Bill Kristol is one very smart man. His famous memo on Hillarycare in 1993 was a milestone on the road to the Contract with America. His magazine, The Weekly Standard, is unfailingly informative, wonderfully well-written and always essential reading. And his dour smirks in response to Juan Williams on Fox News are jewels of broadcast conversational restraint.
In other words, I have long counted myself among the legion of Bill Kristol fans. This was true long before even my sister worked with him and Bill Bennett during the Reagan years at the Department of Education in the long twilight struggle against the blob. But these days Kristol is up to something nefarious. And I am puzzled by his creation of a straw man of conservatives.
Check out his latest column in The New York Times in which he argues that we conservatives are ill-advised to go “charging into battle against Obama under the banner of ‘small-government conservatism.’ It’s a banner many Republicans and conservatives have rediscovered since the election and have been waving around energetically.”
Apparently, Jeb Bush set Kristol off the other day with a remark that “there should not be such a thing as a big-government Republican.” The Florida Bush was alluding to the intramural debate that consumed a lot of intellectual energy during the early Bush years, fueled in great part by this observation from Kristol’s comrade-in-arms Fred Barnes:
“Big government conservatives are favorably disposed toward what neoconservative Irving Kristol has called a “conservative welfare state.” (Neocons tend to be big government conservatives.) This means they support transfer payments that have a neutral or beneficial effect (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid) and oppose those that subsidize bad behavior (welfare). Bush wants to reform Social Security and Medicare but not shrink either.”
For better or worse, Kristol, Barnes and The Weekly Standard are often identified as the principle instructors from the school of Big Government Conservativism. The 2003 essay by Barnes from which the preceding paragraph was taken is well worth re-reading today, both because it reminds us of how Bush once appeared to many on the Right and for its definitional utility for the present discussion.
Those were the days before Tom Delay battered House rules by holding open the vote on the Bush presciption drug entitlement benefit, thus creating a bridge between the failed Hillarycare and the successful version now being crafted by Barack Obama and Tom Daschle. Bush’s pre-9/11 cave on vouchers in No Child Left Behind was an early warning sign of the apostasy that became obvious with the prescription drug debacle.
But I digress.
Kristol’s present Times column warns that in the Age of Obama the Right is doomed if it remains devoted to a “small government conservatism.” That is the mindless opposition to big government per se, whereas big government conservatives are more thoughtful, more nuanced in their analyses, we might say.
Kristol clarifies it thusly: “If you’re a small-government conservative, you’ll tend to oppose the bailouts, period. If you more or less accept big government, you’ll be open to the government’s stepping in to save the financial system, or the auto industry.”
Put otherwise, Kristol would have Times readers believe that those of us on the Right have but two choices: We can either perish politically as a result of a mindless small government conservatism, or we can live in the bright light of a reasonable big government conservativism.
One can almost see Kristol, his face all aglow in Bravehearted blue, parading back and forth in front of our scraggly ranks, waving his Standard and challenging us with “what will you do?”
And just as the cinematic Wallace knows the evil Longshanks would never permit the Scots any such choice, Kristol would have us today think that we shouldn’t have to think about our choice, either, because, as he parenthetically warns us, “the public knows that government’s not going to shrink much no matter who’s in power.”
And so Kristol shows us Leviathan, rank upon socializing rank, led by Obama, Pelosi and Reid, advancing across a field soon to be bloodied, unless we, like the cowardly Scots nobles who eventually brought down Wallace, make a new bargain to protect our own hides.
The nefariousness here isn’t Kristol’s realpolitick fatalism, it’s his creation of the false dichotemy of small versus big government as the essential basis for distinguishing among competing visions of conservatism as the preferred alternative to liberalism’s Leviathan.
Kristol knows better. He even acknowledges as much in the Times, conceding that:
“Now it’s true that the size of the government and the modern liberal agenda are connected. It’s also true that modern conservatism has to include a strong commitment to limited (though energetic) government and to constitutional (though not necessarily small or weak) government. Still, there’s a difference between a conservatism that is concerned with limited and constitutional government and one that focuses on simply opposing big government.”
True conservatism in the American context is concerned with respect for and preservation of limited government, which, as Publius explained in The Federalist Papers, is devoted only to “the proper objects of government” and their appropriate distribution among the several levels of authority, local, state and federal.
Leviathan, of course, sees all objects as proper to government and invariably tends to concentrate authority at the highest level in its vain millenarian obsession with imposing a unitary vision of redemption upon an infinitely complex organism like civil society.
To reframe this choice as merely one between small and big government is to do a great injustice to the central truths of American conservatism, as expressed by defemders like Publius, covenants such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights, and exemplars like Ronald Reagan.
Kristol is also doing a grave injustice to the millions of Americans who call themselves conservatives and who understand, to a greater or lesser degree among each, in their bones if not their philosophical meditations, that limited government means government appropriate to the object.
National defense requires national government, but community renewal is better handled at the local level. Demanding, as Reagan did in his first innaugural, “recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the Federal Government and those reserved to the States or to the people,” is not an American analogy for the unreasoning tragedy of the Light Brigade.
It is rather the logical recognition of Reagan’s reminder to us all that “the Federal Government did not create the States; the States created the Federal Government.” That’s the essence of American conservatism. And it fully justifies opposing things like federal bailouts precisely because they further an improper object of federal governance.
So the more important question to be asked is what is Kristol really “up to?” Could it be, as Powerline’com’s Scott Johnson suggests, that Kristol is working some Straussian magic on his readers?
Or is he merely toying with his intellectual inferiors beyond the Beltway? After all, inquiring minds want to know.
