Conservatism, Liberalism, and the Radical Right

by Gus DiZerega, PhD

There is lots of variety among Conservatives, but if the word has any meaning at all, it emphasizes a distrust of radical change. Conservatives prefer building on traditions that have stood the test of time over social policies based on the speculations of individual minds, no matter how brilliant. In the absence of overwhelming need, big changes are too risky to try. Prudence is a conservative virtue, because the future is unknown but can be relied upon to bring new challenges and unexpected risks.
The Bush administration has repudiated every one of these conservative values. The Radical Right, which provides the majority of his key supporters and officials, is worse.
Appointed President with fewer votes than Al Gore, a conservative president would have governed moderately. He would have taken small steps, moving the country as a whole in the direction he deemed wise, but George Bush did not act conservatively. As a result, we have a country more deeply split than at any time since the civil war, which is not a good precedent.
Bush has given us enormous deficits, with no end in sight. The reasons for his economic policies continually change, but their content remains the same: reduce taxes on those best able to pay, regardless of its impact on the rest of the country. Government has grown enormously under his administration, putting the lie to his claims to favor smaller government. Its bills will fall due in the future, when Bush is out of office. He is making our children pay, so the rich of today do not.
Bush uses all this extra spending to reward private corporations that then contribute to him. He calls this “downsizing” and “contracting out” but in reality it means tax money turns into corporate profits. Some of that tax money comes back as political contributions to keep their benefactor in office at taxpayer expense. For example, Bush, will have no opponents for the Republican nomination, yet he likely will raise between $170-million and $200-million for his campaign--more than all the money raised by previous Republican leaders: Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., and Bob Dole combined. Contributions like that buy a lot of access, and it isn’t access for average Americans. This is called machine politics.
There is a huge difference between reducing government spending so more money is spent in the private sector, and claiming to reduce government spending, but in fact contracting out government work to private businesses, so that corporations receive the tax money rather than public employees. The chief difference is that corporations will then give millions to the incumbents who send them those lucrative contracts. Bush’s strategy depends on heavy government spending benefiting corporations that then donate to him. He has no incentive to cut back or spend wisely. And he doesn’t.
Between 1999 and 2002, the number of contractor employees expanded by 727,000 positions, even as the civil service got smaller, according to a report by the Brookings Institution:
as of the end of 2002, federal contracts were generating 5.17 million jobs, while grants supported another 2.86 million jobs, the highest figures since the end of the Cold War in 1990. At the same time, the number of civil servants continued to shrink-in 2002, federal agencies had 1.76 million civil servants on the payroll, 418,000 fewer than they did in 1990.
Now that it is dominated by the Radical Right, the Republican Party actually is a bigger spender at the state level as well. Again, the practice of contracting out is helping them build a machine based on anything but conservative values. And they call Democrats tax-and-spend!
Whether their policies are wise or foolish, liberals believe government can benefit the country as a whole. They tend to distribute spending in ways that reflect these values, while still rewarding their electoral base. Today’s Radical Right Republicans, and the President, have no such conception of a public good. They use their power to tax to exploit states that do not support them for the benefit of those that do. When Democrats last controlled the House and wrote the 1995 budget, the average Democratic district got $35 million more than the average GOP district. By 2001, average federal spending in Republican districts was $612 million more than in Democratic districts.
Bush also repudiated almost 60 years of successful foreign policy alliances and 200 years of tradition to lay claim to the unilateral right to invade anyone he thinks may sometime in the future be a threat. Less than a year after we invaded Iraq, the lack of wisdom in this is apparent. Our government is asking the UN and European powers we insulted and denigrated only a year ago to help save us from the consequences of applying radical ideas in defiance of our traditions and experience.
Despite a total absence of public support, Bush has sought to eliminate environmental protections wholesale. For example, no other administration has happily adopted interpretations of environmental law that they admit will increase air pollution. Cities and states lose,and corporate contributors gain. $200 million well spent. Bush did this over the objections of states adversely affected, which brings us to the conservative value of federalism.
The Bush administration has assaulted federalism wholesale, from increasing federal control of education, historically a local and state affair, to supporting taking away the states’ authority to protect consumer privacy and regulate corporate misbehavior.
Attorney General Ashcroft has gone out of his way to require federal prosecutors to ask for death penalties in states where it is not applied. His attacks on states that have voted for medical marijuana are well known and vindictive. He is trying to use the federal government to take away licenses from Oregon physicians involved in physician-assisted suicide by suffering terminally ill people, a law supported in two statewide referendums. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wants a constitutional amendment defining marriage as he thinks it should be. This is in response to moves in many states to define it differently.
Insofar as conservatives are sincere in their praise of morality, Bush’s incessant lies ensure that their support of him amounts to enormous hypocrisy or selective blindness. Whichever is the case, conservatives who claim Bush supports their values are betraying many of the principles they claim to honor.
But the Radical Right which underwrites Bush’s policies is even worse.
Their control of the Republican Party and single minded pursuit of power has led them to undermine a major tradition that makes representative government work: that congressional seats are redistricted after every census, as the constitution requires, rather than at the pleasure of the party in power. With Bush’s support, they have sought to make major changes in our judiciary with “stealth” nominees, after making it all but impossible for Democrats to appoint judges under the Clinton presidency. They have repudiated the basic constitutional principle of separation of church and state so the most sectarian, bigoted, and ignorant portion of our country can exercise power over the rest of us. And we pay taxes for that privilege.
