When Conservatives Are Not Conservatives

I’m a neoconservative. I’m a theoconservative. I’m a free-market conservative. But I’m not really a conservative.

Neoconservatives believe that an assertive, even aggressive US foreign policy stance is good for the world. The US does and should uphold and advance liberty. Neocons support defense spending, the liberation of Iraq, and nation-building. Neocons have a revisionist view of history. The British Empire was a good thing. The problem with Vietnam was not that we were in the wrong but that we lost. Europe achieved economic and technological supremacy not by exploiting the rest of the world but because of their civilization’s inherent characteristics. The West still has those characteristics, and it should spread them, by example, and occasionally by force.

Theoconservatives draw a set of values from the Christian faith which they think deserve expression in the public arena. They feel systematically marginalized and excluded from public life by an aggressive separation of church and state. Big issues for theocons are school vouchers, so that they can break the monopoly of the secular public education system, abortion, gay marriage, and symbolism such as having the Ten Commandments in a courtroom.

Free-market conservatives have a pretty good spokesman in The Economist magazine: they support free trade, they love globalization and are happy to see apparel jobs go overseas, they oppose welfare and are suspicious of entitlement programs, they like school vouchers, they like immigration, tax cuts and small government. Sophisticated free-market conservatives would like to abolish the mortgage-interest tax deduction and charge for the use of public roads. They envision a future marching steadily towards technological utopia.

(Now, I should confess that with respect to each brand of conservatism, I’m a bit of a heretic. I differ with most neocons in being more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli; also, while I applaud the liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq, I’m skeptical of the language and mentality of the “war on terror” of which they are a part. I’d be a better theocon if I cared more about abortion; I suspect both sides of having the wrong motives and prefer to avoid the subject. And while I think global capitalism is a tremendous force for good, I've become increasingly revisionist in my attitudes towards free-market theology, which is under-appreciative of institutions. Still, I think I can honestly lay claim to all three labels.)

So what do you get when you cross a neocon, a theocon, and a free-market conservative? The three have their differences—neocons measure the state of the nation in terms of power, theocons in terms of public morality, free-market conservatives in terms of wealth and technology. Are they compatible? I think so, and I’m an example of the mix.

I welcome the projection of US power abroad, because I think it is generally beneficent. I don’t mind embedding US power in alliances, treaties and international law, so long as those things don’t tie us down, but “the mission will define the coalition,” and the mission is to uproot tyranny wherever it may be found, to promote liberty and democracy all over the world. I realize that free democracies can come in different forms, that there is no one-size-fits-all, and that mature and free democracies will express the culture and traditions of the respective peoples—and our democracy should be no exception! We are a Christian nation, not exclusively but predominantly, not only historically but in the present, and there is no reason that the courts should prevent America’s religious majority from prohibiting gay marriage or abortion, or from funding tuition vouchers for students who attend religious schools. To require students to attend schools that rigidly exclude all mention of God is not “neutral;” rather, it is a form of anti-religious propaganda, indeed, since school is compulsory, of anti-religious indoctrination. The government should provide school vouchers and let the market—that is, the parent, the “customer”—decide what students will be taught. None of this will interfere with America’s long tradition of religious tolerance. Rather, it will introduce a new dimension into education, a dimension that faces and tries to answer the most important questions, that seeks meaning in life and resists the tendency of urban post-industrial life towards an empty and bewildering anomie, which gives students the background they need to face central questions of life, such as: what should we live for? Voucher schools will allow children to be educated in their own traditions; they will help knit communities together; they will be free to teach moral principles and thereby strengthen the social fabric; and they will be particularly beneficial to minorities, who get the worst of the public school system—but even that is not the best part! America has famously good universities—among which there is vigorous market competition—and notoriously bad public schools—the centrally planned, Soviet-style sector of our economy, in which children have to spend a dozen years of their lives. Vouchers will infuse grades K-12 with the dynamism of America’s universities by spawning a whole crop of “edupreneurs,” who figure out how to make school both more enjoyable and more suited to the needs of our economy. The rising generation will emerge from this revitalized education system smarter, more ambitious, and more entrepreneurial than ever, well-prepared to find their niche in a technologically super-charged land of opportunity. And none too soon, for old-fashioned dumb jobs are swiftly going down the drain, taken over either by the hordes of cheap labor overseas or else by ever-more-sophisticated machines. American workers will be needed more and more for “creative” jobs in the expanding “knowledge” sector. Education is not the only change in policy ahead: Social Security will be privatized, triggering a more productive use of capital and quicker economic growth. More immigrants will be allowed in, a vital source of new entrepreneurship and energy, and welcome ingredients in a vigorously bubbling melting pot. Yet we have seen that markets are vulnerable to fraud and spasms of greed, so the ethical education of the rising generation, boosted by an increased role of religion in public life, will be crucial to the continued progress of capitalism. As regime changes abroad gradually wipe out tyranny and liberal, constitutional government develops in every corner of the globe, the world economy will be enriched by more participants, and missionaries can spread their faiths, bearing no ill will towards one another: a peaceful competition for hearts and minds as each of humanity’s billions conducts his own search for truth. Led and inspired by a strong, prosperous and virtuous America, humanity will sweep forward towards wealth, liberty, democracy, peace and—at the level of each individual person—truth.

Now, some of you may like this vision of mine more than others do, but surely no one can deny that it would be a social, intellectual and economic transformation. A world like that exists only in the imagination: it is much different from the present world and resembles nothing in the past either.

At this point, let’s go back and ask, what exactly is a just-plain, no-frills conservative? The word seems to denote someone who does not like change, someone who is nervous about the future and would prefer to “conserve” the present, or even, perhaps, to turn the clock back a bit, reversing distasteful changes of the recent past. A conservative wants her way of life, and the context of public values, to resemble that of her youth, or of her parents and grandparents.

So do I, as a free-market minded neo- and theoconservative, classify as a conservative? Not at all! I don’t want to conserve the present or to turn the clock back—I want to make changes and I look forward to the future. If you want to find someone with an urge to turn the clock back, look among the Democrats. Lots of Democrats look around them and see decay—the unraveling of the welfare state, the Reagan (as they see it) counter-revolution, unpopularity in foreign affairs, environmental apathy, business’s ever more naked greed, economic inequality, more incarceration, “the worst economy since the Great Depression”—worry, worry, worry. For purposes of political presentation, they look back to the booming 1990s, but many of them were in resistance then; they really look back to the 1960s, or, in the case of environmentalists, to the remote past before mankind marred the face of earth.

There seems to be something confused about our terminology when it is possible to be a neoconservative, a theoconservative, and a free-market conservative, and yet not be a conservative at all—indeed, I don’t see how a free-market neo-theoconservative like me could possibly be a conservative in the usual sense. In my opinion, there is a sort of crisis in our ideology at the present time, and a deep re-thinking is needed, and in the course of that re-thinking, Bush-hatred will be transcended and a new constellation of progressive political values will emerge. Part of the purpose of this blog is to illuminate the crisis and provoke the re-thinking. This post, anyway, should help to illuminate why Bush has so much popular support among the young. Some individual Republicans may be conservative, but the main threads of “-conservative” thought all run towards a transformed and brighter future, and Bush is beginning to move more confidently in that direction.