Dixie in Denial
Eicher, David J.
BOOKS IN REVIEW tween the States from the Southern Point of View." By the end of the 19th century, abetted by the well-oiled publicity machines of ancestor societies such as United Daughters of...
...Policies aimed at encouraging marketplace competition were similarly deleted from the prescription drug benefit, but that didn't delay the signing ceremony...
...But the amount spent on abstinence-only sex education and marriage promotion initiatives, however unworthy these programs may be, is but a fraction of the price tags for the farm bill, the transportation appropriation, or the prescription drug benefit-none of which were enacted at the behest of social conservatives...
...The $180 billion agriculture bill from 2002 reversed OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 71 BOOKS IN REVIEW Gingrich-era progress in reducing farm subsidies...
...The end result is, if you'll pardon the socially conservative term, heresy...
...The collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War deprived the right's disparate factions of one common enemy...
...By the end of the 19th century, abetted by the well-oiled publicity machines of ancestor societies such as United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans, the revisionists had convinced not only the South but much of the rest of America as well to see the Confederacy as the apotheosis of romance and to accept as revealed truth the mystique of the Lost Cause...
...At its best, it connotes policies intended to cultivate a larger constituency for limited government by increasing stock ownership, thus growing the investor class...
...Sager regularly confuses his policy preferences for winning politics...
...Republican timidity is only part of the problem...
...Education expenditures have doubled...
...Far from curbing the demand for government largesse, enrollment in many major programs has gone up, not down...
...And judicial activism is often what brings social conservatives into the federal arena in the first place...
...In his Ownership Society chapter, Sager merciliabilities...
...Soon this combination was the basis for the Republican platform...
...No Child Left Behind upped outlays but offered little school choice...
...Consider the book's subtitle: Sager too often reduces the conservative crack-up to a war between libertarians and evangelicals, implicitly blaming the social right for big-government conservatism...
...Finally, the author suggests little to grow the constituency for smaller government...
...But the author tackles certain subjects with blinders on...
...T HE ELEPHANT I N THE ROOM excels at exposing the GOP's embrace of this fiscal folly...
...At its worst, the Ownership Society is just a grab bag of tax cuts and spending increases designed to create the appearance of economically conservative action...
...And with Ronald Reagan's election in 1980, it became the governing philosophy of the nation...
...The "edifice built by Buckley and Meyer and Goldwater and Reagan" is being dismantled by "Bush and Rove and DeLay and Santorum" So the GOP clings to power by bashing the Democrats' foreign-policy weakness and cultural weirdness...
...In almost every case, the spending increases are easily identifiable but the free-market reforms are illusory...
...With wit and style, Sager skewers listless Republican leaders (he calls House Speaker Dennis Hastert "a man who wouldn't know a vision if you slipped him a tab of LSD...
...Sager notes that federal spending began its upward trajectory in 1998, back when George W. was in Texas and Newt Gingrich still wielded the Speaker's gavel...
...Defusionism T HESE ARE DEPRESSING TIMES for small-government conservatives...
...Sager concedes that the most socially conservative members of Congress are usually also the most fiscally conservative, yet persists in calling evangelicals "an indispensable part of the God-and-government coalition that makes big-government conservatism possible...
...He rarely demonstrates why smaller government is in the Religious Right's interest...
...His call for cultural federalism is no compromise without federal-court jurisdiction stripping...
...The current leadership of the Republican Party," Sager writes, "has betrayed the spirit of the conservative revolution of 1964, 1980, and 1994...
...And Sager hardly proves real libertarianism is the key to the West...
...Reagan and the GOP class of '94 won in part because they convinced a majority of Americans of three things: big government was hurting them economically and undermining their family valuesand that Republicans had the solution...
...Unfortunately, it usually falls into the latter category...
...Sager traces the conservative movement's current problems to a breakdown in the fusionist bargain...
...lessly compares this rhetoric to the reality...
...If so, New York Post columnist Ryan Sager seeks to revive them both...
...Students of the Civil War will like this book, but students of human nature will love it...
...The current catchphrase is "Ownership Society" (really an updated version of the Jack Kemp "empowerment" agenda...
...Gingrich's "revolutionaries" fought pitched battles to slash spending and close federal agencies in 1995-1996...
...It hasn't all been for homeland security...
...In The Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party he makes the case that not only is big-government conservatism bad politics and worse policy, but libertarianism is actually the key to the Republican Party's electoral future-and a crucial part of the conservative movement's past...
...New York Times columnist David Brooks has praised "the Bushian vision of energetic but not domineering government...
...Anti-statism at home, anti-Communism abroad, and support for traditional moralitybecame the main pillars of the right...
...T HE RECENT REPUBLICAN RECORD helps bear o u t some of this stern judgment...
