Dan

Calabrese

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August 2, 2006

Buckley Notwithstanding, Bush Is A True Conservative

William F. Buckley Jr., the founder of the venerable National Review magazine, is revered as the father of modern-day conservatism. In the eyes of conservatives, Buckley is to columnists as Ronald Reagan is to presidents. And he deserves it well.

So when Mr. Buckley declares that President Bush is not a true conservative, who is a snot-nosed pundit like me to say that he’s wrong?

He is one of the most brilliant thinkers of our time, as are a fair number of others who agree with him – like columnist George Will and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Perhaps I am no one to say they are wrong.

But they are wrong. And their conservative credentials notwithstanding, they have all missed the point by elevating dogma over application.

Attacks on Bush as a real conservative usually fall into four categories: 1) His willingness to get the nation mixed up in foreign entanglements that, according to the critics, seek to play a messianic role for the benefit of the rest of the world; 2) His seeming disinterest in reducing federal spending; 3) His disregard for personal privacy concerns in the formation of national security policy; 4) His expansion of the federal role in matters such as education and health care.

No real conservative, it is said, would embark on idealistic foreign missions, oversee such an explosion of spending, ask citizens to sacrifice personal freedoms in the name of security and expand the role of the nanny state in matters better left to the states or to the private sector.

On the last point, Bush is guilty, but not as a matter of philosophy. He simply punted – when signing No Child Left Behind and expanding Medicare – as a matter of political expediency, every bit as much as Ronald Reagan did when he allowed Ted Kennedy’s ridiculous Plant Closing Notification Bill to become law as a political calculation. That is not much of a defense, but no president has towed his movement’s ideological line on every occasion.

On the other three points, however, the conservative intellectual giants seem to have missed the point by failing to see the big picture of the world today. Bush’s critics on the right see the neoconservative quest to democratize the world as folly, an overreach, a stretch of the use of U.S. forces far beyond anything the founders would have envisioned or intended. What’s more, they fear that the quest is unachievable. American-style liberty, many believe, is inherently and uniquely American – a product of our history, our struggles and our culture. They believe that to expect other people to embrace it as a result of our intervention, without having worked for it as we did, or endured its trials and errors as we did, is simple foolishness.

In a recent speech, Buckley invoked Woodrow Wilson’s ill-fated efforts to change the world through the mechanism of the League of Nations. He is convinced Bush’s efforts are just as ill-fated.

It would be too harsh to call this view isolationism. That is reserved for off-the-rail, erstwhile right-wingers like Pat Buchanan, who is motivated more by nativism and anti-Semitism than by any sort of respect for conservative principles. That is certainly not the case with Buckley, who believes rather that Bush’s change-the-world vision has so enraptured him as to blind him to the real consequences of what he is attempting.

But it is Bush who is applying conservative principles correctly to the times in which we live. Bush, unlike Wilson, is not attempting to build a utopian international body to achieve global harmony. Indeed, he despises the one we have, and few conservatives object to this, but they do object to Bush’s attempt to make the United States itself the instrument of these high-minded ends. Why, they ask, should we burden our taxpayers and imperil our soldiers for the sake of these foreign adventures? How is that conservative?

Here is how: At its core, conservatism understands that liberty is empowering and tyranny cancerous. It is no longer possible in today’s world to isolate ourselves from the consequences of tyranny merely because we ourselves do not practice it. That is about more than 9/11, and about much more than border security. It is certainly about more than federal debts that depend on foreign financing.

A world in which more people are free is one in which the authors of liberty will lead and prosper more than anyone. It is also a world in which those who threaten freedom and security – and there will always be such people, often in control of regimes – have less leeway. Iran, if left to its own devices, will have nuclear weapons soon. The United Nations cannot and will not stop this. It is too feckless to do so. Only the United States can. Does this make us the policeman of the world? Yes. Not because we seek to run the world, but because the defense of our own liberty – the cornerstone of conservative philosophy – by necessity takes place everywhere.

Civil liberties need not take a back seat to national security, but they also need not be the fetish that they are to some, and Bush has rightly declined to pander to such people. Slashing federal spending in every way would be a worthy endeavor, but Bush the political realist has managed to keep it from expanding as a percentage of GNP, and has correctly chosen the War on Terror as the one big mission of his administration. If other missions, like spending and Social Security, are left to future administrations, those successors may one day thank Bush that they have the chance to solve these problems instead of having died in a Tehran-originated mushroom cloud.

Bush is a true conservative because he respects liberty, above all else, as the essential component of conservatism, and has decided to stop at nothing to both protect and expand it. Everything else is subordinate, because the nature of today’s world mandates that it be so. If that means a conservative president needed to discover a different application of the philosophy to fit the needs of the times, thank God we elected a man willing and able to do so.

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