Hunting for a Conservative
I hadn't been to Jack Hunter's site for awhile. No reason, other than nothing had prompted me to go there. Then yesterday, while randomly flipping through my Facebook wall, I saw a post to this great piece by Hunter: Santorum isn't a Reagan conservative.
Hunter's point: Santorum deplores libertarians, but libertarianism is a crucial aspect of the conservative agenda. "Reagan believed that the American right was a three-legged stool consisting of social conservatives, national security conservatives and economic/libertarian conservatives. Lose a leg and conservatism loses a lot, or so Reagan believed."
I think Hunter hits the issue about as squarely as I've seen it hit. If you go back through the annals of conservative thought, the concept of "limited government" is crucial, whether it's Calvin Coolidge, Russell Kirk, W.F. Buckley, or Barry Goldwater. The Republican party has lost that prong of the conservative agenda, and it needs to reclaim it.
But here's my problem: Libertarians would deny that the Republican party has ever been an advocate of limited government. Rather, it has been an advocate of what G.K. Chesterton called "Hudge and Gudge": big government and big business in bed with another, teaming up to screw the middle class and oppress the lower classes. Nock slammed Coolidge for precisely this thing, and I believe Mencken expressed similar disgust with the Republicans of his day.
And that's where I am today. I am coming to realize that there has been no conservative tradition in practical American politics or, if there has been one, it has been about as narrow and ineffectual as a dog's hoisted leg against a five-alarm fire. We can keep trying, of course, but there's a reason that I'm currently reading Memoirs of a Superfluous Man for the second time.
This whole ongoing mess of a debate regarding "What is a conservative," incidentally, is aptly summarized by the cover of the December 31, 2011 Economist. Check it out. The mere fact that the cover includes Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Nixon speaks volumes for the proposition that, if limited government is a key element of conservatism, then conservatism hasn't been a key element of the Republican party.
