by Bill Moyers
EDWARDS: I don’t think the rationale of conservatism is small government. It’s limited government, but that doesn’t necessarily mean small. It means that there are areas where you cannot take government. There are areas where the rights of the people are paramount. In the old system, before America, you had rulers and their subjects, right? And the rulers told their subjects what to do. And our idea was that we’re going to be citizens, not subjects. We’re going to tell the government what to do and where government’s not permitted to go. But within those areas the government can act. There’s nothing that says it has to be a tiny government if the people themselves are willing to pay the taxes and support certain activities for the government within the Constitution. That’s fine.
You’ve been very concerned about not just small government or limited government but about encroachments on personal liberty by President Bush, who has issued over eleven hundred signing statements, each one of them saying, “I may not respect this law that Congress has passed.”
EDWARDS: Which he doesn’t have the authority to do, but he’s doing it. The problem with President Bush is not the eleven hundred signing statements saying, “I’ll decide whether I’m going to obey that law or not.” It’s the designation of himself as head of the “unitary executive,” as he and Vice President Cheney call it, saying that all of the members of all the agencies and departments cannot be told what to do by the Congress.
So it’s not that there’s one thing that he does, it’s a whole pattern of basically saying, “I’m the decider. I’m the commander,” or as Scalia put it, the nation’s commander in chief, which I didn’t know we had. That’s not in the Constitution. That’s the problem. It’s the whole big picture of overreaching.
DOUTHAT: But I want to get back to your point about the size of government, Bill, because I think it’s an interesting one. And it’s something you hear a lot of complaints on the right about: “How has this happened? We came to power as a small-government movement and yet government has grown over the past thirty years under Republican administrations.” However, the economy has also grown enormously. And, in fact, if you look at the government as a percentage of GDP, it’s actually only inched up slightly.
Yes, but the economy grew faster under Bill Clinton and the Democrats than it has under George W. Bush.
DOUTHAT: It’s true. But the thing about Clinton was that, in a sense—just as Nixon was, in theory, a conservative who often governed like a liberal—Clinton was a liberal who often governed like a conservative. He signed welfare reform. He said the era of big government is over. And I think conservatives really didn’t often recognize it at the time. They decided it was more important to destroy him politically than to cooperate with him. And that ended up being a huge lost opportunity for the right.
You said the Republicans set out to destroy Bill Clinton and not to cooperate with him. And like Nixon, Newt Gingrich came to power not to defeat his enemies but to demonize and destroy them.
EDWARDS: If we hadn’t gotten into party über alles, if we hadn’t done that, when Bill Clinton said that we’re making changes, the end of welfare as we know it or whatever, we conservatives would have declared victory. If our focus was on ideas and principles and a kind of governance, then it shouldn’t have made any difference whether it was a Democratic president or a Republican president.
Instead Republicans impeached the president.
EDWARDS: It was nutty. It was totally nuts.
DOUTHAT: I agree. I do want to say, as a caveat, that there is an extent to which you practice what Pat Buchanan famously termed positive polarization, right? Which was what Nixon was trying to do. You deliberately divide the country because you assume you’ll end up with the bigger half. That can be a poisonous force in American politics, but it can also be the way that you get things done. There’s a tendency, especially among liberals after a long period of conservative dominance, to say, “Oh, well, it’s terrible how Nixon divided the country. It’s terrible how Gingrich divided the country.” FDR divided the country, too. “They hate me and I welcome their hate,” right? That’s what he said.
Ross, you write that a party ideologically committed to a small government may be ill-equipped to run a large one.
DOUTHAT: Yes. And I think that’s one of the lessons of the Bush years. The Bush administration came into power with the idea that they were going to be a center-right party that reformed the welfare state rather than abolishing it and sort of steered a middle course between the small-government purists on the right and liberals.
The problem is, because conservatives are naturally hostile or skeptical of government power, conservatives often don’t think deeply enough about what they’re actually going to do with government when they take power. And that’s how you end up with a lot of the problems in the Bush years where you have people unqualified to run federal agencies being appointed. You have bills getting written up that are really good in theory, but then you look at the details, and they don’t actually work.
The challenge for conservatives is to basically prove that liberal argument wrong. Liberals say, “Well, because conservatives are fans of limited government, you can’t trust conservatives to run the government we have.” Conservatives need to prove them wrong, and they haven’t.
How did conservatives come so far in one direction that we ended up with the Congress and the president trying to force Terri Schiavo’s husband to keep her alive against his and, apparently, her will? Where do you draw the line on government if not there?
EDWARDS: There are areas that are not the government’s business. The federal government should not be overriding doctors. The situation in Oregon is that the voters there are saying that if a person is terminally ill, if more than one doctor has confirmed this person is dying and cannot recover, and that person says, “I want doctors to give me medications, not for them to administer it, but for me to administer it to myself, so I don’t have to be in great pain and agony and die in anguish, over a long period of time.” The voters said, “Yes, let them be given those medicines.” Conservatives stepped in and said, “No, no, no. Our position is that we’re the government. We will tell you how to live, and we’re going to tell you how to die.” That was a complete repudiation of everything that those of us who started this modern conservative movement believe in.
