Michael Gerson, best known for being Bush’s former top speechwriter, has a new piece in Newsweek suggesting that the Republican Party is going to have to settle its internal ideological divide once and for all. It’s not necessarily about the center vs. the right, Gerson said, but rather about “big government” Republicans vs. “small government” Republicans.
For Gerson, Hurricane Katrina was the turning point.
[T]he response of many Republicans was to use the disaster as an excuse for cutting government spending, particularly the Medicare prescription-drug benefit for seniors. At a post-Katrina meeting with White House officials, one conservative think-tank sage urged: “The president needs to give up something he wants. Why not the AIDS program for Africa?”
This reaction previews a broader, high-stakes Republican debate as we head toward the 2008 election. One Republican Party — the Republican Party of movement conservatives on Capitol Hill and in the think-tank world — will argue that the “big government Republicanism” of the Bush era has been a reason for recent defeats. Like all fundamentalists, the antigovernment conservatives preach that greater influence requires a return to purity — the purity of Reaganism.
But the golden age of austerity under Reagan is a myth. During the Reagan years, big government got bigger, with federal spending reaching 23.5 percent of GDP (compared with just over 20 percent under the current president). But the Reagan reality is more admirable than the myth. He wisely chose what was historically necessary — large defense increases and tax reductions — over what was politically unachievable: a massive rollback of government.
After debunking the Reagan-era myths, Gerson seems to envision a knock-down, drag-out fight between “anti-government conservatives [who] seek to purify the Republican Party,” and what Gerson describes as “the party of the governors,” who are willing to use government to strengthen conservative institutions and pursue conservative policy goals.
I think there’s a kernel of a good idea here, but I suspect Gerson’s great debate a) won’t happen; and b) doesn’t really matter.
Hasn’t this chasm existed in GOP politics for the better part of a generation? The libertarian wing demands less government, Republican candidates say the right things, they win, they increase the size of government anyway, and libertarians complain and demand less government again. It’s a beautiful little cycle.
What makes now different? We have a few more leading GOP voices than usual suggesting that the party lost its majority status in Congress because it wasn’t libertarian enough to inspire the base, but the facts speak for themselves — the base turned out exactly as it did the last couple of cycles. Frustrated “true” conservatives didn’t stay home in protest on Election Day; they did exactly what they’ve been doing. In 2006, it wasn’t enough, but you don’t hear anyone in leadership positions suggesting that party activists and insiders settle the broader debate “once and for all.” They’ll tinker with the message, turn Pelosi into some kind of money-generating boogeyman, and try again in ’08.
Gerson went on to argue: “Conservatives have generally taught that the health of society is determined by the health of institutions: families, neighborhoods, schools, congregations. Unfettered individualism can loosen those bonds, while government can act to strengthen them. By this standard, good public policies — from incentives to charitable giving, to imposing minimal standards on inner-city schools — are not apostasy; they are a thoroughly orthodox, conservative commitment to the common good.”
I think that’s true, but where are the conservatives arguing against incentives to charitable giving and imposing minimal standards on inner-city schools? Norquist? Toomey? Maybe, but who cares? Rove, Boehner, Blunt, McConnell, and Lott don’t. For that matters, none of the Republicans running for president care either.
Gerson’s debate seems to miss the point entirely. The Republicans’ problems are far broader than an ideological squabble — they have an unpopular and hard-to-defend policy agenda, unpopular and weak leaders, and a record of scandal, incompetence, and mismanagement. The party’s leading presidential candidates understand this, and are shaping their campaigns accordingly.
Whether libertarians and big-government conservatives are getting along is the least of their worries.