The Problem with Compassionate Conservatism

Bush is surely correct that a Republican party seen as narrow, censorious, and mean-spirited is headed for failure — and that the party should be able to avoid that image. Yet the events of recent weeks make one wonder whether Bush and his campaign know how to accomplish this. As matters stand now, Patrick Buchanan, a candidate for most mean-spirited person in America, is welcome in their Republican party; Judge Robert Bork, a courageous and generous man (and the author of Slouching Towards Gomorrah), who was the victim of one of the meanest political campaigns of the last 30 years, is not. This surely isn’t compassionate. But is it even good politics for a campaign that has made mean-spiritedness its enemy? The contradiction may not yet be clear to the public. But a few more mean-spirited outbursts will call into question the sincerity of Bush’s compassion. Without sincerity, compassionate politics looks like politics as usual.

Perhaps, the problem lies with having taken compassion as one’s political slogan in the first place. Ostensibly this has been proven a winner by Bill Clinton’s electoral success. The president wedded a reputation for compassion with many more-or-less conservative policies.

It is true that Bush, like Clinton, needed to remedy a certain bad odor of his party. In Clinton’s case, the Democrats had become identified with liberalism, and liberalism had fallen into disrepute; Clinton was obliged to suggest a more conservative orientation. He did this by calling himself a New Democrat, with “new” meaning more conservative. His “compassion” was conveyed by his persona and the fact that he was, after all, a Democrat.

Bush faced a different problem. Ronald Reagan had made conservatism respectable and even popular. Conservatism itself was identified most directly with the principle of individual liberty; but Reagan’s optimistic rhetoric, his embrace of all Americans, and his pursuit of that great common objective, victory in the Cold War, spared it the taint of selfishness and meanness. Reagan’s successors, regrettably, have failed to present conservatism in the same spirit. They have frittered away this advantage in various ways. They have had either too narrow a vision or no vision. Above all, they have, as Bush complains, “confused the need for limited government with disdain for government itself.” As often as not, they have conveyed the impression that they think the purpose of political action is to wreck or dismantle the government, then go back to the only important thing, private life. Since that, of course, proves impossible, they wind up pursuing a very narrow politics.

Bush is right to see this as the great problem of his party and his candidacy. He is right, too, that the remedy is a politics somehow conveying a sense that the American people do form a public, and that the concerns of that public as a whole deserve respect, attention, and service. But is Bush right that “compassionate conservatism” is a sustainable definition of this undertaking?

Now compassion, or a reputation for it, may be a useful attribute in democratic politics. It suggests fellow feeling between politicians and their constituents. Compassion is not, however, a political or public category. It is a private one. Accordingly, many of the policies the Bush campaign has embraced are designed to encourage or support private expressions of charity by individuals or small groups. This is all well and good as far as it goes. But politics, as a public activity, cannot simply provide for the free exercise of compassion. Compassion asks either too little or too much of politics. It is either too high or too low a goal for public action.

In light of this, one wonders whether there isn’t some other principle to join with the principle of liberty to express public concern. And indeed there is. Every American invokes it when he pledges allegiance to the flag and the American republic, whose blessings are said to be “liberty and justice for all.”

Justice would do just fine. Justice is a public as well as a private virtue; it is the public virtue. It is the virtue or principle that is concerned with the whole public and every citizen. Moreover, it describes and justifies Bush’s policy recommendations far better than compassion. Take his proposals in education, which are important. Is the promise to provide parents and children with better and more accountable schools, and even allow choice among them, an act of compassion? Not at all. It is the just response to the just claims of our citizens. If it is true that the Republican party has been too much the “liberty party” and has conveyed a sense of indifference to our duties and concern for others, let it be the “liberty and justice party.”

Justice like compassion can be passionate and has its own generosity of spirit. But unlike compassion it does not require that one never be harsh, especially in politics. And there, perhaps, is the rub. Compassion allows the pretense that being warm and fuzzy is all that life requires. Perhaps that is what the American public now wants. Such is the lesson some are inclined to draw from eight years of Clintonism. But the same eight years show how empty and self-serving “compassion” may be.

Some months ago, Bush expressed the view that the real question for him and other members of the baby boom generation is whether they have learned from their youthful mistakes and are prepared to contribute something worthy to their country. Exactly so. Bill Clinton, the first representative of that generation to occupy the White House, failed the test. As in his youth, President Clinton adhered to the self-serving boomer creed that the expression of good intentions was goodness itself. The legacy he leaves is political and moral confusion. Governor Bush owes it to his generation, his country, and himself not to make the same mistake.

Hillel Fradkin, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is working on a book about freedom and morality.