DOUTHAT: I agree, this is a real problem for conservatives. You start out with the principle of federalism and certain powers are left to the state. But then when you get control of the federal government, the temptation is to use that power to enact, in this case, conservative legislation about the end of life.
Was that impulse coming from the religious right or the political right?
DOUTHAT: Well, I don’t think you can completely separate the two. And this isn’t just true of the right. Religion has been a force in American politics going back to the nineteenth century, going back to William Jennings Bryan, going back to the civil rights movement. There is an idea among liberals and some conservatives that religious participation in politics, using religious arguments, is somehow illegitimate, that the separation of church and state means that you can’t invoke religious arguments in public.
That’s just not true to American political history. Now, it’s true that if you only make religious arguments for a given position, if you say, “Abortion is wrong because the Bible tells me so; assisted suicide is wrong because only God has the right to take a life,” you’re actually not going to make much headway in American politics because we are a religiously pluralistic society. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t reasonable arguments.
Mickey just made a very eloquent case for allowing assisted suicide, and I think it’s persuasive in certain respects. But there is a case to be made that, in most of the cases where you allow assisted suicide, you’re talking about people whose suicidal thoughts are, frankly, a species of depression, illnesses that are treatable. They aren’t getting sufficient pain medication. This sets up openin
gs to abuses by doctors, abuses by relatives, and so on. And, you know, the same goes with Terri Schiavo.
But do you agree with what happened then when conservatives brought the issue to Congress and the president flew back from Texas to sign legislation?
DOUTHAT: No, I don’t. Because it’s a violation of federalism. There are certain issues, especially some legal issues, that have to be left to the states. Here I agree with Mickey, this is a crucial conservative principle. If you look at the initial issue that sparked the rise of the religious right, it was Roe v. Wade. Now, what did Roe v. Wade do? It took the right to make abortion laws away from legislatures, away from the states, and said, “No, there’s a right in the Constitution. You can’t legislate about it.” Now, if Roe v. Wade were overturned tomorrow, and I think this is something a lot of Americans don’t understand, abortion wouldn’t become illegal. All it would mean is that states and governments have the power or don’t have the power to vote on it. And that’s the conservative principle. That’s where the antiabortion movement comes from. And that’s what it was founded on. The danger is, then you take over the federal government and you want to use it to pursue your end, just like liberals do.
Let me explore this. Ross talked about how religion in the past has been invoked in the political arena. But when Martin Luther King called on all of us to follow a higher morality on civil rights, the Democrats then didn’t say, “We’re the party of God.” And there is no question but that the Republican Party now presents itself as the party of God.
DOUTHAT: It’s true that the Democrats at that moment didn’t say, “We’re the party of God.” But actually, if you look back through American history, there are lots of moments when prominent figures, Democrats and Republicans alike, have said things along those lines. You look at Theodore Roosevelt’s famous speech. He says, “We stand at Armageddon and we battle for the Lord.” But I agree with you, Bill. I think that that kind of conflation of God’s aims with the interest of a single political party is a real problem. I guess I just think it’s more a problem for that party than for American democracy. When I hear Tom DeLay saying, “God’s on our side,” I think, well, this means the Republican Party’s in trouble. It’s becoming self-righteous. It’s alienating the party from the broad religious diversity of the American people. I’m not really worried about the separation of church and state being breached. I think that separation is actually pretty strong. We’re too pluralistic a society to ever have a theocracy. It’s impossible to imagine.
Is it conservative to deny what science tells us about global warming?
DOUTHAT: No. But this happens again and again with modern conservatism, and it’s a real problem. Conservatives assume that if you don’t agree with the liberals on what we should do about global warming—let’s say you oppose cap-and-trade regulations, or you oppose a carbon tax—you have to deny that global warming’s happening at all. That’s a mistake conservatives make time and time again. You see it on the stem cell issue. And I think, no, absolutely, there’s nothing conservative about denying the scientific consensus on global warming. It doesn’t mean, though, that conservatives should just leap to saying, “Oh, everything Al Gore says we ought to do about it is right.”
Mickey, you’ve upset some of your longtime friends and colleagues by writing, “Conservatives today would have us believe they are the voice of American values. In fact, they are not even the voice of conservative values.” Who are you talking about?
EDWARDS: Partly I’m talking about the Tom DeLays. I’m talking about our party coming in and saying, “We’re going to tell you when you can die and how you can die. And we’re going to come in and tell you that we’re going to do electronic wiretapping of your conversations without a court warrant, despite the fact that the law says that a warrant is required.”
