The Problem with Compassionate Conservatism
FRADKIN, HILLEL
The Problem with Compassionate Conservatism There's a better virtue for conservatives to appeal to. It's called justice. by HILLEL FRADKIN "AFTER YOU HIT A DOG'you pet it." This is how an unnamed...
...We must make sure people understand that we care a lot about people," he says...
...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...
...This is how an unnamed adviser to George W. Bush explained (to the New York Times) the governor's revised and softened appraisal of the vices of his party, after howls of protest from conservatives greeted Bush's recent speech to the Manhattan Institute...
...Not at all...
...In Clinton's case, the Democrats had become identified with liberalism, and liberalism had fallen into disrepute...
...it is the public virtue...
...The contradiction may not yet be clear to the public...
...Bush also sympathizes, of course, with Americans who have been wounded by "the sterile numbers and economic news we [Republicans] talk about...
...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...
...As matters stand now, Patrick Buchanan, a candidate for most mean-spirited person in America, is welcome in their Republican party...
...Is the promise to provide parents and children with better and more accountable schools, and even allow choice among them, an act of compassion...
...This surely isn't compassionate...
...The president wedded a reputation for compassion with many more-or-less conservative policies...
...Such is the lesson some are inclined to draw from eight years of Clintonism...
...And indeed there is...
...Ostensibly this has been proven a winner by Bill Clinton's electoral success...
...Justice like compassion can be passionate and has its own generosity of spirit...
...Reagan's successors, regrettably, have failed to present conservatism in the same spirit...
...But is it even good politics for a campaign that has made mean-spiritedness its enemy...
...Compassion asks either too little or too much of politics...
...As in his youth, President Clinton adhered to the self-serving boomer creed that the expression of good intentions was goodness itself...
...Justice is a public as well as a private virtue...
...Exactly so...
...Bill Clinton, the first representative of that generation to occupy the White House, failed the test...
...But the same eight years show how empty and self-serving "compassion" may be...
...Without sincerity, compassionate politics looks like politics as usual...
...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...
...Perhaps, the problem lies with having taken compassion as one's political slogan in the first place...
...Clinton was obliged to suggest a more conservative orientation...
...It is the just response to the just claims of our citizens...
...He did this by calling himself a New Democrat, with "new" meaning more conservative...
...Justice would do just fine...
...conservatives whimper, and felt and shared their pain...
...It is a private one...
...This is all well and good as far as it goes...
...Perhaps that is what the American public now wants...
...Above all, they have, as Bush complains, "confused the need for limited government with disdain for government itself...
...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...
...Moreover, it describes and justifies Bush's policy recommendations far better than compassion...
...Conservatism itself was identified most directly with the principle of individual liberty...
...Bush heard his (fellow...
...But unlike compassion it does not require that one never be harsh, especially in politics...
...And there, perhaps, is the rub...
...But is Bush right that "compassionate conservatism" is a sustainable definition of this undertaking...
...It is true that Bush, like Clinton, needed to remedy a certain bad odor of his party...
...Take his proposals in education, which are important...
...It is either too high or too low a goal for public action...
...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...
...The dog metaphor suggests a new working definition of compassionate conservatism: compassion for downtrodden conservatives...
...Compassion allows the pretense that being warm and fuzzy is all that life requires...
...They have frittered away this advantage in various ways...
...Now compassion, or a reputation for it, may be a useful attribute in democratic politics...
...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...
...Compassion is not, however, a political or public category...
...His "compassion" was conveyed by his persona and the fact that he was, after all, a Democrat...
...and our gloom and doom scenario," our "slouching toward Gomorrah...
...Governor Bush owes it to his generation, his country, and himself not to make the same mistake...
...Bush faced a different problem...
...They have had either too narrow a vision or no vision...
...In light of this, one wonders whether there isn't some other principle to join with the principle of liberty to express public concern...
...rah), who was the victim of one of the meanest political campaigns of the last 30 years, is not...
...Bush is right to see this as the great problem of his party and his candidacy...
...It is the virtue or principle that is concerned with the whole public and every citizen...
...The legacy he leaves is political and moral confusion...
...Ronald Reagan had made conservatism respectable and even popular...
...Yet the events of recent weeks make one wonder whether Bush and his campaign know how to accomplish this...
...It suggests fellow feeling between politicians and their constituents...
...Judge Robert Bork, a courageous and generous man (and the author of Slouching Towards GomorHillel Fradkin, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is working on a book about freedom and morality...
...But politics, as a public activity, cannot simply provide for the free exercise of compassion...
...But a few more mean-spirited outbursts will call into question the sincerity of Bush's compassion...
...Since that, of course, proves impossible, they wind up pursuing a very narrow politics...
...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...
...Bush is surely correct that a Republican party seen as narrow, censorious, and mean-spirited is headed for fail-ure—and that the party should be able to avoid that image...
...Otherwise, Republicans will not win the support of the public...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 5
