virtually all white southern and Catholic voters voted Democratic. The "religious right" as we now know it, an alliance between conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants, was 30+ years in the future at the end of the war. In 1945, a few feeble attempts at ecumenism apart, the relation between Protestants and Catholics was one of mutual suspicion, laced with ignorance and prejudice - although the war itself had had a strong positive impact on this state of affairs. The full scope of this impact is in large part the complete transformation of religious and ethnic identity in America in the postwar era. This transformation made black civil rights easier to swallow (for whites), gave rise to a new level of interreligious understanding, and made Buckley's type of "big tent" conservatism possible. All of these were out of reach and almost unthinkable before 1945. In his relationship with American Jews, Buckley's approach was even more radical, given the level of anti-Jewish prejudice still prevalent in 1945. By the late 1950s, his nascent movement and its allies counted a significant number of Jewish thinkers, many of them refugees from Europe and carrying first-hand experience of life under the totalitarian dictatorships. Well before the Republican party, under Nixon, fully embraced support of Israel, Buckley adopted such support as a matter of course, because he understood the basic issues at stake. When the Soviet Jewry movement started in the mid-1960s, Buckley and his followers were among its early non-Jewish allies and supporters.

Buckley was a wealthy liberal Catholic, a man from a social background (including a father who was an American ambassador) that, on the surface, seemed conventionally WASP. It was his quirky Catholicism that initially made the difference. It made him have to think - really think - about political issues in a deeper way than most people have to, people who take their political views without much thought from their parents, teachers, and peers. This led him initially to oppose modern American liberalism from a traditionalist point of view, but also made him open to libertarian approaches. From these experiences, he formed a clear conception of how to rebuild the American right around a few simple and broadly appealing stands that any rational person could assent to, without regard to ethnic or religious background: opposition to the growth of government at home and opposition to the dominant form of collectivist tyranny abroad, communism. Buckley and his allies founded National Review, still the flagship of American conservatism, and began a campaign that stretched from the early 1950s to the late 70s to absorb all opposition to modern liberalism in this way. By doing this, Buckley sidestepped the leftover isolationist-interventionist debate and ended the American right's parochialism. By the late 1950s, all sorts of people, many Protestant, but a large minority of Catholics, and a surprising number of Jewish thinkers had been pulled into Buckley's movement, so much so that by the 1960s, the movement had become a broad political tendency in its own right and no longer a "movement." Buckley concentrated on the crucial common ground, dispensed with the provinciality and ethnocentrism of the prewar right, and even proved ecumenical enough to accept individualist and libertarian followers. (They often rejected him anyway, but that was their doing, not Buckley's.) Buckley even flirted with libertarianism himself, in his 1965 run for Mayor of New York and his famous, offshore 1960s pot parties on his yacht.

The era of Buckley's and conservatism's success was the late 70s and 1980s. In the 1960s, American liberals had obtained a blank check, under Kennedy and Johnson, and led themselves and the country, both domestically and internationally, into a gratuitous mess: instead of triumphing, liberalism went haywire and, after 1965, began a free-fall from which it has never recovered. The fact that the president who brought the Kennedy-Johnson tendencies to their logical conclusion - Richard Nixon - was a Republican seemed at first to set back the conservative cause. But Nixon was not a conservative. He was nominated in 1968 in part because he wasn't Goldwater and couldn't be tarred as a "crazy radical." The Watergate crisis (and the war that led to that crisis) were largely, and correctly, perceived as failures of the new, expensive, obtrusive, and frequently dysfunctional expanded government introduced by liberals. Nixon went along with it ("we are all Keynesians now," he famous said in 1972) and did big government a few times better - wage and price controls, entitlements and affirmative action as we now know them, and so on. His fall opened up a singular opportunity for conservatives, one taken by Reagan. The rest is history: a halt in the growth of domestic spending in the 1980s and 1990s, the successful and peaceful end of the Cold War, the end of "stagflation" and a generation-long success of low-inflation economic expansion and moderating the growth of the federal government. It was a stunning achievement, especially for a political movement - conservatism - that never gained majority acceptance. Buckley's approach saw to it that what we now call "identity politics" would not wreck his coalition and that, even when not having a strong influence over the Presidency, conservative ideas and policies shaped by those ideas would have their continued impact. Certainly, the rise of Clinton in 1992 was a direct response - "neoliberalism" - to the prior failure of liberalism and the success of conservatism. Clinton went on, chastened by the 1994 mid-term elections, to become the most conservative Democrat since - well, Grover Cleveland.