...And nearly all the fiscal-conservative heroes Sager cites--Mike Pence, John Shadegg, and DickArmey--are strong social conservatives...
...His "fusionism" posited that traditionalist ends were best secured through libertarian means, allowing conservatives to be as united in support of Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential bid as they were in opposition to the Soviet Union...
...They have been attempts to make ownership-society ideas more appealing to moderates...
...72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 2006 BOOKS IN REVIEW While Sager calls for "a renewal of vows" in the fusionist marriage, it is hard to see why social conservatives should do so on his terms...
...The administration barely protested when vouchers were stripped from No Child Left Behind...
...There is also political reality--it is difficult to persuade voters to cut their own benefits...
...Federal spending has soared 33 percent since George W. Bush took office...
...Fred Barnes has offered this rationale for such big-government conservatism: "To gain free-market reforms and expand individual choice, [Bush is] willing to broaden programs and increase spending...
...Rather than cutting entitlement programs and abolishing Cabinet departThe Elephant in the Room: Evangelicals, Libertarians, and the Battle to Control the Republican Party by Ryan Sager (JOHN WILEY & SONS, 248 PACES, $25.95) Reviewed by W. James Antle III ments, the GOP majority has created new ones...
...All this is partly attributable to Bush's willingness to sign almost anything that reaches his desk...
...Thomas Frank asked what's the matter with Kansas, not Mississippi...
...He ridicules their "religious extremism" and "worship of comfortable notions such as 'traditional' family...
...Sager even likens the relationship to "an episode of Cops, with the shirtless social conservatives wrestled to the ground and handcuffed outside the trailer, and the libertarians deciding whether to press charges...
...Republicans have been casting about for a credible fiscal policy ever since...
...We have a Republican President and Congress boosting discretionary spending at twice the rate of Bill Clinton and breaking records set by LBJ...
...But there is also an inherent conflict between growing government and reducing dependency...
...Libertarianism and small-government conservatism are dead...
...The book is filled with oversimplifications of regional differences in an effort to confine social conservatism to the South...
...Social conservatives, he argues (however tendentiously), no longer believe that libertarian means are the best way to achieve traditionalist objectives...
...The idea of shutting down the Department of Education seems in the era of No Child Left Behind as quaint as AuH20 bumper stickers...
...the conclusion of Bill Clinton's presidency and unified Republican control of the federal government cost it another...
...OCTOBER 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...
...Bush's Medicare plan included a modest expansion of health savings accounts-and a massive universal prescription drug benefit that Sager too often reduces the conservative added $18 trillion to the program's unfunded crack-up to a war between libertarians and evangelicals, implicitly blaming the social right for big-government conservatism...
...As tempting as it may be to assign all the blame to Bush, however, he is not alone...
...Robert Byrd in a bolo tie is not a libertarian...
...W. James Antle III is a senior writer for the American Conservative...
...Yet there were many more missed opportunities...
...These early conservatives had common enemies, but the late NationalReview senior editor Frank Meyer helped them build a common ideological framework...
...If the federal government shouldn't be involved in an issue, this restriction should apply to all three branches...
...Opposition to same-sex marriage, support for school prayer, and even some abortion restrictions frequently poll better than school vouchers or Social Security privatization (both of which this reviewer supports...
...McCain-Feingold, Sarbanes-Oxley, steel tariffs-this President's signature can be found on many policies that increased the power and reach of Washington, D.C...
...But after Bill Clinton trounced them in the showdown over the government shutdown, many GOP leaders lost their taste for combat...
...The biggest expansions of the federal government under Bush haven't concerned social issues...
...There were still many achievements, including the capital gains tax cut that helped fuel the Internet boom, welfare reform (which ended an entitlement), and a (shortlived) balanced budget...
...A few commentators have argued that this is all for the better because the right's dream of life without the welfare state is anachronistic...
...Writing in the Financial Times, the journalist Michael Lind proclaimed, "The demise of both socialism and libertarianism pretty much limits the field to moderate social democracy and big-government conservatism...
...This administration has avoided a frontal assault on the supply of government while purporting to attack the demand...
...The number of earmarks has exploded, increasing tenfold in a decade...
...Sager gives readers a breezy and informative account of post-war American eonservatism's beginnings, when libertarians and traditionalists found themselves manning the barricades together against Communism and the New Deal consensus...
...That still sounds like a better conservative strategy than libertarian-evangelical infighting...
...The Medicare prescription drug benefit was the biggest expansion of the welfare state since the Great Society...
...His example of Democratic progress in the region, Montana Gov...
...Brian Schweitzer, uses some anti-statist rhetoric but is to his party's left on economics and its right on God, gay marriage, and guns (though not abortion...
Vol. 39 • October 2006 • No. 8
