The very adjective "compassionate" echoes progressive and liberal denunciations of limited government as cruel, selfish, or social Darwinist. In other words, as a marketing slogan alone, it represented a repudiation of the classical liberalism at the core of modern American conservatism because it assumed that limited government, free markets, and personal initiative were somehow "uncompassionate."
Nonetheless, conservatives who complain about Bush's "big-government conservatism" as if it were some great betrayal ignore the fact that they were warned. When Bush responded in a presidential debate in 2000 that his favorite political philosopher was "Jesus Christ," small-government conservatives should have sensed the ghost of the Social Gospel. Michael Gerson, Bush's longtime speechwriter and adviser, is unapologetic about his belief that the federal government should be suffused with the spirit of Christian charity. After he left the White House, he wrote a piece for Newsweek, "A New Social Gospel," in which he describes the new evangelicals as "pro-life and pro-poor." In another Newsweek essay he railed against small-government conservatism, wrung his hands about "unfettered individualism," and concluded that "any political movement that elevates abstract antigovernment ideology above human needs is hardly conservative, and unlikely to win."7
There's no doubt that President Bush believes much of this. In 2003 he proclaimed that "when somebody hurts," it's the government's responsibility to "move." And under Bush, it has. A new cabinet agency has been created, Medicare has increased nearly 52 percent, and spending on education went up some 165 percent. From 2001 to 2006 antipoverty spending increased 41 percent, and overall spending reached a record $23,289 per household. Federal antipoverty spending has surpassed 3 percent of GDP for the first time ever. Total spending (adjusted for inflation) has grown at triple the rate under Clinton. Moreover, Bush created the largest entitlement since the Great Society (Medicare Part D).
This is not to say that Bush has completely abandoned limited-government conservatism. His judicial appointments, tax cuts, and efforts to privatize Social Security represent either a vestigial loyalty to limited government or a recognition that limited-government conservatives cannot be ignored entirely. But Bush really is a different kind of conservative, one who is strongly sympathetic to progressive-style intrusions into civil society. His faith-based initiative was a well-intentioned attempt to blur the lines between state and private philanthropy. In an interview with the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes, Bush explained that he rejected William F. Buckley's brand of reactionary, limited-government conservatism; instead, the president told Barnes that conservatives had to "lead" and to be "activist." This is of a piece with Bush's misunderstanding of conservatism as support for the social base that calls itself "conservative."8
Bush was not always a captive of his base, of course. Much like his progressive forebears — Clinton, Nixon, FDR, and Wilson — when his agenda differs from that of his most loyal constituents, on immigration or education, he questions their motives as "uncompassionate."
What many conservatives, including Bush and Buchanan, fail to grasp is that conservatism is neither identity politics for Christians and/or white people nor right-wing Progressivism. Rather, it is opposition to all forms of political religion. It is a rejection of the idea that politics can be redemptive. It is the conviction that a properly ordered republic has a government of limited ambition. A conservative in Portugal may want to conserve the monarchy. A conservative in China is determined to preserve the prerogatives of the Communist Party. But in America, as Friedrich Hayek and others have noted, a conservative is one who protects and defends what are considered liberal institutions in Europe but largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines.9 This is why conservatism, classical liberalism, libertarianism, and Whiggism are different flags for the only truly radical political revolution in a thousand years. The American founding stands within this tradition, and modern conservatives seek to advance and defend it. American conservatives are opposed on principle to neither change nor progress; no conservative today wishes to restore slavery or get rid of paper money. But what the conservative understands is that progress comes from working out inconsistencies within our tradition, not by throwing it away.
Conservatives today are constantly on the defensive to prove that they "care" about some issue or group, and often they just throw in the towel on the environment, campaign finance reform, or racial quotas in order to prove that they're good people. Even more disturbing, some libertarians are abandoning their historic dedication to negative liberty — preventing the state from encroaching on our freedoms — and embracing a new positive liberty whereby the state does everything it can to help us reach our full potential.10
Perhaps the gravest threat is that we are losing sight of where politics begins and ends. In a society where the government is supposed to do everything "good" that makes "pragmatic" sense, in a society where the refusal to validate someone else's self-esteem borders on a hate crime, in a society where the personal is political, there is a constant danger that one cult or another will be imbued with political power. It may be disturbing that in the United Kingdom there are more self-proclaimed Jedis than Jews. I may roll my eyes at Wicca practitioners, couples who wed in Klingon marriage ceremonies, queer theorists, Druids, and Earth Firsters, but so long as this sort of thing doesn't translate itself into a political movement, one can tolerate it with a sense of bemusement. But cults often have a will to power all their own, which is one reason why Germany still bans the Church of Scientology along with the Nazi Party. Already it is becoming difficult to question the pagan assumptions behind environmentalism without seeming like a crackpot. My hunch is it will only get harder. Liberals and leftists for the most part seem incapable of dealing with jihadism — a quintessentially fascist political religion — for fear of violating the rules of multicultural political correctness.
Ultimately the issue here is that of dogma. We are all dogmatic about something. We all believe that there are some fundamental truths or principles that demarcate the acceptable and the unacceptable, the noble and the venal. One root of dogma derives from the Greek for "seems good." Reason alone will not move men. As Chesterton noted, the merely rational man will not marry, and the merely rational soldier will not fight. In other words, good dogma is the most powerful inhibiting influence against bad ideas and the most powerful motive for good deeds. As William F. Buckley put it in 1964 when discussing the libertarian idea to privatize lighthouses, "If our society seriously wondered whether or not to denationalize the lighthouses, it would not wonder at all whether to nationalize the medical profession." The liberal fascist project can be characterized as the effort to delegitimize good dogma by claiming all dogma is bad.
This has put conservatives and right-wingers of all stripes at a disadvantage because we have made the "mistake" of writing down our dogma. Indeed, as much as I think it is misguided, at least right-wing Progressivism is honest about where its dogma comes from. One can reject or accept the Bible (or the writings of Marvin Olasky) as the inspiration for a program or policy. Similarly, one can argue with the ideas of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Conservatives — unlike purist libertarians — are not opposed to government activism. But we share with libertarians the common dogma that as a general rule, it is a bad idea. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions to the rule. We dogmatically believe that theft is bad, but we all can imagine hypotheticals wherein stealing might be morally defensible. Similarly, conservatism believes that the role of the state should be limited and its meddling should be seen as an exception. If conservatism loses this general rule — as it has under George W. Bush — it ceases to be conservatism properly understood.