Buckley, like his movement, spent more recent years in ill-health. Certainly, the decline of conservatism after 1994 troubled him. Even more troubling was the return of "Nixonism," in the form of Bush Jr. and Karl Rove. This tendency started at the end of the 90s with a grand throwing-up-of-the-hands by conservatives, a giving-up on ever implementing a conservative program. Being the majority party in Congress put them into the position of actually having to decide whether to go ahead with serious reform, and they couldn't do it. (Many thought conservative reform politically impossible.) Another disturbing trend was the return of authoritarian, big-government populism, as signaled by Perot in 1992 and 1996, with its powerful tendency to split the right-leaning vote. (Indeed, Perot made Clinton's election and re-election possible.) To capture these voters for the Republican party meant dropping much, if not all, of conservatism as Buckley and others had defined it. The prize was permanently incorporating white southern and Catholic voters into the Republican coalition. The price: alienating everyone else - and proving multiple times over that big government fails for an inherent reason, not just when it's done by liberals. It also led, on an intellectual level, to nasty disputes between conservatives and libertarians on one side and neoconservatives on the other, those disaffected liberals who dropped out of the Democratic party in the 1970s and 80s. The opposition of many conservatives and libertarians to the Iraq war sharpened the nastiness.

Buckely's synthesis of traditionalism and "classical" liberalism (to use the L-word in its original and best sense) seemed unstable and incoherent to many. But it has proved enduring, like his very Catholic mix of faith and philosophical reason. It is both seriously intellectual, answering to that part of us that is consciously rational, and attractive because it recognizes the limits of individual reason. It combines with a classical liberal understanding of government a solid understanding of the limits of politics. Conservatives view society as more important than government, culture as more important than politics, and custom as more important than law. Buckley made his own contribution to culture as a prolific author and as host of public television's Firing Line for more than 30 years.**

He will be missed.
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* That exception was the semi-medieval views that had taken hold in the antebellum South regarding slavery, which then influenced the dominant American thinking about race from the end of Reconstruction, in the 1870s, until the 1950s.

** When Binah was a youngster, he was confused by Buckley's sometimes notoriously Latin-inflected discussions on Firing Line, reflecting Buckley's high-level Catholic education. Latin came later to Binah and, with it, some understanding of what Buckley was talking about. Buckley himself adopted a less erudite and more straightforward style in later years.

Is Hillary a neoconservative?

That question was the title of a recent article from the libertarian Cato Institute, which pointed out the similarities of Clintonian neoliberalism and the big-government Republicanism sometimes called "neoconservatism." Activists on the left wing of the Democratic party often feel the same way about both Clintons. They're on to something.

The main obstacle to seeing this is the misunderstanding of "neoconservatism" as a form of conservatism. As with any word, the meaning of "conservative" depends on its context. In modern Anglo-American political usage, it expresses a simultaneous belief in traditional forms of society, a slow pace of political change, and opposition to large government, combined with a strong skepticism about politics and politicians. It's as much an attitude as an ideology. In a general way, conservatism sees society as more important than government, custom as more important than law, and culture as more important than politics. Before the 1920s, the traditional opponent of conservatism was classical liberalism (today called "libertarianism"), which emphasized limited government as well, but for the sake of individualism and greater individual freedom. At the same time, there was a significant overlap between the two. Indeed, the founding figure of Anglo-American conservatism, the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, was a Whig - in 18th century terms, a liberal.*

Modern connotation of the term "liberal" began around World War I and has evolved into something that has only a vague connection to its classical meaning. In American usage today, it means something roughly like what Europeans call "social democracy" - short of real socialism (government ownership of the means of production), it supports a large and powerful welfare-regulatory state and a "mixed" economy. This type of liberalism had its origins in the era of the "new liberalism" in Britain and the Populist and Progressive movements in the US. While rejecting the Marxist concepts of historical determinism and class warfare, the "new liberals" perceived a basic failure in the notion of society (shared by both classical liberals and traditional conservatives) as largely self-regulating. Instead, a stronger and much larger government would be needed to regulate and guide an increasingly complex society. Society itself would have to become more conformist and egalitarian for this vision to work - 19th century notions of laissez faire would have to go.

This modern liberalism carried the day in the 1930s and indeed got an enormous boost from the two World Wars and the Depression. Techniques of wartime government control and emergency economic stimulus seemed ready for use in non-emergency peacetime. The trend reached its height between the late 1940s and the early 1960s, before falling apart under assault by a younger generation (the Baby Boomers) impatient with its conformist demands. At the same time, this generation was also bewitched (at least for a while) by a whole range of radical, totalitarian ideologies and cults. Then they grew up, got jobs, and had to start paying rent. But the basic tension that caused the collapse of modern liberalism remains even now: fervent belief in ever-expanding government combined with an anti-authoritarian suspicion of government as it actually exists - a mentality faithfully reflected in the news media. It means, for example, you can believe simultaneously in socialized health care and belong to the ACLU. It provides no coherent basis for a successful politics.

