It seems that the churning within the GOP is a conflict at various levels between the forces of individualism and collectivism. There is the question of whether the party faithful should do what they think is best or what the party determines to be best. There is the question of whether the national party should be uniform, or whether the local parties should be more autonomous, and there is the question of whether government should enforce the collective good, or allow for more individual choice in society.
With all the jockeying within the GOP there have been plenty of calls for a return to small government principles within the party and generic statements about various groups spoiling the supposed conservatism of the party but in a Los Angeles Times article yesterday Edward Crane sounded a call I never thought I would hear – The GOP Should Dump the Neocons. The first thing I had to do as I read that was confirm the accepted definition of “neocon” to decide if I could believe what I was reading and if there were any implications that I would disagree with. It turns out that I think I can fully agree with this position.
Crane starts by explaining how neoconservatives came to be such an integral part of the GOP and how that immediately twisted the conservative movement:
William F. Buckley {made} anti-communism the litmus test for joining the conservative movement. Dealing with the Soviets during the Cold War was clearly an important task, but it should not have opened the door of the limited-government movement to the neoconservatives, who are now — and always have been — advocates of big government. With the neocon foot in the policymaking door after the Cold War ended, the drumbeat for war in Iraq began in earnest a decade before 9/11.
I had always understood neoconservatives to be proponents of an interventionist foreign policy – which already made me uncomfortable with that wing of the party – but then Crane goes on to show how neoconservatives do not stop at an aggressive foreign policy:
It is important to realize that neocons are not just nation-building, America-first advocates. They like big government across the board. . . Consider this comment from the late Irving Kristol . . . “Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable.”
That was where I really began to think about what we were dealing with here. I agree with Kristol that growth in government power is a natural phenomenon. It is a function of human nature, especially among those who have achieved positions of power within the system, to seek to bolster the systems they are familiar with and to turn to familiar tools to solve emerging challenges. On the other hand I cannot accept that such growing power is inevitable, nor that simply allowing nature to take its course is always desirable. In fact, allowing nature to take its course is rarely desirable – intervention in natural processes and systems is the hallmark of civilization.
Government itself is an intervention on the natural system of anarchy (I mean anarchy as individual choice without any central establishment of authority). As with all human intervention it is most valuable to intervene in a way that works with the natural course, channeling or transforming it to something more suitable to the needs of society, rather than either of the extreme positions of killing nature or throwing up our hands and being swept along in the current of natural forces.
Crane identifies what he calls the “insidious philosophy” underlying neoconservatism with a quote from David Brooks:
Ultimately, American purpose can find its voice only in Washington.
That is a scary thought. American greatness has always been based on enlightened individualism. The nation was founded on the idea that government should be limited so that individuals could thrive. If American purpose can only find its voice in Washington then individuals cannot expect to choose what is best for them with a healthy regard for how that affects those around them, instead the individual must wither so that the collective can flourish.
Speaking only for myself, I would much rather be an individual organism seeking to find a place within the societal ecosystem where I can bloom and grow myself while contributing to the health and well-being of the environment I live in rather than being a Borg with no individual identity devoted solely to the good of the collective whose very existence has no value unless it benefits the (Washington) collective.
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