When Ross mentioned Roe v. Wade—and what I’m going to say has no bearing on whether you’re for or against abortion or Roe v. Wade—but this was a case of not understanding conservative values. Judge Robert Bork, when he was nominated for the Supreme Court, opposed Roe v. Wade, on the grounds that the Supreme Court had created a right of privacy that does not exist in the Constitution. I had breakfast with him with a small group. I said, “Did you really say that?” And he said, “Yes.” I said, “So tell me, Judge Bork, you believe that the only rights the American people have are those that are spelled out in the Constitution?” And he said, “Yes.”
Well, in fact it’s the exact opposite. We’re born with our rights. And the reason you have the Ninth and Tenth Amendments in the Bill of Rights, and the reason so many patriots like Patrick Henry opposed the Bill of Rights, was because they knew some idiot’s going to come along in the twentieth century or twenty-first century and say that unless it’s spelled out in here, it’s a right the American people don’t have. Well, Judge Bork was that idiot. That’s what I mean when I say this is where we forget about values and we start thinking that the government has all the rights and we only have those that the government permits us to have. This turns American government on its head.
DOUTHAT: All right. But in defense of Judge Bork, there is a danger with our judicial branch because they have so much authority to interpret the Constitution that they can read rights that don’t exist. Did Patrick Henry and the people writing the Constitution think that they were writing a document that protected the right to an abortion? It seems moderately unlikely to me.
So what is the core value that keeps both of you conservative?
EDWARDS: Look, I believe that the conservative movement—the one Barry Goldwater believed in, that Ronald Reagan came out of—honors the idea of a constitutional system of self-government that protects the rights of the people. That is an incredibly important perspective on the relationship between government and the people. And I refuse to let people take it over who don’t believe in it. I refuse to let a Tom DeLay or a Newt Gingrich or whomever turn that on its head.
But how did they take it over, Mickey? Given what you say about Goldwater and Reagan’s belief in it?
EDWARDS: It happened out of frustration because Democrats controlled the Congress for so long. We conservatives were in the minority for a very long time.
Forty years.
EDWARDS: And I would say, Bill, the Democratic Party was pretty oppressive, would not let us offer amendments to bills, blocked our contributions at every turn. Conservatives finally reached a point of just so much anger about the way they were being cut out of the process that they came together, putting party loyalty and party control first. So I blame the Democrats for a lot of it. They created the monster and then we built on it.
Why do you remain a conservative, Ross? When I finished your book Grand New Party, I thought you could be writing speeches for Barack Obama.
DOUTHAT: Sure, there’s language in the book that would sound pretty much right coming from Barack Obama’s lips. I think what separates me from Barack Obama and the way I define conservatism starts with what Mickey’s talking about. But I guess I have a more expansive definition. I think of American conservatism as the attitude and habit in politics that’s dedicated toward defending American exceptionalism in all its forms.
Against?
DOUTHAT: Against the idea that we need to change America in pursuit of some abstract form of justice. Conservatism, broadly speaking, has been arranged against that tendency. And conservatism is for limited government, for a focus on the Constitution, and also for a defense of the particular habits and mores of American life. I think this separates me from Mickey and makes me more of a social conservative than he is in the sense that I think government does have a role to play in conserving those mores and institutions. One of the reasons we don’t need the kind of strong central government you have in Europe is precisely because we’ve always been a nation of strong communities, of strong families, of churches that play a much more enormous role in the social fabric of American life than they do in Europe. Voluntary organizations, the same way. Charit
able giving is much higher in the United States than in Europe. This is what American conservatism exists in an ideal form to defend.
If you go back to the 1970s and look at what conservatives wanted to do, they wanted a freer market. They wanted an end to the kind of wage and price controls that Nixon, imitating liberals, imposed. They wanted a reformed welfare system. They wanted a lower tax rate. Starting in the ’70s and ’80s they wanted a greater role for religion in public life. They wanted freer trade. A lot of what looks like conservative failure today is actually conservative success because so many conservative ideas have become the conventional wisdom.
Then what happened the last eight years that—
DOUTHAT: It’s the same thing that happened to the Democratic Party in the late ’60s and early ’70s. You were there. I’m sure that there were people—
There were plenty of excesses.
DOUTHAT: Right. There were people then who saw those excesses and became conservatives. They were the neoconservatives, right? And there are some conservatives today who will look at their movement foundering and say, “We need to jump ship. We need to go write speeches for Barack Obama.” I’m not going to do that for the same reason you didn’t jump ship in the ’70s. I think there’s enough goodness in American conservatism that it’s worth staying and fighting for. And America needs two healthy political movements.
EDWARDS: The Republican Party is not healthy. The Republican Party is not healthy at all. It’s lost the confidence of the American people. It’s lost the confidence of most Republicans. You’d be amazed, Bill, how many people I talk to every day who have been lifelong Republicans who just can’t support the party anymore. One of the things that is harmful to John McCain is that people aren’t looking at John McCain and asking, “Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy?” He’s got this Republican label around his neck. And I think our party is in quite serious trouble.