Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  Such conservatives are delighted at Bush’s tax cuts in principle. But they also doubt whether financing them entirely by borrowing is a real tax cut. If you do not cut spending by the same amount (or almost the same amount) as you have cut taxes, you are merely postponing a fiscal reckoning. Conservatives of doubt question the faith of supply-side economics, where all economic trade-offs are banished. They suspect that either the government will have to raise taxes at some point to pay off its debts or it will have to devalue its currency, or allow inflation. The chances of an administration tackling government spending after endorsing it enthusiastically for four years strikes these conservatives as unlikely. Hence their disillusion with Bush. They worry that this president has effectively granted legitimacy to vast areas of government power that the left will soon seize on to consolidate the welfare state and raise taxes under the banner of debt reduction.

  This ever-expanding entitlement state offends conservatives of doubt as deeply as the theo-conservative religious state. Their reasoning? At any given moment, wealth that is absorbed by the government is not available to individuals. The more of a country’s wealth the government controls, the less freedom for that country’s citizens. For a conservative of doubt, the market is a much more reliable indicator of how individuals actually want to live their lives than a government directive or program. Why? Again, the argument rests on an understanding of human wisdom. Since error is inevitable in human choice, better to lessen the chances for those errors to be magnified and compounded by one predominant actor—the government. The more dispersed power is, the less chance for catastrophe.

  Is this conservatism philosophically strong enough to endure? Rich Lowry of National Review recently argued that it is not: “The secularist view misses that freedom is grounded in truths, in the God-given dignity of man as a rational creature and in our fundamental equality. This is why the pope could say, ‘God created us to be free.’ If the idea of freedom is detached from these truths, it has no secure ground, because the strong will inevitably attempt to dominate the weak unless checked by moral truths (see slavery or segregation or communism).” Without Christianity, Lowry argues, the rights of the individual will be trampled. But what if Lowry’s fellow citizen is an atheist? How can the atheist be persuaded to consent to truths that are only solidly grounded in a faith he doesn’t share? And what happens when even those who share the same faith disagree profoundly on its moral and political consequences? Lowry seems to forget that men of Christian faith strongly opposed and backed slavery and segregation—and used biblical texts to do so.

  The defense of human freedom offered by conservatives of doubt, on the other hand, is founded on more accessible and less contentious arguments. Such conservatives can point to the Constitution itself as the basis of US political life, and its Enlightenment concept of freedom as sturdy enough without extra-constitutional theology. (The purpose of the Constitution was to preserve the Declaration of Independence’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The word “virtue” is not included in that phrase. Its omission is the single greatest innovation of the US founding.) They can point to the astonishing success and durability of the US experiment to buttress the notion that the Constitution is a much more stable defense of human equality than that inherent in any religion. The Constitution itself has far wider support among citizens than any theological argument. To put it another way: you don’t need an actual religion when you already have a workable civil version in place.

  What, though, happens to moral appeals in politics? They do not disappear, especially in a place as deeply religious as the United States. But they express themselves in crusades for personal salvation, evangelism, or social work, rather than in legislative change. Compare President George H. W. Bush’s praise for “a thousand points of light” as a critical voluntary complement to the welfare state with George W. Bush’s channeling of public money into religious social programs. The one is premised on a conservatism of doubt; the second, on a conservatism of faith. In that sense, the new conservatism seems to believe that faith communities cannot do their work adequately without government help. It has less faith in faith than conservatives of doubt do.

  For the last few decades, enough has united conservatives of doubt and conservatives of faith to keep the coalition in one rickety piece. Both groups were passionately anticommunist, even if there were some disagreements on strategy and tactics. Today both groups are just as hostile to Islamist terrorism and fundamentalism. Both groups have historically backed lower taxes. Both oppose affirmative action and gun control. And there have been conservative personalities who have managed to appeal to both sides—Ronald Reagan is the exemplar.

  Conservatism is stronger for containing both traditions. The contribution of Christianity to Western notions of human freedom is indisputable, and conservatives of doubt have no desire to minimize that fact. Similarly, conservative Christians have historically been aware of the need for limited government in order to protect the very freedoms that allow their faith to flourish. Besides, the West has long alternated between periods that emphasized the need for collective moral action and those that demanded smaller government and greater individual freedom. Conservatism’s diverse philosophical pedigree has allowed it to adapt and endure as a political philosophy.

  In the last part of the twentieth century, conservatism in Great Britain and the United States threaded both needles, dramatically increasing individual economic freedom through lower taxes, while retaining respect for moral tradition and stability for family structure and individual responsibility. You might describe Reagan and Margaret Thatcher as people who, in a collectivist age, had faith in the conservatism of doubt. But, as this wave of conservatism ratcheted back government power, and as left-of-center parties—Bill Clinton’s Democrats and Tony Blair’s New Labour—all but acquiesced to the new order, the right’s intellectual energy sought new projects. Conservatism had won much in the 1990s, even as liberal parties ruled: taxes were not raised to anything like the levels of the past; fiscal discipline became entrenched; issues like tackling welfare and crime found their way to the liberal wing of the Anglo-American political spectrum.

