Kinds of Rightwingery

Andrew Sullivan has a good post up about the fecklessness of conservative opposition to Bush's big spending ways. The conservative movement as a whole has offered this kind of token opposition to this stuff ("we didn't say you should do that") but seems to regard, say, the Medicare bill as something more like a minor foible rather than what it actually is -- the largest expansion of federal entitlement spending since the Johnson Administration. I think it's a little misleading, however, to think about such divisions as exist within the contemporary right as really being conservative versus libertarian ones.

After all, someone like Glenn Reynolds falls more on the "libertarian" side of the divide, but he's still very comfortable with the Bush administration. Meanwhile, if you look at Jim Henley, very little of his considerable distaste for the administration stems from any specifically libertarian (as opposed to social conservative) views. Rather, Jim's dislike of Bush stems largely from the general small government preferences that libertarians and conservatives share.

Or do they share them?

I think Jonah Goldberg introduced a good way of thinking about the more important division in a column several years ago, though I would characterize it somewhat differently. Jonah asks us to think of the movement as divided between "anti-state conservatives" and "anti-Left conservatives." I'd like to strike the "conservatives" so we can encompass libertarians and conservatives alike. The point, at any rate, is that some folks on the right are motivated primarily by a distrust of the state while others are motivated more by a distrust of leftwingers. For a long, long, long time between the 1930s and the end of the 1970s these two brands of distrust were almost perfectly aligned. Liberals gave birth to the vast majority of the federal apparatus, and the government was usually controlled by -- and always populated by -- leftwingers. If you were concerned about the state, you had to be concerned about the left, because the state was full of leftwingers. If you were concerned about the left, you had to be concerned about the state, because the state was the most important institution the left controlled.

Over the 80s and 90s the balance-of-power in Washington and the state capitals started to shift, and now by the 2000s the state is mostly under the control of rightwingers. This has started to pull anti-state rightwingery and anti-left rightwingery apart. The National Review hasn't gone in for Weekly Standard-style ideological revisionism and "big government conservatism." They still offer a sort of token opposition to things like the Medicare bill or farm subsidies. But they don't get nearly as agitated about this stuff as they do about the alleged evils of the universities, hollywood, the media, or the governments of western Europe. From an anti-left perspective, this is natural enough. The American state is no longer an important source of leftwing influence on American or world society. Insofar as the left has any influence on the world, that influence stems primarily from Turtle Bay, Hollywood, academia, Brussles, or elsewhere. The important thing is hounding the leftwingers out of their spider-holes, or destroying the credibly of the institutions where they still have some influence. Curbing the long arm of the state would be nice, but the most important thing, state-wise, is to maintain the right's control over it.

From an anti-state perspective, however, things look rather different. The fact that the right controls the state shouldn't make one any less suspicious of state power. You don't need to start loving the Democratic Party, but you probably realize that, in retrospect, the divided government of the 1980s and 1990s was optimal from the perspective of pure suspicion of the state. Gridlock makes it relatively unlikely that the government will embark upon any ambitious new schemes. The counterveiling partisanship of the congress and the White House make it relatively more likely that misdeeds will come to light, and that people will perhaps try and restrain their corruption lest it be exposed.

Now I think what we've seen over the past few years is that the anti-left brand of rightwingery has a lot more popular appeal than does the anti-state brand. And, in retrospect, I think you can see that 'twas ever thus. Most rightwingers were never very interested in applying the same standard of suspicion to the military and the police that they displayed with regard to "bureacrats" or public school teachers. Not coincidentally, the security establishment was the exception, even during the high tide of New Deal/Great Society liberalism, to the general rule that the state was run by and for leftwingers. With conservatives running the show everywhere, that same sort of attitude is extended by most of the right's constituents to the whole project.