When modern liberalism fell apart between 1965 and 1980, it not only left an irreparable breach in the Democratic party. It also spun off a heresy, a "right-wing liberalism" - or better, a "right-wing social democracy." Certain beleaguered liberals, flummoxed by student rebellions, a general collapse of social authority, and the implosion of the conformity needed to run modern government, perceived that what the Democratic party needed to save itself was to shed its "progressive" utopianism and develop a firmer defense of the post-New Deal, Cold War state.

Thus was born "neoconservatism." It was popular too - large pieces of the Democratic party - Catholic and white Southern voters - responded strongly to the first, half-conscious attempts at putting together a "neoconservative" coalition by Nixon in 1968 and 1972. But the US failure in Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, rising inflation, and slow economic growth (the price of ballooning government) stopped this coalescing tendency, discredited establishment Republicans, and gave an unexpected chance to the conservative wing of the Republican party, who quickly found their champion in Reagan. But the "neoconservative" tendency remained strong, if sidelined. It reflects a sound understanding of the connection between a moralistic and authoritarian politics and a large, powerful state.

The late Cold War period and the decade immediately following seemed to be moving in a very different direction - towards a synthesis of conservatism and libertarianism. The Democrats, wanting to regain the White House, were forced to invent "neoliberalism" in response and run a "neoliberal" candidate, Bill Clinton, in 1992. Once in office, Clinton tried one final time, with his wife's socialized health care plan, to impose a mid-century conformist-statist solution to what was widely viewed as a crisis. That proved the final undoing of what was left of modern liberalism; it led to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 and to the transformation of Clinton into the most conservative Democrat since Grover Cleveland: while there's no longer a gold standard, Clinton strongly supported the globalization trends and market liberalization-low inflation policies that started in the 1980s, combined with a clear commitment that America would remain the world's main security pillar.

In order to succeed at modern big government and live up to America's present role as globocop, any successful Democrat will have to adopt something like a "neoconservative" approach. So of course Hillary is headed in that direction - she wants to succeed, and she wants to prove that a Democrat in the White House will not be clone of Pelosi and Reid (feckless and clueless) and not a repeat of Carter (both sanctimonious and ineffectual).

A new binary fault line is developing in American politics that will soon completely displace the older liberal-conservative fault line (which itself has become more and more blurred in the last 40 years). This fault line divides populist, moralistic, and authoritarian approaches to politics, in support of big government, from skeptical and individualist approaches in opposition to big government. Among the big losers will be religious conservatives who still believe in limited government. The other losers will be the left-liberals - the ones who simultaneously believe in government control of everything and remain paranoid about government control of everything. Both groups have been able to maintain their illusions only by not having significant power. Once you've got power in a democratic society, political reality intrudes and forces you into trade-offs and responsibilities.

One small sign of this is the recent Ron Paul boomlet. Ron Paul is an anti-abortion, isolationist paleoconservative, a less grating version of Pat Buchanan. He has no chance of winning anything beyond his Texas congressional seat. But he's become an unexpected focal point for the conservative and libertarian discontent with Bush, neoconservatism, and big-government Republicanism. The boomlet will end when serious presidential campaigning starts next year. But it exposes the new fault line plainly.

So is Hillary Clinton a neoconservative? What's in a name? "Neoconservative" has a number of shifting and partly overlapping meanings. But in practical political terms, it means "mildly authoritarian welfare state-globocop" - having your big government cake and eating it too. The Democratic version will be called something else, only vaguely religious, and friendlier to Democratic special interest groups. The Republican version is simpler and broader, with a stronger religious tinge. However you may think of neoconservatism as failed or unpopular now, it is here to stay - whether it's called that or something else.

POSTSCRIPT: Another conservative throws in the towel on Bush Jr. and the Republicans: Victor Gold, who helped Bush Sr. write his autobiography, co-wrote a novel with Lynne Cheney, and worked for both Goldwater and Reagan, has just released his Invasion of the Party Snatchers: How the Holy-Rollers and the Neo-Cons Destroyed the GOP. Correctly, he understands that the problem isn't just Bush Jr.
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* For example, Burke was an early convert to abolitionism and an opponent of the London government's policies in the American colonies. (Burke was an Anglican, but perhaps a bit of his Irishness was slipping in here.) But he later became a famous and bitter opponent of the French Revolution. Seems like a puzzle - and it seemed so at the time too. It's really not, as Conor Cruise O'Brien explained in his thematic biography of Burke, The Great Melody.