Genuine conservatives have been shut out by the intolerant fanatics of the Radical Right, and the opportunistic liar who they have made their leader. They are busy trying to create a structure of rule and domination that would impress a Caesar.
Some genuine conservatives are beginning to grasp this. Bizarrely, they then argue the Bush administration is “too liberal.” But those who seek power over all else are neither liberal nor conservative. They are simply morally and politically corrupt.
For their part, many liberals are just beginning to wake up to the fact that Bush and the radical right constitute a new and dangerous threat to our country. Political debates between liberals and genuine conservatives will always be with us, because the world is complicated enough. In my view, no ideology is adequate to grasp all the problems to which we need to pay attention. Conservatism by itself will prevent changes that are needed. For example, conservatives opposed civil rights legislation that most conservatives today admit was needed. Liberals, left to themselves, can be too eager to change things, leading to unwise laws and overly ambitious projects. Many of the urban renewal projects developed under Lyndon Johnson are now admitted to have done more damage than good by disrupting neighborhoods and worsening the circumstances of the people they were supposed to help.
I pick these older examples because now fair-minded people on both sides agree that civil rights legislation was largely beneficial and urban renewal did lots of damage. So I can make my point without getting bogged down in policy debates. We need debate and political opposition. It is the lifeblood of a democracy.
While subverting conservatism, the Radical Right denies the very legitimacy of liberal views. The Radical Right’s assault on liberal values particularly targets civil liberties, openness in government, and public values. The first two are foundations to free societies and to the American principle that the people, and not the government, are sovereign. The third is fundamental to what makes us a people, and not a collection of isolated individuals.
The Bush administration’s rapid expansion of governmental secrecy and equally rapid expansion of the government’s power to obtain knowledge in detail about any citizen is completely outside the constitutional traditions of this country. This radical legislation was first passed with a sunset clause, automatically ending it after a few years. Now Ashcroft and Bush want to repeal the sunset provision, making it permanent.
The Bush administration has launched an extraordinary attack on the most basic American principle: the nature of our citizenship. We are citizens, regardless of our views. Government is our tool for self-governance. Never before has an American government claimed the power to hold citizens indefinitely in secrecy, without notification of the courts. Never before has an American government claimed it should have the right to deprive Americans of their citizenship, simply because the President says so. These claims better fit an emperor or dictator than a democratic leader.
Bush, Ashcroft, and others defend these abuses in the most un-American of political terms: “trust us.” I doubt that it is possible for a more un-American statement to be uttered by a politician.
Both conservatives and liberals have emphasized that we should not trust those with great power. This is why we have a constitution. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1789, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” He was hardly alone. For example, Benjamin Franklin observed in 1759, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Politicians as conservative as Dick Armey and Bob Barr have joined the ACLU due to their concern about where Bush and the Radical Right are taking us.
Liberals believe there are overarching community values that only governmental action can provide. These values cannot be reduced to dollars and cents. They are basic to a good life and responsible citizenship. This includes education and adequate health care for all, and protection for the poor, especially their children. Some liberals include more, some much more, but all include these.
The Radical Right denies this as well. The Radical Right believes government should be strengthened insofar as its power to prosecute, incarcerate, and wage war is concerned. It should serve the interpretation of religion of those in power, and oppose everyone else’s errors. It should also serve the interests of well connected corporations, such as Halliburton. But it has no particular responsibility to the citizens who make up this country and whom supposedly it serves.
Clean air is less important than corporate profits. Citizen privacy is less important than corporate profits. Citizen access to public land is less important than corporate profits. Inexpensive public services are less important than corporate profits. Citizens’ rights as consumers are less important than corporate profits. The list could go on, because other than their own power, nothing is more important than corporate profits, plenty of which then returns to them as political contributions.
Liberals’ expansive view of public values opens them to the error of having too much trust in bureaucracies and too little trust in average citizens. But theirs is the mirror image of the conservative mistake of having too much trust in business and the status quo. That is why we need both liberals and genuine conservatives. Each helps provide a reality check on the other. Each represents a valid part of our traditions, a legitimate way to be a good American. The Radical Right attacks both, which is of great danger for our country. It uses any tool or argument or label it can in its pursuit of power--the only value it really worships. Power over our pocketbooks, power over our souls, and power over the other peoples of our world.
Civility can return to American politics once conservatives and liberals realize they have more in common with one another than either do with the Radical Right. Liberals and conservatives will always disagree, and it is good that they do. But they disagree within a common worldview of constitutional government, respect for civil liberties, and the democratic process. Their feuds are family feuds. Family feuds can be pretty strong, but the family unites when outsiders enter in. This is why Armey and Barr joined the ACLU. It is time for the Radical Right and its attack on American traditions and values in the name of “patriotism” to be seen for what it is.
Liberals have begun to grasp the nature of the radical right threat, because they have been its chief targets so far. Conservatives have been slower to wake up, because they were drawn in by the Radical Right’s cynical use of their terminology, and initially thought its failure to follow through was simply because of the need for political compromise. But they will never follow through, because they are not conservatives. Our country’s future will be more secure when all Americans are aware of what is at stake: the end of politics as we have played that game for two centuries, replaced by a government which finances its re-election by control over jobs and manipulation of media and electoral rules. It’s not a pretty prospect.