Don’t look to government for love, tough or otherwise By Jonah Goldberg Here’s my silver-lining hope this hurricane season: George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism gets wiped out like a taco hut in the path of a Category 5 storm. Except
Don’t look to government for love, tough or otherwise
By Jonah Goldberg
Here’s my silver-lining hope this hurricane season: George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism gets wiped out like a taco hut in the path of a Category 5 storm.
Except for people inside the administration, I’ve never met anyone who really likes the president’s “compassionate conservatism.” To the extent conservatives praise it at all, they celebrate the fact that compassionate conservatism got Bush elected.
Don’t get me wrong. I actually respect much of the substance of compassionate conservatism. Now that a neoconservative has been idiotically redefined to mean a warmonger who never buys retail, we forget that much of neoconservatism was really an argument about domestic policy.
The neocons didn’t oppose the welfare state per se. They opposed a welfare state that made society worse. Welfare-state liberals insisted. for example, they “cared” more because they favored higher spending on schools. The compassionate conservatives responded with “care all you like, but the schools stink.” The best summation was Bush’s mantra about “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
So what’s the problem? First, almost by definition, people who claim to be compassionate conservatives are suggesting that other kinds of conservatives aren’t. Conservatism, rightly understood, never needed the adjective.
The second problem is that compassionate conservatism – also known as big-government conservatism – necessarily demands government activism. If normal conservatives are too cheap or too uncaring to spend billions of dollars of other peoples’ money on dubious social improvements, then compassionate conservatives must feel and do otherwise. In the wake of Katrina, Bush is certainly determined to prove he cares about black people and others hurt by the storm by spending more than the other guys.
Ultimately, this is the core problem. Welfare-state liberalism wants the government to act like your mommy. Compassionate conservatives want the state to be your daddy. The problem: Government cannot love you and should not try to.
Love empowers us to do some things government must never have the power to do and some things the government can almost never do well. Parents are real social engineers.
I can force my child to eat, play and dress as I see fit, all in the hope this will make her a better person. I can punish her for making choices that are perfectly legal and reward her for making giant strides that look tiny or invisible to those in government, none of which is the government’s business anyway.
To its credit, compassionate conservatism understands this better than liberalism. But the real compassionate conservatism is the one from Bush’s campaign speeches. It’s all about proving that conservatives “care,” no matter how much it costs.
