Will Neo-Conservatism Die For Compassionate Conservatism’s Sins?

President Bush will leave office with an approval rating of under 30 percent, and the Republican Party is not faring much better.  In the past two elections, it has shed more than 50 House seats and more than a dozen Senate seats.

The conservative label, though, does not appear to have taken much of a beating.  On Election Day 2008, exit polls showed that more voters still identify themselves as conservatives than as liberals.

Conservatives can thus spare themselves the kind of re-branding liberals felt compelled to attempt earlier in the decade when they dubbed themselves “progressives.”  Precisely what is progressive about protecting the regime of Saddam Hussein, protecting public schools from meaningful competition, and refusing seriously to consider entitlement reform was never clear.

Conservatives will not absorb much blame for the Bush administration for the excellent reason that this administration was not particularly conservative.  It was Bush, after all, who created a drug entitlement program, worked with Ted Kennedy to create a more nationalized education policy, declined for years to veto any spending programs, and doled out hundreds of billions in bailouts.

But with the nation mired in an economic slump and still engaged in two wars, some ideology must take the fall.  Accordingly, a scapegoat has been lined up: Neo-conservatism.

Neo-conservatives make convenient fall guys.  They have long been despised by the left for having defected from their ranks, albeit decades ago, and even more unforgivably, for being right about the Cold War.  And as former leftists, neo-cons have never been viewed warmly by certain elements of the right.  Meanwhile, mainstream conservatives are just relieved to see the finger being pointed away from them.

But is it fair to blame neo-conservatives for what went wrong in the Bush administration?  The question turns on whether neo-cons were responsible for the policies that caused the administration to go astray.

This was not the case domestically.  Rightly or wrongly, the Bush administration will be blamed for the recent economic downturn.  But no neo-conservative policy contributed to our current economic woes.

Neo-conservatism was born in part as a reaction against the social experimentation associated with the Great Society and the cultural turmoil associated with the 1960s.  It was hardly neo-conservative, then, to promote home ownership for low income families by inducing lending institutions to make unsound loans.  Neo-conservatives have never favored lowering standards to benefit a particular group.

Some attribute the current crisis to lax regulation or de-regulation.  Whatever the merit of this view, it has nothing much to do with neo-conservatism.  Neo-cons tend to focus on social and cultural issues, avoiding the intricacies of regulatory matters.

Even before the current economic crisis, Bush had encountered harsh criticism from traditional conservatives for, among other reasons, creating a prescription drug entitlement, supporting eventual citizenship for illegal aliens, and failing to control federal spending.  None of these policies or practices was part of the neo-conservative agenda.

Bush’s domestic policy was dominated not by neo-conservatism but by “compassionate conservatism.”  Compassionate conservatives believe, in Bush’s words, that “when somebody hurts, the government has got to move,” but that the government should act less through its bureaucracies than through alternative private mechanism.

By contrast, neo-conservatives perceive no general imperative for government remedial activity.  For them, the best reforms are usually ones that limit the government’s capacity to do harm.  Welfare reform (implemented with the help of Bill Clinton) and the end of governmental race preference programs (opposed by George W. Bush) come to mind.

But perhaps neo-conservatives led Bush astray in the realm of foreign policy.  Neo-cons certainly favored the invasion of Iraq.  But so did 77 U.S. Senators among whom only Joe Lieberman might answer to the description of neo-conservative (and only as to foreign policy).

The primary advocates of invading Iraq were Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, neither of whom had ever been considered a neo-conservative.  And the primary reasons behind the decision to topple Saddam Hussein were not neo-conservative ones.

The most commonly articulated reason – the threat posed by the WMD nearly everyone believed Saddam possessed – did not stem from neo-conservatism, but rather from the more general concept of self-protection, coupled with faulty intelligence.

Vice President Cheney reportedly was motivated by the desire to demonstrate the price of supporting or harboring terrorists.  This desire is not distinctively neo-conservative.  Rather, it is rooted in old-fashioned militaristic American nationalism.

The neo-conservative moment occurred after the invasion, when the U.S. decided to promote democracy in Iraq.  The sentiment in favor of this approach was hardly unique to neo-conservatives.  The liberal pundit Thomas Friedman favored essentially the same approach under the “we broke it, we own it” theory.  Even the more radical Paul Krugman warned against simply imposing a strong man in Iraq and washing our hands of the situation.

Nonetheless, a democratic post-war Iraq can fairly be viewed as a neo-conservative (and a compassionate conservative) project.  But was this project a mistake?

The answer depends in large part on how the alternatives would have worked out.  One alternative was to leave.  But in this scenario, key parts of Iraq might well have fallen under Iranian domination, while other portions could easily have disintegrated into something resembling Afghanistan under Taliban rule.

 Another alternative was to back a strong-man.  But given the Sunni-Shiite divide, this course might have produced an all-out civil war.

The “democracy project” came pretty close to producing a civil war, too.  But in hindsight, this seems to have been due to mistaken decisions about troop levels and anti-insurgency strategy.  These flawed decisions were not neo-conservative ones.  In fact, prominent neo-cons were among the early advocates of the “surge” that seems finally to have brought us success.

Even success in Iraq would probably not rescue neo-conservatism’s good name, however.  The movement has made too many influential enemies, and the hostile narrative is already in place.  Would anyone like to join the neo-progressive movement?

Sunday Reflection contributor Paul Mirengoff is a lawyer in Washington, D.C., and a principal author of Powerline.com.