Anti-Left Versus Anti-State

"Go read Mark Schmitt" is almost always sound advice, and his post on the Goldwater issue is no exception. I like his account of what the conservative movement has accomplished while failing to roll back the New Deal or the Great Society: "What the think tanks and grassroots groups and Karl Rove and Frank Luntz figured out over the 36 years after Goldwater was how to retain the language of ideological conservatism, leave unchallenged the facade of operational liberalism, and use that combination to exercise power long enough and aggressively enough to destroy every future prospect for operational liberalism." To put it in this morning's terms that brand of conservatism primarily directed at combatting liberals has been very successful, whereas the strain of conservatism oriented toward rolling back the state has not.

As Mark says, this isn't "anything for liberals to be glad or complacent about." I would only add that the paucity of success for small government conservatism is something liberals should be aware of and often don't really seem to be. That said, what I really wanted to do here was issue some responses and clarifications to this morning's post.

One common confusion has been reading the post as a knock against what I called the "anti-left" tendency (in retrospect, "anti-liberal" would be a more accurate term in some ways, but that sounds like I mean "illiberal" which isn't what I mean, and "anti-left" was Jonah Goldberg's original term. It's also more in keeping with the way that faction sees things -- persistent overrating of the extent to which America's left-of-center is really a "left" in any robust sense is an important element of the doctrine). I don't really mean it that way. Obviously, as a liberal, I'm not sympathetic to the view that combatting liberals ought to be one's main objective. At the same time, I don't think it's worse in any clear way than the anti-state view. In a lot of ways, it's more in keeping with my own outlook. Narrow views about state power and its appropriate deployment are pretty thin gruel that seem to appeal only to a pretty narrow group of intellectual types.

Nor do I mean to be saying that National Review has been hypocritical (I know Jonah thinks people are always calling him a hypocrite) in tending to soft pedal their concern with big government à la Bush. I think the effort of the Weekly Standard crowd to rationalize the Medicare bill as a hallmark of some novel thing called "big government conservatism" is pernicious and nonsensical. I think NR's decision to expend more emotional energy being upset about Ward Churchill and what he symbolizes than on being upset about the expansion of federal dmestic spending reflects the setting of priorities. All magazines do it. I'm merely making the observation that NR -- typically of the American right -- seems to feel that having captured the state, the most important thing to do domestically is to expose the left in its remaining bastions of strength and engage it there. Abroad, of course, we're fighting the war on terrorism.

Which brings me to another point. Many commenters said something like, "I'm no de-prioritizing small government because I've simply decided to hate on liberals, I supported Bush because the Democrats aren't serious about national security." I think that amounts to a kind of anti-left conservatism (or in the case of Professor Reynolds, libertarianism). It's the view that the main domestic problem facing the United States is the presence of a large and influential movement that's unserious about national security and that stands a good chance of undermining our national security.

That's a view that is, I think, wrong. Had John Kerry won the election he and the people he would have appointed would have been very serious about national security. Others, however, don't feel this way. Powerline has made it clear that they think the primary danger to the country comes from radical Islamist terrorism, and that the secondary danger is a large and dangerously powerful internal opposition composed of Jimmy Carter and every major figure in Democratic Party politics other than Joe Lieberman. Note that this latter bit isn't really a view about foreign policy as such, it's a view about American liberalism. It typically comes paired with complaints about how Democrats used to be so great (gesture toward Truman or Kennedy) and now their awful. For some people, though, it's part of a longstanding trend (insert McCarthyite rant).