Is the Republican Party Really Conservative?

This article is a post that appeared in GM’s Place, an American Conservative website, on May 17, 2009.

In an LA Times Op-Ed piece (May 10, 2009) entitled “What Republicans need is a mutiny,” Richard Viguerie wrote:

Two major debates face conservative Republicans about the future of the party. The first, rekindled by Sen. Arlen Specter's switch to the Democratic Party, is whether the GOP should move further leftward. The second is whether conservatives should tone down their advocacy on social issues. History is on the side of outspoken conservatives in both debates.

A little history is in order to give perspective to the future of the Republican Party. The modern conservative movement formed in the 1950s (William F. Buckley founded the National Review in 1955). Prior to that, various classical liberals (libertarians) such as Albert J. Nock, H.L. Menken, Frank Chodorov, and John T. Flynn had opposed the New Deal. Friedrich Hayek published The Road to Serfdom in 1944. Traditionalists and agrarians such as Southerner Richard Weaver and Northerner Russell Kirk were also influential. Kirk published The Conservative Mind in 1953. In the 1950s, Anti-Communism was the focus of conservative opposition. The purpose of this very brief historical overview of conservatism as an intellectual movement is to place its inception in the late Progressive and Post-War eras (Source for the above paragraph: Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, 1993). In other words, it was a rather recent development, from an historical perspective, and it did not have much impact politically until Goldwater’s campaign in 1964, and finally, Reagan’s ascendancy to the Presidency in 1980.

The New Right, of which Mr. Viguerie is a representative, did not come onto the national scene until the anti-abortion movement galvanized evangelicals, fundamentalists, and conservative Catholics in the 1970s.

If one briefly analyzes Twentieth Century U.S. Presidents from the perspective of what their economic, social, and national security policies were, Reagan was really the first conservative President since the era of Harding and Coolidge. Teddy Roosevelt was a Progressive, as was Hoover to a large degree; Eisenhower was non-ideological and a military man; and while Nixon was conservative on social issues and a Cold War Hawk, he admitted to being a Keynsian on economic policy. He instituted wage and price controls, and terminated any relationship between the dollar and gold standard. Bush I and Ford were both moderates, and while Bush II was conservative on social issues and a hawk on defense, his economic policies were a mixed bag of too little and then too much intervention. His focus was, of course, the war in Iraq.

Viguerie’s conclusion to his LA Times article was that the Republican leadership has lost touch with the grassroots and that to move further leftward would be a disaster. The focus should rather be on revitalizing the base by focusing on social issues. While I agree with Viguerie’s first conclusion that the party should not move further leftward, I think he’s out of touch in the latter case. First of all, the time to move the agenda on social issues was when the Republican Party was in power; other than Bush’s two Supreme Court appointments, the Republicans have little to show for pushing their social agenda, unlike the Democrats when in power. The national attention is now focused on the economic crisis and if the Republicans do not challenge Democratic policies and offer better alternatives, they will not convince fiscal conservatives, independents, and libertarians to rejoin the party, without which they will surely be consigned to minority status.

Let me explain what I think the Republican focus should be: If the Republican Party is to represent true conservatism, then it must return to its core principles. 1) We must be the party of liberty and freedom, including economic freedom, and we must be in favor of limited government and oppose statism in all its forms. 2) A limited government is a government of laws, the Rule of Law, and not of men, which is the opposite of Obama’s vision of the law. When Obama states that he wants Supreme Court Judges who have “empathy” for minorities, he is arguing for applying the law unequally, and privileging certain members of society to the detriment of others. 3) We must fight the Marxist political correctness movement in our schools and universities. We’re already losing the next generation by a margin of 2:1. We are losing the Cultural War to the left: we lost the universities, the schools, and the media, all the organs of cultural transmission. What the Republican leadership seems to have overlooked is that you can’t stay in power politically if you lose the culture. Today, the left attacks with impunity Western Civilization, America, Christianity, and now, even the goose that laid the golden egg, capitalism. And that’s not all; our liberal institutions of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and academic freedom are also under attack by the left. To counter this, we must stand up for American and Western values, and the freedom to speak our opposition to the leftist orthodoxy. 4) We must continue to advocate a pro-American foreign and domestic policy: America First politically and economically, in opposition to the left’s Anti-Americanism. To me, this means that we do not promote global free trade and open borders when the result is that the average American loses his job to foreign competition and cheap labor. Adam Smith did not promote the idea that a free market nation should tolerate huge trade deficits. We must also continue to oppose Islamic fascism and terrorism both at home and abroad. 5) We must advocate the reformation of our monetary and financial system, with sound currency and curtail the ability of the Federal Reserve and banks to create fiat money out of thin air. (More on this on a later blog.)