  What, then, was the right to do? In Great Britain, it has hewed to the center-right and failed to unseat an essentially center-right government under Blair. It has endorsed marginally lower taxes, but essentially reconciled itself to Blair’s incremental increase in government and the social liberalization of the past thirty years. (Compared with Bush’s spending habits, Blair is a Thatcherite.) In the United States, however, conservatives of faith saw their opportunity and reversed many years of limited-government philosophy in order to install a bigger, more morally attuned, more powerful government.

  At the same time, the nature and content of the faith of these postmillennial conservatives changed. It was no longer that of mainstream Protestantism or even of most American Catholics. It was a version of faith that was resurgent around the world as the new millennium passed: a fundamentalist and authoritarian revival that took hold in all the major religions. And it was this fundamentalism that made the new faith conservatism more radical and far-reaching than in the past. It kept the radical edge of conservatism razor-sharp.

  Fundamentalism, by its very nature, eschews compromise. It is not an inferential philosophy, drawing on experience or history to come to a conclusion about the appropriate way to act or legislate on any given issue. It derives its purpose from fixed texts: the Bible or the Koran. In its Catholic form, it vests unalterable authority in the pope rather than in the more heterodox laity or even broader clergy, and it brooks no internal dissent or debate. Because the tenets of fundamentalism are inviolable and its standards are mandatory, fundamentalists are inevitably uneasy in the modern West. The culture affronts them in every way—and the affront demands a response. Women in combat? Against God’s will. Same-sex marriage? An oxymoron. Abortion? Always and everywhere to be forbidden by law. Stem-cell research on embryos
? Dr. Mengele reborn.

  The idea that there can be prudential compromises on issues like the right to die, or same-sex marriage, or stem-cell research is a difficult one for fundamentalists. Since there is no higher authority than God, and since there can be no higher priority than obeying him, the entire notion of separating politics and religion is inherently troublesome to the fundamentalist mind. Whereas for older types of conservatives, religion informed their view of the world and shaped the way they entered civil discourse, the new conservatives of faith bring their religious tenets, unmediated, into the public square.

  Two recent controversies highlight this new stridency. The Schiavo case revealed something profound about the new conservatism. Old conservatives would have been reluctant to intervene politically in a horrifying family dispute. They would have been comfortable letting local courts or state law govern the case. And they would have acquiesced to due process, whatever qualms they might have had about the details. Today’s fundamentalists, by contrast, could see little nuance in the Schiavo case: scant concern for family prerogatives, state law, judicial review, and all other painstaking proceduralism. The fundamental truth for them was that Schiavo was being murdered. A woman who had been in a persistent vegetative state for fifteen years was, for some, indistinguishable from a healthy adult. Some thought her husband’s legal rights were rendered less germane by his allegedly sinful private life. The state legislature, governor, and then the federal Congress were cajoled to intervene. The president flew back to Washington to sign legislation designed for one specific case. If there was once a balance between conservatives of doubt and conservatives of faith, that balance was abandoned. It was abandoned as conservatives of faith morphed into conservatives of fundamentalism.

  The fundamentalist conservatives were able to corral the most powerful people in the Republican Party to do their will. The major organs of conservative opinion—The Weekly Standard, National Review—both backed the fundamentalist position. The Standard published a long essay arguing that even if Schiavo had signed a living will citing her desire to be allowed to die if she succumbed to a permanent vegetative state, she should have been kept alive indefinitely. Morality trumped autonomy. Indeed, the whole notion of individual autonomy was deemed a threat to what conservatism was seeking to defend. The judge in the Schiavo case was vilified, along with the rest of the judiciary. House majority leader Tom DeLay promised retribution against the judges who ruled in the case. Senator John Cornyn made a speech, which he subsequently retracted in part, saying that decisions like the Schiavo ruling made violence against judges more understandable. Conservatives at a conference in Washington, D.C., called Justice Anthony Kennedy’s jurisprudence “satanic.” James Dobson, arguably the most powerful evangelical leader in the United States, compared the Supreme Court to the Ku Klux Klan. A religious-right conference baldly declared that the Democratic Party was fighting a war against all “people of faith.” It was blessed by the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist.

  On same-sex marriage, conservatives of faith have been equally uncompromising. In response to several court cases across the country that edged closer and closer to giving legal equality to gays and lesbians, conservatives in Washington responded by proposing—as a first resort—a constitutional amendment prohibiting marriage and any of its benefits from being granted to same-sex couples. Again, what’s interesting is just how far-reaching the initial position was. Several other conservative positions were ruled out in advance: that marriage is a conservative institution that should include gays; that states should be allowed to figure out their own marriage policies as they have done for decades; that no action need be taken as long as the Defense of Marriage Act remained on the books, preventing one state’s marriages from being foisted on another; or that conservatives could support civil unions or halfway measures that could grant gays some, but not all, of the rights of heterosexual marriage.

  In various state constitutional amendments, again actively promoted by the Republican Party, gay couples were also denied benefits or protections. Judges—some liberal, many conservative—were described as “activists” or “extremists” if they applied their state constitution’s guarantees of equal protection to gay couples. The rhetoric was extraordinary. Letting gays marry was equated with the “abolition” of marriage, even though no one was proposing to change heterosexual marriage rights one iota. “Homosexuals… want to destroy the institution of marriage,” James Dobson said. “It will destroy the Earth.”

  How were conservatives of doubt supposed to respond to these fundamentalist incursions into the conservative discourse? A few dissented. The Schiavo case seemed finally to embolden traditional conservatives into defending due process and limited government. (Some are even defending the filibuster as an essential tool for limited and divided government.) But they failed to blunt the fundamentalist position within the Republican Party or to dilute the venomous attacks on the judiciary that followed. On the marriage issue, even those with openly gay offspring, such as Vice President Dick Cheney, were forced to toe the party line. The religious right’s insistence that homosexuality is a psychological disease requiring treatment forced the president to avoid ever using the words “gay” or “lesbian” or “homosexual” in his speeches; even recognizing the existence of gay citizens was too much for the social right. No surprise, then, that the 2004 Republican Party platform called for constitutional amendments banning all legal benefits and protections for gay couples everywhere in the United States. In a society with a big openly gay population, this was not a politics of moderation. It was and is a crusade.

  Crusades, however, are not means of persuasion. They are means of coercion. And so it is no accident that the crusading Republicans are impatient with institutional obstacles in their way. The judiciary, which is designed to check executive and legislative decisions, is now the first object of attack. Bare-knuckled character assassination of opponents is part of the repertoire: just look at the Swift Boat smears of John Kerry. The filibuster is attacked. The mass media is targeted, not simply to correct bad or biased reporting, but to promote points of view that are openly sectarian, even if, as in the case of Armstrong Williams, you have to pay for people to endorse your views. Religious-right dominance of the party machinery, in an electoral landscape remade by gerrymandering, means that few opponents of fundamentalist politics have a future in the Republican Party. It’s telling that none of the biggest talents in the Republican Party will ever be its nominee for president. John McCain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Pataki, and Rudy Giuliani could never survive the fundamentalist-dominated primaries.

  Indeed, by their very nature, conservatives of doubt are not particularly aggressive politicians. Fiscal conservatives have been coy in expressing their outrage at Bush’s massive spending and borrowing, easily silenced by the thought that Democrats would be even worse. Defenders of an independent judiciary are drowned out by the talk radio/Fox News/ blog-driven megaphone of loathing for unaccountable judges. Many moderate conservatives voted for the law to protect Schiavo. Republican defenders of gay marriage are few and far between. Those few voices of dissent are increasingly portrayed as mavericks or has-beens. You will find precious little time for people like Christie Todd Whitman on talk radio or in the conservative blogosphere.

  But that doesn’t mean that the arguments of doubt conservatism are flimsy or unnecessary. In fact, they may be increasingly critical to conservatism’s survival. An ideologically polarized country, in which one party uses big government for its own moral purposes and the other wields it for its own, is not one that can long maintain a civil discourse. Politics becomes war, letting a key Republican leader like DeLay genially boast that his supporters are armed. What conservatism has long offered is a messy defense of procedure and moderation, doubt and limits, attributes that make civilized politics possible and are often appreciated only when they are lost. But, by then, it is sometimes too late.

  I’m not saying that Republicanism
is headed for an institutional crack-up. What I am saying is that, unless the religious presence within Republicanism becomes less dogmatic and fundamentalist, the conservative coalition as we have known it cannot long endure. Advocates for government restraint cannot, in good conscience, keep supporting a party that believes in its own God-given mission to change people’s souls. Believers in fiscal discipline cannot keep backing an administration that boasts of its huge spending increases and has no intention of changing. Those inclined to prudence cannot join forces with fanatics (at least not in times when national security doesn’t hang in the balance). Retreating to the Democrats is not an option. Small-government conservatives are even less powerful within the opposition’s base than in the GOP’s. Bill Clinton’s small-c conservatism was made possible only by what now looks like a blessed interaction with a Republican Congress. The only pragmatic option is to persuade those who run the Republican Party that religious zeal is a highly unstable base for conservative politics: it is divisive, inflammatory, and intolerant of the very mechanisms that keep freedom alive.

  This doesn’t mean purging Christians from the GOP. It means filtering religious faith through the skeptical and moderate strands of conservative thought. It means replacing zeal with religious humility; it means accepting that trading compromise of religious principles for political compromise is an ineluctable and vital democratic task. It means a lower temperature within conservative circles on issues like abortion, stem-cell research, and gay rights. And it means a renewed commitment to restraining government from its democratic instinct to act too often, too quickly, and too expensively.